NASA Claims Supersonic Breakthrough For Biz Jets

(Incidentally, Twitter is a good source for finding what titles were before they were edited. In this case I found it at https://twitter.com/#!/newsyc20/status/187650762111844353)

Couple anecdotes: I work in a semi rural neighborhood that's 2km from a regional airport (a bit off to the side of the approach path). I work right next to a window and haven't once heard an airplane go by. Now, this might be due to our shielded glass and white noise generators in the ceiling, but that's not bad.

Second anecdote, there was an airport downtown on the water that was re-opening with an airline running Bombardier Q400s (Porter Airlines at Billy Bishop). There was a group of protesters that were claiming that the noise would ruin the quiet of a nearby spit. So on the launch day, before the sun rose, they gathered at the spit to protest. Unfortunately for them, they missed the first flight as their talking had drowned it out.

Maybe it's just because I lived next to the railroad tracks for 20 years, but I say, bring on the jets.

Leaving aside that that's a terrible reason to stop even trying to predict something, I haven't found this to be the case at all.

Since about 2000 the date that's been put out was 2004-2006. The recession did indeed delay that a couple years, but we've still never extracted more oil than we did in 2008 despite continued high prices (vs. say the 1979 peak, after which oil prices collapsed).

>Every time we seem to run out of oil or natural gas we find more - known oil reserves have never been higher.

Helped in part by the fact that the OPEC nations (which account for ~80% of those reserves) allocates daily production limits in proportion to known reserves. So the more oil you claim to have, the more oil they let you produce! When the rules changed in the 1980 there was a gold rush of "revisions" that increased global oil reserves by 33%.

Peak oil is not "running out of oil," so the fact that that hasn't happened is not a real argument.

If you honestly believe that a global economy in which oil production has been flat for 4 years despite high prices, in which only 14 of the 54 oil-producing nations are growing production, in which another 30 are in active decline–forcing them to import more oil and more every year just to maintain current consumption (let alone fuel growth)–is a global economy in which peak oil isn't taking place, then I honestly don't know what to say.