Dreaming City
If you ever read Michael Moorcock you'll probably know of Imrryr the dreaming city. Imrryr was a major city port, the center of a mighty empire, where people attained such dominance and power that they were always drugged (dreaming) in completely disconnection with reality.
The dreaming was so grave that they just failed to see the end of the empire and the city, brought by the emperor himself.
The folk commenting at SlashDot surely looked like Imrryrians at the edge of time.
People do not face reality. In our immense affluence and well being we just turn on the TV and let those images flood our brain without questioning it, without saying "is that so?"
The Media just throw it at us without a second thought without a rebate.
Remember that more than 50% of the Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11.
Most of these comments got at SlashDot are based on the common sense got from the same MSM that created those beliefs. You know, at the edge of time...
Ah! November, the month of sweet chestnut harvest, and of new wine tasting! Now, you love sweet chestnuts and on St. Martins' day you buy a hundred of them. On that day you just eat one, properly roasted on dried pine needles. But it's so tasty and sweet that on the next day you have two; on the third your mouth is watering and you have four. You go on like that until you've finished the hundred bundle. Then in your immense unhappiness you look back and see that there was a day when you ate more than on all of the other days - Peak Sweet Chestnut Day.
This small parable is just to show you a very simple (and quite obvious) fact: a Peak is a mathematical result of growing consumption of a finite resource.
Nothing can change that, even if you think that Oil is abiotic in nature (this issue will be dealt with in a subsequent post).
Peak Oil also brings with it the concept of peak occurring around the point in time where half of the recoverable resource is extracted. In our first parable this isn't the case, nothing stops you from eating more sweet chestnuts every day, until the resource isn't there.
Of course your digestive system could put some restrain to that.
So it's quite common to get a question like "Why is the peak at the middle?" There's no easy direct answer besides the vague "That's how things grow in Nature." To understand the peak-in-the-middle concept we need another parable: The wood pile vs. wood land parable. You can find the hole story at WolfAtTheDoor.org.uk, here's the essential (homage to Paul be made - WATD improves from day to day and it still is one of the best websites I've ever surfed to, not only in content but also in design):
article N° 1000