Two Men In Chicken Suits  

"Institutional Economics" has a post on 'peak oil nutters'. While I think the survivalist types have misread the situation, this guy's commentary leaves me wondering what sort of institution he been been committed to.

How do you go from "some peak oilers have gone a little overboard in their response to peak oil" to "peak oil isn't a problem" so quickly, and with so little background knowledge ?

The WSJ profiles some typical Peak Oilers ... Not sure how a few bags of rice, a propane tank and a few grand in gold is meant to help with TEOCAWKI, but like they say, whatever helps you sleep at night.

At least someone is out there trying to give the peak oilers an education:

Three weeks after their first immersion, the couple drove to a peak-oil conference in Ohio, where lecturers showered them with statistics on demand curves and oil-field depletion rates. Then, at a conference in Denver, a man in a chicken suit called them crazies as he passed our fliers arguing that the world still has plenty of oil.

I'm with chicken suit guy.

I've been following the Peak Oil debate for several years now. Pretty much everything the "nutters" forecast 2-3 years ago has eventuated: Oil has breached $100/bbl, global oil production has been stuck at ~84 million barrles/day for almost 5 years, very little new oil production capacity has come online, no significant oil discoveries have been made and food inflation is accelerating as biofuels compete with food production.

Despite oil prices increasing 10 fold since 1998 the market has not magically produced a substitute fuel, nor has it produced an alternative to the internal combustion engine.

OTOH, your forecasting record is pretty poor. The U.S. housing bubble (that supposedly didn't exist) has burst messily. Your much-loved U.S. economy is in tatters, the Fed is panic-mode and the U.S. dollar continues its downward spiral.

Can you and the chicken suit guy please explain how, where and why the "world still has plenty of oil"?