Curmudgeon,
George Monbiot fell for the duff data put out from Harvard Kennady School by (Maugeri)

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-07-04/treehugger-monbiot-and-peak-oil-over

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9292

There was a whole spate of articles showing where it was in error.
It was never corrected or replied to as far as I have seen.
The situation has not changed much since 2005.
Even ethanol has come under attack because of its effect on food prices.

But please go and read the plentiful info on the Harvard article.

Bazz

I'm not just reacting to Monbiot so it does you little good to point to supposed "errors" on this part.. I was only quoting him as evidence that even sections of the environmental movement are beginning to acknowledge the inevitable.. You still have the problem that now only extreme sections of the environmental believe in peak oil.. No analyst will go near it, although some did for a time.

The is because, and I'm getting tired of repeating this, the revolution in the oil and gas industry. All reserve estimates have gone through the roof.. granted prices are still high for various reasons I've referred to in previous posts on this thread, but the concept that there is any fundamental limits to oil (never part of the original peak oil forecasts, incidentally) have been abandoned. Forget them.

Time to move on.

@ All reserve estimates have gone through the roof..

Use of the word ALL seems patently false if you read any of the the articles linked to. Not saying the articles are necessarily correct but your use of the word ALL most definitely is not.

It seems to me that we have a situation here where banding the terms reserve and resource around without understanding them has seen people make huge errors of judgement and calculation. We're using the stuff at an alarming rate, a 50 billion barrel reserve is days of consumption and might be from a trillion barrel resource.

back to the article, I think Ted Trainer's piece some time ago was equally politicly untenable, yet both offer a glimpse at a possible solution. I am not completly sure the author is about though, he makes the a point about re-tasking the vast arms budget, and a good thing that would be but surely re-tasking simply sees consumption shift ? consumption at unsustainable rates is the problem... but if the outlook from the climate scientists is right, we're going to be down a few billion in the next 100 years anyway, so I guess in that sense the Planets biosphere is simply finding a new normal. Alarmist or realist ?

but he's right, we're pissing around at the edges and that's worse than nothing.