Oil in Peak oil refers to petroleum. I don't have a liter of petroleum in my kitchen.

I would be happy with your suggestion of using the term "local maximum" instead of "peak". Biological resources are renewable. Oil is not, and once you've used the resource, it's gone. You can't recycle burned petroleum like many metals. You can't regrow it like a southern pine plantation.

Please stop using "Peak" when referring to non-oil resources. Wood is renewable. The production of wood can be sustained, or can be engineered to increase over time, depending on management resource. You can't do that with a finite resource like oil. And don't use the term for mineral resources either. You can almost always find another deposit, with a slightly lesser yield than the one you just mined. That continues until you are mining the ocean for elements. It's a matter of how economic the resource is to mine. Oil is none of that. You can't find 0.5ppm oil in some soil somewhere like you can with gold or uranium or neodymium or whatever fearmongering element you wish to be afraid about.

I attended a lecture (probably ten years ago at this point) in which he suggested particular mass extinction horizons in the geological column were the result of methane hydrate eruptions. I can't recall the specifics, other than the general disbelief of most of us in the room, on his particular hypothesis. It required a lot of specific proofs that weren't there. There was much discussion on the existence of C60 in various ash levels. And that's all I can remember, other than thinking Gregory Ryskin needs to provide stronger evidence to this hypotheses. But seriously, some of the leading paleontologists and paleoclimate people really thought his stuff was ignoring strong evidence.

Amen--Ubuntu was fine, a touch slow, but functional until I installed accelerated graphics drivers for my ATI card. Then menuing, windows, everything, became spiffy and quick.