We’re All Good Now: A Mysterious Reversal

Art Berman today responded to the many critics that piled on him after his last essay in which he reversed his prior warnings about oil depletion by doubling down.

https://www.artberman.com/blog/peak-oil-requiem-for-a-failed-paradigm/

Peak Oil: Requiem for a Failed Paradigm

Technology, capital, and price—not just geology—now dictate oil supply. The 2005-2014 price boom unlocked more oil than anyone expected. Today, financial markets and geopolitics—not depletion—drive the oil game.

Shale changed everything, unleashing a massive new supply. Peak Oil still pretends it doesn’t exist—won’t even put it on a chart. That’s why it’s a dying paradigm. It had its moment and reshaped my world view in important ways. May it rest in peace.

If you listen to the Art Berman that existed a year ago, and compare him to today’s Art Berman, and observe he did not correct or retract any of his prior analysis, you have to conclude that some powerful force is in play, like perhaps mRNA transfection brain damage, or grandchildren induced MORT.

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Anonymous
Anonymous
February 12, 2025 12:45 pm

Looks like RFK is going to be confirmed tomorrow:

RFK Jr.’s Health Secretary Confirmation Live Updates: Senate Advances Nomination—All GOP Senators Vote ‘Yes’

The Senate cleared a procedural hurdle Wednesday to approve Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health and Human Services secretary—inching one of President Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks closer to confirmation after he won over some skeptical senators wary of his vaccine views.
RFK Health Hearing in Washington DC

Feb. 12 The Senate voted 53-47, along party lines, to invoke cloture and end debate on Kennedy’s nomination, teeing him up for a final vote Thursday (though some of the GOP senators who advanced the nomination could still vote no).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/02/12/rfk-jrs-health-secretary-confirmation-live-updates-senate-advances-nomination-all-gop-senators-vote-yes/

nikoB
nikoB
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 12, 2025 1:47 pm

I like Sabine but she is too energy blind.

nikoB
nikoB
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 12, 2025 6:19 pm

Definitely. Hope springs eternal.

paqnation
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 12, 2025 8:26 pm

Thanks. All three were great and left me wanting more. His writing skills are top notch.

But his website sucks… not the content, just the layout. My computer always freezes up multiple times when I visit over there. Hey xraymike, fix that. Too much stuff going on. Maybe get rid of some of the side banner action.

gwb
gwb
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 12, 2025 12:53 pm

Oilman Mike Shellman politely pokes a hole in Art Berman’s balloon…

https://www.oilystuff.com/forumstuff/forum-stuff/shale-oil-keeps-growing-on-trees

The heart of the Permian Basin watermelon has already been eaten. Whats left, even in the cores is going to be gassier, less liquids productive, more expensive, and less profitable. Where the money will come from to drill all those wells is beyond my comprehension. You cannot pay back $130 billion of public and private long term debt, and retire and completly decommission 55,000 wells (YE24) with 40% returns on total investment over 12-14 year periods. At $7o oil that is all the return these wells can realize.

paqnation
February 11, 2025 12:51 pm

Tom Murphy’s keeping it simple today. He’s just analyzing the lyrics to a song he recently heard for the first time. I like this post because I’m a big fan of the song. Nothing But Flowers | Do the Math

My favorite lyric:

We used to microwave
Now, we just eat nuts and berries
You got it, you got it

scarr0w
Reply to  paqnation
February 12, 2025 6:31 am

One of my favorite songs from that era. Fun fact- We’ve planted hundreds of hazelnut and chestnut trees here on our little farm, as well as raspberries and Juneberries. Quite good fare, actually.

monk
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 11, 2025 3:30 pm

Estimates 40% of that article is AI. Maybe she knows we are on to her LOL

paqnation
Reply to  monk
February 11, 2025 7:48 pm

Only 40%! Not bad, LOL. Much better than the 90% she’s been using lately. Ya, I think your right, she knows the pit bulls over here are onto her. This is the comment I’m gonna drop on her site if I ever feel like outing her:

