Debunking Jay Hanson

[ribozyme]

I pressed enter too early…

There are many threads about peak oil on this forum and a few of them have several hundred posts. I wonder what do you think of the ideas of Jay Hanson - the person who provided most of the intellectual ammunition for the peak oil die-off movement. His main hypothesis - which I believe he has elegantly argued - is that humans will eventually die off from peak oil.

His ideas can be accessed at www.dieoff.org and www.warsocialism.com.

 

[ribozyme]

I do know one potential counterargument to Hanson’s predictions: Cuba. Cuba has survived it peak oil (during the so-called “special period” where it stopped recieving aide from the USSR) and it hasn’t turned into a libertarian paradise like Somalia.

This need to bring agriculture into the city began with the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of more than 50 percent of Cuba’s oil imports, much of its food and 85 percent of its trade economy. Transportation halted, people went hungry and the average Cuban lost 30 pounds.

Scarce petroleum supplies have not only transformed Cuba’s agriculture. The nation has also moved toward small-scale renewable energy and developed an energy-saving mass transit system, while maintaining its government-provided health care system whose preventive, locally-based approach to medicine conserves scarce resources.

The era in Cuba following the Soviet collapse is known to Cubans as the Special Period. Cuba lost 80 percent of its export market and its imports fell by 80 percent. The Gross Domestic Product dropped by more than one third.

globalpublicmedia.com/articles/657

So do you have any other arguments that declining energy would not result into Mad Max anarchy (I doubt there would be motorcycle gangs though). Unfortunately, I do not have the certitude that alternative energy will replace fossil fuels.