Peak oil--in the sense of Hubert's peak--is a perfectly good robust estimator of conventional oil reserves.
Anyone who does robust [] estimation for a living (me, say) looked at it and said, "Yeah, that makes sense." A lot of people who have never produced an accurate estimate of anything said, "That proves we're all doomed!" and "That's clearly wrong!" both of which are wildly inaccurate.
You point out the steep price curve of liquid petroleum as if that made things OK, but in economic terms, ten years ago, it was the cause for concern: when conventional oil started to get scarce, prices would go up. We knew that. But the new equilibrium price of fuel would depend on what alternatives were technologically* practical, and it wasn't clear that unconventional oil was going to live up to its hype. If it had stuck us with $250/bbl oil due to technological limitations, the economic hit would have been considerable, even if over a decade or two the price came down due to technological improvements. I'm emphasizing technology here because anyone reading this should realize that it can take rather a long time to go from "yeah this is basically feasible" to production at scale.
With hindsight we now know we are OK, but again: ten years ago unconventional oil was not ready for prime time, and it wasn't obvious it ever would be. Boosters within the industry were claiming that it would be ready to go Real Soon Now, but there were skeptics in industry as well, and therefore it behooved those of us on the sidelines to be a little bit concerned.
[*] Robust estimates are not the most accurate, but the least influenced by extraneous factors, special assumptions, etc. They are by far the best way to go when estimating highly uncertain things (like software delivery schedules) because they are the most difficult to game.
Anyone who does robust [] estimation for a living (me, say) looked at it and said, "Yeah, that makes sense." A lot of people who have never produced an accurate estimate of anything said, "That proves we're all doomed!" and "That's clearly wrong!" both of which are wildly inaccurate.
You point out the steep price curve of liquid petroleum as if that made things OK, but in economic terms, ten years ago, it was the cause for concern: when conventional oil started to get scarce, prices would go up. We knew that. But the new equilibrium price of fuel would depend on what alternatives were technologically* practical, and it wasn't clear that unconventional oil was going to live up to its hype. If it had stuck us with $250/bbl oil due to technological limitations, the economic hit would have been considerable, even if over a decade or two the price came down due to technological improvements. I'm emphasizing technology here because anyone reading this should realize that it can take rather a long time to go from "yeah this is basically feasible" to production at scale.
With hindsight we now know we are OK, but again: ten years ago unconventional oil was not ready for prime time, and it wasn't obvious it ever would be. Boosters within the industry were claiming that it would be ready to go Real Soon Now, but there were skeptics in industry as well, and therefore it behooved those of us on the sidelines to be a little bit concerned.
[*] Robust estimates are not the most accurate, but the least influenced by extraneous factors, special assumptions, etc. They are by far the best way to go when estimating highly uncertain things (like software delivery schedules) because they are the most difficult to game.