The Problem With Hubbert's Peak (as seen today)

Been giving a bit of thought lately to the idea of "energy descent" - basically that as stocks of petrol diminish, humans will be forced to come up with a way of living with less total energy available to them. Now I know that there are plenty of arguments about alternative sources of energy such as solar or wind or even nuclear, but petrol remains the major source of energy in the global economy. However, the thing I can't get about people who create websites like this one: is that they don't take into account shale oil. Terrible as the strip mining/processing/retorting/refining is of shale oil, it seems as though the trillion or so barrels of shale oil should act as a cushion since it "only" takes a good $60-70/barrel to produce oil from shale. If you believe these folks: then it wouldn't even cost that much. So my conclusion? Imminent disaster isn't going to happen anytime soon (i.e. within 10 years), and since the U.S. is thought to sit on almost 1 trillion barrels of shale oil, it might be in an even better spot in terms of world energy than it is today. Strange.

Unfortunately, that only gives me more time to ponder the odd concept of "energy descent."