Anyway the definition of "slow squeeze" I had in mind only gets up to 3% per year depletion toward the end of the 20 years. You'd need 3% every year for 20 years to get down to half of current production.

When regions peak, you can just import more oil from other regions, which is what we've been doing up until now. The result is a more or less symmetrical curve in regional production.

When global production peaks, the physical reality of oil shortage and the psychological (and therefore economic) impacts are likely to be entirely different.

We really are sailing into uncharted waters. What happens next is anyone's guess.

For those who weren't here, Strategic Air Commander General Curtis LeMay strongly advocated using nukes to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.

"China Oil News reported last week that the government plans to spend US$15 billion to build plants that annually manufacture 16 million tons of oil products from coal in the next five to 10 years."

That is about 5% of their 2006 oil consumption.

Since, according to china.org they are building 144 new power stations with a capacity of 160GW this year alone, most of them coal powered and their car production rose to 5.7 million vehicles this year not including 1 million very crude inefficient and dirty single-cylinder diesel agricultural vehicles and is set to rise further, it follows that even with heroic efforts by the rest of the world there is zero chance of stopping a massive rise in carbon dioxide production and only Sweden so far seems ready to put in such heroic effort.

If conventional oil has peaked and is about to drop sharply, as Deffeyes  suggests, I suspect that before 2025 the environmental effects of even dirtier alternatives like coal to oil, tar sands, and oil shale will be so bad that further expansion of their use will have to be halted and we will have a catastrophe on our hands.

Only Stuart's slow squeeze with perhaps a couple of more years before peak gives us hope of introducing massive cuts to energy usage by us energy hogs in ways that leave us some form of reasonable life style while allowing poorer countries to develop sufficiently to prevent resentment growing so that the present guerrilla warfare against us that is draining trillions of dollars grows beyond all hope of countering  and beyond our ability to finance such countermeasures.

Even this course will require some use of dirtier technologies and allowing nuclear technology to spread widely to places we would ideally prefer not to have it as well as all the alternative energy production we can install.

The political reality is that even with the best efforts of the peak oil and environmental communities it will take several more years and even more obvious problems before a political party with a program of massive cutbacks will be electable in many of the countries that need to do so. If so many people can still be persuaded there is no problem, it will be a long time before people stop believing those that tell them that there is a problem  but is has a solution that allows them to carry on more or less as they have been.

I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that there are no good outcomes and that it is not even certain we have a choice between bad and catastrophic. When I first became aware of the peak oil problem I thought of it a short to medium term problem that could be tackled  before the slightly longer term climate change problems.

However as the environmental evidence has come in and the size of the global economic changes has become clear and the scale of the enmity against the West by so much of the world has grown I have seen these problems conflate to a single nightmare. We can but work in the hope that there is a merely bad solution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory

The Olduvai theory states that the industrial civilization will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.