The timid iconoclast notes that The Economist Acknowledges Peak Oil:
“The world is consuming more oil than it is producing.”
— The Economist, July 14-20 print edition.
Pretty simple, but it’s out there now.
To be clear, we’re not producing oil, but discovering/extracting it. Perhaps a matter of semantics, but we can produce lumber by growing trees or steel from raw ingredients or recycling existing steel (ship-breaking comes to mind). Like land, there’s no way to make more oil. Liquefying coal or extracting from the tar sands or oil-shale is too expensive, requiring too much of the energy we hope to harvest.
In the long run, everything is finite, sometimes even in the short run. I think we’ve lost sight of that over the past couple of generations.
Technorati Tags: peak oil