After I wrote my post on theoildrum.com, I found that one of its writers, Gail Tverberg, is still highly active in the blogosphere at here website ourfiniteworld.com. I therefore reached out to her by email to ask some questions regarding her time at theoildrum.com and her time since then. I felt the conversation was enlightening, so I have (hopefully with her permission) copied our email conversation here in hopes others can learn as well

Dear Gail Tverberg,

I’m a biology researcher, a blogger on wordpress, and a sometimes internet historian.  I’ve recently found the blog theoildrum.com, which I think is a fascinating window into the time when Peak Oil was more talked about.  I personally remember watching An Inconvenient Truth in school and being taught in class about Global Warming and Peak Oil on the same day.  I can remember walking out of school being very scared for the future thinking about how we could make earth entirely uninhabitable through oil.

Yet while Global Warming is still talked about, Peak Oil has faded from view, despite the work put in by you and the others at theoildrum.com.  I was wondering if I could ask just a few questions about your work there just so I could get to know your feelings about all this.  And I was wondering also if I could put my questions and your answers together on my blog, streamsofconsciousness.blog.  I’ve already written a tiny bit on what I found on your blog, but I’d like to know more.

1. How big/popular was theoildrum.com when you were part of the team there?  I remember Peak Oil being a topic of conversation during my school years, but I wasn’t on the internet as much so I don’t know where it was talked about.  Was there a large amount of web traffic coming to theoildrum.com? 

2. How popular/common was the viewpoint of theoildrum.com regarding Peak Oil?  Did you get a lot of pushback?  As I said, I learned about Peak Oil in school but I don’t know how much it was in the public consciousness at the time.

3. Did your views evolve during your time at theoildrum.com?  The blog was active from around 2005-2013, though I confess I cannot find exactly when you worked there, did your views on Peak Oil change and shift over time or did you feel that events continued to prove your thesis correct?

4. I have read some of your current blog, ourfiniteworld.com, and I’m interested in your current views.  Are they much the same as when you worked at theoildrum.com, or have they changed since then?

I hope your current work is going well, and I thank you very much for any answers you can give me.  Have a pleasant day!

And Gail’s response:

Dear Anonymous,

Thanks for writing. I am glad someone is interested in TheOilDrum.com.

As background, you need to understand that there are really three quite different theories of what our problem is.

A. Peak oil (as well as Peak natural gas and Peak Coal). According to this theory, the growth of the economy is limited by fossil fuel use. Oil, coal, and natural gas are all quite separate. The amount available is limited by technology and something called “Energy Return on Energy Invested.” At some point, if EROEI gets too low extraction stops. In any field, extraction naturally peaks and declines. Low EROEI makes it impossibly to add a huge amount of additional energy supply.

Demand is believed to be pretty much unlimited. People will keep “demanding” more fossil fuels.  Price will keep rising, to get all resources out that can be technologically extracted. While oil will deplete first, coal and natural gas can continue afterward. In fact, wind, solar, and other energy types can reasonably substitute in the future if their EROEIs are high enough.

The economy will keep going on much as before, after “peak oil,” as the transition is made to other fuels. While running out is sort of a problem, rising prices, substitution, and conservation are likely to “save the day.”

“Preppers” can likely continue in the future, as they live today, if they adequately plan ahead. 

B. Global warming / climate change is closely related to Peak Oil theory, but without EROEI limiting what can be extracted. 

Global warming morphed into “climate change” when it became clear that the changes that are occurring are not all in the direction of an increase in temperature.

Under Climate Change theory, there is a very large amount of fossil fuels available for possible future extraction. For example, the UK has an enormous amount of coal for possible use, far under the North Sea. With rising prices or improving technology, perhaps someone might get the benefit of buying this coal. 

Under this theory, it is imperative that people make every effort to stop fossil fuel extraction, because it will not stop by itself. Instead, it will cause huge temperature changes. Humans and their use of fossil fuels seem to be a big part of what has caused the higher temperature changes that we have been seeing to date.

This has become a major political cause.

C. Gail Tverberg’s Physics and History-Based Theory of  Overshoot and Collapse

Our economy is a physics-based system. In fact, it is a “dissipative structure,” just as the human body is a dissipative structure. It requires a mix of energy types, of the right kinds, in the right quantities, or it will collapse, just as a human body requires somewhat the right mixture of foods, in the right quantity, or it will collapse. In fact, even if the economy gets the right mixture of energy types, it will still tend in the direction of overshoot and collapse, just as humans will die at the end of their normal lifetimes. 

In the case of economies, one of the usual limiting factors for energy products is diminishing returns, because the easiest to extract energy supples are removed first. In fact, this same kind of problem occurs for fresh water supplies and minerals of all kinds, indulging copper and lithium. Population, however, continues to grow, so that energy per capita starts falling. With less energy per capita, it becomes impossible to grow enough food for the rising population. Other types of goods and services become more scarce as well.

