We Don't Need No Stinking Giant Fans

Maybe Hubbert meant peek oil..?

But we're running put of CO2 .... or something

Limits to growth, Club of Rome, all these idiots screaming doom in the 1970's. Turns out they were in it for the money, made a tidy income for their whole careers out of doom-screaming.

All BS of course, I remember being distinctly unimpressed by it all as a second year uni student.

I am so sorry, at first I thought you wrote "We don't need no stinking Giants Fans" and was ready for an article about sports. Where did that coffee pot go...

Fantastic piece by Cosh.

Just a random comment. The article was ho hum but what caught my eye the most in that article was the bankruptcy of Beacon Power..... "flywheel-based energy storage solutions for grid-scale frequency regulation services and other utility-scale and unitary energy storage applications." In other words, they made centrifugal "batteries". And they actually worked. This technology is critical for wind and solar to succeed as it provides a means of leveling out their erratic production. It's about the only "practical" way of doing it as it is not location based, not limited by other resources, and not involving conventional batteries.

My favourite line is about the switch from coal to natural gas meant the US has lowered its emissions two times as much as stipulated in the Kyoto accord.

Of course, the ultimate solution for electricity production is highly-efficent nuclear power. First, though, all the chicken littles must die.

All i can say is as long as there is earthquakes that means the techtonic plates are moving and if they are moving oil is being made period end of story!!

Colby Cosh is great. Maclean's has improved a lot.

Set you free - fully agreed. And when the medical isotopes start to dry up because the older and more dangerous reactors are shut down because they're such a threat, where will we turn for more? I'd argue that a fast breeder reactor that can re-process others reactor's wastes and designed to build the unusual isotopes we use more and more of would be a good fit for a remote area with high power draws (ie north of the Bridge to Nowhere above Fort Mac, if you can find a large barren area). Just make sure you put a military installation around it with live-fire rules in effect to practice Darwinistic principles on the protestors or would-be mulla-thieves.

The problem is extracting oil/shale/ect from existing sources, not really its amount.

Osumashi - That's always the way with resource extraction. Don't think of the source, think of the resource. We're effectively out of whale oil, but there's lots of mineral oil to take it's place. We're running low on rich placer gold deposits, but there's a lot of gold left to mine. Our ancestors didn't exit the stone age because they ran out of stones. "Peak Oil" depends upon no economic drivers.

I've decided to go over to the dark side and cash in with my new research - the mother of all junk science studies - "The effects of climate change on peak oil." Perhaps you weren't aware I was a climatoilogist.

Kaching!!

I made the mistake of reading some of the moonbat comments on this article. WTF do these people come from? I'm getting very pissed off at the defeatist attitude present in an overly large section of the population.

When I was in my environmentalist phase, I viewed oil as just a temporary power source until most electricity was produced in nuclear reactors. That was one of the things that got me into arguing with technophobes, but it appeared clear to me in 1970 that we switch to nuclear, use oil primarily as a hydrocarbon feedstock for the production of plastics and other carbon based chemicals and hopefully would have fusion power about now.

Those who describe oil as a "finite resource" are unbelievably provincial in their outlook. We live in a solar system filled with hydrocarbons and to access a source of raw materials greater than the mass of the earth we just need to get out into space. I marvel at how much people did in the 1940's and 1950's with what would now be considered quaint technology. However, what they had in quantity was intense motivation to get things done, no idiotic bureaucracy to stand in their way and a vision of a future world in which technology continued to advance at the same rate it did in WWII.

The single most dangerous danger to the earth at this time is encountering another dinosaur killer meteorite. The theoretical dangers of CAGW are nothing compared to the climate change that would occur from such an encounter. The only good thing that would come of such an event is that it would reduce the moonbat population of the world substantially.

We knew about methane hydrates in the 1970's and any concept of "peak oil" that fails to take this into consideration is fatally flawed. There were science fair projects in Calgary in the 1970's where high school students did their best to make oil out of greasy sand from the oil sands. The theoretical potential of this hydrocarbon reservoir was well known in the 1970's.

I suggest that we consider the concept of "peak stupidity" and it would be nice if we could predict a year when human stupidity would peak and then begin to decline. Unfortunately, it seems that there is an immense reservoir of stupidity in N. America that shows no sign of being depleted in the near future. We should fund studies to determine whether or not injecting moonbats into depleted oil formations would accelerate the arrival of peak stupidity while producing more oil as a byproduct.

This article is a classic example of the hazzards of allowing mathematically and technologically ignorant journalists to pontificate on important scientific questions. As soon as rational discussion and debate ensues, Cosh responds with nothing but puerile smartassery. If he has actually read Hubbert's work, he clearly didn't understand it.

Any geologist or earth sciences engineer is well aware that reserves of any naturally occurring commodity are a function of availability, price and extraction costs, and known reserves in situ therefore rise and fall with market conditions and technological capability. That doesn't alter the inescapable fact that reserves of petroleum, natural gas, coal, copper or whatever are finite. At some point they will be "all used up". Its foolish to suggest that we won't run out of oil; the only question is when, and with the rapid modernization of China, it will probably be within the lifetimes of some people now living. Fortunately, uranium and thorium in low concentrations are very abundant elements - sufficiently abundant that, with improved technology, they could maintain civilization for a few centuries but, even that will have to end sometime. Then what? Que sera sera.