Summary: a brief analysis of Matt Savinar’s Life After the Oil Crash. Are we doomed? Probably not. My title is, of course, fun but absurd. Peak oil is too vast a subject, the range of expert opinion too wide, for any blog post to pose as more than a introduction — showing one perspective of the many possible. Still, I believe this makes a good case for betting that peak oil will not result in depression and war. Please see the conclusion at the end for caveats, and the links at the end for more information.
...Does Savinar subscribe to the Psychic Hotline? Energy forecasts — esp. those warning of Peak Oil — have been notoriously wrong for many decades. Has the future suddenly become clear as glass? Let us parse the third paragraph on this home page.
“In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980.”
It was an evil day for humanity when Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss “invented” the bell curve. It applies to many phenomena, but not to ALL phenomena. There is a strong basis to believe the global production curve will be asymmetric. Just to mention one, the graph should be of “liquid fuels” not oil, as substitutes for petroleum (e.g., biofuels, coal to liquids) were insignificant on the way up – but might be significant on the way down. Also, 2005 may have been but probably was not the peak year (see section II below).
RGE