We know that with humans, a small drop in food supply can temporarily be tolerated (but the population will tend to lose weigh), but a bigger long-term drop cannot. People will become more susceptible to disease and may die.

With economies, the financial system is one system that is likely to be particularly stressed by a smaller supply of energy products. With a falling supply of energy products, ever-fewer goods and services can be made. Thus, supply lines are likely to break. Empty shelves in stores are likely to be a problem. Fewer and fewer airline flights will be offered. Fewer and fewer jobs that pay well will be available. It will become increasingly difficult to make repairs to electricity transmission lines after storms, so lack of electricity will become a major problem.

Financial systems will be stressed because these are based on the assumption of ever-lasting growth. People take out loans assuming that they will have a job that will pay well in the future. This is likely not to be the case. Businesses take out loans assuming that they will sell an increasing quantity of goods and services. Debt defaults will become a problem. Share prices are likely to fall.

It is quite possible that inadequate energy supply will never be recognized as the source of collapse, because governments and educational institutions can never tell people what the problem is. Partly, the problem is difficult to understand. (My brief description here misses a whole lot.) The problem of inadequate supply of goods and services is likely to manifest itself as increased fighting among countries. It may manifest itself as over concern about illnesses that, in previous times, would have quickly evolved themselves down to very high frequency, low severity events that mostly removed a few ailing elderly people. (Keeping people inside is a way to artificially reduce the “demand” for goods and services.) 

A likely outcome of inadequate energy supply is that financial systems will fail. Governments will fail. People are likely to find that the money in their bank accounts can’t really buy goods and services. The situation could look like a Weimar Germany situation, with a huge amount of money trying to buy goods that really aren’t there, or it could look like many people being cut out of the competition for buying for goods in the first place, by pensions being cancelled and money in bank accounts now longer being available. In this case, it is as if debt defaults wiped out the value of bank accounts. Fields will produce less, because machinery used to plant and harvest crops will fall into dis-repair from lack of spare parts, or lack of fuel. 

The expected outcome is that a large share of the human population may die. In fact, most species have historically become extinct. This may occur with humans, as well. On the other hand, humans and pre-humans lived through ice ages, so they may live through a financial collapse, as well as any change in climate. In a finite world, the climate is always changing. It is hubris on our part, to think that we can somehow make the climate do what we want it to. It will continue to change. In some ways of thinking, the timing is getting close to the correct timing for another ice age.

In fact, the economy is set up to expect change and to adapt to change in the climate and in the availability of resources. It is a self-organizing system in which all species of plants and animals have more offspring than they need to replace themselves. The expectation is that “survival of the best adapted” will fix any problem that takes place. While some offspring may die, the survivors will be better adapted to the changing conditions. If humans remain, they will move to habitable places and again flourish and multiply until they again reach a population bottleneck. At that point, population is likely to again collapse.  

Now, to try to answer your questions:

On Nov 11, 2022, at 8:00 AM, User Name <theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Gail Tverberg,

I’m a biology researcher, a blogger on wordpress, and a sometimes internet historian.  I’ve recently found the blog theoildrum.com, which I think is a fascinating window into the time when Peak Oil was more talked about.  I personally remember watching An Inconvenient Truth in school and being taught in class about Global Warming and Peak Oil on the same day.  I can remember walking out of school being very scared for the future thinking about how we could make earth entirely uninhabitable through oil.

I have never been a Peak Oil theorist. Quite a few of the writers at The Oil Drum were very much interested in Peak Oil theory, but a variety of different theories were discussed. I was not well liked at The Oil Drum because the theory I was talking about was very different from theirs. It was much more financial in nature. It didn’t end up with a “happily ever after” stories for survivalists growing their own crops.

Yet while Global Warming is still talked about, Peak Oil has faded from view, despite the work put in by you and the others at theoildrum.com.  I was wondering if I could ask just a few questions about your work there just so I could get to know your feelings about all this.  And I was wondering also if I could put my questions and your answers together on my blog, streamsofconsciousness.blog.  I’ve already written a tiny bit on what I found on your blog,

I would caution you to be careful in the comparisons you make. There is “oil” and there are “liquids.” It is not fair to compare “oil’” to “liquids.” The various organizations try to confuse people as much as possible by adding in more and more, close-to-worthless products into the “liquids” category. They do this, to avoid showing that the “good stuff” is running out. What we are left with is a mix that doesn’t doesn’t meet the needs of society. You seem to have missed this point in the post you link to.

but I’d like to know more.

1. How big/popular was theoildrum.com when you were part of the team there?

The number of subscribers was a little over 20,000. The number of subscribers to Our Finite World is also something over 20,000 now. Articles were copied over on other sites, both OFW now and TOD then. My theories don’t make it into popular discussion, because they are not easily summarized on the back of a napkin. Also, no politician would ever want this story to get widely distributed. Educational institutions want the fiction to be given that “of course,” there will jobs for students in the future that will pay well. While there may be energy problems, they are easily solvable energy problems.

