Peak-oil theory combines serious geology with pop economics to “envision a dying civilization, the landscape littered with rusting hulks of useless SUVs,” as Caltech professor David Goodstein describes it in his book Out of Gas. The most popular leaders of this movement also envision a massive “die-off” of the world’s population, along with the end of industrial civilization.
There is only so much oil worth pumping out of the ground. Peak-oil theory claims that once it’s half gone, the rate of pumping will reach an all-time production peak and start to decline. The peak will herald the beginning of an “earth-shattering crisis,” as one author puts it. The world economy and, most likely, the world’s population will decline right in step with oil production. According to peak-oil theorists, the oil is about half gone. Our time is up.
Goodstein, a physicist, says that “until the 1950s, oil geologists [believed] that the same rate of increase [in oil production] could continue forever.” And geologists say that economists think this still. But I can find no evidence that anyone has ever believed in limitless oil. Back in the 1800s, a famous economist named William Stanley Jevons predicted peak coal in England far too early. And patent-medicine salesmen, hocking “rock-oil” remedies, predicted peak oil just before Edwin L. Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania. (Before then, people got oil from natural oil seeps.)
Starting in 1979, the Mad Max film trilogy painted a bleak and violent picture of a world plagued by oil shortages that cause a nuclear war. Since then, predictions of a similarly grim economic future have become attached to peak-oil theory.
Peak-oil geology has fascinated me since 1998, when I read a Scientific American article by two leading peak-oil geologists. Pursuing the topic more recently, I found its basic tenets showing up in mainstream arguments over U.S. energy policy. One such policy—that the U.S. military is to achieve “energy independence” through subsidies for liquid fuels derived from coal—is backed by the Departments of Energy, Defense, and the Interior.
As with the idea that we will “wreck the economy,” fear of peak oil is counterproductive. Peak-oil scare tactics aid in the push for liquid coal and synfuels. Using these can nearly double carbon dioxide emissions. Worse still, overblown claims of economic collapse have led, naturally enough, to the erroneous conclusion that peak oil will solve the climate-change problem. This makes it easier to accept the push for liquid coal.
