Here is David Friedman pointing out the incompatibility of Global Warming and Peak Oil.
As best I can tell, the two arguments tend to be supported by the same people. This makes sense from the point of view of someone who has a conclusion and wants arguments to support it, since both arguments support the same conclusion…
The more limited our supplies of fossil fuels are, the lower the climate effects of burning them all up. If we are going to run out of all of them by, say, 2050, then any global warming projection that depends on our continuing to burn them thereafter is impossible.
He brings up the point that these great atrocities awaiting us are always paired with the same policy recommendations that liberals and environmentalists have always wanted in the first place. In that sense global warming and the like are extremely convenient truths. Too convenient, in fact -- which is why they ought to be approached with extra skepticism.
Even with extra skepticism, global warming passes as a reality and to an extent man-made. I don’t think that those two things alone amount to a need for carbon regulations or alternative energy funding.
I tend to think that world ending events are too rare to be predictable. If it happens, nobody will have thought of it, and when it does everyone will make the mistake of thinking that it was predictable. For all the time that it doesn’t happen, people will keep trying to predict it and once in a while it will amount to great and unnecessary cost.
