Peak Oil Drum?
Posted by Stuart Staniford on December 2, 2005 - 6:13pm
Monthly visits to the Oil Drum, both the old site (prior to August), and the new (after August). August is a sum of figures for both sites).
I would agree with EUE that gas price declines may explain part of the October to November decline. Another factor could have been that Prof G. was obliged to spend too much of his time on his real life for a while - he normally does a lot of behind the scenes stuff to promote the site and to keep our content fresh and topical (he reports that things are slowly returning to normal).
Overall, I'm not worried. Just as oil prices are going to be volatile across the peak, interest in peak oil websites will be volatile month-to-month too. As long as we are basically right about oil peaking, interest will overall get stronger and stronger until such time as we are substantially past peak and society has figured out basically what it is going to do in response.
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I run the Spanish spoken Crisis Energética, and I superposed the visitors between April 2004 and March 2005. This is the result:
Las August, with prices around 70$, we doubled visitors, from 4000 daily to 8000.
Stock markets act the same way - when they go up, they attract the money and when they correct, the volume drops off.
But in practice government has its own rules and its own dynamics. There is no reason to expect it to follow the dictates of the Peak Oil community. When PO is hot, yes, government will want to show that it is taking action against the problem. But the population is fickle and will soon loose interest, as demonstrated by the graph above. At that point government's priorities are likely to change.
Historically what we tend to see is regulatory capture, where the parties supposedly being regulated by government come to control the regulations for their own benefit. They never lose interest, you see. When the public turns away, they will still be present, lobbying for their views to be heard and accommodated.
Either the visitor are looking for solutions to peak oil, or they are looking to verify the validity of production decreases through the discussions. Maybe it went right over thier heads, and they moved on. I for one am curious and trying to learn about this.
The other peakoil.com website seems to be pretty busy, maybe compare stats with them. It is a big site too. That was my first intro to peak oil, i don't go there anymore. I prefer the intelligent dialog here!
Fortunately, we are still decades away from Peak Alcohol!
Traffic statistics for the Energy Bulletin are following the same trend as at TOD, though not as extreme. I think you got the spike in hits for Sept for your outstanding coverage of the hurricanes.
Otherwise, traffic seems to jump when gas prices jump, then drops off to a consistent level. I think there was a similar jump in EB's readership last year.
Bart
This business of predicting the future has its rough edges - I'm determined to find the best path through this that I can. And coming from outside the oil industry, I have no access to the technical information, or at lest am too ignorant of the terminology and sources to find it. I think sites like TOD are a great illustration of the power of the exchange of information and the internet. Thanks to all those that contribute!
And those that lose interest - well, some will take the red pill, and some will take the blue. I prefer the reality based community.
Christmas and new year's celebrations and responsibilities should interfere with visits . Additionally, differential equations do not typically draw a crowd .
What I see is an increasing awareness of problems with world energy production . That is good .
The key data is not "hits", it is "unique visitors". I have no doubt that everyday, this site is generating more and more awareness of peak oil and all of its complexities. I'm not sure exactly how many TOD users there are but I'm sure it has continued to increase over time.
The ASPO-USA conference was a real eye-opener for me. Most people were familiar with the information services provided by TOD and all commments were positive.
By and large, I would say that peak oil issues are still rather marginal in American culture as a whole but are getting more widely known due, in no small part, to websites like this. Still, it's an uphill battle, there's no doubt about that.
Now all you have to do to boost your ratings is engineer a quick crisis :-)
I think of us on the leading edge of this issue as being the people trying to perform a drug intervention with the rest of the world.
HO
I am a Christian, and know and feel strongly about peak oil.
"Such a populace hardly has the mental equipment to study PO as presented here. "
Excuse me for saying this but, you are wrong.
The folks that bury their head in the sand might be who you are speaking of, but in general I know a Lot of Christians that do worry about these things. Though I do not know a lot that think the "rapture" will be engineered by our own actions.
When "the end" happens, it will be final, no lingering issues to worry about. Over, done with!
IMH(umble)O, the folks preaching the "rapture" could fall into "cult" status. Or as Christ said "false prophets".
So not all Christians are to dumb to read this page or others.
Good thing this isn't the oil business itself, though, where you'd have to decide whether to massively increase production in order to meet peaks in demand (or alternatively, just pretend the oil's there and underestimate the demand for it, as the IEA does in its reports).
I have known about Peak Oil as a concept for 3 years, but knew we had problems as much as 20 years ago doing my own reading. I have been on the internet for 16 years, back in the days of IRC (Inter Relay Chat), and BBS's (Bulletin Board Services). Even back then the talks on the more widely used sites could get into energy issues.
All in all this is a very good and technically rich site, giving thinking people lots of things to think about that we might not have found on our own.
Thank You