The general view of the issue is that shale oil saved us from peak oil, and the issue has largely disappeared from the media, to be replaced by warnings of peak oil demand, but there are still articles about peak cobalt, peak cocoa and similar scares. Rather the way your local news station constantly reports on some new threat to the public (germs in airplane bathroom sink water, dangers from household cleaning products, etc. ad infinitum). Unfortunately, very few people realize that the entire concerns about peak oil were based on misinformation or junk science. Specifically, the research was not scientific at all but statistical analysis so badly done that it wouldn’t pass a first-year college course. The work by Campbell and Laherrere relied on the basic idea that geology determined production trends, and thus trends could be safely extrapolated based on the bell curve model. If production was […]