This is the fallacy that led to the collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery. Regulators assumed that cod catches would start to drop long before the number of cod dropped to unsustainable numbers. This didn't happen. The number of cod caught remained stable until it collapsed.
What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping.
The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.
A similar scenario is likely with fossil fuels re: declining EROEI. There is always more oil, but as we use up the easy oil the harder oil takes more and more energy to get. This is hidden though, as the process will just scale and scale and use more and more energy to get the same amount of oil.
... until it can't do that anymore and production collapses. This will happen when overall system EROEI drops below some unknown threshold, probably 5-10X.
In any iterated debate between an economist and a physicist the economist will be right N-1 times and the physicist will be right once.
I know what you mean by that. And yet I've got a problem with the phrase. What it suggests is "there's is always more oil ... available for useful extraction". And that isn't the case. Yes, there's more in the ground, but (as your EROEI argument says) there is a decidedly limited amount of feasibly extractable oil, and once that limit is reached, there is no more useful oil in the ground. The key being "useful".
I know. It's ... trying to marshal the argument in the most effective way possible.
A friend pointed me at a 1978 address Milton Friedman made on energy policy. It ... boils my blood (I'm not a Friedman fan): http://fixyt.com/watch?v=hj1974Ek4nw
It starts out relatively well: Friedman is quoting W.S. Jevons. And then he repeatedly simply asserts "he's wrong". And equivocates Jevons being mistaken in other predictions (which are pretty vaguely unspecified) with being wrong on this one. Etc., etc. I've been watching and reading a bit more of Friedman recently, and what I'm realizing is that 1) his biggest tools aren't factual ones but rhetorical ones, and that 2) he really likes making his debating opponent look dumb, even when the opponent is expressing views, however poorly, that Friedman himself supports. Makes me find him all the more non-credible in general.
Nailing down the language of peak oil seems somewhat useful. So I wasn't picking on you so much as trying to clarify (mostly to myself) what in the "there'll always be more oil" phrase bothers me.
Not sure which fallacy you refer to. I'm just trying to understand what is actually known about this issue and what is just anecdote like the OP.
I know about the collapse of the cod catch in 1992[1] as well as declining catch of some species of tuna in some areas[2]. On the other hand some fisheries have come back after they supposedly collapsed, such as the BC sockeye salmon[3]. And since the overall catch is roughly flat any losses must have been made up by increases in other species. Right?
So I guess we are talking about a prediction for future global collapse. Is there good academic research on this? What is the specific forecast? What data do they use in their forecast?
The best academic article I could find is this[4] from UCSB and seems to say we generally don't have enough information to make forecasts.
What they didn't account for in their models is that cod are schooling fish, so the local density of them remains constant even as the global density is dropping. Ships would have to travel further to find cod, but provided they found them they would keep catching the same number until that region was exhausted, and they would move on. This meant that regulators were blind to the fact that the number of cod schools was dropping.
The same thing is likely happening with other fish, but due to whole ocean areas being devastated rather than schooling. So long as each boat can find some area of the ocean that is still alive, they will catch the same number of fish, until there aren't any areas of the ocean still living.