Peak Oil & the stock market

Tonight Emily and many people from Portland Peak Oil attended a presentation titled "Energy: A World Without Oil" with Kenneth Deffeyes as the keynote speaker. I have to thank the financial group who put on the presentation, but from the looks of things more then half of the people in the audience where from the peak oil school of thought.

It was typically creepy to see people trying to figure out how to profit on declining oil and and all the faith put in growth, thankfully Kenneth Deffeyes answered a rather concise "NO" to a question of is all this growth possible.

I did hear a few of the good things about hydrogen generation and usage. I should mention that I think _WAY_ too much faith has been put into the hydrogen economy and on the Canadian tar sands. Anyway the two fairly sane things about fuel cells powered by hydrogen are:

1) even though you might lose energy when generating hydrogen, because fuel cells are even now much more efficient then the Internal Combustion Engine that you might still be better off with hydrogen.

2) If you figure out how to generate the hydrogen on site at a gas station you also remove a bunch of problems from the equation.

Having said all that, I still view the hydrogen economy as being a cool idea that I really doubt that civilization has enough time to get the bugs worked out and scaled up to do much of anything useful.