Peak Oil: Is This Approach The Only Option?

The roster of Fellows at the Post Carbon Institute hardly strikes any reasonable person as a collection of bug-eyed extremists out to strike fear into the hearts of mere mortals everywhere. Disagree if one must with the conclusions they draw, but this think tank has shared with the public a variety of thoroughly-research, fact-based reports on energy, fossil fuel supplies, climate, and related issues.

“Extremists” is not the first thought that comes to mind when reading the great body of work the Institute has created over the years. Unless of course you are one of the advocates of fact-free nonsense as policy still out there in full force peddling their views by stirring up their readership with less than admirable efforts to steer policy debates away from reality and into the rabbit hole of denial. Anything or anyone contradicting their narrow and self-serving interests is met with whatever arsenal is available.

Since facts don’t seem to be part of that supply very often, revving up the red-meat buzzwords is Plan B. Why engage in honorable discussions about facts if you can instead just insult or ascribe motivations and objectives existing only in tiny minds? (Probably suggests a few things about the “merits” of their positions and preferred methods of conduct, however.)

The radical anti-fracking advocates at the Post Carbon Institute took over leadership on the whole ‘Peak Oil’ argument a few years ago. Since doing so, they have turned what was at one time a somewhat misguided and short-sighted mathematical endeavor into a full-blown religious cult, in which every data point, regardless of its nature, becomes twisted into a support point for the argument that the dreaded ‘Peak Oil’ – and/or ‘Peak Gas’ depending on what day it is and which side of the bed these activists wake up on – is just around the corner, and nations that depend upon petroleum products for much of their energy mix, i.e., pretty much every nation on the face of the earth, are DOOOOOOMED!

Yeah! You tell ‘em! Thanks for helping me to recall the days of sixth-grade schoolyard debates. Nothing substantive, but if you can glom onto a factoid and spin it as needed without appearing entirely insane or offensive, then use whatcha got! Who cares about serving the public good, properly informing citizens, or even basic decency when you can just toss out this?

What’s the point? Who does this benefit? Certainly not the public.

Post Carbon Institute’s Richard Heinberg recently offered a thoughtful and fact-derived essay entitled “The Gross Society: We’re Entering an Age of Energy Impoverishment” which apparently thoroughly enraged at least one writer who didn’t seem to find much time to actually debate the merits of Richard’s argument in his piece. He did latch on to one relatively minor offering from Heinberg’s article to fuel his entire argument, which likewise suggests that if that’s the best rebuttal available, perhaps some added consideration and reflection might be worth considering.

These people are quite verbose, able to whip out 3,000 word diatribes with the snap of a finger….
Note that the Cult’s entire argument in this piece (assuming you have the patience and lack of anything better to do to actually read the whole thing) hinges on acceptance of the assertion that oil prices are somehow today at historic highs. Think about that for a second:  That assertion is not remotely true in absolute terms, much less in inflation-adjusted terms.

First up, I apparently had nothing better to do and was stocked with just enough patience to endure a start-to-finish reading of all 3000+ words of Richard’s “diatribe” [that was a grueling ten minutes, but I endured, although his reasoned argument differs from what I understood “diatribe” to be]. If anyone else came away from that reading with the idea that this lead Cultist’s “entire argument” hinged “on acceptance of the assertion that oil prices are somehow today at historic highs” I would suggest re-reading the article with eyes open the next time.

That was one point among many. To argue that that trivial spin on a relatively minor point served as sole justification for raising a number of legitimate concerns about future energy supply suggests motivations having nothing to do with engaging in anything remotely-associated with a mature debate about the facts and issues at hand. Why might that be?

Give credit where credit is due, the Forbes’ contributor does offer an impassioned defense of his one-note “historic highs” argument:

That assertion is not remotely true in absolute terms, much less in inflation-adjusted terms.
In absolute terms, the price of oil exceeded the current price for WTI by 50% in 2008, rising as high as $147/bbl before suffering a steep decline at the advent of the Great Recession.  But in inflation adjusted terms, there have been many times in the past when the real price of crude oil exceeded the current prices for WTI or Brent crude.  Just off the top of our melon-like head we can tick off 2011 and 1980, to name just a couple of years in addition to 2008.
More to the point, the price of gasoline is really the key statistic that indicates the true cost of petroleum to any country’s economy, and there is literally no case to be made that current gasoline prices are at historically high levels on an inflation-adjusted basis.

My melon-like head does not process math or economics well … at all. I’ve readily admitted that, so I will not dispute that assertion or the stats cited. But who among the general population cares if today’s inflation-adjusted/absolute/real/whatever prices are lower than those in 1980, or 54 B.C.?

Although the 1%-ers and their loyal followers don’t give much thought to the struggles and challenges of the great majority of fellow citizens, their daily financial struggles and fears aren’t helped much by those academic analyses. For them, prices are high, period. High prices may be a delight to bean-counters focused on bottom lines, but for most others, what needs to be maintained and what needs to be curtailed in the weekly budget matters more.

And regardless of the economic keywords employed, production via hydraulic fracturing, or deep-sea exploration, or Arctic considerations are all more expensive, too. Toss in added risks, investor concerns, those silly environmental issues which we cultists just delight in considering—especially when it comes to contemplating our children’s future—and a host of other issues Richard Heinberg managed to discuss but which our intrepid Forbes’ guy found no rebuttals for, we have some energy supply challenges facing us now and in the years to come.

Reality sucks, rarely more so when it interferes with a narrative premised on ideology first, second, and third.

The Peak Oil cult alternately argues that we are on the verge of reaching the ‘peak’, or have indeed already reached it. Meanwhile, global crude oil reserves and production continue to steadily rise, and every real expert understands that we are just at the tip of an enormous underground iceberg when it comes to identifying and producing global shale oil reserves.
As for the whole ‘Energy Impoverishment’ argument, it is crucial to remember that the goal of the radical environmentalist movement personified by the Post Carbon Institute activists is to deny nations access to abundant, affordable energy that oil and natural gas provide every day. Energy impoverishment is in fact what we will all experience if these people ever do achieve their ultimate goal in life.
At the end of the day, ‘Peak Oil’ theory has become nothing but a religious exercise engaged in by environmental radicals, designed solely as an effort to create alarm in the public’s collective mind about continued reliance on crude oil and natural gas as our main source of energy.
That’s what it is, and if you fall for it, well, shame on you.

A fine, clueless, red-meat, facts-be-damned-(or-ignored), insult-them-because-I have-nothing-else, and doesn’t-get-it-at-all conclusion.  Instead, we’re treated to “[A] religious exercise engaged in by environmental radicals, designed solely as an effort to create alarm in the public’s collective mind….”

Say what? That’s so embarrassingly juvenile, false, and petty it’s hard to imagine an adult wrote it for anyone other than Stephen Colbert or Jon Stewart (or Fox News). But why discuss anything about the economic, geological, and production facts and considerations  involved in the fabulous “underground iceberg” and reserves when you can simply toss out a not-even-close-to-true objective of “environmental radicals” to “deny nations access to abundant, affordable energy that oil and natural gas provide every day?”

If anyone is buying that strategy as a sound analysis or critique, “well, shame on you.”

Better still, take up the writer’s offer and “actually read the whole thing.” Then decide. Knowledge is a good thing, and more useful—especially if the future matters to you.

Peak Oil Matters