I never "played" an expert.

please

one of the site owners specifically asked me to post this information here

I am truly baffled.

The premise is that, say starting from right now, i.e. Time=0, we will find a growth in reserves that goes like 1/(Time+k), where "k" is some small number to keep the starting number finite. Let's say that this reserve growth falls in the provable category to indicate that we can extract it.

Three interesting results spring from this premise.

1. The amount of reserve left from now until eternity is infinite. This is a property of integrating a hyperbola (1/Time) over all time. Essentially we get a URR of infinity.

2. If production is rate proportional to the current reserves (the classic "greed is good" assumption which explains man's and the free market's capitalistic instincts), the position of peak won't change too much. This has everything to do with rate considerations. The rate of reserve growth cannot match consumption rates, and new discoveries are clearly dwindling.

3. The draw-down from reserves can become vanishingly small in this scenario.  Taking finite production from an infinite pool leads to the conundrum that we are extracting an infinitesimal fraction of that eventually available.

This argument is subtle, but if interpreted incorrectly, it gives ammunition to the cornucopians, who can assert that huge reserves lay in wait.  However, in reality, since rate extraction is proportional to current reserves, all we see is the classic effect of "diminishing returns".   Of course this has real ramifications for a continuously growing energy-based global GDP economy, but the cornucupians will not spin it that way.  They instead point to a continuously finite reserve that doesn't get drawn down by as much as one's expectations can intuit.

Having to face and account for this argument, a cornucopian would have to propose a reserve growth rate that will keep pushing the peak into the future. Unfortunately, this would have to be a growth even more aggresive that the 1/Time variant, which already has an infinite URR !  Fortunately, anyone actually proposing such a growth rate puts themselves in a situation that they can be endlessly mocked.

We have to continue to do question the numbers because otherwise we fall into the logical conundrum B.S. traps that politicians and corporations and scam artists have historically used to try to separate us from our money.  Simple thought experiments like I have shown here remain one of the few options that we have to eliminate the rhetorical arguments from the public discourse.

As a recent and complementary example of where people have gotten hoodwinked in this fashion, google the "infinite horizon" argument to escalating Social Security costs.  Bush's people have actually suggested huge future costs of S.S. based solely on a hidden assumption of an "infinite horizon". It takes time for the economists to dig this stuff out of the rhetorical arguments, but by that time the damage is done and people get a completely misleading impression.   I remember hearing Al Franken debunk this argument quite effectively by saying that, "yes we may have a huge SS deficit, but will have infinite time to pay it off, so it looks like our current funding is no problem".  Touche.