Peak Oil what do the search engines say?

Filed in archive Opinion , Peak Oil on May 4, 2006

More curios about peak oil and oil dependency as well as our economic future, I decided to figure out the answer to the question, "when will oil run out?"

My approach is based on the fact that rarely do I venture far from the first page of one of the top search engines when looking for information and thinking there might be some general validity to this, I took a survey of these engines and for the results I used a weighted average formula.

What would the first page of MSN, Google, and Yahoo report on the issue, "when will oil run out?"

Only those pages directly making predictions are summarized and factored:

MSN Search
when will oil run out

Motherjones - 25 years weight factor 1

The Catalyst - 30 years weight factor 1

About Economist - 'Never' rounded off to 100 years weight factor 1

Google Search
when will oil run out

Economist - 100 years weight factor 2

CNN - 4 years weight factor 2

Yahoo Search
when will oil run out

About Economist - 'Never' rounded off to 100 years weight factor 1

John Quiggin - 'Never' rounded off to 100 years weight factor 1

Yahoo ATQ - 50 years weight factor 1

World Net Daily - 'Never' rounded off to 100 years weight factor 1

Summary:
MSN Average First Page Consensus: 52 years
Google Average First Page Consensus: 52 years
Yahoo Average First Page Consensus: 88 years
Weighted Average Major Search Engine First Page Consensus: 61 years

In answer to my question, "when will oil run out?" The analyzed results of the first page on each major search weighted accordingly reveals that we should have sufficient oil for about 62 years. Therefore, no need for a peak oil panic according to the top search engines on the Internet.

Please note that I had to make an assumption about the predictions of, "never," hence those predictions, based on market factors, and in numerical terms are rounded off to 100 years so this report may contain some margin of error.