Peak Everything

Denis Dutton today reminds me of the Tierney bet with Matthew Simmons, which ought to pay off in Tierney's favour by the end of the year. Simmons reckoned peak oil meant a fair odds line on 2010 average daily oil prices, inflation adjusted, of $200 per barrel. Barring the complete meltdown of the US dollar, that's not going to happen, and even in that case, a fair bit of the price rise would be knocked back by inflation adjustment. And so Tierney will be $10,000 richer come year end...Happy New Year!

Colby Cosh weighs in on Peak Everything in a beautiful post that tries to find an element that hasn't peaked:

How about peak lithium? Surely not… wait, yep, there’s a peak lithium guy. Helium? C’mon, helium makes up a quarter of the goddamn universe! Sorry, peaked. Phosphorus too. You may be under the impression that we’re all swimming around in a sea of nitrogen but turns out that’s peaked. And you may be certain thatlong-passed, purely local peaks of many resources represent rehearsals for more intractable global limits, and cannot possibly just mean that the Republic of So-and-So found better things to do than mining arsenic. Pretty much everything’s peaking, all at once. Very soon now we’ll all be scurrying like ants across an eight-thousand-mile celestial object that looks suspiciously like an apple core.

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