A Response To: Where Have All the Peak Oilers Gone?
Dancing on the grave of peak oil clearly annoys somebody.
Yesterday, I put up an item in which I mused, "Where Have All the Peak Oilers Gone?" I noted the recent strange laconism of prominent peak oilers such as Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes, and Daniel Goodstein. All of these gentlemen declared that global oil production had essentially peaked before 2010 and the long downhill slide of industrial civilization was about to begin.
This morning I received an email from an interlocutor who styled himself as "somebody" who asked me:
How can you say that peak oil is dead, when oil's sell price is one third of the price needed to sustain current production level? That's silly. Many oil companies are going broke, oil exporting countries will be broke soon. You just don't understand the subject. But when you don't understand it, you shouldn't write articles about it.
Peak oil happened in 2015, instead of 2005-2007 probably only because of coal boom in China. But that coal boom has now ended.
Before making a fool of yourself again, please get to know the subject first.
My response was:
Dear Somebody: Well, I guess you told me! As the mirage of peak oil continues to recede, I await future emails from you confidently asserting that peak oil occurred in 2020, in 2025, in 2030, etc.
Regards,
Ronald Bailey
Actually, it seems to me that it is peak oilers who should stop writing about a subject that they have so clearly failed to understand.
Bonus link: Go here to enjoy reading some deep thinking on the topic of peak oil back in 2007 by the progressive intellectuals over at ThinkProgress.
