Cliffman, I'm looking forward to that. How far back did you run the numbers? Did you go back at least as far as it took to find Peak Oil per Person"? [POP] Just guessing, right around Apollo 13. "Houston, we have a problem."

Ain't gonna work, no. Another set of numbers that would be helpful at least anecdotally - what was "Barrels of Oil Equivalent per Person" [BOEP] of various societies at various times. Europe now is about half US I understand. US around 1960 about half of current. If society, culture and technology are all of a piece - though not necessarily uniquely so - one could solve decline rate and amount of work to replace infrastucture to find the set of True Paradigms Possible. ;^>

cfm in Gray, ME, channelling Harri Seldon.

clifman - sorry - i just can't keep up - please resend it to address on my profile. thanks

hi cliffman

I too would be interested to see your analysis. Looking quickly at the BP site it's interesting that the big drop in oil consumption per capita happened between 1979 and 1982, from 0.71 to 0.6 tonnes/person/year. 2007 was unchanged from 1982 at 0.6. For the same dates total energy consumption/capita/year was 1.55mtoe in 1979, 1.43mtoe in 1982 and 1.7mtoe in 2007.

2 immediate conclusions suggest themselves from this;

1. The big drop in oil consumption, on a per capita basis, occurred in the relatively short recessionary period 1979-1982. This probably represented genuine, irrecoverable, demand destruction (expressed/capita) and likely resulted from energy substitution, esp non-transport.

2. Since 1982 oil consumption/capita has remained remarkably steady against a backdrop of increasing total energy/capita. This suggests that oil demand may be far less elastic than back in 1979 - most of the easy substitution has happened.

TW