I think the idea of a peak is almost tautological
Tautological as in true on every line of a truth table? I think not...
a geological product is limited, by definition. I know that some people doubt that oil is a fossil fuel at all, but this does not make much difference. From a logical point of view, there cannot be a limitless supply of it.
Logic says absolutely nothing about this.
It seems to me that the idea that the oil will peak is obvious. But it seems that it is beyond the limits of science to predict when it will happen. No-one seems to know how much oil is in the ground. By using the data of discovery, seems very weak as an accurate method of prediction. It is too easy to explain falsified predictions on other factors. (The oil crisis caused the 2000 prediction to be delayed, the OPEC countries are exaggerating the amount of reserves .... all these are "ad-hoc" hypotheses to "save" the theory).
My main problem is that false predictions, by the peak oil theorists, are always explained away by these methods, and I am afraid, this is a sign of a pseudoscience.
Popper probably wouldn't have thought so. But so what? Falsificationism runs into Quine-Duhem too easily. We use natural language because we have to (more or less); but we understand a scientist who puts forth some theory as proposing a number of related theories that make slightly different predictions. If oil peaked in 2001 rather than 2000, Popper would still have allowed that Hubbert's theory was corroborated, not falsified, unless some other competing theory had different ontological implications and had predicted 2001 as the date specifically.
Technically, by your apparent interpretation of Popper, Newton's laws of motion have been falsified by every single trial ever held to test them, since no ideal environment has ever existed. The actual experimental results have never once, and will never, precisely match what Newton's laws calculate. By the principle you seem to be stating, this means that Newton's laws were falsified the first time they were tested.
I'm not aware of a single branch of science that doesn't have a certain level of tolerance in measurement, and this is something that Popper was very much aware of. He would not have thought that because oil didn't peak in 2000, suddenly Hubbert's theory is false.
Perhaps we could say that no-one can give hard evidence for when the oil will peak. It seems difficult to base any kind of political policy on such a vague prediction.
The hell it is. We ought to be doing roughly the same things whether oil will peak next friday or 20 years from now. Only if oil peak is more than 20 years away should our politics be different.
It could be argued that the peak oil theory, although weak from a strictly scientific point of view, is in awareness, but the powers that be are "managing" the oil supply.
That's less Popper and more Duhem...
Making doomsday predictions is not science. Sorry.
I thought you were a Popperite? Popper had no problems making predictions (specifically in contradiction of Hume's problem of induction). So, let's say the sun blows up. We are perfectly justified in predicting doomsday, and Popper wouldn't have said otherwise--unless, that is, the sun blew up and even long after life was rolling along, in which case the doomsday theory would be falsified.