Building our Membership through knowledge sharing

Our first initiative is an educational program designed to introduce peak oil theory to the general public. The campaign, imitating the breast cancer awareness initiatives, will alert the public to the adaptive challenge the economy faces in a peak oil world. The hope is we can bypass the politics of alternative energy by framing the need for new energy solutions in macro-economic terms.

We chose peak oil theory as our first issue because its obscurity affords us access to an audience with minds free from partisan preconceptions. Obscurity gives us a blank tape on which to write our non-threatening message of renewal on; a message that most people find fascinating and extremely relevant to the times. But, it is an “issue”, and like all issues, there are sides.

Peak oil theory, while being largely unknown to the general public, is a hotly debated subject within the oil investment community. The disputes arise from a misinterpretation of the theory’s core premise, which states that there is a point-in-time when the maximum rate of extraction of oil is reached. Meaning, there is some daily production rate that the world will never go above, as global oil production mimics the bell curve production profile of an individual oil field (see below). The detractors incorrectly conflate running out of oil with PEAK PRODUCTION. Peak oil theory does not suggest that the world is close to running out of oil, it only proposes that the laws of physics dictate how fast the oil can be extracted. Producing entities are disinclined to promote the theory.