We can pretend that physical reality doesn't exist while we have abundant access to energy, but sooner or later, reality comes to knock at our door, just like Death comes to all of us eventually, no matter how much we are in denial about our mortality.
Peak oil is a term that few people use nowadays, because it refers to an old theory (Hubbert's original paper dates from 1956!) which had major problems with some specific predictions it made, and the people who agree with the main thesis try to separate themselves from those debunked aspects.
The main claim of peak oil is simply that our society is utterly reliant on fossil fuels (most notably oil, but coal and gas are just as important for energy because of their central role in industrial processes), that nothing can truly replace them, and that because those are non-renewable resources (at our timescales, fossil fuels take dozens if not hundreds of millions of years to form 1), our society will eventually reach a point of peak energy, and then an ensuing decline, which can be long or short depending on your view of societal collapse.
Hubbert then went on to make several overly confident predictions. He tried to identify the peak at a specific decade, I believe in the 1970s, which obviously turned out to be false. He also made the claim that the decline part after the peak would be perfectly symmetric to the rising part, which also turned out to be wrong—and it's difficult to see why it would have been true to begin with—for a variety of reasons, most notably, the rise of unconventional sources of oil such as fracking and tar sands. 2
But we need not concern ourselves with the specific details of his theory, and the possible refutations or defenses, because the main point is by far the most important. Focusing on details to not pay attention to the main thesis is the hallmark of small minds, which is why so many people listen to the news day in and out, because they do not want to see the big picture. Societal collapse is too terrifying to them, they just want to complain with others about specific aspects of it, but never accept the entire thing, because to do so would require them to change their life.
Though what we can learn from Hubbert's failed examples at predictions is that trying to make specific predictions about a system as complex as a human society is doomed to fail, especially because people have an incentive to maintain the system going for as long as possible. The main thesis of peak oil works because it looks at a bottleneck of civilization, namely energy, something which is essential for everything we do, and draws conclusions on what we cannot achieve, but it is impossible to predict when or what will happen in details. Who knows, a nuclear war might happen due to the tension between countries with dwindling energy bases? Or there might be a series of floods that disrupt key aspects of the global supply chains? Or people might be resourceful and delay the inevitable for a few years? Or there might be an actually deadly virus this time? But no matter what, we are not going to progress our way to interstellar travel, because technology is utterly reliant on energy, and our energy base is mainly made of fossil fuels—more than 76% according to this source, as official as it gets when it comes to this type of things. 3
Let's look at our main dependences on fossil fuels. All of the following activities are heavily reliant on fossil fuels:
§1. Mining. Excavators require diesel, and the transportation of ores and debris also requires fossil fuels (see below), which becomes more and more significant because the grade of ores (concentration of the ores amongst the debris that we don't care about) keeps declining (again, non-renewable resources). The only way to build more computers, cars, weaponry, and machines in general, is to mine more things, because recycling is not possible in the vast majority of cases (and to the extent that it is possible, more costly than simply mining more)
§1b. Agricultural machines, which, like the excavators for mining, are in far too remote of places to be realistically powered by electricity.
§2. Mass Transportation. Planes, boats and trucks directly depend on fossil fuels, because their energy density and driving range are far superior than anything else we have. Hydrogen is a 30 year-old fantasy that people keep trying to bring up and doesn't work, because of the energy cost of producing the hydrogen to begin with. Nuclear doesn't realistically come in small forms, and to the extent that you can build a mini reactor, it still weighs much more than oil or gas-based solutions. And battery-based solutions are much heavier and far worse on the driving range aspect than fossil fuels, once again.
§3. Smelting ores. Many industrial processes require high temperatures, in ranges above 1000°C, that electricity simply cannot reach (and to the extent that it can, it is again more costly, less convenient). Steel in particular uses coal not only for the concentrated heat that it provides, but also for the carbon required to bind to the iron, and steel is utterly vital to anything that we build in the modern world.
§4. Melting glass. Same thing as with smelting ores, very high temperatures are needed, which is not achievable (realistically) without fossil fuels. One thing to note is that we are not just running out of (high-quality) ores, but also running out of usable sand for engineering. Sand by default contains many impurities, particularly the stuff found on beaches or in the desert, and only high-silica sand can be used for making glass (amongst other things).
§5. Making cement. Again, this requires high temperatures, in a specialized kiln and with inputs of limestone, clay and fly ash typically, which electricity cannot easily composate for.
