Naturally, I read Porter's comments about "believers" who are "polishing their oily chrystal balls". He was all over the map in that December 23rd article (sorry about my mistake about the date), for example

Meanwhile neo-liberal fundamentalists like author Peter Odell tell us that oil will be drilled forever and waste is a good thing. Their party ideology seems to be based on the same logic as the Japanese whaling industry. The more you consume the more you will consume. If you believe that eat all the food in your fridge now, the market will send you more courtesy of the magic oil pixies.

Fundamentally, I agree about the futility of specific forecasts--this is one reason I wrote this post. Now, the IEA is in the "prediction business" but GreyZone has gotten my point that their forecasts seem to go in one direction only and further that they constantly make the same kind of mistakes (and therefore revisions) every year. You would think that they might wake up and smell the coffee but they never do. However, I do believe in the existence of historical trends. IEA's consistently mistaken forecasts seem to ignore supply & demand trends that we should all be concerned about. Extrapolating such trends is risky too but, hey, we can't just pretend they don't exist.

I get the sense that some making comments here think TOD is in the prediction business too (not thinking of you, Halfin). We're not. This tends to be a news, information and analysis site--I think this approach is its principal virtue. To my knowledge, no editor or contributor (including me) at TOD has made any specific prediction about the timeframe for peak oil and the demise of civilization as we know it. Speaking personally, I vacillate on this all the time. There are lots of other peak oil websites you can visit if you want dire predictions of imminent doom but I won't be naming names here. However, TOD is not one of them.

best,