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I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The wor

I used to be in the “peak oil” scene — and by that I mean, I listened carefully to my friend, who was really into the peak oil scene. It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be. EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’” Let’s see what his conclusions are.

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XorNot 5y ago
That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-production-1846248229 https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
  - schimmy_changa 5y ago
    Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!) The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
    - wussboy 5y ago
      I hear you, and I regret that the Environmental movement feels the need to ratchet everything up to a catastrophe. But surely if “peak” means anything it means that we used to grow, now we contract, and therefore peak oil has already occurred.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      > The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand. That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
- CommieBobDole 5y ago
  Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually. The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries. And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  The problem with most these malthusian style analyses is a presumption of a first-order system within their models. Human society is more able to adapt than deer herds, between both social changes and technology with second and third order effects. Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually). That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it. An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts. The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct. [1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
  - lmm 5y ago
    AIUI US oil production actually did peak at more or less the originally predicted time, and the 1970s oil crisis was a reflection of that. Obviously it didn't result in the total collapse of civilisation, but it wasn't totally insignificant either.
    - snowwrestler 5y ago
      U.S. oil production has gone up so much since the 1970s that in 2015 Congress removed the crude oil export ban they put in place in 1975.
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable. And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us. And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Oh, to be clear, I think it will happen. I just don’t think it’s going to be something so predictable. Almost by definition, a civilization collapses due to a surprise — some belief was wrong. And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome. Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it? One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
  - nemo44x 5y ago
    Rome didn’t really collapse but rather wither away slowly over hundreds of years. Even still the most useful parts lived on five without the empire aspect which didn’t matter for most people. In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Qem 5y ago
> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. The same thing, but now with 7 billion+ people. It's a lot of deforestation just to feed all these campfires.
- OliverGilan 5y ago
  Except we aren't running out of forests any time soon [1] and they're actually growing back to levels we haven't seen in decades. [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offset.html https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    Monocultures are not forests. https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-forests-arent-really-forests/ https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-for...
- hi5eyes 5y ago
  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692 China's forest carbon uptake 'underestimated' reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are
titzer 5y ago
There are multiple, independent studies that have concluded that global human society has gone into overshoot. So much so that it is an unwritten consensus on that. There's even this site[1] that calculates the day of the year when humanity has consumed that year's entire resources and is dipping into annual overshoot. [1] https://www.overshootday.org https://www.overshootday.org
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  "studies" are not the same as science. That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.
marvin 5y ago
A former partner of mine is an artist, and has a different perspective on the world than most engineers, combined with an amount of melancholic clarity. She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery. I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.
bawolff 5y ago
Maybe,but i think that can go both ways - bad things really do happen, often due to causes that are easily predictable with hind sight. I feel like assuming that the world cant end is just as unrealistic as always assuming the world will definitely end due to issue of the day (i mean "end" in a metaphorical way)
thewarrior 5y ago
I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy. Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008. It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg. Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.
- justbored123 5y ago
  Shale is not economically viable, regular oil is profitable at 10 dollars a barrel, shale needs 60 dollars or more. That is an extreme difference that we are not feeling because of massive amounts of credit pumped into the shale boom. Once the fake money dries up and the market prices that shale oil at its correct value you are in for a world of pain. Imagine the gas a the pump station going x6 and that affecting the rest of the economy. That is a world based on shale instead of conventional oil.
  - YouCanDoBetter 5y ago
    Shale is profitable because oil prices per barrel hit over 100$ in the 2000s. It's our answer to the OPEC oil cartel, and the reason they dumped all their oil for pennies on the dollar at the start of Covid - "This time we'll REALLY drive shale out of business and we can raise prices again in 5 years!!!" Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$. Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
- iammisc 5y ago
  This is like how peak wheat has not been truly debunked because we now have GMO wheat and novel agricultural practices.
  - 5y ago
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly. It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this. As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem. And we're not even close to being done yet.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  It’s probably better for the thread to avoid any specific modern political collapse theory. For example, I think it’s nutty to say that the attempted coup in the US had any chance of collapsing civilization. But I can’t really say that without sounding insulting, so my “flamewar territory” alarms are starting to go off. And that makes me a sad panda HN user. Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Your original argument was much more dismissive: > It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. > It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable. > Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories. There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
- wussboy 5y ago
  Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?
justbored123 5y ago
> “peak oil” ... It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?
- yosito 5y ago
  I think what they are suggesting is that humans will adapt to the changing environment as we have done over tens of thousands of years of evolution.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    "Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay". Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
    - marcosdumay 5y ago
      And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine. And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse. Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
      - XorNot 5y ago
        It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do? Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do? Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do? "Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it. In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".
spurgu 5y ago
> It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. So it is and so it does. And while it does, empires collapse, species go extinct...
ben_w 5y ago
The fear of the fall can cause the search for the solution to prevent the fall. The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.