All of these activities are utterly essential for an industrial world, even if we went down the road of a "green transition". I put the latter in quotation marks because renewables are only viable because of the entire infrastructure (not just the machines but also the energy) we take for granted when building them, an infrastructure powered by and maintained by fossil fuels, because of the constraints I just mentioned above.
While it might be technically possible to replace all of those processes with fully electrical means, whether it is economically viable to do so is an entirely different question. If you had to add all of the downsides of switching to electricity in the entire system, it now becomes questionable whether a "renewable"-based supply chain would even be net positive in terms of energy. If renewables had to mine their own ores, smelt it, transport it around, and power all of the supply chains that make solar panels or wind turbines possible, I am not even sure that the process would be net positive. To the extent that it is, it would take several years for the energy return to compensate for the energy investment, and we would still be left with intermittent sources of energy, which come with entire host of issues.
This is because there is a massive difference between energy and power. Power is the rate at which you get energy, per unit of time. The same way that athletes tend to care much more about their acceleration than their top speed, think of a football player being able to zig zag through defenders, companies and countries care much more about power than energy. Because the ones that can get quick returns on investment outcompete those which are slower, even if the former are overall worse.
Likewise with energy sources. Fossil fuels have a much higher power (and energy density) than "renewables" especially, and they're far more practical and cheaper than nuclear, especially for the tasks which, as I have mentioned above, are away from an electrical grid, such as mining, farming and transportation, three major demands on the global energy supply.
And this is not to mention all of the secondary products that the petro-chemical industry manufactures. The main ones include:
The list of what fossil fuels provide us keeps piling on, and on, and on. Again, this has to be repeated, you might be able to replace each of the needs one by one, although I doubt it when it comes to the heavy duty energy part, considering the 76% figure I mentioned. But replacing the entirety of what they provide? That's asking for a lot, especially because you would have to use massive amounts of energy in the first place to recreate the missing industries that would be needed to compensate for the loss of fossil fuels ... a catch-22 situation.
Perhaps the scariest aspect that a world without (or at the very least far less) fossil fuels would confront us is the need for countries to rely on local productions to meet their needs. Except that by and large, the West has offshored the vast majority of its production. Hardly anyone knows how to make something practical here. Even food production is largely dependent on exporting countries.
Where are the people with the skills and willingness to produce the things that we will need, in a world without global supply chains? Where will be the motivation, the knowledge, the determination, and the coordination to make all of that happen? Difficult to not be pessimistic about the decline not just of energy, but of social cohesion and (real) competence—being great at creating powerpoints and tinkering in Excel is not a real skill.
Europe likes to present itself as a more "green" and "environmentally aware" continent, but this is just PR, because at the end of the day, it is entirely dependent on products from the polluting industries of China, India, and many other countries. And those industries are polluting because nothing can fundamentally replace fossil fuels when it comes to industrial processes. Europe has simply exported its pollution to countries with cheaper labor, and buys back their products, which allows their spreadsheets to look nice while they do not have to make any real compromise whatsoever, in the short term at least.
This narrative trick, an almost childish one at that—imagine a kid playing with a ball and making a mess, and handing the ball to another kid right before the angry teacher comes—is one of many tricks used to believe that we can grow forever on our finite planet. Simply focus on artificial, man-made boundaries to make the point that you want to make, and ignore the fact that Reality doesn't care about those boundaries.
Another narrative trick is to simply focus on money rather than energy, which is obviously absurd because energy is fundamental in a way that money isn't. It doesn't matter what your plans for "cheap" electric vehicles are if you do not take into account the finiteness of mineral resources and fossil fuel energy, upon which the production of EVs is utterly dependent on.
To the extent that techno-optimists talk about energy, they will only talk about gross energy, and not net energy, which requires you to subtract the amount of energy needed to produce the machines producing the energy to begin with. To be fair, assessing net energy is incredibly difficult, not to mention that companies don't seem particularly keen on people having that type of information, very likely because if we could take a peek at the numbers, the conclusion of our technological fancies would probably crumble in an instant.
This focus on gross as opposed to net energy is why nuclear appears like such a powerhouse and an inevitable solution to all of our energy problems, when in reality it is incredibly expensive to get started with, requiring heavy subsidies from governments, and even then you are left with a form of energy which cannot be used for industrial uses (remember the high temperatures needed for smelting ores and glass), and one which doesn't seem that impressive when compared to fossil fuels or even renewables, accounting for 3.6% of the global energy mix in 2024 (again from the same source), compared to the 6% for solar and wind combined, and 76% for fossil fuels in total.
