Reply #5: Ignores Economics 101 [View All]

The "chicken little" Peak Oil scenario requires that you discard everything you were ever taught about economics and assume that several known and proven technologies don't exist.

The Peakers dismiss every potential alternative energy source as being too expensive and not ready for deployment, no matter how expensive oil becomes. They assume that absolutely no additional research will be done no matter how expensive oil becomes. And they assume that oil will become so expensive so quickly that normal corrective forces which govern every other economic system in the history of modern civilization will somehow cease to operate.

The Peakers also assume that no additional reserves will ever be found, despite widespread suspicions that there is a hell of a lot of yet undiscovered oil in the Gulf of Mexico in particular. In fact, several geologically inclined friends of mine believe the US has encouraged a deliberate policy of depleting the rest of the world first before we confirm just how much oil we have close at hand. That oil in the deep Gulf is expensive to drill, too expensive to justify at $20 a barrel, but not too expensive at all at $100 a barrel.

In other words, if you want to worry that oil may get expensive and stay expensive, that's valid. If you want to worry that we'll have to rethink some technology, including our massively wasteful use of transportation technology, that's valid. If you want to worry that there will be large-scale economic restructuring with a lot of job displacement and hardship, that's valid. But if you want to worry that we'll be reduced to living in caves and chasing deer across the savannah with hand-carved bow and arrows to get dinner, that's not gonna be valid for a long time.