{"id":55647,"date":"2020-11-16T18:34:40","date_gmt":"2020-11-16T23:34:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55647"},"modified":"2020-11-16T18:34:40","modified_gmt":"2020-11-16T23:34:40","slug":"peak-oil-never-went-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=55647","title":{"rendered":"Peak Oil Never Went Away"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/economicsfromthetopdown.com\/2020\/11\/16\/peak-oil-never-went-away\/?fbclid=IwAR2WvruJ-moqgX9KLe0BvtFnvb3X9DIQ6fP_D8pyV21STdCp4RqvQuxKWEk\">Peak Oil Never Went Away<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Do you remember peak oil? It was all the rage a decade ago. Now, almost no one is talking about it. The funny thing is, the problem never went away. If anything, it\u2019s gotten worse.<\/p>\n<p>In this post, I take a deep dive into peak oil. I show you that the peak in the production of conventional crude oil isn\u2019t some distant prospect. It\u2019s\u00a0<em>already happened<\/em>. What\u2019s more, the model that correctly predicted this peak suggests that conventional oil production is about to collapse.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, talk of peak oil went away. But the problem didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p id=\"peak-oil-a-brief-history\"><strong>Peak oil \u2014 A brief history<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If you use an exhaustible resource, you will eventually run out. This fact is so obvious that everyone understands it \u2026 at least in principle. But in practice, humans are shockingly bad at predicting resource exhaustion. Why? The reason, I believe, is that we don\u2019t understand things that are\u00a0<em>big<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s an example. Imagine you\u2019re stuck on a desert island with a one-year supply of food. What would you do? You\u2019d probably ration the food so it lasted as long as possible. Now imagine that you had 100-year\u2019s worth of food? Now what would you do? To hell with rationing \u2026 you\u2019d probably gorge yourself without worry. This change in behavior is important. Like the 1-year stock, the 100-year stock of food is still exhaustible. But it\u2019s so large that it\u00a0<em>seems<\/em>\u00a0infinite. And so you behave like the resource is actually infinite.<\/p>\n<p>When this behavior plays out in the real world, the results are always the same. We exhaust a seemingly inexhaustible resource \u2014 and we do so sooner than we expect. Here are a few examples. The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/American_bison\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">bison of North American<\/a> were once so plentiful that they seemed infinite. Yet by the end of the 19th century, only a few hundred were left.<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Peak Oil Never Went Away Do you remember peak oil? It was all the rage a decade ago. Now, almost no one is talking about it. The funny thing is, the problem never went away. If anything, it\u2019s gotten worse. In this post, I take a deep dive into peak oil. I show you that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[29938,29907,617],"class_list":["post-55647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy-2","tag-blair-fix","tag-economics-from-the-top-down","tag-peak-oil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55647"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55648,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55647\/revisions\/55648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}