u/MangoPeachRadish

Well this is disappointing. JMG (formerly of The Archdruid Report) revisits his old peak oil predictions. There's some good stuff here, especially if you haven't read JMG before. And props to the guy for engaging with his past work to see what was wrong and why. But he's not staying with the times on solar and wind energy :

"Nuclear fission, solar power, windpower [are] niche resources propped up by government subsidies for political reasons. They have to be propped up that way because they don’t pay for themselves. They may be technically feasible, in other words, but they’re hopeless in economic terms."

He also refers to solar and wind by the lovely term "subsidy dumpsters". Regular readers of this subreddit know that solar energy is now both the cheapest and fastest growing source of new energy, and is likely to continue to accelerate in the coming years. It looks to me like JMG is stuck in his own conception of the future, and unwilling to update based on major new (positive!) developments.

It is not my intention here to convince you that the peak oil thesis of the late 00's was correct, just to explain what it was and why it seemed plausible at the time. Obviously a decade and a half of political and technological developments have changed that picture.

Let’s say you were living your life in back in 2008. BOOM! Great financial crisis, bank bailouts, all that stuff. Ostensibly the cause of the crisis was a bunch of mortgage defaults, but there were folks who noticed how the price of oil (and thus gas) had spiked before the crash. Could it be that the spike in fuel prices had driven the timing and severity of the crash? Might it happen again?

Some of the main points emphasized by people who argued for taking peak oil seriously were as follows:

1. Oil is necessarily a finite resource. At some point the world will pump the most barrels it ever has and then decline from there
2. Declines in oil producing nations can be exacerbated by increasing domestic consumption. Oil rich nations often subsidize fuel, giving people little incentive to economize. Exports are then pinched between less supply and greater demand.
3. Oil storage, refining and transport infrastructure is fragile, and a lot of it is located in a part of the world not especially known for stability. War, sabotage or even simple accident could take big chunks of the world's oil supply offline in a matter of days, and take potentially years to replace.
4. Before you pump oil you have to find it. Oil discoveries peaked decades ago and have been falling steadily ever since.
5. Not every barrel of oil is identical. Some sources, like tar sands and tight oil, require so many resources to produce that they deliver significantly less net energy to human civilization.
6. While alternatives to liquid fuels do exist, it remains to be seen if they can be delivered on time, at a workable price, and at the scale the world requires. Into this bucket put things like corn ethanol, biodiesel, algae biofuels, wind-to-liquids, etc. etc. Crucially, some of these sources of fuel have such low energy return on energy invested (EROEI), often below 2, that they would never be significant sources of net energy.

So why are we here? Obviously the worst predictions of peak oil doomers haven't come true. Planes are flying, gas stations are full and grocery stores are stocked with food. Well most obviously, recent hostilities between the US/Israel and Iran have brought both real and potential supply disruptions. On the positive side, the surge in battery electric vehicles, along with cheap solar and battery electricity to power them, have made the prospect of peak oil *demand* look a lot more likely. We are here because we agree that, to at least some extent, future supply of liquid fuels is both important and not guaranteed. Welcome to that discussion.

Not that interesting an article as it's mostly just an interview with the President, but the Philippines is worth watching. US ally, relies on imported oil via the Strait of Hormuz, and has not much strategic reserve.

This is probably my biggest remaining gripe with the car (other than ICCU). When using the Hyundai phone interface to receive text messages, it somehow thinks that the person sending the text has cc'd themselves, which is annoying. But worse, the car then reads their phone number as a number, i.e. "Text message from John Doe cc John Doe, plus five billion, five hundred and fifty eight million, six hundred seventy five thousand, three hundred and nine." It's incredibly aggravating and so far dealer service has been no help. Yes I could just use Car Play but I'd like the car I bought to actually work. Has anyone else dealt with this and gotten it fixed? I've deleted and reinstalled the phone connection several times and it does not fix the issue. Thanks!