Curmudgeon

Yes, there's a lot of US shale gas, not least in the Marcellus deposits. But don't get carried away. They are not delivering as hoped. In most wells there is an initial burst and then the decline is rapid, making only a few wells economically viable.

As for the pre-salt oil resources in Brazil, yes they're there in large quantities but they're pretty deep and the economics of extraction hasn't been sorted as yet. Don't hold your breath on those.

Even if the scaremongering was half true it is obvious that having a carbon tax is purely wealth distribution. Those who went to school in the seventies have heard it all before many times over. Yawn.

$3 or $4 or whatever, doesn't matter does it, since the current government is going to carbon tax us and make us better off than before we were taxed .. isn't that how it works?

So we'll have more money to pay for more expensive fuel, and if they raise the tax on fuel, we'll have even more money .. this is so fantastic .. bring on more tax!

I demand more tax, so I'll be better off .. or something like that /sarc .. what an absurd notion.

I agree with curmudgeon, the Peak Oil "scare" is just that, carefully selected to ignore the reality of life and all the alternative fuels, like biofuels .. now I know there are issues with all those things, but the bottom line is, we will nt run out of vehicle fuel. It may be produced differently, cost differently .. but we will have fuel.

Stop the scare campaigns that we will have "no fuel" .. we will and you don't like that, we get it.

Amicus

Please enlighten us as to what the alternative vehicle fuels are. Algae can apparently replace 17 per cent of US imported oil. That's a start except we now find it takes huge amounts of fresh water, in the same way that corn ethanol takes land away from food production (and we are close to crisis on that front). Biofuel from sugar has at least a decent EROEI but large scale development in Brazil may wreck valuable ecosystems. Gas? Yes, there's potential there but we may not get the infrastructure in place before oil prices go through the roof.

It's not good enough to just say "we'll be right". You have to be specific so government can at least provide initial financial incentives to get the alternatives in place, otherwise we'll all be in economic meltdown once again.

"You have to be specific"

No I don't ..

This is an opinion forum, not a guaranteed solutions forum

popapesh - you're just p*ssy because there are alternatives and you don't like that, you would prefer we all got our comeuppance, yes?

There are biofuels, and I expect with all the land we have in Australia to grow our fuel it's a renewable and might even provide some of those new green jobs

the fact you will find fault with any solution, does not mean they don't exist, with or without difficulties, which can and will be overcome. they may not be ready today, but they don't have to be, we have years to plan and get our act together

suffer baby

Ben/popnperish - as you've basically agreed to in a previous post, the peak oil scare is dead.. sure the pre-salt stuff is expensive to extract, as you say, but that means it'll be expensive oil. Thre is no actual barrier to extracting it. No the fracking stuff is changing everything, you are concentrating on the failures in the hope that they mean something in the scheme of things. However, to even admit that those reserves exist (only a few wells..) means you agree that peak oil is dead.

In any case, there was a lot of unconventional oil before fracking came along, the real issue is the trade off between oil prices and extraction prices, and OPEC production which has levelled off noticeably. Commentators have attributed that levelling off to the peak in easy-lift oil but, as I pointed out, an alternative explanation is that OPEC members haven't bothered to investing in oil exploration or production facilities. This has to do with the way they set their production quotas.

Whether either explanation is right is neither here nor there now, as far as peak oil is concerned. As a scare story its effectively dead.

The sad part is that although you, popnperish, at least know enough about this to quibble, Ben doesn't seem to know anything at all about these developments.