There's plenty of good quotes in this NY Times piece about rising oil prices, but I think the key is this one:
“It's a crunch,” said J. Robinson West, chairman of PFC Energy, an energy consulting firm in Washington. “The world is not running out of oil, but rather it's running out of oil production capacity.”
Right. When people dismiss the peak oil thesis, they tend to demonstrate their ignorance of it. Peak oil doesn't say that the supply is going to dry up, but rather that production will peak and then decline, while demand continues to increase, overtaking production. We'll never actually run out of oil, rather it will simply become more and more expensive to the point where demand for it will have to lessen (as it has in the United States recently, the story notes, precisely because of the economic slowdown). One hopes an alternative to the oil-based economy will present itself by then, but as the Times story illustrates, the Chinas and Indias of the world aren't exactly setting a good example. We might also wonder why the United States is not taking the initiative on evolving beyond the carbon era.
--Mori Dinauer
