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Peak oil is nonsense. All resources on Earth are finite. What’s special about oil? Why not peak aluminum or peak concrete or peak cobalt?

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Peak oil is nonsense No, it's not. > All resources on Earth are finite. What’s special about oil? Nothing; it would be special if it was an extractable resource and didn't have a peak where utility vs. cost of extraction meant that extraction declined from the peak. > Why not peak aluminum or peak concrete or peak cobalt? Aluminum and Cobalt, as extractable resources, will probably also have extraction peaks.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    The earth's crust is 8% Aluminum.
    • dragonwriter 7y ago
      But not all of it is equally easy to extract. In any case, yeah, “peak aluminum” is far more distant than peak oil.
  • credit_guy 7y ago
    Here’s Hubert’s peak oil projection and the actual oil production in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil#/media/File%3AHubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_1956.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_pea... Now there are multiple schools of thought, but one of them holds that when reality diverges so much from theory as in this plot, it’s time to question the theory.