When the Peak comes, there will be no one to salute it

Ever since 1911, Big Oil has consistently delivered oil, solutions and wealth : that is some record, small wonder their credibility is on top.

 Ever since 1970 and the lower 48 Peak, Peakists have delivered problems, riddles and interrogations : you do not lead with questions, you lead with answers, whatever the answers. Small wonder no one listens to Peakists.

The unfortunate habit from certain Peakists to provide Peak dates which are :

• already past and forgotten, or
• so diverse and spread over a long period of time

has only added to the confusion at best, to the idea that Peakists cannot be trusted in any manner at worse. But there is more.

Reading from many Peakists sources, one gets the idea that the Peak will not be a peak, it will be a plateau - undulating at that. So much so that it will probably go unnoticed for ... a few years ? How can such a supposedly so important date be inconspicuous ? And what the hell is an Undulating Plateau ?

M.K. Hubbert issued his theory in 1957 ; little has been added since. In how many fields did theory evolve so litle in 50 years ? Oil definitely is an economics question ; is our economics knowledge the same as in 1957 ?

In 1957, oil was pretty much everything to our economies ; not so today, and seeing Russia help India set up their nuclear industry certainly was not in the picture 50 years ago. And Iran, and Egypt ?

The higher price of oil makes other energy sources competitive : will the Peak be buried under the Gas peak, and then the nuclear peak, and then coal ? What will we actually see ?

What kind of Peak theoricists are we really ? Wild fish seems to have peaked back in 1995, that went totally unnoticed because fish farms kicked in, and account now for nearly 50 % of the total. Anybody cared to have a look at the curves ?

We need more theory than the mere scrutation of production curves ; we need to know more about how a global peak collides with economics and turns into an Undulating Plateau ; and we need an indicator.