Call me a skeptic about the “peak oil” story. Human ingenuity has always found ways to produce more of, find substitutes for, or discover ways to do without a scarce resource when price signals tell us to. But if peak oil is true, doesn’t one good peak deserve another? Why not meet peak oil head on with its dreaded natural enemy: peak travel?
In a trenchant Times Op-Ed, Michael Lynch explains, point-by-point, why the “peak oil” concept is so wrong.
Worried that peak oil is about to put a sudden end to cheap kiwis and civilization as we know it? Kathy McMahon is a clinical psychiatrist who wants to help. She runs a website for people with peak-oil panic, which pledges to help you separate “what’s ‘mental preparation’ from what’s just ‘acting mental.'”
We’ve blogged repeatedly, and somewhat skeptically, about the “peak oil” frenzy. Chris Turner of The Walrus recently profiled Dave Hughes, a Canadian geologist who has crisscrossed North America lecturing on the end of the fossil-fuel age. Hughes, who spent 32 years mapping Canada’s coal reserves, believes that “there’s no possible way to keep running the engine of a modern global economy for much longer at the pace we’re burning [hydrocarbons].”
It is always interesting to watch what happens when the media latches onto a given issue and then, as the reality on the ground evolves — sometimes radically — the media fails to catch up to, or even monitor, the changes. This means the public is stuck with an outdated version of conventional wisdom which, even if it were true . . .
Peter Maass wrote the NY Times Sunday Magazine piece on “Peak Oil” that I have been blogging about recently. He was interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. During the course of the interview, he defended Matthew Simmons, saying, “Matt Simmons, he is not some kind of wild environmentalist, or kind of rogue economist, or anything like that…” Phew, we already have . . .
John Tierney wrote a great New York Times column in response to the Maass article on Peak Oil in the Sunday NY Times Magazine that I criticized. Tierney and Matthew Simmons, who is the point man for the Peak Oil team, made a $10,000 bet as to whether in 2010 oil would be above or below $200 a barrel (adjusted . . .
The cover story of the New York Times Sunday Magazine written by Peter Maass is about “Peak Oil.” The idea behind “peak oil” is that the world has been on a path of increasing oil production for many years, and now we are about to peak and go into a situation where there are dwindling reserves, leading to triple-digit prices . . .