Wharfie, to belabour the point for you, even if we take your figures as correct rather than BP's and I don't, one swallow doesn't make a summer, or Global Winter in the case of Global Warming and CO2 reduction. A third significant figure reduction for one year doesn't mean Peak Oil has happened, any more than, as I explained and do so again, the drops from 1979 and from 1990 for a year or three were demonstrations that Peak Oil had happened way back then.
If you take a trip to India and China, you'll notice that they won't each be driving SUVs, ever. The traffic jams in Beijing are actually funny. Even the bicycles get into jams and they have no idea how to behave to avoid gridlock in the real meaning of the word = they form self-blocking jams by stopping other people from moving which goes around the block and comes back at themselves so they stop themselves from moving.
They couldn't even fit that many SUVs on the streets. When you get bicycle jams, you can imagine that each person in an SUV would block it up even more just by the square metres of road space taken up by each vehicle.
What they will have is swarms of Mq's little electrically propelled individual transport capsules which will be electronically and GPS controlled. It doesn't take an SUV to move 70kg of human. Also, most movement is unnecessary. Moving things can be done by delivery vehicles much more efficiently [100 packages fit in one delivery vehicle and that's more efficient than 100 vehicles going to a mall]. Moving information is easier done in cyberspace than by driving to the place to transact information = no SUV needed.
Just as people don't hitch a horse on Broadway, people in India won't hitch an SUV on Brigade Road in Bangalore. Things change Wharfie. I used to load ships by hand, one carcass and one carton of butter at a time. Now dirty great containers arrive on a container truck or train. Straddle carriers plop them down and dirty great container cranes zoom them up and onto the ship in seconds. Unloading just one railway carriage by hand took hours rather than seconds.
Indians don't need woollies. It trends from hot to really hot in India. Chinese know about woollies. Indians need SUVs and woollies like a fish needs a bicycle.
It's possible that Peak Oil has happened, but it's a bit like Uncle Al KBE's bubbles - we only know we were in a bubble AFTER the event. I hope that's cleared it up for you. According to BP, the peak was NOT in 2005, contrary to what you and that other source think. But maybe 2007 was the peak. One of these days, years or decades, you'll be right. My guess remains 2037.
Already, in NZ, the political gears have clashed in election year and all of a sudden the extra taxes to pay for Greenhouse Effect machinations, carbon credits etc are being ditched and there are demands that the dopey carbon credit scheme be ditched. Immediate poverty and starvation seem to be of greater concern to people than some arcane priesthood promises of nirvana a century from now if we just walk instead of driving our vehicles 10km to work or to the local supermarket.
Mqurice |
