you're kiddin, right? Kunstler is a teacher and teaches his ideology to his students. If that is not "professional", then I wonder how incompetent he is, daring to teach such "hobbyistic" stupiddity and horror to the kids as some kind of an atheist form of apocalypse, an atheist version of coming hell.

Ya know, I would really like for CERA to be correct this time, as the predictions here from Nate have given me some nights of poor sleep. If wishing was profitable I would continue doing that.

Unfortunately I see around me the raw facts that everything requires energy, and that the prices of everything that requires energy is going higher.

Let me know when I should expect the price of fertilizer to come down.

The Oil Drum has been pretty accurate in its predictions.

Well then, what's the current TOD prediction for supply and price over the next 5 years? We can't expect policy makers to make decisions based on the TOD forecast if TOD doesn't actually have an explicit forecast. You guys are bristling with confidence. Get off the pot, and post the TOD forecast on the sidebar, where policy makers can make use of it.

Ummm: I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think the blackouts in Zimbabwe are peak-oil related.

Sorry to be tardy, and I've only skimmed the comments, but there's one highly relevant fact that doesn't seem to be recognized: Actually we, the Peak Oil concerned, do have the IHS data!

Before referring to details, it may be useful to set this fact into relief by means of the following quotes from the discussion:

"The only thing that's relevant is our data," Jerre Stead, chief executive officer at Englewood, Colorado-based IHS, said today in an interview in Houston. Believers in the so-called Peal Oil theory "don't have our data". (Bloomberg 2/13/2007)

"Well right off the bat I should point out, with a track record like the one above, I'm not sure we want the data that IHS refers to" (Nate Hagens)

"Nate is discussing CERA's terrible record of predicting OIL prices based on their "top secret, the rest-of-you-don't-have-it" data" (MacDuff)

“Are Yergin, Russia, OPEC, et al, ready to open their databases to all interested parties?” (Bob Shaw)

“I am still to see a comprehensive data report about the state of oil fields around the world…” (Luis Dias)

“I imagine I am being very naive but if Cera can make this statement, Believers in the so-called Peal Oil theory "don't have our data" then they should make that data available, otherwise they could well be using chicken entrails in their auguries much as a former, collapsed, civilization made it's forecasts.”
(ChrystalRadio)

The fact is that an evidently very knowledgeable industry professional has done a Daniel Ellsberg-like service by putting much of the IHS data into the public domain - over at the InvestorVillage, Clayton Williams Energy Inc., Message Board - along with his critical evaluations.

In "OPEC reserves and revised estimates IMO," (Msg. # 56151, 5/7/2007) the source refers by number to twelve previous country-by-country posts, giving IHS field-by-field data on the 144 oil fields which have accounted for 75.5 percent of OPEC's cumulative production. An additional post referred to reviews specifically the case of Shaybah and how its alleged reserves have escalated enormously over the years.

Messages 74013 and 74021 (9/20/2007) review the data for the 50 largest natural gas fields, as ranked by IHS:

Very big gas field part 1

Very big gas fields part 2

Message # 71577 introduces the gas field posts and mentions his previous posts on IHS OPEC and Russian oil fields data. I have not been able to locate the Russian posts, however, since I don't know the subject heading or message numbers. Anyone out there able to come by them?

Take that, Jerre Stead!

Most of us, I'm sure, would welcome the day when peak oil arguments are airtight. Unfortunately, we will probably have to wait about ten years until that is the case. Even then, there will probably be a few who are predicting oil production over the previous peak.

Unfortunately, decisions are being made, and policy is being made now which will determine what our society will look like in the future. What is a politician or a policy maker to do? I would suggest that it would be prudent to take an approach that plans for a case approaching the worst, as opposed to an approach which plans for the best, especially if that best is touted by the likes of CERA.

Even if CERA is correct, and who here is willing to bet on that being the case, it would be profitable and enhance security to invest in a more efficient, and less energy intense society.

You too are obfuscating. The discussion here is about CERA's failed prediction history. Are you going to deny that too even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, Roger?

By the way, Roger, I keep waiting for KSA to flood the market and drop oil to $10 per barrel the way you used to predict. I haven't heard you issue that one lately, probably because it is so embarrassing that you would rather people forget you made it. And it's funny how JD forgets such failed predictions by people like yourself, or CERA's $38 per barrel oil prediction, for example.

Yet JD has contributed his little effort, and will cause those who are not yet prone to accept pronouncements as facts, but instead are still willing to ask, "how do you know?", are you certain you can prove that?", "can you compare one set of 'predictions' to another and prove one set more valid?" and "has this been seen before, and were mistaken conclusions drawn then?"

Wonderful! I am thrilled at the prospect of you providing us with JD's many questions to CERA, XOM, etc.!! I can hardly wait! The fortitude for him to ask CERA, "Why are you always **so fucking wrong** on oil prices, etc? And how do you know what you know? You WILL be showing us your database, given how important this issue is to the survival of civilization!"

Right?

