[Pops]

Yeow! what a screed!

[ralfy]

I don't agree with the title of this article but I see helpful points in the content:

www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/5-reason ... d_08102011

[Loki]

Yeow! what a screed!

This is all we really need to know about how "irrelevant' peak oil is:

Why would I have trouble considering the possibility of peak when the price of oil is 5 times higher and supply has barely budged in 8 years?

Our resident trolls like to troll on about "price signals" spurring technological innovation. Well if the current price of oil isn't a signal, I don't know what is. Yet global production has remained in the doldrums. Why would that be if economic factors are all that matter? Clearly it couldn't be related to actual resource scarcity, which does not, and never will, exist.

[Loki]

Might be I'm reading the wrong sites but there is a bit of noise that O would love to have a national emergency and stall the next presidential elections- become a dictator. The same sites are often saying he should be impeached for treason- but that's off topic

Yes, you're reading the wrong sites. Hyperpartisans tend to be mentally deficient, examine their claims with that in mind. The exact same nonsense was spewed by the hyper-leftists when Bush was president.

Fact is, even the left isn't all that fond of Obama, for many reasons, most of which have to do with him doing a damn good impersonation of Bush in his third and fourth terms. Which is why we won't need a "dictator," the ass in the Oval Office's big chair changes every 4-8 years, but all the policies that really matter remain the same.

Less off-topic, Obama has done very little to alleviate peak oil aside from (1) helping to create a modest increase in future fleet efficiency and (2) bending over backwards to facilitate fossil fuel extraction and export (wingnut propaganda notwithstanding).

The American people as a whole don't give a shit about peak oil and never will. Price will be the only thing that will ever matter. Americans want to be told the lies we want to hear, and Obama is whispering those sweet nothings in our ear. 100 years of natural gas! Energy independence!

From his 2012 State of the Union speech:

And nowhere is the promise of innovation greater than in American-made energy. Over the last three years, we’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration, and tonight, I’m directing my administration to open more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources. (Applause.) Right now -- right now -- American oil production is the highest that it’s been in eight years. That’s right -- eight years. Not only that -- last year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past 16 years. (Applause.)

But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough. This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy. (Applause.) A strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.

We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years. (Applause.) And my administration will take every possible action to safely develop this energy....

The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy. (Applause.)

From the White House site on "Securing American Energy":

Domestic oil and natural gas production has increased every year President Obama has been in office. In 2012, domestic oil production climbed to the highest level in 15 years and natural gas production reached an all-time high....



Increasing American Energy Independence

Since President Obama took office, America’s dependence on foreign oil has decreased every year. During his first term, net imports of foreign oil and petroleum fell to their lowest level in nearly 20 years. We are now less reliant on oil imports than any time since 1993.



http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/securi ... can-energy

[SeaGypsy]

Gypsy you are on a tear lately, LOL

Thanks Pops, put it down to altered brain chemistry- (Recent Ayahuasca journey and complete withdrawal from D&A ) I was one of those kids who's parents thought should become a Lawyer or a politician but my sense of ethics wouldn't let me. So instead I read everything I could about mind expansion and live life as an adventurer. My greatest strength is being able to face just about anything and stay objective. I like walking around in 3rd world cities in the middle of the night unarmed and alone, digging up stuff most people would rather stayed buried- (hence my war with 6Strings at the ME Madness thread).

I'm not sorry to see Jan's ilk failing and looking for a job- I already said I think that's right and just. My peak oil heroes are people like you, Loki, Carinke, Shaved Monkey, Newfie, W. Flynn, Dmitry Orlov, and others around who have made big choices and changes in their lives based on their very honest appraisal of where we are at on Hubbert's curve.

I was half joking when I said what I said about O becoming a dictator. I don't care that much about US politics or anywhere else's that much to worry about the extreme possibilities. From my view they are all mad- all touting Perpetual Growth & Miracle Economics.

[MD]

Very few make a living out of prognosticating the dynamic-

The bloviators may or may not be making money from the exercise. There are those that are though.

[Loki]

Very few make a living out of prognosticating the dynamic-

The bloviators may or may not be making money from the exercise. There are those that are though.

And why not? For every professional peak oil bloviator there are 10,000+ professional BAU bloviators. Or is it 100,000+? Hard to tell the exact order of magnitude.

[MD]

Very few make a living out of prognosticating the dynamic-

The bloviators may or may not be making money from the exercise. There are those that are though.

