Reply #3: A couple points of disagreement [View All]

You're right to point out the scale of that second graph. It's a dishonest way to present the data (and it almost certainly must have been intentional). But you don't need the second graph in order to see that there hasn't been a plateau since 2004, since the crude production is the bottom bar of the first graph. There hasn't been much growth, but the folks at TOD who claimed that 2005 was the peak were clearly wrong.

But my real disagreements are that even if there is a plateau, you can't tell from the graph whether it's a supply plateau or a demand plateau (such plateaus have occured in the past yet weren't "peaks"), and...

"it doesn't give an accurate picture of the total energy. You need to know that in order to determine how much energy-driven stuff our civilization can actually do"

This presumes that energy is all that we use oil (and related HCs) for.