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Followers of the peak oil theory argue the world has already or soon will have used up more than half the non-renewable resource. They say current crude prices are just the beginning. Skeptics insist there is no reason to believe that carbon-based capitalism has started to run out of gas. Today’s record prices, they argue, are driven by massive market speculation. Canadian Business writers Thomas Watson (anti-peak) and Jeff Sanford (pro-peak) debate the issue below.
10 Reasons not to buy Peak Oil
1. High prices do not prove the world is running out of oil. After the dot-com market implosion, housing prices soared. After real estate crashed, the cost of oil spiked. People still have homes and Internet access.
2. Higher prices do mean that a lot more money will be invested in finding more oil and better recovery technologies.
3. Peakers take turns dismissing technology on YouTube, then watch each other on credit-card-sized iPods more advanced than computing systems on the first space shuttle.
4. Future oil prices are lower, not higher.
5. Peakers say supply is running out but demand can’t fall, even during a global recession. But the International Energy Agency has been lowering global consumption forecasts.
6. Brazil just found a supply of oil like the ones peakers claim no longer exist.
7. Peakers are like cultish folks who want to believe the end in near. Industry experts like Nansen Saleri, former head of reservoir
management at Saudi Aramco, say the point of peak supply isn’t even close.
8. According to Saleri, the world has consumed about one trillion barrels of oil. But remaining conventional and unconventional (oil shale, oilsands, coal, etc.) resources each represent six to eight trillion barrels left to be harvested.
9. According to a recent U.S. energy task force, America’s unconventional resources alone could produce seven million barrels of crude a day as early as 2035, which is about 35% of total current U.S. oil consumption.
10. Global warming will dramatically reduce oil demand — or kill us all — before the peak show hits.
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