Tverberg: ‘Businessweek Gets It Wrong’

Here is a link to an article by Gail Tverberg. As I’ve said before, I cannot find fault with Gail’s analyses.

Businessweek Gets it Wrong—Everything You Know About Peak Oil is ‘Not’ Wrong

Posted on February 6, 2012  
On January 26, Bloomberg Businessweek printed an editorial by Charles Kenney titled, “Everything You Know About Peak Oil Is Wrong.” This editorial reflects several common misunderstandings.

According to Kenney:

Titled Limits to Growth, their report suggested the world was heading toward economic collapse as it exhausted the natural resources, such as oil and copper, required for economic production. The report forecast that the world would run out of new gold in 2001 and petroleum by 2022, at the latest.

Limits to Growth gives a table that might be interpreted to show that oil and gold new extraction will be exhausted by the dates indicated. The book is careful to explain that the situation is more complicated, though.

I agree that it is about the cost of oil and its consequences. I try to find workarounds that can help us here in Hawai‘i. Geothermal is one of those workarounds.

More from Gail Tverberg’s article:

…With high oil prices, people cut back on discretionary goods, resulting in layoffs among people who work in those industries. For example, fewer people have jobs in vacation industries (for example, in Greece and Spain) if oil prices are high. This leads to recession and debt defaults. If one country defaults, ripple effects can spread to banks around the world.

Our economy has a high level of debt. We need economic growth in order to repay that debt with interest. If oil supply remains flat, or worse yet, falls, it will be difficult to produce the level of economic growth needed to prevent debt defaults.