Sorry Sarah, but it must be said… Please stop using performance enhancing drugs. Your essay’s used to have emotion and heart. Nowadays, they read like encyclopedias. AI is not helpful for collapse writers, I promise. Go back and read your older work. It’s really good… My purpose for this intervention is to get you back to that level again… clean and sober😊 (and for the record, pretty much all drugs are ok in my book, just not AI… heck, I’d rather see you full-on plagiarizing than using the devil’s tools)

monk
Reply to  paqnation
February 13, 2025 12:16 am

Man, I love your sense of humour!

paqnation
February 10, 2025 9:06 pm

I was put to the test this past weekend. I hung out with normies. The idiocracy and reliance on technology was in full force. Never seen anything like it. The place I stayed was in an upscale neighborhood (just think yuppies and WASP’s). The goddamn house was controlled by Alexa. I couldn’t make a move without asking her permission. Lights, tv, music, air/heating, stove/oven… if you’re a luddite like me, then you might think I’m exaggerating here. No, the whole house was run by Alexa. First time I had ever seen this technology and the worst part for me was the endless questions being asked (usually pop culture related). “Alexa, what year is this movie from”. “Alexa, what other songs did this singer have”… I probably heard one thousand of these mindless trivial questions this weekend… it was a nightmare. 

I had more fun when we were away from the house. Dinner, drinking, dancing, meeting new people… stuff I just don’t do anymore. I was able to blend in for the most part. Tried hard to avoid going toobin’. I’m the only doomer of my friends so they like to tease or genuinely engage. Going toobin’ refers to senator Ted Stevens a while back trying to define the internet (series of tubes) and his delivery was so incomprehensible that he became a joke:

It’s very easy to go toobin’ when you start preaching collapse/overshoot to the sheep. I’ve done it many times. And I’m still guilty of it because it happened over the weekend a couple of times. So much easier to talk about it when you have time to think and write what you want to say. LOL. But I did have a couple conversations where I didn’t look like a complete jackass clone of Ted Stevens. And overall, I saw a pattern emerging… the normies don’t believe anything science related. Archaeology, anthropology, any type of dating (carbon, potassium-argon, uranium-lead), etc… nothing. When it comes to evidence or facts, they’re full-on atheists. I wised up after a while and just refused to engage in any doomerism talk.

And like I said, I blended in pretty well, but by sunday morning I was ready to GTFO of dodge. I would not make that trip again… ever! And if you asked the couple I was staying with, I’m sure they would also prefer I never make the trip again. I had a good attitude going in, but by the end my hatred for humans had gone up a notch or two. 

ps. I totally agree with Gaia’s line above about: “I have been lapping up your and Hideaway’s summation of the Predicament”… ya, that was some good stuff. I need to reread it a couple more times.

paqnation
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 11, 2025 2:06 am

Thanks. Ya, you have it correct. About a year ago, after mentioning some bad feedback I got from one of my collapse sermon emails to my inner circle, you gave me pretty much the exact same advice.

I’ve always been able to bullshit my way through anything. Faking it’s easy and pretty much autopilot for a good salesman. But I’ve been out of the sales world for a few years now (thank god!) … can’t fake it anymore. Was ready to drive home (4-hour trip) after the first night but sucked it up and stayed.😠

Might not leave home base ever again. Waiting out the collapse in my perfect little world sounds much better than being on vacation when the EMP hits. 

Stellarwind72
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 9, 2025 10:55 pm

William Rees probably considers those opposed to mRNA transfections to be idiots because most (but not all) of them are climate change deniers.

AJ
AJ
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 10, 2025 12:05 pm

Listened to this while I pruned more apple trees.

It was good. No mention of shots. He hit all the points he usually does. Did mention that he just read the latest Hanson report on climate change and understands that we now face predicaments and not problems with solutions. He also seemed to disagree with Art and thinks Art is looking at Peak Oil from a financial perspective and not from a collapse of everything perspective.

