MAJOR PEAK OIL FIGURE STEPS BACK

A classic case of the bad driving out the good.

Peak Oil and the Lunatic Fringe
Robert Rapier, March 24, 2007 ((R-Squared Energy Blog)

WHO
Robert Rapier, Peak Oil authority.

WHAT
“I have been posting at The Oil Drum as a contributor for about a year now. Yesterday, I announced that I would be taking a break for a while.”

WHEN
As of March 23, 2007.

WHERE
Posted at Rapier’s own site, with reference to The Oil Drum

WHY
“The Oil Drum receives a great many visitors each day (currently over 12,000 a day). While the vast majority are interested in intelligent discourse on energy issues, there is a very vocal lunatic fringe who accept Peak Oil RIGHT NOW with a religious fervor. They lash out at any viewpoints that challenge this notion… legitimate challenges of the data are sometimes met with bitter ad hominem attacks. Add to that the fringe who think that because I work for an oil company, they are entitled to pile on with ad hominem attacks, and I have found myself increasingly on the receiving end of some very nasty comments and e-mails… In response to my latest essay, in which I compared some of the arguments in favor of the [Hubbert Linearization] as "faith-based", many posters bitterly lashed out… I think you have to see this for yourself, if you are unfamiliar with the sort of lunatic fringe I am talking about…Therefore, to lower my stress level a bit, I have decided to remove the bulls eye from my chest. As I mentioned in the opening, I will continue to post at least 1 essay a week here.”

QUOTES
“…here is a sampling of the comments (without corrections for spelling errors) I received in response to my essay. Again, this is a minority, but a very vocal one:

“basically garbage”, “dangerous”, “keep being unreasonable or start thinking”, “not that interesting”, “not even close to being the right way to critique HL”, “assumption you childischly refuse to mention”, “sad, silly, egotistical”, “pissing contest”, “disingenuous”, “arrogance, pigheadedness and perhaps even childishness”, “waste of time”, “absurd”, “clumsy and actually self-defeating”, “gross”, “way off base”, “contrived examples”, “get off your high horse”, “re-inventing the wheel”, “junk”, “deceitful”, “unrealistic scenarios”, “let me hand you a clue”, “over the top”, “not very useful”, “cheating”, “vindictive, and spiteful”, “constructed cases where it does not work”, “diatribe”, “obnoxious attempt”, “a guy with an aganda and a axe to grind”, and “quite revealing in an unflatering way”

“It was after reading some of those comments (and the posters attempted justifications of them) that I finally decided to take a break.”