Status Updates From ما بعد النفط: منظوراً إليه ...

An earlier chapter on coal is a similar story to shale and tar: it'll return to fashion with most of its old problems as cheap crude runs out. So to uranium, ie. nuclear. If Deffeyes is slightly optimistic about it, he was writing before Fukushima. It's now pretty much a dead duck and we skip quickly on to hydrogen, our saviour. Not. It too is mature technology that still only delivers 40% of the energy put into it.

The chapters on tar sands and shale oil confirm that, despite the hysteria, both are as old as industrial civilisation. Travel between Edinburgh and Glasgow to see historic workings, for instance. Cheap oil gushing out of the ground put paid to these. The key word is cheap. Now that liquid oil is dearer, it pays to exploit these harder-to-work sources. But they will still produce expensive oil, maybe too expensive.

This is a hard read: the thoughts are haphazard and some are pure non sequiturs. A good editor would have reigned Mr Deffeyes in. A pity because I think I've teased out the essence of Hubbert's Peak, with a struggle. It has its roots in population dynamics, which roughly say: you can tell how much is left to come by how much has been used and is being used. In other words: bar a miracle the future is knowable.