Creepy

Murky Views has a truly amusing post on when the oil runs out. I say "amusing" in the way you might start to laugh after learning something truly horrible yet somehow unbelieveable. To truncate Murky unfairly, if oil consumption continues to grow at it's current rate the industries of man will deplete the entire supply of usable oil currently unused by... 2017.

Of course, oil consumption can't continue to grow at it's current pace. As Kevin Drum has pointed out, we're probably at max production right now, and we certainly can't produce much more than we have right now. But it points out the fraud that is optimism in the face of oil depletion - to argue that things can continue just as they are is in fact far more disruptive and destructive to wealth than any oil peak.

On the subject of Peak Oil (again, I know) the Saudis are now saying they may be unable to meet demand for the fourth quarter of 2005. Amusingly, this coincides with the US Thanksgiving, 2005 date Ken Deffeyes has picked as his guess for Peak Oil. Deffeyes has said that he was surprised in 1970 to realize that M. King Hubbert's prediction had come true right on time, when Deffeyes read a newspaper article saying that Texas oilfields had gone to full production. (Texas oil fields were run very much like OPEC back then - full prediction meant that US oil production had peaked, and there was no more reason to ration production.)

I wonder if we'll look back, 30 years from now, and say that we realized Deffeyes was right when we read in the Gulf Times that...

(Gulf Times link via The Oil Drum.)