With a major Peak Oil conference underway in Europe this week, we have been receiving a number of emails expressing the notion that Peak Oil is nothing but a speculators pipedream, designed to drive up prices. We find it an interesting coincidence that articles like this one at the \"Center for an Informed America http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr64.html questions the reality of Peak Oil. Other sites go further with one claiming, in part, that Peak Oil is a \"Zionist Scam\" http://www.joevialls.co.uk
What's at the heart of many such attempts to \"debunk\" Peak Oil is the fact that once an oil well is pumped dry. it tends to recover some capacity over a period of time. Whether the \"recovery\" is caused by residual oil slowly percolating into the recoverable area of a well, or whether there's some yet-to-be-understood way that the earth perpetually makes oil is open to debate.
Unfortunately, a simple thought exercise demonstrates the problem clearly enough. Suppose you have a water well that can at maximum, produce enough water for 10 people. Everything is fine and the well provides for the whole community. But then two children are born. Suddenly, the well is no longer sufficient and depending on the well's capacity, it will decline over time until two users are eliminated through natural means or death from dehydration.
That's the reality of Peak Oil. It isn't that there isn't oil in the ground. It's that we are, as in the example above, far beyond the carrying capacity of wells to recover. It takes some precision of thought, but when you read about \"peak oil\" and ask \"Why are we still pumping\", remember the example of the village and the water well. They reached \"peak water\" when the new users were born and started making systemic demands. That \"peak water\" would not become visible to them until the well was pumping mud is a problem of limited perception. ?That's the reality of Peak Oil as far as we can judge it, regardless of whether the earth might be making more petroleum every day.
What we note, most importantly, is the timing of these attacks: They coming during a major peak oil conference and in close proximity to American elections which feature an incumbent president from the oil patch.