It’s been a long time now since peak oil dropped off the radar screens of public consciousness.
Mention it these days and the reaction you’ll get from the few people who remember it at all amounts to “Yeah, that’s right, weren’t people scared back in the day that we were going to run out of oil? Just one more doomsday cult that turned out to be dead wrong. Hey, did you hear about [insert random media babble here]?”
What’s more, in a certain sense, that reaction is justified. There was indeed a doomsday cult around peak oil, and it did in fact turn out to be dead wrong. That’s undeniable. What gets missed in this kind of conversation is that the the people who promoted and believed in the doomsday cult didn’t understand peak oil. They got even the most basic facts about it wrong, and wrenched the entire subject wholly out of shape to fit a preconceived narrative. That’s why you had so many people insisting at the top of their lungs that someday soon the world’s oilfields would echo to that disappointing slurping sound that tells you you’ve gotten to the bottom of the milkshake and there’s no more left, and that industrial civilization would plunge into the world’s biggest remake of Mad Max shortly thereafter.
Oil refinery plant at night
I freely admit that I believed the same thing, back when I was fifteen and first understood that petroleum supplies are finite. Fifteen-year-olds believe a lot of silly things. Since I’m autistic, my predictable response was to hit the books and learn something about the subject, and this cured me of the mistaken belief just named. That was why, when I posted my very first online essay about peak oil in 2005, I titled it “The Long Road Down” and explained, in quite some detail, why a sudden apocalyptic end to industrial society was very nearly the last thing anyone needs to worry about. I discussed the same thing at even more length over the following decade or so of blog posts, and I also refined my analysis considerably during that time, focusing especially on the crucial role of economic factors.
Read more: Ecosophia
