@Perpetual Cyclist, also: rant

You're such a cheery, uplifting type. Great bedtime reading.

My understanding of peak oil is that peak oil is the point where we have reached the maximum barrels/day that this planet will ever produce, and from there on in, production will only decline. As production declines, and demand grows, of course, prices will rise, and we are all...well...you know...

Have we reached peak oil though? I don't know about that. In fact, I honestly doubt it. (Full disclosure, I live in a province with one of he largest reserves of oil in the world, and our economy is overheating trying to get it all out of the ground yesterday.) I think we have a ways yet to go on peak oil, not because there are more reserves than stated, or because demand will fall, but because more and more money and talent is being put into exploiting the last remaining reserves on earth.

The debate is academic, really, because nobody, regardless of what they say, honestly knows the production values of every oil company on earth even over the past ten years, let alone into the future. (So many lies have been told, and figured fudged humanity may never know the true tale.) That said, let me paint a different picture:

I believe that we still have at least a decade, maybe more of rising production, as new technologies come on-stream, and we simultaneously run every reserve dry in our quest for that last, final drop. When that peak is crested, however, there will be no gradual economic slowdown, not even a "depression" like the early 20th century. The curve won't be bell shaped, it will reach a peak, and then plummet. With 10, 20, maybe even 30 years ahead of us, my dad, the elder Bush family, that whole generation can die happy, never having seen the hell that they hath wrought.

I, on the other hand, by the time I am their age, will probably survive just long enough to be killed by a friend or neighbour for food, water, or gasoline. It hurts my green, left-leaning soul to say this, but...environmentalism is a huge, tragic mistake. Certainly, pollution, renewable energy, happy pandas and environmental toxins matter, and they are important. The harsh, harsh truth, however, is that the money going towards everything except solving the growing food crisis, population boom, and finding new, renewable sources of energy is a tragic waste that could well be the doom of us all.

We need to stop having so many babies. We need to find food to feed those we've got, and by the gods, we need to save every last precious drop of oil we have, because there so very, very many things that we make out of it that we have absolutely no (viable) way of making any other way. An example? Plastics. We can recycle only so hard. Certain plants can be used to make plastics, (that involves quite a bit of hocus pocus, from what I understand,) but it would never meet even the smallest fraction of demand. Having a healthy, green earth won't do us any good if we wipe ourselves trying to control the last remaining resources on earth. And if we DO get to wiping ourselves out, after a few thousand years, those who (might) survive should have a healthy, green earth...with no oil.

Now of course, these are opinions based entirely on my personal paranoia, research on the internets, and via a few interesting scientific journals, and a healthy dose of alarmism, but they may yet be valid. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

Dead vulture, because I'm probably allready to old to survive the looming resource wars.

@Pascal Monett

Not sure what you're saying. Peak oil is physical reality. Agreed we haven't begun to feel the full economic implications yet, but we will, probably in the next two years. Sure China is building 10M extra cars a year, but if they can't pump or buy the oil, then they aren't going to be driven very far.

Oil represented about 1% of global GDP ten years ago. At $130 it represents 6.5%. About half this price is the real cost of developing new oil fields and pumping old ones, the rest is profit which is (to a large extent) recycled into the larger economy. It simply means the rich get richer whilst the poor get poorer.

The oil price is rising hyperbolically (faster than exponentially). So is the real cost of new oil production. Once (real) total energy costs reach about 15% of GDP, modern industrial civilisation becomes untenable. At current rate of increase, we reach that point in under two years. The price of oil cannot then increase further (in real terms - ignoring hyperinflation). The world economy MUST then shrink in line with the oil supply. All business as usual economic models then become invalid. Total financial collapse is inevitable.