PowerSwitch

With many of the old peak oil ideas having been swept away by the unrelenting onslaught of yet more oil production (including from places that were once dismissed as having peaked decades ago) it seems prudent to consider what will cause peak oil.

When I ran into the first 3 claims of this (CSIS, Barclays and Rystad) I cataloged them as harbingers of something, but then a 4th reputable source (no, not the IEA for Gods sake, they declared peak oil like more than a decade ago now) landed, and it seemed time to talk peak oil again.

The good news is that the current mechanism requires zero understanding of the geology, engineering/technology and resource economics issues that sank the last happy band of recycled Malthusians. It only requires an understanding that just as always, price, supply and demand are interrelated, and always have been.

Peak Oil or equivalent will arrive in due course. We will be using oil for fuel, plastics etc for ever . and they aren't making any more.

Sure, renewals are on the way ... but not as fast as we would like as key raw materials are not available in sufficient quantities.

Governments are not helping - for example the UK government is increasing taxes on solar panels.

At one time due to the activities of an 'independent' trade body they also would only approve rebates etc for panels NOT made in cheap foreign lands.

We are facing a race between Climate Change, AI, populism, religious intolerance, post modernism, failure of antibiotics, war, water shortages, pollution, demographics, loss of biodiversity etc.

Hopefully I will be persuaded otherwise, but I suspect the next couple of decades might be difficult.

Vortex2 wrote:Peak Oil or equivalent will arrive in due course. We will be using oil for fuel, plastics etc for ever . and they aren't making any more.

Of course a maximum of oil production will one day be reached. Only some abiotic crank would suggest otherwise.

Claiming that someone would deny this type of peak oil was a popular strawmen back "in the day". I always felt it was the first tool in the tool
box for those who had only one tool in it. Plus even an acolyte could be expected to regurgitate it with enthusiasm, even without any understanding or nuance of the real issue.

Not even Yergin or Lynch ever denied that oil would one day peak, both providing their own approximations.

Vortex2 wrote:
We are facing a race between Climate Change, AI, populism, religious intolerance, post modernism, failure of antibiotics, war, water shortages, pollution, demographics, loss of biodiversity etc.

Humans have been facing a race since they invented agriculture, and other groups of humans wanting the stuff that some other group had. We're pretty good at competing with each other for stuff, to the exclusion of things that most likely matter more.

Vortex2 wrote:
Hopefully I will be persuaded otherwise, but I suspect the next couple of decades might be difficult.

I remember when Ehrlich was postulating that the late 1970's would be difficult, starvation and pollution and population decline and whatnot. "Difficult" being relative of course. Back then, folks did seem about as serious as modern folks about how "difficult" things were about to get. Relative measures like this are quite tricky.

The good news is that folks don't much include peak oil ideas within their near term doom scenarios anymore. The success of drill baby drill having put a cork in them for now I figure.