Peak Oil, Peak Nonsense

It’s been less than a year since the world was nearly as awash in writings about “peak oil” as it is in crude oil itself. The psychology of the moment was so twisted that, for example, the op-ed page of the New York Times ran a 2,850-word piece titled “The End of Oil” (March 2006). It argued, among other things, that while the world’s crude supplies may be more than half gone, not enough was being said about peak oil.

Still, a bogus argument will always seems less so in the ears & eyes of an audience that’s predisposed to believe it: oversimplification, misstatement, and ignoring the inconvenient (for starters) create nodding heads instead of furrowed brows.

Thus you can say — as the NYTs did — “oil is a finite commodity,” which sounds simple enough. So no one thinks too hard about how to define “finite” regarding crude oil. And, they get an implicit definition soon enough anyway: increasingly scarce and expensive, to the point that a drop of “4 percent of normal daily supply” would be enough to send oil prices to “$161 a barrel,” meaning that “millions are thrown out of work,” and the “quintessentially American lifestyle