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I had some friends who were fully sold on Peak Oil for a few years. Basically: we were about to hit the point where supply of oil was going to fall below demand once and for all, and there was no viable replacement, so prices were going to skyrocket, societies would grind to a halt, wars would start over the dwindling oil resources, and we were going to be living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland within 10 years.
In ~2009, the price of oil hit a record high of nearly $200/barrel. This was at the tail end of a sharp jump, after 20 years of steadily-rising oil prices. One of my friends was pretty obsessed, and had been reading blogs and listening to podcasts, and had all kinds of facts & figures on oil production, known reserves, predicted demand, etc, and they all seemed to point to a crisis. He predicted a price of $300 or higher per barrel within a year, and that was just the beginning.
So we made a bet on where oil prices were going to be in 5 years. He said (with absolute confidence) $300+, I said somewhere under the current price of $200.
It ended up being under $100/barrel. Nobody talks about "Peak Oil" anymore.
(I won't say where I got my confidence that oil prices would stabilize and fall, because that would just invite a barrage of downvotes and angry arguments...)
Which is funny because logically speaking we draw closer to "peak oil" every day.
Well, yes, but if it's far enough into the future it's kind of irrelevant. We can transition away from oil.
That was a key part of the argument at the time: there is no replacement! At that point, solar was much, much less efficient, wind was very much in the 'early experimental' phase, 'nuclear' was still a dirty word, electric cars were a joke, corn-based hydrogen was still a fresh and embarrassing failure, etc etc. No country at that point had ever grown their GDP without using significantly more oil & coal. The rhetoric was very much that we were stuck with gas cars forever, and everything else was a silly pipe dream.
The world has changed dramatically in the meantime--largely because oil prices started rising so dramatically.
LOL. That was a fun story. Reminds me of that one time a friend of mine claimed with 100% confidence that physical money would be gone within a few years. Then again, he isn’t exactly mentally stable so that could explain a lot.
Well, your friend wasn't totally crazy (nor was mine TBH, the trends looked bad). A few countries have more or less eliminated paper money. India was a very high-profile one, because lots of older people in India had savings stored under the mattress or whatever that were scheduled to become worthless...they had to postpone it a couple times. And a few European countries (I wanna say Finland? maybe Estonia?) have more or less got rid of physical currency.
A person might see those datapoints and extrapolate from that that it's only a matter of time before all countries would be paperless, without accounting for differences in culture. I can't see the US getting rid of paper currency...uhh...anytime soon, let's say.
Can confirm that thing about Finland. Physical currency has been eliminated almost entirely. Or well… at least the need for physical currency is pretty much gone at the moment, but some people still use it.
When it comes to buying and selling stuff between individuals, It’s not uncommon to find a person who won’t accept mobile payments, but wants paper instead. All the stores obviously accept paper and metal, but more and more people pay with a card or a phone. There are some excetional stores that only accept electronic payments, but that’s limited to small companies that can’t be bothered to deal with coins. All the medium and large stores have the means to accept both physical and electronic payments.
I can’t exactly remember when that prediction was supposed to come true, but I think it was something like 2010 or something like that. Seeing how slowly these things actually change, I would guess it’s going to take like 50 years untill all payments are fully electronic and physical currency is fully eliminated. Could take longer. Who knows.
Haha, I bet you're both talking about the same guy. How's his positions on BTC and GME?
I haven’t been in contact with him in years, but I’ll try to remember if I bump into him in the future.
US oil production was in decline from 1980 to 2010.
Technology made shale viable.
We kicked the can.
Of course we did. We couldn't change our entire society and technology and industrial plant in a year or two.
The claim was, we couldn't kick the can anymore. But we did. The speed with which the US went from the largest net importer of oil to a net exporter (when people were saying there were no remaining reserves in the US) was kind of bewildering, and it took the wind right out of the sails of the 'Peak Oil' people. If prices go up still further, there's clearly plenty of reserves that will become viable.
Of course, that's kind of a bad thing: we need to reduce carbon emissions, and shale is dirty as hell. If all we did was burn different kinds of oil, we could sigh in disgust and say "all we did was kick the can". But in the meantime:
I think if oil prices started to spike again today because supply wasn't keeping up with demand, the outlook would be totally different. Hell, one could legitimately view it as a good thing, because it would accelerate the adoption of cleaner alternatives. It's now very clear that we don't need to ride the oil train right into the ground, the alternatives are viable. The critical pair of claims that made Peak Oil an apocalyptic scenario were: (1) we're almost out of oil and (2) there's no feasible alternative to oil. We now know that neither claim is true.
An excellent take overall, in a frankly bewildering turn, but the explanation is clear in this misunderstanding:
Neither claim was made. After the peak, you get nearly as much oil as last year, every year. It doesn't just stop. The continental US hit peak drilled oil and took thirty-plus years to taper off. And the workarounds to "oil's getting expensive" are exactly what we've been pushing throughout the twentieth century - public transit, walkable cities, nuclear power, blah blah blah.
The expectation of things going completely tits-up instead was based on the previous eight years of right-wing maniacs actively undermining all of that, specifically to start endless foreign conflicts over resources. We'd done negative preparation for another oil crunch. "Fortunately," 2008 saw the near-collapse of the fake economy, which severely impacted the real economy, and demand went down. Between that and squeezing oil from dirt, we've propped up our way of life again, while the alternatives go from 'we could just do this and it would be fine' to 'and it no longer costs 10% more than your coal-fired Humvee.'
The cost isn't the only part that's changed. But it's the only part that seems to matter, to the kind of dolts who think Mad Max is a documentary, and are convinced they'd run Barter Town.
I think that's the matured version of the argument. It wasn't the version my friends were fixated on--though I should say, that version also didn't claim we were almost out of oil. I did oversimplify that.
The actual claim was more like: (1) production of oil is going to stop growing, and may even start to slowly fall, (2) demand is going to keep growing, because China, India, et al aren't going to shrug their shoulders and stay undeveloped (and the assumption was that oil == growth), and developed countries aren't willing to backslide on their prosperity, (3) the increasing demand for a fixed or shrinking supply was going to drive the price up--rapidly, and (4) this was going to cause all hell to break loose.
There was no viable alternative to oil (in the version I'm familiar with), so overall worldwide prosperity would be fixed or falling even as the developed world was hungry for a better life, leading to, basically, World War 3, in which every country would be willing to throw down for every bit of oil they could get their hands on. And it was all downhill from there: things would never get better for the world in general ever again, and when we spent fuel on war (which burns through the stuff in a hurry) it would only accelerate the downfall. Like I said, it was an apocalyptic vision.
Now, obviously, there is a finite amount of oil. We are continuing to burn through it. It's just not the burning fuse it was made out to be, inches away from the barrels of TNT. Climate change seems like a much more urgent issue, and luckily we can solve them both at once.
I'm not arguing against the concept of a finite oil supply leading to an eventual peak in oil supply (assuming we stay dependent on the stuff), just the apocalyptic vision that was popular in roughly 2007 which was claiming world society was on the verge of collapse in the next decade or so.