Luis,

When you want to engage in a debate / argument with somebody, the first thing you have to do is to take the other person serious, even is you don't agree with him. Calling the other guy names, or making fun of his arguments, even if you think they are untrue, is not the way to get the discussion going.

Mr Clarke is not particulary 'insulting' or 'behaving badly', so I see no reason not to listen first.

So I take it that you believe in the "civilized discourse" approach that lead us down the path of cozy inside-the-beltway punditry. Ever see the British parliament in action?

I believe both these guys are British. They can handle themselves quite all right.

The British have nothing on the Taiwanese parliament.
Puts CSPAN to shame.

The corruption level in government is inversely proportional to the number of fights in parliament. If no one is fighting then you know everyone is bought.

I respect your opinion but I don't agree at all. I didn't call him names but I did make fun of his arguments, because he didn't make any whatsoever. He just called the other guy a doomer:

    "your case is locked into the peak oil litany."

... as if that was some kind of an argument. The notion that he denies Peak Oil is laughable, because even the industry acknowledges PO.

And then he goes to claim that PO view...

    ...is one that greatly discounts world oil resource and reserve potential, future exploration efforts and discoveries, inherent oil market dynamics, crude price impacts and inter-fuel transitions, the future application of multiple technologies, the on-going and substantial phenomenon of reserve growth in the world’s oilfields, societal adaptation, and much more besides

... which is blatantly false. Either he is beating a straw man, or being ignorant or being a liar. I think he's the third. Then he makes another ignorant rant:

    This new 21st century paradigm may be expected to continue. But it does not mean that the world has run out of reserves or the supply of oil, let alone all liquids. Nor, despite peak oil’s assumptions, is all now known once and for all on world oil reserves.

... which is completely unrelated to PO. First, no one is saying that oil "is running out", second, no one is saying that all is known once and for all. This is completely a wrong criticism of PO.

    The world oil game is arguably one of the hardest things to understand and measure, let alone predict with precision.

Yet, he's the one who claims that oil will be alright, just because he awoke with good feelings, as he gives no data whatsoever. Have faith will ya?

Right.

And why should I "respect" such fraudulent speech, so full of rethorics and shallow of content, that serves no purpose than to derail debate and to further delay the political PO lobbyism that he so envies about (why sure, the oil majors lobby is certainly smaller...) and to delay the public consensus that something is got to be done about it. He's no more than a shill, and I am happy and all the way to joke him whatever I want.

luisdias,

I think you did an excellent job of knocking Duncan Clarke down.

You could have also pointed to the blatant hypocrisy embedded into Clarke's "sound" logic.

On one hand Clarke says:

The book focuses rather on why the models advanced had failed in the past, why (mostly for the same reasons) they may well continue to do so.

In other words, Clarke adopts a linear forecasting approach in which PO models will continue to include gross errors just as they had before.

On the other hand Clarke says:

The problem is that the arguments promoted by the [pro-PO] lobby are built on shaky foundations: the future they project is derived from a linear model of the oil world, whereas non-linearity is far more probable.

He wants to have it both ways. He is allowed to maintain a linear model of failing PO models that will continue to fail forever in the same way but we are not allowed to have model of increasingly converging PO models because it is only "we" who fail to appreciate where the knee in the nonlinear curve occurs.

I'm sure westexas is holding his breath every night for that surprising nonlinear up tick in Lower 48 production.