And why not? For every professional peak oil bloviator there are 10,000+ professional BAU bloviators. Or is it 100,000+? Hard to tell the exact order of magnitude.

The ones making money are the ones that see through the bullshit.

[MD]

Might be I'm reading the wrong sites but there is a bit of noise that O would love to have a national emergency and stall the next presidential elections- become a dictator.

Gypsy you are on a tear lately, LOL

There are .94 guns per capita in the US.

Now I'm no gun nut and I certainly hope they all stay tucked away quietly under the mattress but you gotta admit, that is a lot of guns. Like lots of our dubious titles we have more per capita than our leading rivals (Serbia and Yemen) by 50%.

therefore I see a vanishingly small chance of elections being postponed anytime in the foreseeable future, by anyone. Don't you remember "hanging chads"? We had a pretty touchy situation there and the process worked just fine - to the extent that the constitution was followed and no one hit the streets with pitchforks or tanks that is. That's all you can hope for.

In fact, I predict there is no need for O doing [whatever] because the dems will win the POTUS walking away in '16. The House Republicans are in the process of abdicating the White House (and Senate) in favor of retaining their seats in Mississippi and whatever other backwater protected district. The fact is there plenty of legal ways for usurpation of power here, no need for a constitutional crisis, heck, we're so democratic we believe in civil rights, for corporations! But that's way off topic.

--
But on topic, PO is only irrelevant until it isn't. I had no trouble considering peak back when oil was $20 and yearly supply growth was 2-3%. Why would I have trouble considering the possibility of peak when the price of oil is 5 times higher and supply has barely budged in 8 years?

Fact is, I didn't even think supply would begin to get tight and prices start to rise until about now.

The FF industry finally took the PO "meme" seriously enough to devote a few million to a PR campaign that has capitalized on the drilling frenzy in the shales. Their plan seems to have switched focus to convincing the US that we are the new KSA and should become an exporter (even while we're still an importer). If they can pull that off and export as much nat gas and oil at world prices as possible they'll win big and of course then the US will be worse off than before.

True, the public has adapted to $3.50 unleaded, perhaps wondering from time to time why the massive Glut touted everywhere hasn't lowered the price but motoring on more or less regardless. Search hits here at PO.com are way down. That tells me that folks have bought the bill of goods and think this ($100 oil/$3.50 unleaded) is a passing phase and that certainly there is no upside, how can there be, we're KSAmerica?. That just like the '80's we're headed for tall cotton, that the shales are just like the North Slope and the North Sea and the GOM. Unfortunately they are anything but.

So, what is the future of "peak oil"? Exactly the same as it was 10 years ago:

A finite resources will have a beginning and end of extraction, first growth, then a peak and finally decline.

Shale is a detail, if every ounce the USGS says is there could be extracted starting today, it would delay the peak 5 years. But for a lot of reasons, it can't be extracted overnight. Not the least of those reasons are mineral rights the world over will never make shale anywhere else look like here, It may be extracted eventually but not overnight. Same with the trillions of "barrels" of under- and over- cooked oil typically lumped in with crude, they will indeed last hundreds if not thousands of years... but that's because it will take to mine them. So since peak oil is about peak flow and peak flow is about the 20% of 50+ year-old wells that produce 60% of the oil, nothing has changed

The only thing I see different now than 10 years ago is some folks placed large amounts of personal capital on overly precise estimates of future events when they should have been trying to be more encompassing in their outlook and think about society as a whole. I feel like peak oil is moving along about as predicted but I see many others saying the predictions were exactly wrong - and they are correct, I saw some chart with a pile of some math scribbles on it showing exactly how wrong or right, out 3 or 4 decimals. LOL! Tell me how useful that is... LOLOL Like someone said, rather than being generally correct they've turned out exactly wrong.


A holistic approach to depletion is the future. Sorta what we've been practicing here for almost 10 years, no?

.

[ROCKMAN]

Loki – Good charts…facts are facts. And then there are other facts. Such as there are several years of lag time in the ff exploration game before one sees any significant production increase. Thus you chart showing increased production beginning just when President Obama took office indicates the wheels for expansion were set in motion before he was elected. It’s also difficult to ignore the connection between our recession and the decline in US oil consumption which led to a decline of imports. Decreasing oil requirements is good via improved efficiency is good. Destroying demand via economic malaise and higher prices isn’t. But there’s also the time lag factor working in the president’s benefit in this regards: the seeds of the recession as well as lower imported oil demand were also planted before he took office.

