I don't recall any of the original Peakist manifestos including your very reasonable caveats about hindsight and uncertainty? Really though, this is why I sort

I don't recall any of the original Peakist manifestos including your very reasonable caveats about hindsight and uncertainty? Really though, this is why I sort of stopped worrying about peak oil about a day after I was first exposed to the idea. It was a very absolutist disastrous sea-change phase-transition sort of scenario, and those are relatively rare in real life. (Well, at some level they are very common: everyone is conceived at some time and dies at another. These details disappear in aggregate.) It's much more common for equilibria that have been stable over decades to continue that stability, even if at slightly different locations. Lots of things are more expensive in our modern times than they used to be; somehow society has survived.