Comments on: Oil hits $100

By: jtc

jtc — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 13:39:53 +0000

I think that 50 years from now, we’ll look at the “Peak Oil” theory the way we look back at Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” prediction.

By the way… I LOVE this site!

By: Tomas Martin

Tomas Martin — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:57:24 +0000

As Paul said, the reviews of ‘The Bottomless Well’ are a little underwhelming. The thing is though, even if the authors are right, we will have to undergo an identical process of converting to new energy to meet demand as we would if they were wrong. I’m not a doommonger that thinks the world is going to end over this. This is merely another challenge. But I do think the economic and technological policies will have to change to match problems such as these.

The point is, it doesn’t matter if peak oil is real or not. The increase in price of oil due to increased demand over supply has exactly the same effect on the world economy and the way we live, whatever the root cause.

By: Paul Raven

Paul Raven — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:35:42 +0000

From the Publisher’s Weekly review of The Bottomless Well, as quoted on the Amazon page linked:

But their treatment of energy-consumption pitfalls like global warming is cursory and unconvincing, and they devote too little space to explaining exactly where new energy supplies will come from, and too much to assurances that “[f]uels recede, demand grows… but logic ascends, and with the rise of logic we attain the impossible—infinite energy, perpetual motion and the triumph of power.” Long on Nietzschean bombast but short on some crucial specifics, theirs is an intriguing but incomplete vision of energy policy and prospects.

I think almost every regular reader here at Futurismic is pro-technology, and no one is advocating a return to primitivism. But I still remain to be convinced by nay-sayers that there is anything to be lost from making our energy consumption cleaner and more efficient … apart from the profit margins of the fossil fuel industry, that is.

By: gmoke

gmoke — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 04:33:54 +0000

Maybe Peak Oil is a myth but according to the world oil production figures at theoildrum.com, it seems that we reached at least a local peak sometime around the summer of 2006 and production has declined since then.

By: jtc

jtc — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:00:02 +0000

Peak oil is a myth. This is a book right up your alley: all about the long term history and future of energy use. You will, at the very least, be less pessimistic.

‘The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy’ by Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills

http://www.amazon.com/Bottomless-Well-Twilight-Virtue-Energy/dp/0465031161

enjoy!