Peak Oil Nonsense II

"In the end, it is likely that human ingenuity will prevail."

Now, I’m not afraid of an apocalypse any more than the fellow who wrote the next load of Bollocks over at the guardian.uk. For whether a plague, economic collapse, ecological collapse or war, apocalypses happen. So why worry? Besides, apocalyse (which can be defined according to whoever’s talking about it) can always happen, so why worry too much this time around?

At the same time, I studied enough history to know that partial collapses are quite common – if not being the usual way of things. But like other authors who dismiss "difficult times ahead", Garry White's historical horizons reach back to a whopping 200 years as Malthus made his poorly-timed analysis. Besides, Malthus’s real failure was failing to explain exactly why the birthrate in GB was making an historical jump while the death rate fell dramatically.

Of course it was human ingenuity helping cause this. And systems pressure. And the (not very free) markets, but markets nonetheless. But mostly it was human ingenuity in figuring out how to use the enormouly dense energy of fossil fuels (coal) and our enormously rich "fossil" oxygen atmosphere. Chemistry was evolving quite nicely out of the established branch of alchemy.

The expansion was just getting started, while the reservoires of hydrocarbons were (and still are) enormous.

Now, isn’t it ironic that Malthus’s falty prophecism would be used to argue away peak oil’s threat? That the one element missing in his discussion over 200 years ago will be missed by today’s pundits just the same - so that just like he was blind to the actual causes, we stay blind to the actual threat?

Yes, threat.

For, most people who argue about peak oil are not worried about the flow of oil - which is, btw peak oil’s definition. No, they’re busy about arguing peak oil’s threat. The risk of using less oil today than we did yesterday. Apocalypse or Singularity. 100% threat or 100% utopia.

So when discussing peak oil I try to keep my arguments either with the validity of production peaking – which it has been doing since 2005 – or what the risks are. I try to stay out of a mixed debate. Which usually kills all conversation.

No, I don’t wave off the risks of peak oil, for they are very real. Peak oil is here, and anyone who’s filled up at the pumps recently knows that there are definitely consequenses.

And I’ll tell you why the risks are very real. Not because of a lack of human ingenuity, nor because of foul politics on either side of the fence. Neither the Saudis nor the Russians nor hydrofracking (or rather horizontal drilling) can change this reason. Peak oil is a threat because:

Our industrialized society has never made the transition from a more concentrated form of energy to a less concentrated form of energy.

It’s that simple. It's a new experiment that's never been made before.

And since oil supplies 35-40% of humanity’s primary energy (depending on whose stats you believe), it’s not a bad idea to pay attention to what’s going on in the patch.

Of course there’s the atomic option. But we shouldn’t open up a third discussion here, now, should we?

So, before drawing any other conclusions; especially before we say "yes, we can", let’s just say, "yes, there’s a risk".

Now, is that all so horridly hard to say?