Peak Oil Denial

Well, it looks like Arizona Tea Party Congressional candidate Jesse Kelly thinks oil is a renewable resource.

SMDH.

It's a .gif if you click on it.

Aside from the fact that this clown is trying to replace the irreplaceable Gabby Giffords, and regardless of whether or not he was joking (he's a joke either way), this new focus on the availability of oil represents a disconcerting shift in Republican/Tea Party anti-environment strategy.  They've spent the last few years dismissing the overwhelming evidence for climate change as junk science, and now they're trying to confuse people even more.

If you're not familiar with the scientific and economic definitions of peak oil, it's easy to get confused.  Formally, it's the maximum, or peak, of the extraction rate path, i.e. when the first derivative of the extraction rate with respect to time is equal to zero.  In layman's terms, once we've discovered and developed the economically viable extraction technologies, and once we've tapped most of our known oil reserves, the price of extraction will go up, demand will go down, and the extraction rate will necessarily begin to fall.

Equally important is understanding what peak oil is not.  It's not when we run out of oil, or even when we get close to running out of oil, for that matter.  Republicans are now trying to argue that we're not anywhere close to running out of hydrocarbons, and they're right.  We have hundreds, maybe thousands, of years of natural gas that we could suck up and burn.  That's a straw man, though, because no one ever suggested that we were about to run out of oil.  Republicans know it's a silly argument, but it gives them something to talk about other than the health and economic effects of local pollution and the devastating domestic and international effects of climate change, the evidence for which would completely discredit their drill-baby-drill position if it ever enters the mainstream American dialogue.

We should be offended that they think we're so stupid.

*****UPDATE*****

Someone asked me about the math behind the idea of peak oil.  It's pretty straightforward, and I've drawn a crude graph here:

From the point where time t equals zero, which we'll assume is the exact moment humans started extracting oil, oil was being extracted (I hope this is obvious).  Intuitively, since we were extracting something as time moved forward along the bottom axis, the rate of extraction is necessarily greater than zero.  It's impossible to know exactly (or even approximately) how much oil is underground, but we know for a fact that there is not an infinite supply.  That means eventually, as time continues moving forward, the extraction rate must move back toward zero.  Thus, there has to be a trend, and it has to have a turning point.

Now, obviously in real life, the extraction rate isn't smooth, which is why I've included the thin red line to simulate what an actual extraction path may look like after including new discoveries, new technologies, etc.

Anyway, just FYI.