Perseus I strongly object to your comment. I'm 53 and I'm nowhere near peaking even though I no longer play footy. However possibly some people's ability to understand does peak sooner which brings me to your statement "Both peak oil and peak coal are nothing more than the point at which reserves begin to be reduced through use. " That is NOT peak oil etc. Clearly unless a source is renewable it begins to be reduced from the moment it is first tapped/exploited.

Peak oil is the point at which the supply (as in the technically achievable supply, not market controlled supply) no longer meets the demand for that resource even though a majority of the resource may still be unexploited. The result is that there is a shortfall of supply against demand which firstly leads to price increases (the current US situation with refined fuel is an example, but that will correct itself), but moreover as oil (or gas or coal) are needed for economic growth the level of growth, to the extent that oil etc is not replaced by another technology, will taper off before reverting to decline.

I don't know when oil will peak, some suggest it peaked in 2005 the industry suggests 2030 maybe it somewhere in between but when it does and if 'we' haven't any alternatives ready (only about 55% of oil is used in transport you are looking at one use of some of the remainder: plastics) it will get messy.

I suggest you understand an issue next time before you comment.

Hi Perseus, Peter JH and others,

Perseus, your substitutionist economic argument against peak anything is a core belief of the cornucopian view. However, it is not valid since technology/subsitution require energy to function/occur. Energy is the central enabling resource that makes techno- and substitutionist-fantasies possible. Once energy availability starts to decline there is simply less that you can do. The real problem with peak oil/coal is that, on the post-peak down-side of the energy resource availability curve (whether it be oil, coal or whatever) the energy required to be invested for an energy return begins to increase rapidly so that the net energy available decreases at a faster rate than the decrease in the physical availability of the resource.

The mocking cynics above may laugh now but I would love to catch up with them in 10 years time and stuff copies of their words into their sorry little mouths.

Peter JH, I have heard your definition of "peak" occasionally used by others but I do not think it is the most valid. I think that the best definition of "peak" anything is the moment of maximum production rate after which production can never be raised to the same level. This need not occur at 50% of resource depletion but tends to do so.

The sooner the stuff runs out the better. I live on a once beautiful river, now destroyed by longwall mining. Fourteen rivers are at present under the same threat but too few people give a damn. Has anyone driven through Singleton and Muswellbrook recently ? Coal mining has turned once fertile agricultural land into a vast and hideous moonscape, which will never recover. Coal mines are also about to destroy the black soil and aquifers in the Liverpool Plains. And that's just in NSW - I hate to think of the destruction now taking place in Qld and elsewhere. I'm afraid this country will be vandalised and our water sources wrecked before we wake up to ourselves. What sort of society are we, I wonder, to allow this to happen to our country ? (Answer: a colonial settler state of recent origin, settled by people whose only aim has ever been to rape the land and make a buck).

When the US hit oil production peak in 1970 (or there abouts), they were woefully unprepared for it (despite Hubbert acrately predicting the peak in 1956). The US could no longer sustain its economy by domestic production alone, so began to source more of their oil from elsewhere, notably the middle east.

When the Yom Kippur war broke out, OPEC placed an embargo upon the west.
Increasing oil dependance was one of the many factors that made the OPEC "oil weapon" wielded during the Yom Kippur War. Prices rose, economic recession occured and a decade of high unemployment began. Oil exporters suffered emourmous levels of inflation.

Newer technologies did not step into the breech to help the US when it met it's own production peak. Now, with an oil peak suggested within the 2 decades, I don't see any new technology coming in the replace all the cars on the road or planes in the sky (not to mention plastics).

Peaks will bring problems.

Still, I will reiterate I don't see a coal peak any time soon. Dosen't mean I'm a fan of coal, or that coal will not peak in the future.

What a quaint assumption, a doco appears on the ABC, it must be right. Give us a break, what about the ABC morons bunging on about an island off Bougainville that was supposed to be evidence of rising sea levels but this rising sea level was not even present on Bougainville itself, only 80km away. The Science show had even reported, 3 years earlier, that the island was in a volcanic zone and was SINKING. The ABC is nothing but green "Boganville".

But do let us all know if this ABC crud bothers to quantify the amount of shale oil and oil sands that latest technology can deliver at well below current prices.

*Perseus:* "This whole concept of 'peak anything' is mired in moronic simplicity. For it implies some sort of catastrophic decline when there is every indication that technology will replace a resource long before the resource runs out."

You mean as in Easter Island, or the Levant (where the Greeks and Phoenicians cut down all the trees to make warships) or the "fertile crescent" (where excessive irrigation eventually turned the most productive farmland of the ancient world into salt marshes).

History is rife with civilizations exploiting a resource to excess, then crashing and burning. Read Jared Diamond.

*Perseus:* "I just can't wait for 'peak moron', the point at which the supply of new morons drops below the stock of existing ones."

Don't have to worry about that as long as you're posting.