(Coming out of lurker mode here)
ROCKMAN wrote:And yet some think there will be an oil "Armageddon"...
...whether we've reached GPO or not this year it will be of little consequence to what's happening in the world today. The complexity of the dynamic greatly overwhelm some date on a calendar.
You've stuck the "-dynamic" suffix on peak oil, made the cause and effect more diffuse and harder to define, but you're still pushing the same narrative of "oil depletion" => "negative events" as hardcore peakoilers do. So I don't understand why you feel so superior. Yes, it's less apocalyptic, but it's still basically the same attempt to simplify the cause of bad things happening by blaming it on a PO boogieman. Sounds very much like a religion in delivering easy explanations for complex systems.
Debates that devolve into ad-homming dissenters and preaching to the converted reflect a last-stop reversion to dogma, similar to what you see in the dark corners of the internet where Holocaust deniers hang out.
I mean, some of the attempts at logic I'm seeing applied here to fluff-up the relevance of peak-oil are really no more compelling than
Kirk Cameron proving creationism with bananas. Only the gullible and heavily-biased are moved by such pseudo-science.
The irony here is that the peak-oil movement 10+ years ago used to frame itself on The Matrix's red-pill/blue-pill metaphor. A big emphasis was placed on studying the true nature of psychological denial of supposed "cornucopians". Essays about
magical thinking, for instance. But these days I see very little attempt on the part of peakers to hold their own convictions to the same degree of scrutiny as the march of history continues to contradict their predictions. (For the record, I see a great amount of trouble brewing, but most of it revolving around ecological problems rather than the threat of near-term fossil fuel shortages.)
Say what you like about Michael Lynch but at least he's trying to apply scientific-method to the issue rather than starting with a conclusion and clinging to "alternate-facts".
I wonder sometimes how Hubbert himself would handle the challenges to his bell-curve if he were alive to weigh in. I would expect him, as a scientist, to be much more willing to admit he was wrong then peak-oil die-hards. I mean, even Einstein had blind-spots in his models (quantum theory).
The debates here have reached a sort of intellectual closed-loop. In
the ETP thread if you back up and read forwards you'll see the same talking points repeated again and again, almost verbatim. It's just going in endless circles. I don't know why those people feel it's worth their while to keep that wheel turning since it's not moving anywhere.
It just seems the most active posters here are really not interested in intellectual inquiry as much as they are at the entertainment-value of poster-on-poster drama.
There's still a more level-headed discussion worth having here, but it would be difficult to do so with such strident voices dominating things.
I hesitated to post because I suspect by doing so I'll just be dragged into the game of hurling petty-insults that masquerades as a debate, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has stumbled into this forum and feels the way I do.