[quadrangle]

regardless of Thiel, there's nothing invalid about the concept of peak oil. The main questions are "when?" and "will we have enough oil so that full destruction of the stability of the climate hits us first before major peak oil issues?" and things like that

[gmarx]

Crap like this bugs me. Because you waste more time on Hacker News you can downvote and I can't? I am clearly correct that we did not hit peak oil back then and if he made a bet on it he got burned for exactly that predictable reason.

Someday we will hit peak oil? Duh? Someday the sun will burn out. The peak oil histeria from 5 or ten years ago was about the claim that we had already hit peak oil and pretty soon we wouldn't have enough petroleum to even grow food and we were all going to die. I had two friends having panic attacks over this BS.

Sorry reality failed to confirm your preferred political narrative in the past. Keep retconning and you can always think you were right

[dragonwriter]

> I am clearly correct that we did not hit peak oil back then

It may be the case that Thiel misinterpreted the economic consequences of peak oil and made bad bets based on it (particularly, there are no particular clear short-term market effects associated with peak oil beyond greater price volatility).

> The peak oil histeria from 5 or ten years ago was about the claim that we had already hit peak oil and pretty soon we wouldn't have enough petroleum to even grow food and we were all going to die.

The idea that the point that will be the peak in the smoothed long-term production curve is already past is not yet rejected, though there remains some doubt as to whether that point is in the recent past or not.

The idea that the peak would have any particularly clear set of clear short-term market consequences (and particularly anything like "we wouldn't have enough petroleum to even grow food" or "we were all going to die") has never been part of peak oil theory. Now, its clearly possible Thiel bought into some crazy idea like this secondary to peak oil theory, but that's a different issue than peak oil itself.

[quadrangle]

Yeah, sorry but peak oil isn't something that happens on a particular day or hour. There's tons of evidence that we actually already are past peak oil. We're now already getting oil out of tar sands, and if that's even close to economically sensible at all, then it's obvious that the cheap, easy oil is past its peak.

Anyone who thought that peak oil meant immediate real-world decline in availability of gasoline would be deluded. We have too much at stake in our oil-dependent system to let that happen. We'll screw with tax incentives and government systems and all sorts of crazy things and get at the hardest-to-get oil until we get way way way past the peak.

We probably will never hit the point of being on the far tail end of the oil curve because the pollution and climate mayhem will take over before that, so we'll have to stop burning all the oil for environmental reasons long before we run out of oil to burn. But that doesn't mean we haven't peaked our accessible, cheap oil options.

P.S. I have no clue about the voting here. I typically don't see downvote options, and I'm pretty sure you can't tell who downvoted you, so you seem to just be speculating.