12. THE "AMAZING" BOONE PICKENS

As recently heard on NPR, and widely quoted, Boone Pickens has already called the peak.

Predictably, the peak oil cheerleaders mindlessly took the bait. "See! Boone Pickens says its happening!! He's famous! It's true!"

Let's step back and think this through:

1) Boone Pickens has no way of telling whether we are at peak or not. Nobody does. Like Deffeyes, he doesn't even pretend to have any data or science to back his call up. He's just shooting his mouth off. Saying "He's an oil man, therefore he can call the peak." is ridiculous. It's the same fallacy as saying "John Madden's a football coach, therefore he can predict the winner of the super bowl."

2) Boone Pickens has been a greedy scumbag for years, and has been known to do just about anything for a buck. Furthermore, he is a known player in the oil futures markets, and runs a hedge fund. So what do you think? He goes long on crude contracts, then goes on every media outlet available to spread the message that we are RUNNING OUT OF OIL. Of course, he's Boone Pickens, so the market takes the bait, and the price duly goes up.

3) Next year, we find out that, no, 2004 wasn't the peak after all, and Boone Pickens was full of shit. But hey, what's he got to lose? Nobody from the media's going to call him back and ridicule him about his hasty, incorrect prediction, and even if somebody did, he'd just say: "Well, these things are notoriously difficult to predict due to the lack of precise data." Ha ha. $$$ Ka ching!

Boone Pickens is a joke.

“Never again will we pump more than 82 million barrels.”
-- T. Boone Pickens, 9th August 2004. On the Kudlow and Cramer Show, MSNBC.
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“Global oil [production] is 84 million barrels [per day]. I don't believe you can get it any more than 84 million barrels."
-- T. Boone Pickens, addressing the 11th National Clean Cities conference in May 2005.
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"I don't believe that you can increase the supply beyond 84 or 85 million barrel as day."
-- T. Boone Pickens, on "CNN In the Money", June 25, 2005.
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"Supply is—you‘ve just about had it on supply; 85 million barrels a day world supply is about it. "
-- T. Boone Pickens, on Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC, Aug. 26, 2005
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