Probably you’ve heard of “peak oil,” the theoretical point at which maximum pumping of the planet’s oil resources is reached and production begins to decline for various reasons, including rising extraction costs and shrinking reserves. This is a passionately disputed conjecture, but there is one point of general agreement — the peak has been pushed well into the future by directional drilling and the other advances associated with hydraulic fracturing. Then there’s “peak coal,” an even more fractious effort to apply the same sort of frame to dinousaur-based fuel in solid form; experts have never been able to agree within even a couple of centuries on when we might arrive at this milepost. Now we have from the analysts at Bloomberg New Energy Finance a forecast of peak fossil fuel consumption, covering natural gas as well as coal and oil, and determined not just by production costs or available […]