Peak oil is baloney?i'm not familiar with the new book.
I think people are talking about peak oil also because of Kevin Phillips’s new book. It’s one of his major focuses.
You believe that petroleum is a renewable resource? Or I should say, renewable to the extent that its natural production occurs more quickly than our depletion of it? I suspect that you don’t. I also suspect you don’t believe that the DoDo or the Maori are a renewable resource.
All the brambles that have attached themselves to the essential peak oil theory may be baloney, but I have a very difficult time believing that you think God’s going to keep pouring it on.
the reason that i think PeakOil is baloney is the way it is being marketed - my guess is that the oil companies have financed a few front groups to inoculate us toward accepting that high oil prices will be with us forever. it smells a whole lot like the Discovery crew and Intelligent Design (aka IDiots)
of course oil is non-renewable (absent Mother Time) - but it was also non-renewable when Clinton was president and oil was at $18/barrel.
don't get me wrong - i wish we were about to run out of oil and that we had some sensible policies to deal with it. heck, i'd even be 'happy' to have Preznit Blinky and his cronies in power if they were better than the next best alternative in dealing with global warming. (the australian govt is equally guilty).
i wish we had a new Manhattan Project to find new energy sources
i wish al gore was president
but as for Peak Oil and the imminent living-in-a-bunker earth-scorching apocalypse that Ruppert et al envisage? i dont think so.
5 comments:
You're the only other person I've come across that thinks peak oil is a bunch of shit. I don't dare blog about it though, as I work in the auto industry and I get accused of only wanting to sell people big suv's. I don't even sell the damn things, either.
Peak oil is like a chia pet.
lol - that's funnny.
i saw a docu on PO and it reminded me of watching a Countdown To Terror show on fox
I have no expertise on this but I've arrived at the view that there is probably merit in the Peak Oil idea. One article in particular by Jeremy Leggett, an apparently credible lecturer on petroleum engineering at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, has convinced me there are at least some grounds for concern.
He gives five reasons:
1. The biggest oilfields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago, either side of the Second World War.
2. The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965.
3. There were a few more big discovery years in the 1970s, but there have been none since then.
4. The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago.
5. Since then there has been an overall decline.
Leggett points to oil insiders who have come to believe in Peak Oil:
Is there any chance that the early topping point of oil production is somehow wrong, all just a bad dream? I am sorry to say that I think not. It is important to realise that the early toppers are not advocates or agitators by choice. They tend to have high residual affection for the industry they have spent their lives in. Colin Campbell, for example, the founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), worked for 40 years in the oil industry before retiring to western Ireland. Chris Skrebowski, the editor of Petroleum Review, a leading trade journal of the oil industry, spent nearly a decade arguing against Campbell before conceding that he was right. “In 1995 it all seemed pretty fantastic,” says Skrebowski. “I tried hard to prove him wrong. I have failed for nine years. I am now with him. In fact, I think he’s a bit of an optimist.” Other early-toppers include Richard Hardman, former chief executive of Amerada Hess; Roger Bentley, formerly of Imperial Oil in Canada; and Roger Booth, who spent his professional life at Shell, and who now believes that, when the peak does hit: “A crash of 1929 proportions is not improbable.”
Just assessing things at a superficial level we can see that oils demands are going through the roof globally (esp. with China). Oil Co's are not discovering new fields, that's for sure. So you'd want to be very certain that the proven oil reserves were adequate. According to Leggett, they're not.
I buy the idea of decreasing supply in near future. What I don't buy, however, is the way it's sometimes marketed, as a doomsday scenario: "One day, people notice on their way to work that all the gas stations are out of gas. Then they die on cold and starvation, in the middle of motorway littered with now-useless SUVs."
I've yet to see (I haven't looked for one, really) an analysis where increasing demand drives the prices up gradually, over a period of years and decades. That allows adaptation, unlike "suddendly the gas price could jump into $100 a gallon".
(FYI: Due to gas tax, the cost here in scandinavia is about $8/gallon, no doubt a nightmare for many americans, but it's nothing really once you get used to it.)
(FYI: Due to gas tax, the cost here in scandinavia is about $8/gallon, no doubt a nightmare for many americans, but it's nothing really once you get used to it.)
Oncet you've taken it in the ass that hard you get used to it? eeeiiiii.
I agree that there' *some* merit to the peak oil garbage, in as much as there is some finite amount to be pumped from the earth. Only recently since the force feeding of peak oil talk has serious work been done on -- make that semi-serious work -- in finding alternate fuel sources. Cleaner, earth-friendly fuel can only be a good thing.
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