Has Peak Oil already happened?

[GliderGuider]

1. We've been on the "Peak Plateau" since mid 2004.

Last edited Thu Dec 22, 2011, 04:17 PM - Edit history (1)

The 800-pound Peak Oil gorilla, though, is net exports. These can decline faster than actual oil production, and have the potential to drop to zero within the next few decades. That means that the international oil market could go completely dry, putting oil-importing nations at an enormous disadvantage. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_Land_Model for more information.



The social and economic implications depend on too many factors to make predictions possible. Some of those factors are:

How fast will both production and exports decline?
How will oil importers react as market supplies start to shrink? E.g. policies including sectoral rationing, resource wars, mercantilism etc.
How fast can transportation be electrified?
Will renewable liquid fuels be widely adopted and what will the consequences be?
How vulnerable is the global economy to rising oil prices, especially in the face of the ongoing financial catastrophe?

The opinions about the outcome range from the extreme fast-crash scenario popularized by people like Jay Hansen and Richard Duncan (http://dieoff.org/dieoffindex.html), through the slower "Catabolic Collapse" foreseen by John Michael Greer (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/01/onset-of-catabolic-collapse.html) to the view held by the renewable energy devotees that we will develop renewables fast enough to avoid a crash.

I used to be in the fast-crash camp, but I now tend more toward Greer's view. I expect to see a cyclic descent into a permanent ever-deepening global depression - a stair-step descent driven by a combination of peak oil, climate change, economic/financial instability and global food supply problems. The social problems of such a development could obviously be enormous.