Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

sartesian wrote:

> Anybody interested in knowing just how "flexible" and "elastic" the
> speculations about "peaks" really are would do well to read the original
> peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert.  Take a look at
> http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf  and you will read the King
> predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early
> to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc.
>
> Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it?

Wow, those are some spectacularly wrong projections. But there's a
long history of this sort of thing, isn't there? There's a chart
reproduced in Baumol et al's Productivity & American Leadership -
must remember to dig out the book & scan the page - that tracks oil
production over the last 100 years with similar projections marked at
various points in the history.

Someday we may run out of oil, but I suspect we'll choke ourselves or
ruin the climate completely before we do.

Doug