He did comment that Trump has taken down the posting of temps/CO2 from Mauna Loa. I get it that he thinks Trump is a idiot (I do too, but I sure couldn’t vote for Kamala). I understand that the usual Trump voter thinks that climate change is a hoax because they see the hypocrisy of the elites jetting all over telling everyone else how terrible CO2 is. I only respect those who at least try to limit their emissions (and sadly Al Gore became the poster child of hypocrisy with his lifestyle).

AJ

Stellarwind72
Reply to  AJ
February 10, 2025 7:24 pm

I voted for Kamala simply because I view her as the lesser of two evils.

paqnation
Reply to  Rob Mielcarski
February 10, 2025 5:00 pm

I just watched that video. Rees is always good, and this was a pretty typical presentation of his. But the subject that I’m now obsessed with is never even mentioned by William. It’s starting to become (for me at least) ridiculous to see someone this aware of our predicament, yet so completely blind to fire.

And just like most of his work, this presentation dives a little bit into how agriculture and fossil fuels were huge mistakes (or how they made huge problems down the road). But he always stops at agriculture (just like everyone else who has the disease of fire blindness). So bizarre how the only thing that enabled a species to make those huge mistakes… is completely ignored. There was even a funny line by Rees where he says something like “we humans are the only species to have ever done this” (can’t remember if he was talking about agr or ff’s, but how the hell can he not use that same simple logic to connect the dots back to fire?)

Bill spends some time on the evolution of human brains… thought for sure he was gonna at least mention the almighty “F” word here… kind of a big deal when it comes to the evolution of human brains😊. But no mention whatsoever. His last slide where he talks about the importance of accepting reality and knowing ourselves… well, c’mon Bill, practice what you preach and start accepting the reality that you need to go further back with your story… in order to truly know ourselves.

This kind of ties into that Paul Chefurka article that I posted a couple weeks ago where I was impressed with Paul’s emphasis on fire:

Burning carbon and using the released energy of combustion is easy and obvious… we have been doing it for over a million years

That article sent me on a mission to see what else Chefurka had to say about fire. He has way too much content for me to check everything. I was just doing a control + Fkey search for fire, carbon, and CO2. Probably went through 200 articles. And it took extra-long because I stopped to read a bunch of his articles along the way because Paul is such a damn good writer. He has tons of info about thermodynamics and the MPP… but nothing meaningful about fire anywhere. I just don’t know how he could say what he said in that article and not have more interest/curiosity about the subject. 

Well, actually I think I do know how. The same reason Rees can’t even acknowledge it… Denial, of course. Accepting fire as the bad guy is a tough red pill to swallow. Just speaking from my own experience now… Your worldviews will most likely change drastically. Instead of seeing hunter/gatherers (and the big chunk of time where everything basically stayed the same) as the pinnacle of humanity… you start to see it more as a waiting game… waiting for the fruits of one million years’ worth of fire use to catch up with that species and give them the superpowers required to carry out a self-induced mass extinction.

Any other planet that has witnessed full consciousness will look exactly like Earth… meaning only one species has a monopoly on the ecological destruction… with zero competition. I seriously doubt there is anywhere in the universe that has multiple species with full consciousness, simultaneously. The group that gets there first, will always crush any other fire experimenting species long before they were able to get close to full consciousness. 

And then connecting it all with the MPP… and how all life, if capable, would be going down our same road, just following their programmed instructions… kind of like, if human life is just mimicking what the rest of life is doing (with the added bonus of full consciousness provided by fire) then maybe it’s not just humans that suck… It’s life that sucks.

For those that choose to see life as a gift/miracle and something to be in awe of… I’m very jealous😊. But I also think that kind of logic is the same logic used by people who choose to believe that technology and human ingenuity will save us… or choose to believe some god and the afterlife will save us. Just another sneaky way we fool ourselves into believing everything is ok. Same old story ever since sapiens were thrust into the nightmare of full consciousness 100-200kya. Desperately assigning meaning to anything and everything, every step of the way… to distract from the bleakness of it all.

So ya, I can understand how Chefurka could see how “easy and obvious” it was that fire is where it all went wrong yet couldn’t bring himself to explore where that road leads to. Ditto for Bill’s blindness. It’s just too scary, I guess.