Divergence

I'm well aware of the price, of course.. Unfortunately your link does not work but is it adjusted to real dollars? Never mind.. certainly prices are high at the moment but that has more to do with OPEC and failing to invest in production, than any peak. There may also be some short term dispruption due to the general switch over from OPEC to non-OPEC sources (actually all peak oil was ever really about).

I can't discuss this interesting subject in all the detail it deserves at the mo, but as noted before even the environmental movement has dropped peak oil as a cause due to the revolution in the energy sector.. although ther are a few hold-outs..

Curmudgeon,

I can only respond by saying "CRAP" you obviously believe those within your inner-circle, the 'business as usual mob'.

Sorry to bust the bubble but we are in terminal decline, every scientific (and that would be peer-reviewed) oil report shows that conventional oil is in decline, perhaps as high as 6.5%.

Unconventional oil and all of the other supposed up line solutions to fuel the 'growth economy' are just not there, and technology will not solve these predicaments in time.

If LSC (Light Sweet Crude) remains above US $100 per barrel during the biggest recession since the 1930s, explain to me what will happen if any real 'green shoots' begin to appear.
Currently the US is reporting unemployment (U3) at about 8.2%, how about the real unemployment figure (U6) which stands at around 22%, tell me then how the real economy in the US with more than $1T going toward hegemony and overseas wars, fractional reserve banking, credit (debt) and the hollowing out of the middle class is working toward a better future! Australia is not far behind, we have private debt at nearly 92% of GDP and our banks are about as badly exposed as one could wish.

Rose colour glasses are great when you have a vested interest, however I worry given my own vested interest in seeing my children, aged 5 and 8 gravitate into a world that is going to need a paradigm shift in thinking from here on in.

Your, old, biased, and blinkered view is no longer relevant.

Bet on the table ($1,000AUD) - Oil will either be $250+ per barrel by 2015 if BAU continues or circa $40 per barrel if we have a complete international collapse of the global financial system within this time-frame (confirmed date 1-1.2015).

Maybe you should take the time to look at the real situation and report back on what is self-evident, chaos in the near future.

Bazz, Geoff of Perth and others

Fellas, look this business about peak oil ending has been discussed many times on this forum and elsewhere, and its becoming old. Its time for you to catch up. For starters search on the UK environmentalist George Monbiot, notably his recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he declared the peak oil story was over. Also search on peak oil and that should bring up the analysts who have declared it over. Also start reading up the energy revolution and oil and gas reserves going through the roof.

Now granted there may well be price disruptions and oil prices are high for a host of reasons that have nothing to do with peak oil as such, but does have a lot to do with OPEC production. And, no, I have not the slightest idea what will happen to prices from now. There are a legion of highly trained analystst who consistantly get price forecasts wrong.

But some of those analysts did believe in peak oil. Now they don't mention it. The peak oil story is gone. Deal with it. Leave it with you.

The author gives us much food for thought regarding the Bigger Picture, nationally and globally. Yet we seem bent on focusing on minutiae, with a myopia nurtured with near religious fervour from ages of fastidious reverence to a view that someone else can always do it better than we ever could.

Time to wake up and take a good look at just how very inward and foolish we can be - if we continue to try very hard.

For all global thinkers the writing is on the wall. Business as usual is taking us on a one-way ride to a place we would all very much rather avoid - where economic-capitalism creates an unbridgeable divide between the elite and the masses, where ultimately even the rich will no longer have sufficient means or interest to care for the poor, and where this Earth is hardly a place where one would care to live. That is, even if such outcomes are not predicated upon an age of global warfare too horrific to even contemplate.

Time to think very hard on what is really important, and how best to get there. The choice is in our hands, as much as in anyone else's - why should we just sit back if there is the least we can do to shape the sort of future we would like to leave for our descendents and beyond?

A little tinge of Green is a good thing, and the only thing which may preserve any concept of Community, of Humanity, and which may enable us to avert the total desertification of our only home, of Mother Earth. Eventually the profit-motive will have to be seen as the destructive force it really is, and wealth creation accepted as having to be shared equitably (with emphasis on the have-nots) and not as currently at the expense of those taken advantage of and dispossessed of their reasonable rights. Now would be a good time to start on the inevitable revolution in global systems - while there is still time to avoid far less-attractive alternatives becoming the only reality.

Curmudgeon,

Try this link to the same crude oil price graph. The graph also has notations indicating the explanation for previous price movements.

http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm

There is no monopoly supplier, so it is hard to believe that someone wouldn't be raking in all those lovely dollars if there were plenty of cheap oil out there or an easy substitute.

On the peak oil question and other environmental/resource issues in general, you seem to have a pattern of looking for an expert or commentator (such as George Monbiot) who agrees with you and then pronouncing the issue settled. Scientists and other experts are people too. Some of them are corrupt and willing to act as guns for hire. Others will lie for ideological reasons. Still others are just deluded. You can find a properly qualified expert to say anything you like: alien abduction is a real phenomenon, the HIV virus doesn't cause AIDS, childhood vaccinations cause autism, fluoridated water is dangerous, etc., etc. If you look at the balance of expert opinion, you don't see anything like grounds for the rosy, Cornucopian future that you believe in.

Geoff of Perth and the rest of us are like the mighty unpopular people who were warning about the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. People in Britain and France had suffered terribly in WWI and in the Great Depression. They didn't want to know about rearmament, and there were plenty of politicians to echo their views. Peace in our time. If they had listened to the Cassandras, WWII might have been avoided, or at least, they wouldn't have had to take on Hitler after he had the industrial resources of the Rhineland and Czechoslovakia.

Divergence

Okay, a reasonable response from you (unlike Geoff of Perth), but I must express some surprise that you're still holding on to this concept. You also accuse me of the sin of which you yourself are guilty, that is of searching for sources that agree with your beliefs.

Now you do know the energy sector is undergoing a revolution right? This is mainly gas but it is spreading to oil. You point to the oil price. Sure its high due to supply constraints and its not necessary for OPEC to be a monopoly supplier to affect oil prices, just a major one which it is. So OPEC has not been investing in production capacity or searches for any more reserves so supply for its wells has levelled off, and production in unconventional oil and from deep ocean discoveries has not ramped up fast enough to compensate.

However, there have been too many changes in technology freeing up unconventional oil reserves and too many deep ocean discoveries (which were entirely unexpected)to cling to peak oil. But the original proponents - Campbell and Laherrere in 1998 - have an out as all it was originally about was a forecast of higher prices and disruption while the world switched to unconventional oil. However, they did not forecast the deep ocean discoveries. Environmentalists later distorted the original proposition into a claim that it was some sort of fundamental limit - that part is completely wrong.