Peak Oil May Worsen the Climate Crisis

It’s hard to know whether we should be more worried that consuming oil is killing the planet or that there’s way too little of this killer oil left.

Joe Romm of Climate Progress has an article that is getting a lot of attention in Salon, called “Peak Oil. Consider it Solved” (subscription required). His argument is that if we do what is required to address climate change


At Climate Progress, he summarizes his worry-about-climate-first argument: “The bottom line is that if we solve the climate problem, we will solve the peak oil problem. If we don’t solve the climate problem, peak oil will be a somewhat painful, but relatively short blip on the history of humanity compared to the extremely painful, multi-century tragedy our children and the next 50 generations after them will face.”

But now comes the response from the peak-oil folks. Dave Cohen at Energy Bulletin argues the world is going to be in the grip of fuel shortages before the solutions that Romm talks about come to fruition. “Many climate activists have tunnel vision that prevents them from appreciating the real oil supply problems we have to solve right now,” he writes. “Everything is viewed through the lens of climate change. This view is naive