Comment by cs137

This. The other issue with peak oil is that people have been predicting it since 2005 (if not earlier) and the general picture has been, and still is:

    * we don't fully know when oil production will peak, because it's based on human behavior.
    * when we do pass peak oil, we won't know for a few years that we have. (It's possible that the 2019 local max was "the peak"; it's also possible that it was related to COVID-19 more than oil scarcity.)
    * very few of the issues caused will be attributed to "peak oil" at the time. Instead, they'll be blamed on state collapses, policy failures, economic depressions, and resource wars that will all be indirectly related to peak oil. 
    * peak oil is not necessarily a bad thing (although it probably will be, because the global system is already fragile and nearly universally despised) if we can find replacements in time--unfortunately, we're decades behind where we should be with nuclear energy, which for all its flaws is nevertheless the greenest energy source we've found thus far.

To the outside observer, "peak oil" seems like one of those things people have been worried about forever but that has not yet come to be and thus "never will".