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XorNot 5y ago

That's making a rather broad claim from a rather specific one, even if the adherents have a lot of ideological overlap. Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).

dane-pgp 5y ago
> but it hasn't happened yet To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February: > In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes. [0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-production-1846248229 https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
- schimmy_changa 5y ago
  Yes, but the term 'Peak Oil' implies the catastrophic and sudden crash in the availability of oil, not in the slow decrease in production due to alternatives. (Don't get me wrong, I'd like production to decline much faster for climate reasons!) The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
  - wussboy 5y ago
    I hear you, and I regret that the Environmental movement feels the need to ratchet everything up to a catastrophe. But surely if “peak” means anything it means that we used to grow, now we contract, and therefore peak oil has already occurred.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    > The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand. That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
CommieBobDole 5y ago
Peak Oil, in the very narrow sense of there being a point of maximum oil production before it starts declining as what remains becomes harder and thereby more expensive to extract, will probably happen eventually. The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries. And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
jacobr1 5y ago
The problem with most these malthusian style analyses is a presumption of a first-order system within their models. Human society is more able to adapt than deer herds, between both social changes and technology with second and third order effects. Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually). That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it. An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts. The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct. [1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
- lmm 5y ago
  AIUI US oil production actually did peak at more or less the originally predicted time, and the 1970s oil crisis was a reflection of that. Obviously it didn't result in the total collapse of civilisation, but it wasn't totally insignificant either.
  - snowwrestler 5y ago
    U.S. oil production has gone up so much since the 1970s that in 2015 Congress removed the crude oil export ban they put in place in 1975.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago

> But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable. And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us. And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Oh, to be clear, I think it will happen. I just don’t think it’s going to be something so predictable. Almost by definition, a civilization collapses due to a surprise — some belief was wrong. And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome. Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it? One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  Rome didn’t really collapse but rather wither away slowly over hundreds of years. Even still the most useful parts lived on five without the empire aspect which didn’t matter for most people. In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

Qem 5y ago

> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. The same thing, but now with 7 billion+ people. It's a lot of deforestation just to feed all these campfires.

OliverGilan 5y ago
Except we aren't running out of forests any time soon [1] and they're actually growing back to levels we haven't seen in decades. [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offset.html https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Monocultures are not forests. https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-forests-arent-really-forests/ https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-for...
hi5eyes 5y ago
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-54714692 China's forest carbon uptake 'underestimated' reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are

titzer 5y ago

There are multiple, independent studies that have concluded that global human society has gone into overshoot. So much so that it is an unwritten consensus on that. There's even this site[1] that calculates the day of the year when humanity has consumed that year's entire resources and is dipping into annual overshoot. [1] https://www.overshootday.org https://www.overshootday.org

deregulateMed 5y ago
"studies" are not the same as science. That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.

marvin 5y ago

A former partner of mine is an artist, and has a different perspective on the world than most engineers, combined with an amount of melancholic clarity. She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery. I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.

bawolff 5y ago

Maybe,but i think that can go both ways - bad things really do happen, often due to causes that are easily predictable with hind sight. I feel like assuming that the world cant end is just as unrealistic as always assuming the world will definitely end due to issue of the day (i mean "end" in a metaphorical way)

thewarrior 5y ago

I don’t think that peak oil has been truly debunked. Conventional oil production has indeed peaked and shale has come in to fill in the gap. However shale oil is a lot more expensive and this does propagate throughout the economy. Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008. It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg. Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.

justbored123 5y ago
Shale is not economically viable, regular oil is profitable at 10 dollars a barrel, shale needs 60 dollars or more. That is an extreme difference that we are not feeling because of massive amounts of credit pumped into the shale boom. Once the fake money dries up and the market prices that shale oil at its correct value you are in for a world of pain. Imagine the gas a the pump station going x6 and that affecting the rest of the economy. That is a world based on shale instead of conventional oil.
- YouCanDoBetter 5y ago
  Shale is profitable because oil prices per barrel hit over 100$ in the 2000s. It's our answer to the OPEC oil cartel, and the reason they dumped all their oil for pennies on the dollar at the start of Covid - "This time we'll REALLY drive shale out of business and we can raise prices again in 5 years!!!" Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$. Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
iammisc 5y ago
This is like how peak wheat has not been truly debunked because we now have GMO wheat and novel agricultural practices.
- 5y ago

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

A cursory reading of history is enough to show that civilisations collapse regularly. It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this. As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem. And we're not even close to being done yet.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
It’s probably better for the thread to avoid any specific modern political collapse theory. For example, I think it’s nutty to say that the attempted coup in the US had any chance of collapsing civilization. But I can’t really say that without sounding insulting, so my “flamewar territory” alarms are starting to go off. And that makes me a sad panda HN user. Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Your original argument was much more dismissive: > It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. > It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories. Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable. > Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories. There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
wussboy 5y ago
Yet here we are. Our current trials and tribulations are nothing compared to the Black Plague, the Hundred Years‘ War, WW2, even the stress of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?

justbored123 5y ago

> “peak oil” ... It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?

yosito 5y ago
I think what they are suggesting is that humans will adapt to the changing environment as we have done over tens of thousands of years of evolution.
- XorNot 5y ago
  "Adapt" doesn't mean things will be better. Or even "okay". Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
  - marcosdumay 5y ago
    And yet, we are here, with oil priced around 100x what it was when the book was published, so that it is being outcompeted by alternatives for several uses. It's not great, but people are adapting just fine. And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse. Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      It's not the house price: it's your house is destroyed and the land is no longer viable. What do you do? Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do? Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do? "Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it. In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".

spurgu 5y ago

> It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round. So it is and so it does. And while it does, empires collapse, species go extinct...

ben_w 5y ago

The fear of the fall can cause the search for the solution to prevent the fall. The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.