” And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.”

You critics of peak oil chaos won’t consider the real problem. The truth is that the earth will never run out of oil. The peak oil study never predicted that earth will run out of oil. The problem is going to be a declining production rate. Declining production is going to cause extreme fuel shortages, starvation and war. It’s too late to prevent these problems. The earth cannot sustain 6.5 billion folks with declining oil production.

There are currently 880,000,000 gas guzzeling vehicles in the world. Our civilization depends on these vehicles for the generation of wealth and food. There is nothing anyone can do to solve this problem in a manner that will avoid chaos.

This bears paying attention.

We’re still talking about way less than 50% recovery of oil in nearly every field ever worked on. Every tech that therefore increase production even marginally dramatically increases total oil reserves

Move over, Lysenko…

But please, Shannon. Keep up the good work of keeping our country from preparing. You’re doing a fabulous job

And please keep up a 130 year tradition of fostering counter productive hysteria. The problem with hysteria is that they tend to get politicians involved and then things go to hell.

I just started reading a book on “Peak Coal” warning about the inevitable end of coal in Britain the consequently inevitable decline of British civilization. It was published in 1865.

The basic problem is that your fundamental model of natural resources is flawed. Resources are created by technology. Increasing technology increases resources. You and everyone else who has predicted resource exhaustion ever since Malthus fail to grasp this concept.

located in more distant locales, thicker, containing more sulfur, et cetera. Some of the deposits are known to take more energy to extract than they will yield. And all that lovely technology has done very little to raise output in Texas or the North Sea.

But please, Shannon. Keep up the good work of keeping our country from preparing. You’re doing a fabulous job.

These predictions are always wrong because they work under the assumption that there is this singular substance called “oil” and that it pumped out the ground with a fixed technology . In reality, their is a wide range of hydrocarbons interred in the earth and has our technology changes we can make use of wider range of those hydrocarbons. About a 25% of our existing oil used today is made of hydrocarbons that we couldn’t use 50 years ago. As technology changes, the oil we can reach changes as well.

Likewise, known reserves always underestimate future oil supplies because (1) no one prospects for oil that they don’t expect to use in less than 15 years and (2) no one can predict what technology will be available to harvest oil 20+ years down the road.

We’ve got more oil today than at anytime in history. To the extent we face shortages it is because our economic growth, especially in the developing world, is causing demand to exceed supply. This is an entirely different problem than demand remaining fixed and supply decreasing.

I doubt well see any major natural shortages oil before replacement technologies come along.