But overall the oil patch has no complaints about President Obama’s policies towards us. He’s been more proactive than President Bush was in such matters. For instance, with his policies in place, Canada will export more oil sands production to the US in 2013 than ever before in history. And that has been facilitated by the expansion of the transport system between Cushing, OK and the Texas coast. An expansion the president gave his personal promise to do everything in his power to expedite. So far it appears to be working quit well. The 5X expansion of rail transported oil has given the east coast refineries a new lease on life so that the entire burden of refinery pollution is no longer concentrated along the Gulf Coast. The Deep Water GOM players are even more thankful. I doubt if an R had been in the White House we would have seen as quick return to drilling out there after the BP nightmare. The liberals would have done all they could to highlight such policies and crucify an R president for such efforts. With their candidate controlling the offshore drilling effort they can’t do much complaining. Heck, the current administration awarded BP 11 new offshore leases in the sale earlier this year. Can you imagine Romney allowing this to happen if he had won? Just speculation but I doubt it. At the very least a Democrat dominated senate would have dragged him through the mud if he tried IMHO.

We might have strong differences of opinions in a variety of other areas but when it comes to exploiting our hydrocarbon potential it’s good to have a friend in the White House.

[AdamB]

Recently it came to my attention that ASPO was rolling out an official association at the same location that some remnants of TOD had fled to.

"Hosted by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas USA (ASPO-USA) in cooperation with The Planet Beat."

http://www.theplanetbeat.com/aftertod

It is interesting because I believe Jan (head of the ASPO lobbying group in DC) posted over at TOD about opening up something called the Energy-XChange, and if you check the page you'll see that is what is listed at the top.

Combined with the lack of updates and recent recycling of old articles (with a conspicuous lack of date to accompany them) at the ASPO-USA website:

http://peak-oil.org

and one more interesting factoid....no ASPO conference announced this year. In past years August and September was the rally the troops moment for a small get together somewhere or another in October or early November. This year? Nada.

Tom Whipple is posting regularly at Resilience.org, but none of it is showing up at the ASPO website. Since May. Jeff Brown is obviously still alive and posting, as is Kobb and other members of the ASPO board, so they weren't all hit by a bus last week.

So what I am wondering is if the same disrespect recently shown to TOD editors and contributors at industry professional meetings has spilled over and affected the lobbying efforts of ASPO-USA, with the same result?

Anyone here about whether or not ASPO-USA is circling the drain, same as TOD did?

BINGO!!!!! Someone with suspicions that turns out...were true!!!! Perceptive of you Sam, very perceptive. Your first link is a bust, so it has been abandoned. The PO website basically is just the Tom Whipple show at this point, and the energy exchange site you mentioned, related to ASPO is just as empty nowadays, and Jan? Appears to have moved on, working with the grounds crew at some Michigan university, if his linked in profile is accurate. He appears to have erased any particulars in his background even referencing having fallen into the peak oil religion, similar to why TOD imploded perhaps? Being slapped that hard by reality, in so short a period of time after having proclaimed energy crisis that never materialized, and missed the glut and over supply that piled in instead, can be quite disheartening I imagine. Well..maybe when the next peak oil comes around, he will be invigorated again, ready to rinse and repeat the past claims as has happened before? No reason for peak oilers to stop using the same claims they've made in the past, if there is one thing they have displayed over half a century now, it is the ability to hope that the same reasons they were wrong last time might FINALLY work out, if they just keep saying it enough.

[AdamB]

Who cares?

Oil's decline is coming no matter what happens to ASPO.

Yes. We know. People have been saying it in 3 different centuries now. Probably won't make it to 4, but the ones who claimed it in the first or second centuries didn't think it would make it into the 3rd. But here we all are....

KAPOW!!!!

Quite true Sam, and dear lord why weren't you perma banned for knowing this!! However, I would argue that the peak oil claims in the 1800's were explicit enough to be called "peak oil", and could generally be classified as "running out" claims rather than peak claims.

[AdamB]

Who cares?

Oil's decline is coming no matter what happens to ASPO.

Yes. We know. People have been saying it in 3 different centuries now. Probably won't make it to 4, but the ones who claimed it in the first or second centuries didn't think it would make it into the 3rd. But here we all are....

And despite your team crowing about the death of peak oil 'theory' and predicting exponential growth, global oil production hasn't increased in a decade.

Apparently the people you accuse of crowing know more about future rates of oil production than you and yours. Because guess which way oil production went after you posted this? ( a hint...it wasn't down... )