I saw Gail Tverberg's writings regularly back in the Oil Drum days. I don't think that she is a credible prognosticator. Like some other people on The Oil Drum, her theme seemed to be that industrial civilization was facing an imminent crisis from energy supply contraction. Did she ever go back and explain why she was so wrong the first time around with predictions like these?

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/what-is-peak-oil/

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/16/is-this-a-false-alarm/

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/08/06/peak-oil-whats-ahead/

Did she make more cautious predictions going forward, after making such badly failed predictions 13 years ago? If she did, I didn't see it. It looks like Our Finite World is still a drumbeat of predictions about crises just ahead. If she's eventually correct about a specific prediction it will be a case of the stopped clock showing the correct time by chance.

That doesn't mean that I'm unconditionally optimistic about the future. The "Galactic Scale Energy" post is exactly right. The problem is that constraints like "growth can't go on like this for another 1000 years, because of physics" can't provide much guidance for the next 15 years. And predictions from the Peak Oil crowd from 15 years ago about what would happen in 15 years were mostly wrong.

My personal take: after the 1960s, people basically stopped inventing more energy-intensive goods and services that could achieve mass market adoption. Jet air travel was the last big energy intensive service to reach the mainstream. The diffusion of energy-intensive lifestyles continued in the United States and is still diffusing throughout the world, so we're rushing toward a global warming disaster faster than ever. But GDP growth per capita in the developed countries has slowed. Energy consumption per capita in the developed countries has stabilized or reversed.

Small efficiency improvements in existing technologies accumulate without enough new energy-intensive technologies being invented to push up the per-capita demand from the median American. We are encountering the per capita "limits to growth" in highly developed nations but the limits showed up on the demand side before the supply side.

Global warming also -- and unfortunately -- seems unlikely to be curbed by supply-side fuel constraints any time soon, since we don't need any new energy-intensive technologies to blow out the global carbon budget. All we need for that is for the rest of the world's population to try to live like Americans circa 1990.