;)

Cheers

Grautr: Yes. In the financial economy, incompetence is always the fall back excuse whenever corruption appears.

CERA is the Moodys of the oil world. They are paid by their big oil clients to keep nations hooked on gas.
Their AAA ratings for the future of oil production, will only be modified after the charade can no longer be maintained, in the face of real shortages.
The same conflict of interests, that fraudulently inflated valuations, and has lead to systemic financial failure, misleads with claims of abundance, and will undermine the worlds ability to mitigate a nett energy crash.

CERA wants to make money. They don't 'see' that the externalities of their actions and comments are setting us up for a greater shock once events catch up. They are acting in their own self-interests, which I understand.

Hmmm... which is more likely true:

CERA is to Peak Oil as ExxonMobile is to Climate Change.

CERA is to Peak Oil as Al Gore is to Climate Change.

CERA is to Peak Oil as Chicken Little is to skies falling.

CERA is to Peak Oil as Chicken Little's neighbors are to skies falling.

CERA is to Peak Oil as Noah was to The Flood.

CERA is to Peak Oil as rain was to The Flood.

Multiple answers acceptable.

Cheers

Hi Nate,

Thanks for this valuable article.

I like your question number 4 (to CERA) above, as it focuses on what "we" need to do, regardless of the effort to put the truth (as we see it) in front of them.

re: "They don't 'see' that the externalities of their actions and comments are setting us up for a greater shock once events catch up."

This is the real kicker.

This is also where the opportunity lies for perhaps some connection and collaboration.

Are there specifics you/we can propose as things they might be willing to sign on to?

I'm sure that you would find some willing sellers if you want to buy into some prime auto dependent American suburban real estate.

It all started well before people drove massively their cars to the city. It started with trains and buses.

True, at least the trains part. The doomed suburbs are not any that lie outside a town or city, its the ones where expending large amounts of energy are required for survival. I live in a former streetcar suburb. They typically had everything the residents needed within walking distance (usually on a small 'main-street'). For many jobs and cultural persuits you took the streetcar into the city. Some suburbs could be fixed perhaps, but many are physically just too messed up to easily be converted to walkable suburbs. On the other hand, they will have to make do so we may see some interesting adaptations.

US 26 barrels of oil per capita.

6.3 billion x 26 barrels = 163,800,000,000 barrels a year.

Remaining endowment: 1 - 4 trillion (all types and possibilites).

Time to total consumption: 6.1 to 24.4 years.

You're right. No problem.

Luisdias - I live in North County San diego and I am a Real estate Broker here (and I also have a license in Nevada and I own property there as well). In San Diego county we have seen drops in real values of homes over the last two years of 20 to 30%. In Las Vegas one in 20 homes are in foreclosure. The affordability index in San Diego is less than 8%.

People are not moving into dumpsters or under the freeway impasses but they are moving into the cities in mass numbers, buying up small condos and getting rid of a lot of "pack rat" garage clutter. The garage sales are truly amazing, showing that people in large are deciding to downsize for financial as well as practical reasons. Having more "keep up with the jones" stuff is so "not happening".

There is a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly detailing what the lifestyle wants of the new Gen-xer's are and the suburban model is out of fashion. What young people are looking for in Real Estate is places where they can catch a train to a job, walk to the movies or dinner and live in a upbeat cosmopolitan area. The sales in downtown areas and "walkable communities" are picking up while the areas in Poway and Escondido are being abandoned and the inventories continue to grow.

Who wants to live in a McMansion? is what you need to be asking rather than debating the sustainablilty of suburban estates. In Southern CA even the auctions for these "boxes" are generating very little interest. I daresay that 25 years from now we will be plowing a lot of these poorly thought out communities under.

I'm sorry that you might be upset because the loss in value has hurt you or people you know personally but guess what? We all bought into it.

But in the long run you really have to take a deep sigh and say:

Good riddance!

It's interesting to see how the auto, housing and finance industries have fared since "End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion & the Collapse of the American Dream" came out, versus skyrocketing food & energy prices.

Considering the rapidly increasing level of investment in oil (e.g., oil sands) and alternatives (e.g., wind, solar, batteries, electric cars), I'm not convinced that CERA's word carries an enormous amount of weight.

The problem is that the "rapidly increasing level of investment" is not increasing at anywhere near the rate that the problem is increasing.

From 2005 to 2006 we added about 5% in renewable energy to our overall electricity production (http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/solar.renewables/page/prelim_trends/rea_pre...). (I'm not counting biofuels as renewable, because I consider them basically a conversion of oil into another form without significant gain.) But that's 5% of a dinky amount, which means we added roughly 0.2% in renewables in terms of our overall energy needs. (We did virtually nothing to increase the energy efficiency of our transportation system.)

So, we have oil production declining at a minimum of about a 2% rate, and we have renewables increasing at roughly a 0.2% rate (and that is an optimistic figure--I think it's significantly less than that in reality).

