[ExI] Peak Oil -- Amory Lovins

spike spike66 at att.net
Wed May 30 16:32:23 UTC 2012


On Behalf Of Kelly Anderson
Subject: [ExI] Peak Oil -- Amory Lovins

>...Amory Lovins ...[predicted] we will indeed reach peak oil in 2016.
However, the peak he is talking about is peak demand, not peak supply. His
contention is that oil is becoming uncompetitive prior to becoming
unavailable.  ...I have never heard this assertion before...-Kelly
_______________________________________________

Kelly I have been toying with this idea for a long time.  My own outlook
might be colored by a daily commute to work I have been doing for the past
17 years.  Check on Google maps to get a picture of the following
description.  State Road 237 is an eight lane road going along the bottom
end of the SF Bay which connects a huge amount of residential areas in the
east bay to a huge amount of office space, business headquarters, internet
fly-by-nights etc in the west side of the valley.  Google is over there,
Intel, Lockheed, Moffett Field, Yahoo, Cisco, AMD, IBM, a bunch of other
alphabet soup companies and software biggies.

I have noticed over those 17 years that the daily traffic rises and falls,
but it hasn't really increased over time.  I think it peaked right around
1999, when the Bay area seemed collectively convinced we were on the verge
of the singularity, and therefore all geeks should all be found working in
an office when the technocalypse happened, all the better to achieve
techno-salvation.  

Today there is still plenty of traffic on that corridor, but I think it is
about 80-ish percent what it was then.  So here's where I would go with that
argument: peak demand may be reached in the western world, but not in China
and India.  Those guys each have over a billion people, who are getting
internet and seeing how the west lives, and they want that too.  So I would
disagree with Lovins if we take that critical factor into account.  

If the Chinese and Indians figure out a way to leapfrog our technology from
the latter 20th century, then I would agree we may have seen peak demand for
oil.  But it isn't clear that they will do that, in which case they will
want their personal ape-haulers and will drive the wheels off of them, just
as we did.  The demand on oil will be astonishing.

spike




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