Reply #27: Well... [View All]

[Spider Jerusalem]

increased fuel efficiency doesn't solve the problem. Development of viable, cost-effective alternative energy sources is what's needed...but we don't have the lead-time we need to do it. Had the problem been addressed twenty years ago, we might.

Unfortunately for your idea that peak oil is "hysteria", the science has been shown to be sound. Repeatedly. The United States went into decline in 1971. The North Sea, in 1997. Mexico, last year. All over the world, in oil basin after oil basin, peak oil has been proven fact. To think that what's happened in individual oil fields ISN'T going to happen worldwide is ridiculously optimistic, especially given that there have been no significant new fields discovered in the past decade and that the rate of consumption vs replacement through new discovery is negative and has been since at least 2001.

The idea that continuing business as usual...continuing to tie our transportation and economic infrastructure to the use of a commodity that is running out and becoming more difficult and expensive to produce...is a GOOD thing, if we can just figure out how to use it more slowly...is utterly absurd. That's a bit like deciding you're less likely to get emphysema if you just cut down from TWO packs of cigarettes a day to one.