Now we're trying to increase our investment in alternative energy at a time when we have much less energy to do so. The reason we're in this sorry state is, as Nate correctly points out, because of the influence of the bad predictions of organizations like the IHS and CERA.

Kunstler actually quotes Daniel Yergin extensively in The Long Emergency and gives Yergin credit where it is due.

CERA is funded by the oil business and it may be that CERA doesn't need to be right about oil prices, just right enough.

I daresay the companies pouring tens of billions into the oil sands over the last several years didn't pay much attention to "oil prices will be in high 20s to low 30s through 2005".

Not sure at what price oil sands become profitable but maybe low 30s from CERA was a strong enough signal to invest anyway. CERA may be ultra conservative on price which gives oil companies a margin of comfort.

On Kunstlers efforts to kill suburbia, I fail to see some sort of deluded conspiracy on his part. I work in real estate and I can gurantee you that towns with streets laid out pre automobiles are far more highly valued than tract suburban lots. The markets speaks pretty loudly. What is amazing is why developers and planning authorities only produce the crap that people don't want and refuse to build anymore of the 'old' style towns that peopale actually want to live in.

Kunstler is a social critic who is not content to stay within some narrow confine of journalistic constraints imposed by labels and qualifications. I have found his books, if not his blogs, well researched and considered, drawing in all the threads together and weaving the cloth to suit his message that I believe he has come to through his own journey of discovery, much like any of us here at TOD.

I would hardly call the end of suburbia a circular argument. Rather I think it is quite linear. Rise and Fall of the Suburban Empire. Not sure what his Y2K argument is but if you have some links to old quotes of his I'd be very interested.

BTW Y2K should be seen as a model for preparing for a coming, known event. The potential ramifications were indefinable but scary enough to prompt action on a large scale. The trigger point weas very well defined by nature. The preparation was huge and because many of the critical systems had been fixed years before, nothing happened when the trigger point came. But Y2K was never going to end suburbia (unless the nukes escaped). A right proper clusterfuck could have occurred if power went down for any significant period but that was recoverable, eventually. Peak Oil has no recovery and will not be a sudden, anticipated and well bookended emergency. It will be the Long Emergency that Kunstler has coined and it will kill the car suburbs very slowly but inexorably.

I personally did a lot of work to make sure Y2k wasn't a disaster - the reason things mostly continued to work was because we took hugely expensive remedial action.

There is little evidence that simmilar things are happening with regard to peak oil, and even less with Anthropogenic Dangerous Climate Change - CERA (just for one)is predicting massively more CO₂, not less, it seems climate change is not a consideration as we must have growth!

The oil supply forecasts?!? *What* oil *forecasts*? I only get to see reports, not *forecasts". It is too early to tell if the long-time forecasts are right or not. And like Campbell says, you only know it with precision in hindsight, which, btw, doesn't count as a "forecast". And if the oil megaprojects that are scheduled to come on stream do come on stream, we will hit new records of oil production.

Which puts an end to all the thousands of posts and comments concerning we-are-already-past-the-peak euphoria.

The only problem I see at it, is that it will only be put to rest until the next euphoria.

Funny, it reminds me a bit about the cyclical bubble and bust of capitalist societies.

Ah, so now those "scenarios" which happened to turn out close to the mark are now claimed as "forecasts".

In jumping off the top of the mountain of peak oil, part of the problem is the way the prediction is stated. "We will hit the ground in 2 minutes."

Three minutes later, we're still sailing through the air. "See, you doomers! You were wrong, everything's peachy!"

The prediction is not that we will hit the ground at a certain time, the prediction is that we will hit the ground, period.

We don't need to know exactly when the blizzard hits next winter to start chopping wood now. We don't need to know exactly when we will get hungry to plant or buy food now. We don't need to know exactly when we will get thirsty to dig a well now.

The problem comes from the illusory belief that we will never hit the ground, and this is somehow acceptable.

But if someone were to say that we will never be cold, thirsty, or hungry, we would readily classify them as deeply disturbed or dysfunctionally neurotic.

We tend to be awed by a narcissistic fascination of our accomplishments that leads us to believe in immortality of the system that produces these works, our current system of civilization.

Of course, as you go down the line, Turkey cut off gas exports to Greece.

Regardless of country or ideology, food and energy exporters tend to look after the home team first. Do you want to cut off food and energy from the guy across the street from you, or from the guy 5,000 miles away?

It simply wasn't going to work until AFTER oil prices rise through the roof.

And the problem there, Glenn, is the receding horizons issue. At today’s price, alternative energy looks good at X + $30 (or whatever). But X is a moving target, and thus the break even for alternative energy (or GTL or CTL) is as well.

If someone built a GTL plant 10 years ago when oil prices were very low (but also labor, equipment, etc. was much lower) then they looked stupid. But they are probably making money now, because they locked in most of their investment at, say $20/bbl. Once oil rose above $50, they were making money. If an energy company knew for certain that oil prices over the next 5 years would average $150 or so, they would make a lot of investments they aren’t currently making.

The blog's where it's always been:
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/