Yabbie - maybe you have a point and Kloppers is just playing a deep game, but he still sounds uncannily like a nut.

Baygon - no you guys have to take a refresher course on the interaction between prices, production and reserves. Reserve totals at any point have nothing to do with production and everything to do with the price of the commodity. After ten years of production the agreed reserves of a particular mineral may fall by eight years or increase by 20 years - depending on whether the price has increased or decreased.
This has been known by the resources industry for a long time, which is why they have long given up paying any attention to this doomsayer stuff. The partial exception is oil and that's for oil from wells (easy lift oil), not the likes of shale oil. No one with any authority has said otherwise.
The projections you so proudly point to could have been made at any time in the past century and more, and been proven wrong each time. Why should we believe them now?

Well done Syd. You're mostly right though gas and coal peaks will come a lot earlier than you say. Oil peak is probably past. New gas finds are certainly going to delay the inevitable crisis and thank heavens for that. But the immediate crisis is climate change and we have to get emissions down from whatever source by 80% by mid-century. That DOES mean a post-carbon economy. We can be grateful we have a few years to make the changeover, though with comments like these on this forum, we may well hit crisis before the changeover has been made.

curmudgeon your rebuttal only reinforces my point - you state:

Reserve totals at any point have nothing to do with production and everything to do with the price of the commodity.

Presumably you agree that oil is a finite resource. Therefore as reserves decline the price will act as a means of rationing that resource.

There is no doubt that this will considerably lengthen the time line that we have some oil available.

BUT - the key issue is that our economy is structured around everyone having access to energy either in the form of coal or oil - thus as the price goes up it will impact on all industries - the assumption that most economists make is that the price signal is sufficient to enable us to shift to alternative sources of energy. The problem with that scenario is that it takes time to make that transition - just as the resource will not disappear overnight so the transition cannot happen over night.

My argument is that we can either follow your advice and allow stocks to run down to the point where alternative energy sources are price competitive or we can recognize a threat to our well being and act to minimize the impact of that threat by gearing up for a low carbon economy now.

Those who talk about Peak Oil and Peak Coal are not talking about a situation where there is plenty one day and nothing the next but rather point to a bell shaped graph - once you are over the peak then the decline will mirror the original growth - that is consistent with your scenario.

What you ignore in that scenario is that we have created a world which is highly dependent on increasingly scarce commodities (rare earths need to be added to that mix as well) we either find alternatives or we can simply watch the system collapse, albeit in slow motion.

Unlike many of the commenters here I think the science is sound, something they could find out for themselves if they didn't prefer to get their information pre-filtered by sources that aim to convince climate change due to human causes ain't happening. But experience tells me that whilst the real world effects of warming continue to increase in strength the chances I - or NCAR, NOAA, NASA, CSIRO, BoM, CRU, all the scientists and institutions of the world that actually study climate - individually or as summarised in IPCC reports - won't convince them. Entitled to their opinions I suppose, even if those opinions promote policy that's dangerously irresponsible, howevever I expect elected representatives to take the scientific advice at their disposal seriously and be deeply sceptical of those urging them to dismiss or ignore that advice. That advice includes that there's more than enough fossil fuels to strongly change our climate and cause enormous costs to fundamental activities like growing enough food. We'll face the costs of adaptation but those costs are still able to be mitigated by investing in mitigation. If the human race can organise itself to effectively do so and that looks doubtful. But just because it's hard isn't a good enough excuse to fail to try.

The fact that fossil fuel reserve are finite will start to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and sooner than most people think. We still need a carbon tax in order to drive investment in alternative fuels. If we just rely on scarcity prices to do the rationing it will be too late to avoid the worst consequences of both global warming and fuel depletion. In rational world, we would have a global resource rent tax, which would distribute costs and benefits between the resource rich and the resource poor. Without it, there will be conflict and chaos within decades.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/51097