I don't like the popcorn popping analogy. I don't see the connection to peak oil at all, really.

I like the popcorn analogy, but I think the qualitative aspects will be more important to most than the quantitative analysis. Right now we're in the middle of the fast-popping zone -- so fast you can hardly discern individual pops, and there is no way to know if the bag is 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 popped. Keep going much longer though, and the smell will make it obvious that this party is about over.

I have enough math hours to have a math minor on top of an engineering degree, but that was a long time ago. I can follow the math but I couldn't devise it anymore. I appreciate that those who focus on that skill set do so, and that provides a necessary quantitative and theoretical basis for what is happening in the empirical world. It certainly helps with the "prediction" side of the problem.

So, use your nifty algorithms to draw up some nice explanation/prediction graphs and devise cogent relationships between contributing factors and I'll be right there with you. If you want input on which regression method should be used to refine the second decimal point of your exponential decay rate, you're on your own!

I don't like the popcorn anology, as near as I can understand it, because I don't think it is accurate. Your curve still looks like the standard bell curve. I think this is highly inaccurate. I believe we are well past 50 percent depletion. Take Russia for instance.

Russian organic decline in production is close to 19%. To compensate for that organic decline, Russia drills somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 wells every year.
And:
Therefore, next year there will be a lot fewer fields coming on stream; in the absence of new incentives to put more money to work to grow Russian oil production, it will naturally start declining, with organic decline rates of around 19% and growing.
Russian Oil and Gas Industry

19 percent and growing! How can a decline rate that high be growing? Easy, in order to keep production rate high they are just punching a lot more holes in their old reservoirs and sucking the oil out a lot faster. This keeps production up but increases the decline rate from all other wells in the same reservoir. This will mean that when Russian oil does start to decline, it will plunge like a rock in a pond.

And this very same thing is happening in most other old reservoirs, especially OPEC reservoirs. Saudi Arabia has decreased their decline rate from an average of 8 percent to 2 percent simply by sucking harder on their old reservoirs.

And theis is why the peak oil curve will look like a shark fin, not the standard bell curve. This will become apparent to the world by no later than 2012.

Ron P.

The problem with science and particularly scientific theories on this level is that you need a controlled experiment to test against. Unfortunately, we are in the middle of the biggest controlled experiment known to mankind, and ultimately the only controlled experiment available to test the hypothesis is the one we are in.

Therefore one way to convince people is to use metaphors and analogies of other controlled experiments and compare the trajectories of those against the observations of our own oil depletion path.

I think the video is good but it doesn't help as a management tool as much as a model would. For example, a model with a good analogy can be used directly as a depletion management tool. It could actually be used for prediction and possible outcomes. This could help shape policy. Since have impressive experience in politics, of course you realize the importance of policy in politics. ;)

Well, maybe, but I dunno..."normal folk" don't go to the Corcoran...never mind whether they even have ready access to something like it...they're too busy shuttling their kids to the endless sports meets, or, if the kids are grown up and gone, they're maybe going to football games or (in summer) the cabin up north, or, if they're really poor, they're staying home...

Worse still, according to the video, the picture show appears to be little more than an artistically self-indulgent exercise in equating large scale with iniquity and doom. One perhaps supposes the desired alternative to be, as usual, some sort of mythological ancient agricultural landscape where everything is done on a small scale, in order that the viewer should see it as "humanized", meaning in part that the dirty bits, rampant disease, starvation, and so on, should fall neatly out of the frame. Alas, it just seems so hopelessly fatuous in the face of a population of seven billion and rising with no end in sight. Wherever and whenever populations become large and dense, we seem to encounter large scale.

Indeed, we encountered large scale millennia before the arrival of 'fossil fuels' in the modern sense. So even a stack of emotionalized photographs tall enough to to use as a space-elevator might be unlikely to make it go away. And we should be careful what we wish for - concepts such as "capping global carbon emissions", for example, will become meaningless should global social structures become severely compromised or break down.

My favorite analogy to explain "why" would be a Slurpee analogy.
The first half of a Slurpee is easy to drink as the juice comes right through your straw. We could even share it with someone else with two straws. Eventually the easy to get juice declines, and the ice starts to pack together. There is still plenty of juice, we just have a harder time drinking it. We have to shake the drink up a bit, or poke the straw in multiple times, or stir it, or blow into the straw to break up the ice, or just wait till it melts. It comes out slower no matter what we do, and the juice we unlock is not as tasty as the first juice when we first got the Slurpee.

Sorry, joining the conversation late.

As you are aware, several days ago I prompted readers to post their stories/metaphors about peak oil.

Debbie, your request strikes me as no different than people who are looking for the silver bullet that will solve the energy problem itself.

Isn't it possible that changing a societal conversation is really hard especially when there are so many physical structures that support the current one? (i.e. the gasoline is still coming out of the pumps, 401k statements pull people toward a growth economy, etc.)

We could have a wonderful analogy and the distribution and action problems would still be there: how to get it in front of enough people, how to burst the bubble that protects people from understanding it, then how to motivate them to actually do something when they finally do get it.

Getting peak oil widely known will never happen in time and likely never will happen. Wishing it is some other way is like complaining that the basketball hoop is too high or the football field has too many yards. A football field has 100 yards, not one yard more or less. Since those are the rules of the game, the only fulfilling option is not to fight that but instead to embrace it and have fun playing the game as it is constructed.

I prefer the mound of dirt or haystack full of basketballs, baseballs and marbles. What you gonna find first? Could be any of the three. But which are you gonna finish finding first? Basketballs, by a wide margin. Next? The vast majority of the baseballs, also by a fair margin, though the actual last field or two to be found might be baseballs. Marbles last.

Make it beach balls in a pile of dirt on the beach... whatever. The nice thing is, it's the same action: digging for something buried. Hell, make it buried treasure. Cannons and treasure chests, cannon balls and goblets then ingots.

Whatever.

Cheers