 I remember Peak Oil being a topic of conversation during my school years, but I wasn’t on the internet as much so I don’t know where it was talked about.  Was there a large amount of web traffic coming to theoildrum.com? 

2. How popular/common was the viewpoint of theoildrum.com regarding Peak Oil?  Did you get a lot of pushback?  As I said, I learned about Peak Oil in school but I don’t know how much it was in the public consciousness at the time.

Both Peak Oil and Climate Change theory depend on a high price of oil (and coal and natural gas) allowing huge amounts of these types of energy to be extracted. I am very doubtful that this is the case. We are now reaching affordability limits on fossil fuels of all kinds. The problem is that the price cannot rise high enough to get the resources that look like they are in the ground, to be extracted, out. This has been Russia’s big problem. It needs a higher price than it was getting from Europe to make the extraction of its natural gas sufficiently profitable. In fact, coal and oil have had much the same problem. People who developed the EROEI theory left out the need for adequate tax revenue for governments, among other things.

Once the price of oil dropped back down in late 2008, and growing oil (or liquids) seemed to be available, the Peak Oil theory disappeared from discussion. Peak oilers had “cried wolf” too often.

I was talking about financial problems associated with energy limits from the beginning. My theory keeps growing and expanding, as I learned more about the real nature of the problem.

3. Did your views evolve during your time at theoildrum.com?  The blog was active from around 2005-2013, though I confess I cannot find exactly when you worked there, did your views on Peak Oil change and shift over time or did you feel that events continued to prove your thesis correct?

I started writing my blog OurFiniteWorld.com in March 2007. In fact, I wrote all my articles on that site, until August, 2007. Sometime shortly after I started writing articles on OFW, TOD asked my permission to copy some of them over onto its website. Not long after, they wanted me to be a regular staff member, and somewhat later they wanted me to be an Editor. Other staff members were mostly college professors or graduate students. I was the only person who did not have a full time job doing something else, so I ended up doing a whole lot at TheOilDrum, between September 2007 and October 2010, including a lot of duties as Editor or the site. 

I wrote only at TOD (not OFW) between September 2007 and October 2010. There was a lot of conflict at The Oil Drum. The two people who started the site came from pretty much opposite perspectives. “Heading Out” was a professor of coal mining technology at a university in Missouri. He thought perhaps coal could replace declining oil supply. “Prof. Goose” was a political science professor from a university in Colorado, interested particularly in preventing climate change. Leanan (a woman)  (who linked to articles every day) also came from a climate change perspective. Several staff members were interested in modeling exactly how oil supply might run out. 

TOD staff members coming from one perspective were very protective of their particular perspective. There were commenters who would push back in argument with respect to articles written, but there was also quite a bit of conflict among staff members.

There was a reorganization of TOD in November 2010, which I wrote about in this post. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2010/11/21/changes-planned-to-the-oil-drum/

Basically, some of the other staff members thought that I had too much power. I was deciding what would run, when, to a significant extent. Also, too many of my own posts did not put forth the “correct” peak oil perspective, at least in the view of other staff members. After the reorganization, there would be a staff of six editors, and there would be a vote to see which articles would be accepted. I would go back to writing on OFW, and TOD would copy over only those articles that it agreed with. There would be a paid TOD staff member who would take care of copying over articles from OFW to TOD, as well as performing other duties.

Technically, my titlea didn’t really change at TOD. I was both a Contributor and Editor from whenever I started being an editor (sometime in 2008) until the site ceased operations in 2013. Nate Hagens was an editor as well, but in practice, I ended up doing a whole lot of the day-to-day work, up until the change in November 2010. Nate was more involved with recruiting staff members and keeping peace among the staff. He also was involved with the finances of the site. I was not involved with the finances of the site or with things like potential law suits against the site.

OFW has grown and flourished because I was telling a different story that seems to be right. Neither the Peak Oil theory nor the Climate Change story is really right in my view. 

Climate change is a popular story because indirectly, it forces people to figure out what they would do with much less energy supplies. In fact, we are losing energy supplies regardless of what we do because of affordability issues. The climate change story allows people to think that they can voluntarily leave fossil fuels. We are losing access to fossil fuels because of the way the self-organizing system works. The climate change story makes these problems seem modest and solvable. Thus, the climate story is popular with both politicians and educators.

4. I have read some of your current blog, ourfiniteworld.com, and I’m interested in your current views.  Are they much the same as when you worked at theoildrum.com, or have they changed since then?

My views are basically the same, with many additions and refinements. I tried to explain a little bit of my current views above. My view of the timing keeps getting moved farther and farther back.