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> turns out that if you are willing to pay more, I don't think that actually refutes "peak oil" suggestions that there's a price curvature that's going to keep

• lsc 8y ago
  I don't think anyone disagrees with the idea that oil is a limited resource and will become more rare and thus assuming continued demand, more expensive as time goes on? That's not what 'peak oil' was about. Peak oil was this idea that both supply and demand were largely inelastic. In that case, when those curves crossed, you'd have the figurative unstoppable force and the immovable object; the price of oil would climb out of control, the economy would grind to a halt. The primary thesis of 'peak oil' was that we couldn't extract more oil from the ground than we already were extracting. Through fracking and the exploitation of oil shale and oil sands... we did, in fact, extract more oil. Turns out, the supply of oil is, to some extent, elastic. Yeah, we're going to run out some day, but with our current tech... it's starting to look like we might have trouble dealing with the atmospheric carbon output before we have serious trouble with the supply of hydrocarbons.