isen.blog

From The New York Times, Week in Review, April 4, 2004: "Imagining a $7-a-Gallon Future"
By DANIEL YERGIN

No price in America is more visible, indeed inescapable, than that of gasoline. And Americans don't like the numbers they're seeing today, and their anger has turned high prices at the pump into highly flammable political fodder. OPEC's decision last week to cut production has further fueled the fire.

But what are those prices telling us? That driving this summer will be expensive? Or that $3 a gallon, which spouted last week at a California station, is our future? Or more worrying, that after many years of false alarms, the world is truly beginning to run out of oil?

That last question is at the center of a fierce debate. Adherents of the 'peak oil' theory warn of a permanent oil shortage. In the next five or 10 years, they maintain, the world's capacity to produce oil will reach its geological limit and fall behind growing demand. They trace their arguments back to the geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who in 1956 accurately predicted that American oil production would reach its apex around 1970. In a recent book, _Hubbert's Peak_, Kenneth S. Defeyes, an emeritus professor of geology at Princeton, wrote that 'Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade.' Current prices, he adds, 'may be the preamble to a major crisis.' "

Deffeyes spoke day before yesterday (4/3/04) at WTF!?! His theory is about as "controversial" as the Stupid Network was in 1997, and vastly more definitive because it is entirely uni-dimensional and data-driven. It is only "fiercely debated" at all because oil has been in oversupply for about 100 years and we've gotten used to it.

Moreover, Yergin's NYT article understates Deffeyes' key assertion by orders of magnitude. Deffeyes is much more definite than "sometime this decade." He says that the peak of the smoothed curve of oil production will occur on November 29, 2005, give or take -- three standard deviations span but a few weeks either way.

Deffeyes says that he's "the new Kyoto." He says that soon, even without a treaty, we won't be polluting the air because we won't be able to afford it.

Put that in your tailpipe and smoke it.