What’s the basic math behind your forecast that world oil production peaked Dec. 16?

Hubbert’s theory says that the ease of finding oil depends on the fraction of oil that hasn’t been found yet. It’s a simple hypothesis that explained U.S. oil production, where we’ve already gone over the peak and we’re halfway down the other side. A corollary that comes out of the math is that the peak occurs when half the oil has been produced. In Chapter 3 of “Beyond Oil,” I take the date these oil fields were first discovered, the first wells, and it turns out that the whole world is mature. We’ve found 94 percent of all the oil we’re ever going to find. It’s easy to extend that line down to the zero level and say that there are 2.013 trillion barrels that we’re on track to discover, and we’ve already discovered 94 percent of that. So there’s not much guesswork in that number. So I divide that number by 2 and I get just over 1 trillion barrels. Then I add up the world oil production from the beginning and figure out when we’re halfway, and that’s where the Dec. 16 number comes from…

What do the oil companies say?

With the oil companies, you have to watch what they do and not what they say. What they’re doing is taking in $10 billion and $20 billion a quarter in profits and handing it out as increased dividends, buybacks of their stocks, giving it to their executives. They’re not drilling, they’re not building new pipelines and not building new refineries. If there were good prospects out there, they’d be out there drilling like crazy….

We’re not doing much about it. We could have had a soft landing if we had listened to Jimmy Carter and started 20 years ago. But in the absence of a Winston Churchill or John Kennedy, I’m not sure we’re going to get in gear fast enough to avoid this. The mildest form of the disaster is a global recession worse than the Great Depression, and that’s a form it could take rather than war, famine, pestilence and death.

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