You know, what I am about to bring up I have avoided for about a year and a half now. Not because I didn’t think it true but because in my experience bringing up the subject of Peak Oil incites stupid arguments usually revolving about economies of scale this and techno-fix that. I will come clean and say it - At this point in time there are no economical scalable and reliable methods or technologies for replacing liquid crude oil as it is used by modern society. None at all.
Definition
This is an easy one - but for some inexplicable reason the term Peak Oil continues to confuse and bewilder people into the incorrect conclusion. Peak oil is the point in time where crude oil production peaks before going into terminal decline. Much like the peak of a mountain is it’s highest point, the peak of oil production is the point in time where the most ammount of oil is being produced per day. Peak Oil is NOT ‘us running out of oil’. Not even close.
So what?
Well as we all know, when a finite resource has high demand its price is determined by it’s availability and market demand. Market demand is fluctuating but is projected to increase with countries like China and India ramping up their industrialisation projects. The United States of America among other countries also has a huge industrial base as well as countless numbers of cars and other oil consuming devices. All of this combined will drive up the price of Oil products, their derivatives and their dependants until the market cannot sustain the price.
So, Drive less then?
If only it were that simple. If you look around your room (whatever room your in at the moment), take not of everything you got from a shop (transported multiple times using oil based fuel). To give you a fair idea of what oil is used in, I’ll just list oil derrived products. You can extrapolate the rest.
- Plastic - this is a petrochemical
- Fuel oils - stating the obvious here, all oil distillates
- Natural gas - an offshoot of oil production
- Food - used in agribusiness like nobodies business. Everything from growing to transport nees oil
- Heating - unless you use electric or wood, of course
- Electricity - I’d like to see you maintain an electical grid without oil. Coal is mined, after all, and transported using diesel powered trains
I should go on more and more but maybe you got the idea 
. Everything has been touched by oil if it has ever been contained, wrapped, transported or manafactured.
But the market will create substitutes
This is one point most people dont realise. The ‘market’ which represents a collective idea by people of some omniescent force capable of creating anything out of nothing has become the catch-all for all our problems. Like Deus Ex Machina, The ‘Market’ will supposedly create some super-oil type synthetic which will be a 1-1 substitute for all our crude oil needs. Oh and it is also outputs more energy then they put into it to manafacture. Yeah right…
The market is no more capable of breaking this law of physics than anyone else. There is no magical way of creating some substance that will be as useful in as many different applications as oil at the cost of oil. It is quite literally impossible. Oil is essentially solar power, concentrated into liquid form. This is the basis for my next point, Energy return on Energy Invested.
Explaining EROEI
EROEI (Energy Returned On Energy Invested) is a measure of the value of an energy source by the amount of energy it takes to extract and use it to the amount of energy it releases by using it. It is basically expressed as a number. If an energy source has a EROEI of 0.8 then it takes 20% more energy to create it then it puts out. An example of this is Ethanol from commercial sugar farms (which incidentally has an EROEI of 0.8). This makes it useless as an energy source.
The more energy you get the more valuable and useful it is. Oil fuels are very useful becauser they can be easily stored (unlike hydrogen), are cheap to produce for the energy you get (incidentally, also unlike hydrogen) and have massive energy density. This means the 40 litres of fuel in your car pack more eneregy then most (if not all) other equivelants of that amount.
Ok crap explanation over with 
What about Solar/Wind/Nuclear/Etc
The biggest problems is these alternative power sources only address electicity production. They do nothing to address liquid fuel usage as well as petrochemical production. These would need to be addressed seperately which would be difficult to roll out without massive economic consequences. The other problem is the inability for these technologies to scale well. Solar PV cells require large amounts of very high quality silicon which is expensive as there is a lot of demand for it. Wind only works in windy areas and solar only works during the day. In theory you can mix the two but not economically. Basically it would be decades before they stop being energy sinks and start outputting net energy. This all goes back to the EROEI issue. You cant force positive energy output and solar takes a long time (measured in years) to generate the ammount of energy needed to ‘pay back’ the energy debt of it’s own creation.
Also we would need this stuff quickly and currently all attempts at large scale developments of solar, wind and nuclear have been blocked by environmentalists, nimby asshats, fucktards, politicians and blindsighted consumers who are easily scared by the media. There is no way of easily changing perception of these technologies and for solar and wind there is no method at the moment of making these scalable and effecient like they would need to be to act as a decentralised power system for the sheer amount of energy we would need to replace.
So what will happen
Nobody knows exactly. Predictions range from ’soft landing’ where our economy comfortably scales back and we adjust to having much less energy over a number of decades with no major problems. At the other end some predict hard crashes where the initial signs of peak oil will shockwave through the economic community bringing global trade to a screaching halt after countries outbid each other for the last cheap oil futures. In these scenarios everything from oil wars to trade embargoes and martial law have been proposed. This is in part possible, as we have seen the market react suddenly to changes in the oil market (see the 1970’s and 1980’s oil shocks, where minor disruptions in oil supply cause the price to jump enormously). Such oil shocks in the future could cripple our economy as oil based products become unaffordable and the very means for our society to operate unravel. While this is only just a possiblity and not absolute certainty, it is always important to remember that people do not act rationally in these situations and we can’t rely on people being rational at all - especially at the state level. Do you think the United States of America will let ‘their’ oil sit locked away under middle eastern sand? What about Central America or Russia, what about their energy supplies?
OMG DOOM!!!111oneoneone
Yeah kinda. I have done enough research over a long enough period of time. I have (while knowing about Peak Oil) seen oil prices double and the nations of the world dance about with their energy supplies clearly in question. Though peakoil has not yet been announced I have little doubt it is coming. Soon. I predict before 2010. Hold me to that if you wish. When it comes it will be bad and will only get worse. It will at very least mean a very uncomfortable paradigm change for our society, so used to living in material and eneregy excess.
Linkys, clicky clicky
PeakOil.com
DIE OFF - a population crash resource page
EROEI site
(actually, I thought doom 3 rocked but this was just unbelievably hard). I think the people should make proper batteries, the kind that last more than 5 seconds powering a single light.