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Let's talk about peakers' "mistakes": > Firstly, there must be no discoveries of new reserves.

Wrong, all it takes is that the demand grows above the discoveries rate. If I remember correctly, demand to discoveries ratio was about 4:1 in the last decade. (and demand is to go even higher as emergent countries create middle classes that aspire to follow the American dream)

> Secondly, there must be no advances in technologies in extraction or refinement.

That is irrelevant. Efficiencies can only buy you more time. Every grade school kid knows fossil fuels are non renewable resources. We could debate whether the Peak Oil is one year, or one decade or one century away, but this is something that will eventually happen.

> Thirdly, there must be no advances in technologies to convert different hydrocarbon sources into others.

This is frankly foolish! It takes energy to transform materials from one "format" to another, and it takes serious energy to do that at an industrial scale. Specially, if you want to take low concentrated energy sources and make then highly concentrated, you will waste most of it away! (while screwing the environment on unprecedented scales) There is a good reason the Nazis tried an all-in and attacked Russia. They could not afford to keep converting coal into synthetic oil for much longer!

> Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands...

One thing that has to be said about this, is that the good stuff is already gone. Clearly, there is plenty of cheap, dirty, low yield fossil fuels around. But the sweet crude, the one that yielded 100:1 returns on energy invested, was burned during the economic expansion of the 20th century.

This is not to say that we are doomed, and that we are back to the dark ages (when I see the stupidity around in Facebook, I sometimes think we are indeed, but it clearly has nothing to do with peak oil). The catch is that we need to recognize that our whole civilization is built over a non renewable resource, and we have to use whatever we have left of it in an strategic way (which I think may last for the 21st century, give or take). It would be nice to make the jump now that we have still some capacity for retooling, than later on when we have less so.

According to the table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density coal doesn't fare too bad compared to gasoline in terms of J/kg.

Another factor in the attack of Germany on the Soviet Union was that both countries had quite insane leaders..

Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.

I don't think this is true, and your argument ignores how expensive many of the technologies you cite are, like coal gassification, which has been available for decades but isn't used because of the cost. The question isn't only about reserves, but about how expensive those reserves are to access (and what kinds of environmental damage access will cause).

And oil prices have, in real terms, gone steadily upwards through a boom and bust cycle: prices rise stratospherically, then crash, then find a new trading point higher than the previous trading point. For more on that, see Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon . Note that I don't believe the provocative claim in the title, but he provides a lot of useful historical data.

And this argument mostly ignores the environmental cost of oil, both in terms of extraction and in terms of consumption. And in terms of the massive wealthy transfers from the West to charming places like Saudi Arabia that do a great job of churning out people who become terrorists and ideologies that are repressive. If the price of oil goes up—and it almost certainly will—the latter dynamic will only get stronger.

People who cite peak oil aren't doing it because they have "a visceral hated of petroleum," especially if visceral refers to inward feelings rather than the intellect: they have rational concerns about the world in which we live. Those concerns might be misguided, but they might not be, and time will, as usual, be the judge.

Seems that a number of these alternatives are unfeasible (given current tech) since net energy figures are negative ie it takes more than 1 barrel of oil to produce a single barrel. Of course we're banking on technology solving these issues which it has done 'til now.