"The 'free market', taken as a given by believers in the invisible hand, seems likely to turn out to be just another fizzer, an expression of the 'cargo cult magic' that I reckon will evaporate at the first real sniff of a market shortage."

The free market is a bit like democracy, isn't it? -- it's the worst possible option, apart from all the others that have been tried. But like Paul Keating, I will continue to back the horse Self-Interest above any plans to get our unimpressive governments even more involved than they already are in providing us with the essentials of life.

What happened to peak coal, confidently predicted to be not later than 1925 by Jevons (1865), but even Garnaut (2008:71) puts its exhaustion off to 2147 or so? Anyway if we do run out of coal and oil that solves the emissions problem! In reality, proven reserves of oil are always 30-50 times larger than the current rate of consumption (BP Annual Reports since the 1970s).

3- to 4-year election cycles mean that our politicians are more interested in keeping their jobs and privileges than dealing with longer term issues that cannot be popularly spun. We need to have generational election cycles of say, 15 to 20 years.

The three short comments above underscore Sam Powrie's idea that many (if not most) people have no idea about energy supply and demand, and the production and consumption of fossil fuels.

Any person who can remember back to growing mold and/or germs on a Petri plate, in high school science, ought to take a moment to put themself in the shoes of one individual germ (yeh, yeh, germs don't have shoes, I know) and use his or her eyes to see the edges of the Petri plate, which of course the germ likely knows nought about.

IMHO, free-market economists and energy growth proponents have no more vision than a germ. Like the Petri plate, the earth has limits to growth. Sooner or later, said germ may briefly and unconsciously swim in its own self-created cesspool, before turning into something else's stop-gap nourishment. There is only so much agar on the plate, and likewise, only so much in the way of sustainable resources on our planet.

I could have a good laugh about it all, except that I have to share the planet with these very ignorant people. The best of these write short daft comments to essays like Sam's. The worst of them pay millions of dollars to undermine the work of climate scientists and others who understand and model and carefully argue the subtleties of energy and materials flows in a finite world.

See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/feb/15/leaked-heartland-institute-documents-climate-scepticism?newsfeed=true

and
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3807130.html

Gee it must be great to be one of those rare & privileged people who can actually understand how all that petrol gets into that little pump at the service station.

Come off it Sam, anthropology is not such a high tech science [science?] that its practitioners, or it's drop outs are burdened with any extreme knowledge mate. I think you will find quite a few who know a hell of a lot more than you.

One thing many now realise is that petroleum is not actually squashed up old dinosaurs. It is percolating up from the core, & may in fact be inexhaustible in practice, although not necessarily available at the rate we would like. Just why is it that academics in particular rarely keep up with the vast knowledge developed since their graduation? Could it be a certain smugness?

Then we have all this gas. Practical people have developed economic ways to harvest over a centuries supply of energy from fracking alone, or haven't you noticed? How can people be still bleating about peak oil?

Sir Vivor, there are two types of "very ignorant people", those who don't know, & those who don't want to know, in case that knowledge interferes with a preconceived idea. I guess we all know which you are.

I don't like conspiracy theories, but with the number of light weight academics crying wolf about things like peak oil, one starts to wonder. Is it that they want to share their superior knowledge with the peasants, or do they really want to set the scene to restrict access to much of modern comfort by the "common" people?

Sam if the latter I've got news for you, & it's not good. The modern world could function perfectly adequately without anthropologists, & even speech pathologists, but can no longer get by with out plumbers. Get used to it.

Dear Sam, this might have been an interesting article on generic energy issues about ten years ago, but with the recent discoveries of colossal fuel reserves in CSG, Shale oil and natural gas, your case, its topic content and its conclusions are hopelessly out of date.

Europe and the UK have announced massive reserves whilst the USA has announced,

“Total US recoverable natural gas resources (includes conventional, unconventional in lower 48, Alaska and offshore) totals 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet according to the Institute for Energy Research: Enough natural gas to meet US electricity demand for 575 years at current fuel demand for generation levels - Enough natural gas to fuel homes heated by natural gas in the United States for 857 years - More natural gas than Russia, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkmenistan combined. Plus: The US has three times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia in shale oil”. --Gary Hunt.

So when you say that “Peak Oil is a geological and engineering reality not just a matter of economics. Its’ about the realities of production, not the elastic definition of what is and is not an economically defined reserve”. You might want to update your thinking a little before you suffer further embarrassment.