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gjm comments on Lesswrong 2016 Survey - Less Wrong
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If you go to the Wikipedia page about Peak Oil one of the first things you see will be a graph, derived from Hubbert's 1956 paper. It shows oil production continuing to (and, looking at the graph, presumably past) year 2200. Hubbert's paper doesn't actually say anything much about when supply will fail to meet demand -- it makes no attempt to model demand. (It does say something like "This doesn't mean we're going to run out of liquid and gaseous fuels real soon now, because we can make them from other more abundant fossil fuels", presumably meaning coal.)
I'm not sure what it means to say that "peak oil was wrong". I mean, the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite. At some point we will either run out or stop using it for other reasons; at some point before then there will be a global maximum of production (if it hasn't occurred already). Some specific guess about when those things would happen could well have been wrong, but that doesn't invalidate the overall picture and I'm not aware of any reason to think it even changes the timescales all that drastically.
The arguments about peak oil mostly consist of running to and fro between the motte ("the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite") and the bailey. It's tiring and not very useful.
Peak oil has been promising permanent -- and accelerating -- reductions in absolute oil production, sky-high -- and climbing -- prices and widespread -- and worsening -- scarcity leading to a variety of unpleasant social consequences since the mid-1970s. That's 40 years of being wrong.
Well, what happened in this actual case is that I said it might turn out that rebuilding technological society after a huge catastrophe might be dependent on cheaper oil than we'd actually have, and it was to that that you replied "can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?".
What version of "peak oil was wrong" refutes what I said?
That wasn't an argument against your position per se. It was more of a side lunge. Or a distraction or a pirouette or a slip-and-fall or a bête noire or a whimsy or a wibble -- you pick :-)
Another possibility is that it will become possible (and cheap enough) to produce oil from other things, before it runs out. In that case it would seem reasonable to say that the peak oil theory was wrong.
It is possible to produce oil from coal. It's not a new process, Germany used it widely during WW2 as it had little access to "regular" oil.
And, as I remarked above, when Hubbert wrote his original paper about "peak oil" (at least, I think the thing I saw was his original paper), he explicitly said that coal can be used to make oil and gas, and that therefore diminishing oil extraction doesn't have to mean no more oil.