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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>> Nobody knows, anything is still possible but it sure looks like there 
> are still those who want it to end.
> 
> I never understood the people who want the big catastrophic changes <shrug>.
> 

Rob, there's a vast difference between 'wanting' something to happen and 
seeing it coming.

In the case of Y2K, I was in the IT game in the thick of it.  I asked the 
Y2K'ers "Please be specific, what do you think is going to happen.  Almost 
all IT 
and control is handled by equipment many generations removed from the 8080 
and 8088 based machines that "might" be subject to the problem.  Where are 
these 
old systems operating under the old languages and OS?  Point them out and I'm 
sure we can fix them."

The answer was always "Nyaaa, ya never know!  There MIGHT be some weak points 
out there.  Ya just never know!!"

The simple truth of the matter is that we indeed DID know.  A lot of people 
in IT industry didn't WANT to know that Y2K was a non issue because there 
were 
a lot of bucks to be made in analyzing and certifying systems.

In a way you are right.  Peak Oil and Y2K are alike, but not in the way you 
suppose.  The shoe's on the other foot this time.  This time those who deal 
in 
numbers rather than deja vu's say the world is now using just under 90 
million 
barrels of oil a day and it is coming from the following oil fields:  Ghawar, 
Cantarell, North Sea, North Slope, etc. etc. in the following proportions 
....  Those fields have been declining at this given rate .... 

Taking all that into consideration, where is the energy that oil now supplies 
going to come from as the known sources continue their decline??

Said same number crunchers look at nuclear and understand that uranium 
resources are finite and already stretched by current nuclear use.  They look 
at 
solar, wind, biofuels etc, calculate the maximum potential for those and 
realize 
that it comes to a very, very tiny percentage of the world's current energy 
consumption.

So they ask passionlessly, dealing with those numbers, where's the energy 
going to come from???

And just like the Y2K'ers, the cornucopians say, "Nyaaa, ya never really 
know!!  They might invent something, or find something, everything will be 
OK!  Ya 
just never know!"

Back when gas was $1.25 a gallon, I started following this.  There were 
geologists, people in the petroleum industry, etc. who said that were were 
headed 
for an energy crisis starting about 2006.  They predicted the maximum 
petroleum 
output, it's price rise, and even the current lull in prices.  It happened 
just about exactly as they said it would.

I also heard people give the old "Nyaaa, ya never know" line back then and 
many of them predicted a world oil glut to be going on right now with oil 
below 
$10 a barrel.

This alone would have been enough to make me take the numbers more seriously 
than the "Ya never know" position.

So the situration is roughly this:  The large oil fields, the likes of which 
have not been doscovered since 1964, are in an average of 5% annual decline 
(with some like Mexico's Cantarell in more than a 15% annual decline), the 
deficit has been made up with numerous small discoveries and enhanced 
recovery 
techniques that simply deplete the large fields all the faster.  World oil 
production has been flat since 2005.

So you see, it's not a matter of ' you say toMAYto and I say toMAHto,   
rather it's a matter of here are the numbers .... where do you think the oil 
or the 
energy is going to come from????   </HTML>