Peak oil was coming by 1975 just as the new ice age kicked in and we’d all be dead. That started in 1965. The doomsday date started out as 1970, then 1975, then somewhere along the line it got changed to global warming. Peak oil was still a thing until sometime in the 80’s.
I forgot....as a kid in the 1970s I was told about the coming ice age.
Peak Oil on a very basic level, makes sense. It is rational to believe we can, at some point, use more oil than we can produce. When that point will be reached, if it ever is, is beyond our ability to predict.
We have found we do not have anywhere near the knowledge to predict when it may happen.
I am related by marriage to perhaps the greatest petroleum geologist of his age, Lewis Weeks. He literally “wrote the book” on how to find oil.
In his biography, written not long before he died in 1977, he warned of the reality of “peak oil”.
He was wrong as to the timing, and we still do not know the timing. We will almost certainly find new sources of energy to replace oil in the next 200 years. We seem to have enough fossil fuels to last that long. Nuclear fission could give us another couple of hundred years by itself.
Weeks said we need to develop those sources before we hit peak oil. He did not even know there was a theory of “global warming”. In 1977, the great bugaboo was the next ice age.
My point is: Lewis Weeks was a genius, the best petroleum geologist of his age, and he got the timing wrong. We are fallible humans. All of us.
Weeks was no wild-eyed leftist. Is peak oil a lie? It was an honest mistake on the part of Lewis Weeks.