My main concern is not the effect of peaking itself--that is, the 2-3% or so decline in production per year that would follow the peak. As several people on this forum have commented, there is a lot of fat in the West's energy budget. Even a sudden disruption like the fall of Saudi Arabia could still be absorbed, amid much hardship, simply because our consumption habits are SO overblown.

My concern is how people will react to it. There appear to be a LOT of people out there whose reaction to any hardship is to blame someone else. The degree of venom I'm seeing on these blogs is appalling.

Historically, the United States' response to the 1970's oil crises were basically to elect Reagan and start dismantling the New Deal. The fact that, twenty-six years later, lots of people who would otherwise have benefited from the New Deal are still applauding this, does not bode well for the U.S.' ability to deal with hardship or to learn from mistakes.

We can say "humanity will adapt" but that adaptation can take a lot of different forms and unfortunately, I have seen very little in recent American history to suggest to me that people will accept any solution that requires them to cut back on their own consumption. And this goes for those on the left as well as those on the right--although those on the right tend to be more loudmouthed and personally aggressive about the issue, those on the left are much more prone to wishful thinking vis-a-vis the possibilities of alternative fuels.

The (okay, not the, but a) defining element of North American history has been the abundance of resources. Basically a whole continent, sparsely populated, by cultures that had no use for petroleum or much of the other wealth that was here. Then they conveniently keel over and die when Europeans come over and cough on them. Probably never has such a huge amount of wealth been inherited so quickly. So, no wonder we think the world is inexhaustible, and those parts of it that aren't, at least replaceable. For the entirety of North American history, it has been true. Our culture has developed around that assumption and is ill-prepared to confront the possibility that it is not true.

This is why biodiesel disturbs me. No doubt, some cars will be able to be kept running on biodiesel. But that biodiesel will be labour-intensive without pesticides and fertilizers to keep the industrial agriculture model running. I can EASILY see car-addicted people coming up with justifications for why a bunch of people should be plantation serfs so that he can keep driving his car. Hey, he worked hard and went to school, right? Got a good job. Those other people should have made some smarter investments. People choose to be serfs; not his problem.

Eilonwy writes:

"Contrary to Alec Johnson’s claims on nuclear's viability being a myth, France already provides nearly 80% of her electricity from roughly 55 nuclear-driven plants and would not require “thousands of them”"

By my calculation:

Current oil consumption worldwide is about thirty billion barrels a year. Gross heat in one barrel of oil is 6100 megajoules. So, oil consumption amounts to 183 trillion megajoules per year.

Here in New Brunswick, we have one reactor (Point Lepreau.) It's a CANDU-6 reactor with a peak output of 630 MW, or 630 MJ per second. (Admittedly not state-of-the-art, but I did these calculations for a Canadian conference.)

Quick calculation yields 9,200 Point Lepreaus running at peak capacity, year-round, to replace the gross energy we get from oil.

Granted, the CANDU-6 is not the state of the art. France makes reactors that are about 1,800 MW. So we're talking about maybe one-third of 9,200, or about 3000 such reactors running full-blast year-round.

Then again, it's not a good idea to run a reactor, even those spiffy French ones, full-blast year-round. Assume a capacity ratio of about 50% and you're talking about 6,000 state-of-the-art French reactors to replace global oil consumption.

Haven't even gotten into replacing natural gas, or the energy that must be reinvested in mining and refining uranium. Nor the inherent limits on the supply of uranium, which I'm not qualified to evaluate, but obviously it's not infinite.

A key point to consider is that when someone talks about replacing oil, and someone else says "Yeah, but X country gets Y% of its electricity from nuclear power," you have to consider that electricity generation is a very small part of our energy consumption. Most of what we use oil for is transportation, and that's something that electricity doesn't do very well. (I mean yeah, you can run electric trains, but those don't work when your cities are sprawling all over the map.)

If you want to use that nuclear electricity to make hydrogen to run the hypothetical hydrogen cars (not likely any time soon) you'll need an extra 25% of that total electricity to cover thermodynamic losses from electrolysis. 6000 x 1.25 = 7,500 reactors.