biodiversity loss, climate change and peak oil -related threats

[Steve]

I have some ideas on peak oil, just theory, nobody outside the elite knows the truth.

There is no oil shortage, there are billions of barrels in proven reserves, the problem is that all the easy oil has been used and the remaining oil is expensive to extract. As new techniques are developed to reach ever more remote oil, the proven reserves figures will continue to rise, it is in the oil companies interest to keep these figures high to encourage investors and keep their share prices high.

If the global economy is driven into a major crash by rising oil prices demand will be destroyed, prices will fall below the level required to extract the difficult oil and the oil companies, and governments, will be left sitting on huge reserves they can't afford to extract. I'm not sure of the implications of this, I'm not an economist, but it seems likely to me that they will keep pumping as much as possible, even at low profit margins, for as long as they possibly can - to extract the maximum amount of money before the big crash. This makes a sharp downturn in production more likely than a gentle tailing off.