What was Mahatma Gandi’s famous line? First they ignore your e-mail, then they ridicule you in their blogs, then you win and they scrub their web sites and claim to have been on your side all along? OK, maybe I’m updating the quotation just a wee bit, but this seems to be the general pattern that’s playing out regarding peak oil.

First we have the premature crowing about Bakken (and Jack2 before that and Brazil’s rumored finds afterwards).

Next, we have the constant drumbeat, growing in both tempo and volume lately, of people wildly mischaracterizing what peak oil means.

Exhibit A: In an AP article carried by MSNBC (an outlet I know for a fact understands peak oil better than this), Brazil thinks it has found massive oil field , the writer uncorks this beauty:

However, it does cast new doubt on peak oil theory, which postulates that world oil demand will soon outpace supply.

To which I can only say: [loud buzzer noise] You don’t win, you don’t get the Turtle Wax and Rice-A-Roni, you don’t even get a copy of the freakin’ home game, and don’t be surprised of Don Pardo intentionally mispronounces your name on the way out. But thanks for playing.

I will type this next part very slowly to allow even those with vision clouded by ideology or willful ignorance to follow along.

Peak oil says nothing about the interplay of supply and demand. It says that when you keep using a finite natural resource, in this case “oil”, eventually you reach a point of maximum production, or “peak”, beyond which the rate of oil production necessarily declines. That’s it. Of course, this is so simple and so inarguably true that it makes it hard to demonize those of us concerned about this inescapable eventuality. Which brings me to…

Exhibit B: A Forbes article, There’s Still Oil In Them Hills, which says:

Oil is trading once again at record levels, but the doomsday scenario of peak oil does not yet seem to be upon us.

…

Even if the true worth of the discovery is highly speculative at the moment, it does show that there is oil out there to be found, according to Global Insight’s Wardell. He said that the supply situation was definitely “tight,” but that a lot of peak oil claims could be exaggerated.

Honestly, the people who write such things are trying to kill me, right? “Doomsday scenario”??? Did someone resurrect Irwin Allen and plunk him down in front of a browser tuned to the doomer sites, plus a word processor, when I wasn’t looking?

Once again, I will try my best to lay this out in terms anyone who cares to can understand.

• A lot of people understand that oil is a finite resource that we’re using at a stunning rate of about 86 million barrels per day. These are the informed people.
• Some of those informed people believe we’re getting very close to the time when so much of the cheap, easy to extract and refine oil has been used that it can no longer meet growing world demand, forcing us to rely ever more on nonconventional oil of much lower quality and/or from far less convenient places, like ultra deep water fields. These are the observant people.
• Some of those observant people understand the relevant math of the situation (fields already in production, many of which are declining, plus new projects coming online), and have concluded that the peak is not decades away, but very close, as in the 2011/2012 time frame. These are the analytical thinkers, a group that includes the ASPO and Chris Skrebowski. It’s also the part of the peak oil spectrum that I most closely identify with. The people who think we can keep producing ever more oil for decades to come, usually through some hand waving regarding enhanced oil recovery and/or the magic of the marketplace, are the cornucopians. Based on the bad fiction in the Annual Energy Outlook, the US Dept. of Energy’s statistical branch, the EIA, is in this camp.
• A small but highly vocal group of the analytical thinkers have lost their minds (but not their Internet connections) and endlessly tell us that we’re all going to die horrible deaths in just a few years, or we’ll see the collapse of modern civilization, or some such idiocy. I suspect a lot of these people are recycled, frustrated Y2k doomers who are still eating the last of the canned tuna and sacks of rice they stockpiled in their basement in 1999. These people are every bit as wrong and every bit as harmful to our situation as the cornucopians, simply because they make it so easy for the cornucopians and market magicians to trivialize the issue and stall meaningful action.

So yes, there are some peak oil doomers out there, the people I often call Apocalypticons, but they are not representative of the rest of us. Lumping us all into the doomer category is no less intellectually lazy and dishonest than calling all teenagers vandals just because one 15-year-old jerk smashed in your car window with a rock.

What exactly is the point of all this spleen venting, you may well be asking. It’s simply this: Don’t think for a nanosecond that peak oil or those of us talking about it can be so easily characterized. Stare at it closely enough and you’ll see that it’s a horribly complex situation, with more bodies orbiting and influencing each other than Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, and Hugh Hefner could track, combined. At arm’s length the picture simplifies a bit, but we’re still left with declining production from old fields and precious few new, high-volume fields coming online.

Put another way: You have to do your homework, and you have to question everything you read about this topic, including every word I post or utter in a live presentation. The potential impact on all of us is far too high for you and everyone else to be passive, casual information consumers; we all need you and everyone else to be thinkers.