Granted, nuclear energy has suffered from an incredibly bad PR, whereas renewables have had the opposite: nothing but fawning for them. But still, you would expect a lot more output from such a seemingly powerful form of energy no? The one which seems to frighteningly powerful that it has led to the nuclear disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Going back to narrative tricks, yet another one of them is to focus only on the ceiling of technology, rather than the commercially viable, and thus scalable technologies. The honest sorcerer describes here how some solar panels achieve efficiency levels far below the average, but they also use rare metals which aren't viable at all for scalable purpose:
The solution [to efficiency gains] was to add expensive to mine, corrosive and poisonous materials like Gallium to the silicon wafer; complemented by an increased level of complexity (new manufacturing methods, more layers, etc.) And while these metals make up only a minuscule amount of the total weight of a panel, without them we would be back into a rather disappointing efficiency range (practically half of today’s best in class). The story didn’t end with Gallium though. There are several other elements involved in making today’s top-notch multilayered (so called multijunction) super efficient panels reaching 45% efficiency. These cells are not mass produced for a very good reason: cost and complexity. What makes up most of the sales nowadays are thus simple monocrystalline silicon panels with a typical efficiency of 15–18% (measured in sunlight converted into electricity with a best in class performance of 24–25%).
We live in a world of rackets. People latch onto fantasies of perpetual growth on a finite planet because they want to believe in it, and then the racket of ideas provides them with what they want to hear: hope, wealth, security, none of which require them to change their life of course.
If you are intelligent in any way, you know that distinguishing social fantasies from the truth is essential. Or at least, social fantasies from collective beliefs which at least care about being sustainable in any shape or form.
Environmentalists have screamed at the top of their lungs about the need for sustainability for so long that some people have become tired of hearing that word, and even think that it is kind of bullshit, that "nature" is just an idea that we romanticize in our head, and that we do not need to care about this strange notion of "sustainability" that only exists on graphs to scare people off. This is deeply misguided. There are many, many problems with activism, because it resorts to using shame and catastrophization to make its points, but that doesn't mean that their actions and ideas aren't informed by some partial truth.
Peak oil was never debunked and we are about to find this in the coming decades. As I am writing this, people are constantly talking about the US-Iran conflict, and for good reasons: it directly affects the price of diesel, and all car fuels in general, which means that people actually have to pay attention to what is going on with Reality, rather than try to live in their perpetual life of commuting-working-sleeping.
But in a very disappointing and predictable way, people are not paying attention to Reality, the fundamental scarcity of fossil fuels in this case, but are once again trying to blame it all on a small group of people. Not that there aren't such small groups which are disproportionately responsible for larger problems of course. There certainly are. But once again, it's depressing to see how people never want to look at the big picture.
There is no such thing as perpetual growth on a finite planet, and the sooner one accepts it, the easier one can live in a declining society, which is the one we live in but few are willing to accept it as such. There is no hope for society. None. But as an individual, you can still live without that hope. Because the best things in life are not the safety, wealth, power and comfort that society can give to the self, it comes from consciously attending to the present. Only in the present do we find love, beauty, freedom, and a sense of peace. If there is no future, then clearly it means that the lesson of our times is to not turn to the future, but instead live in the present. There is no reason to defer your life in a collapsing society to a future that might never come. You might as well live true to yourself.
See the articles from the Honest Sorcerer on his Substack, a great communicator who provides a good overview of the technical aspects of peak oil, or this article by Darren Allen on the collapse, which points to more reading and data.
1 The fringe theory of Abiotic oil seems unfounded. But even if it were true, the global demand for energy keeps rising year after year, meaning that whatever miracle is necessary to show that the theory is correct is unlikely to be relevant at the global scale. If the oil that comes from abiotic sources came in any significant amount, surely a company or even a country would seize the opportunity, because energy is so vital for anything in our economy. It is rather telling that, even when we take literal miracles into account, peak oil still is the inevitable truth of our society.
2 Which aren't solutions but merely ways to delay the inevitable, because they are significantly lower in terms of energy return on energy investment, and obviously do not address the fundamental problem that there is only so much (cheaply available) oil to begin with.
3 Read below to see why this figure is much higher than what we have in Europe, and why focusing only on Europe or the West in general isn't relevant at all, even if you live there (because Europe is dependent on imports from other countries).
4 Look around you, and chances are that the object in front of you is either made from plastic, or made from something else derived from fossil fuels, because those materials tend to be so much cheaper than their alternatives.
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2026-04-09