From Conversations With Casey:
I have to be bullish on energy, notwithstanding the fact that the Greater Depression will curtail a lot of energy use. In thinking about this, the obvious place to start is oil. And though I find the idea philosophically distasteful, I do believe that Peak Oil, as a geological theory, is correct.
Most people misunderstand the meaning of Peak Oil. It doesn't mean that we're going to run out of oil, it simply means that, as M. King Hubbert predicted, the easy, light sweet oil is basically gone. In the 1950s, he said that oil production in the continental U.S. would peak and then go into irreversible decline in the early 1970s and it has. He also said that this would happen in the world at large, starting around 2005. That also appears to be happening.
This doesn't refer to unconventional oil sources, like shale oil, tar sands, oil-from-coal, and deep-ocean deposits, of course.
This ties into why I say I dont like the idea of Peak Oil, philosophically; it seems to imply that the world can actually run out of oil. It won't. We won't run out of anything - at least as long as the price mechanism is allowed to operate. This is why it's foolish to rely on the popular media for information entirely apart from the fact that few reporters have any technical knowledge at all, they have a natural inclination to fear monger and promote man-bites-dog stories.
You have to keep in mind that oil is just a hydrocarbon. What does that mean? It means that it's a compound made of hydrogen and carbon. Carbon is very common on the surface of the earth, there's plenty of oxygen in the atmosphere, and hydrogen is the most common thing in the universe with the possible exception of stupidity.
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