Peak everything refers to the everyman-entangling likelihood that, due to the recent, one-time migration of consumers, corporations, and corporate states from non-renewable, high-caloric consumption of crude oil, crude oil condensates, and liquified natural gas (LNG) to psuedo-renewable, low-caloric consumption of biofuel, ethanol, and wood and non-renewable, lower-caloric consumption of coal and coal to liquids (CTL) — all of which incur, cause, and exacerbate prohibitively high “externalized costs” of ecologic degradation and, assuming slow resuscitation times for ecologies, ecologic collapse — civilization itself has pasted its own peak.
Peak everything has its causes in greed (biologically pre-programmed as the human-discount function and societally re-programmed as the supply-demand market function and invisible hand of the market), and consequences in the charnel grounds of your children.
Peak oil is a statistical inevitability. Its statistics — theoretical, but heretically justified via real and observation — describes the statistical shape of local and global oil discovery, extraction, and subsequently inevitable depletion. It specifically, successfully predicted that depletion of all oil fields, globally, would resemble depletion of any one oil field, locally, and that (moreover) discovery of all oil fields, globally, would resemble this same shape: a bell-shaped Gaussian curve.
The Earth’s endowment of crude oil is finite. This rate of oil production reaches a maximum (i.e., peaks) when approximately half of the original resource remains, and thereafter goes into irreversible decline.
— Wikipedia, summarizing Wikipedia:M. King Hubbert.
This theory, therefore — in the same manner that Newton’s Theory of Gravity is not so much a “theory” as a “valid descriptor of consensual reality” — is not so much a “theory” as a “valid descriptor of consensual, geologic reality.” First proposed by prominent U.S. oil geologist M. King Hubbert in 1954, “peak oil” accurately predicted the peak and subsequent demise of domestic U.S. (lower 48) oil production within one year of accuracy (predicted to be 1970; it was actually 1971) and global oil production within eight years of accuracy (predicted to be 2000; it was actually early 2008, according to thin evidences thus far).
Having peaked past crude oil production in May, 2006; edible grain production in 1985; and intangible, but tautly knowable, financial wizardries and wealth production sometime in the mirror’s blindsight of 2007; civilization, itself, is peaked — and is, now, past-peak. Off the nightward vales of omnipresent, presently observable and irreversible decline, it’s shuddering nigh… its end.
Material Golden Age, that immaterially impoverished us all, to deal the deathly, lying products to us all (without limit, surcease, or feigned halt), is faltering onward the line of the end.
Keening songs of earth-hued and -hewn fields and fruits of the fields, that is our genetic keepsake for unremembered sakes of those who follow us to tend those fielded glories, is slipping low and slipshod.
Keening songs are almost done. What’s left to keep is ours to keep, who live; but dying, in its mammoth throes, mayn’t civilization stamp what’s left to dustbowl ash and tramped, leeward dust? To our communal detriments — it may.
The detritus of civilization must not be permitted to kill us all.
This documents that.
Gaussian curves have several significant properties, whose application if applicable to global oil discovery, extraction, and depletion implies several rough facts about the long-term viability, sustainability, and rationality of these operations.
Gaussian curves exponentially, quickly grow from 0 to a slowly rising slope (the pre-peak plateau), slowly rise from that slope onto a one-time maxima (the peak), slowly fall from that maxima back onto a slowly falling slope (the post-peak plateau), and exponentially, quickly decay to 0. These curves, though non-concrete abstractions, accurately model concrete observations of oil discovery, extraction, and depletion; that is, these curves “fit” the geologic data. This data, though collected, collated, and published from several independent data-sources — the EIA (Energy Information Administration), IEA (International Energy Agency), and U.S. Geological Survey, et al., with occasional variances thereby — smoothly matches the Gaussian curve predictions of peak oil.
Oil futures have recently gone contango: that is, begun pricing oil in the future at a higher price than oil is priced in the present. If this contango, which is (mostly) unprecented in the commodities market, persists, it will be the market-based recognition of the validity of peak oil. As this validity, as of the present, has no valid detractors, we suspect the contango will persist; and will, thereby, be leveraged to amass vast quantities of squanderous money.
Oil futures, by their very name, imply that they are: that money invested in the ill-gotten, blood-graven gains of multinational oil corporations is the future, and that that is good, just, and just deserving.
Raiazome, however, promotes the view that your dollar is your vote; that you should only vote for good; that oil is not good, but the greatest, spreading ill; that, therefore, you should not vote for oil; and that, therefore, you should not invest in oil futures — but water, wind, and sun-derived renewables, that are, by climate-bound nature, good. Nevertheless, if your nascent lust for never-spilling profits demands, you are guaranteed a firm, omnipresent fortune via investure in so-vested ‘long’ oil futures.
From Peak Oil.