Poor Hubbert: He Just Didn't Know . . .

[M. King Hubbert's] estimate for the world's total reserve was only 1.2 trillion. We know today that estimate was woefully wrong. Today, the proven world reserves are more than 1.6 trillion barrels, despite 56 years of increasing production. Just one example of the supplies Hubbert didn't foresee: The average estimate of the Orinoco heavy oil reserve in Venezuela is more than 500 billion barrels.

Why Hubbert was (and still is) wrong has nothing to do with the price system – although that explains why we will never actually run out of oil. Hubbert was wrong because he didn't understand how technology would greatly increase the size of the total reserves. As Hubbert's own calculations would show you, increasing the size of the known reserves has the impact of pushing off Peak Oil.

Today, known reserves are larger than they were in 1956, when he first published his theory. Thus, Peak Oil is, at the very least, decades away.

But the reality is, our ability to discover new reserves continues to increase. That means it's much more likely the risk of Peak Oil will continue to recede.

...As long as the oil industry has been tracking known reserves, we've seen that reserves tend to keep pace with, or slightly exceed, production. That's counterintuitive. You'd think that as production increases rapidly, reserves would get consumed and the total amounts would fall. But that's simply not what's happened. That's why we have more reserves now than we did 56 years ago, despite the huge increases to production. _Peak Oil is Intellectual Fraud

One version of peak oil states that humans are running out of oil. That particular version of peak oil is certainly an intellectual fraud.

Another version of peak oil which is growing more popular, states that humans are running out of cheap oil, and that increasing prices for oil will make it difficult or impossible for modern societies to sustain economic growth and prosperity.

But in a world where economic decline has multiple causes, it is an intellectual fraud to claim that your model of the world is able to compress all of those causes down to a single cause: the price of oil. Such an endeavour is all the more dishonest when looking at the multiple causes for why the price of oil is what it is, and compressing all of those causes down to one cause: depleted reserves.

Wherever one looks, one sees such intellectual frauds being perpetrated by vested interests who have much to gain. From carbon hysteria to peak oil to frack-hysteria to nuclear hysteria -- all of these have the effect of intentionally limiting the human future, of compressing the future into a tiny cubby hole which will satisfy the lefty-Luddite green dieoff.orgiast regressives.

I suspect these latter day crusaders will run into a number of surprises along the way to their great green garden of Eden utopia.