I don't deny that at all. Peak oil would actually be great for the climate. Unfortunately, no magical supply peak is going to save the climate from us.

EROEI is only relevant when looked at as an entire system perspective.

The Luftwaffe in the latter part of WWII was largely fuelled with aviation fuel made from coal. The primitive coal to liquids technology they used was very inefficient tech consuming way more energy of coal than it produced jet fuel (highly negative EROEI). Yet it kept the Germans in the air until the plants were bombed.

How can that possibly be? How could a negative EROEI work? Simple: because the net energy picture was still positive. Energy from coal in, less energy from jet fuel out. And the economic picture worked because you can't stick coal in a jet's fuel tank and fly it.

Oil doesn't have to be some super high EROEI fuel to work. It doesn't even have to be a positive EROEI fuel to work. So long as you can put it in your gas tank, and so long as the world can produce energy to make it, it can get alone just fine.

Even as it stands, oil is already a fuel whose value is many times higher than its raw energy value. Compare the per-BTU costs of coal or natural gas to that of oil - even in our current low oil price regime. Oil's value isn't it's energy value. It's the ability to drive an engine with it that makes it valuable. Changing other forms of energy into oil is a perfectly realistic economic proposition.

That said, in reality, oil is far, far from a negative EROEI, and won't be going negative for a long, long time, if ever - not that that matters.

It would be great if you could find someone who would pledge to pay your legal bills if the FAA sues you, and then launch anyway and hopefully use it to save someone's life. The publicity such a case would bring would do wonders for improving drone regulations.

Yeah, and you should get money for every satellite that passes over you too!

First off, nobody is talking about flying "a few feet over your house". Unless you just ordered something, wherein one would presume that you're giving the drone permission to come to your house.

Secondly, you purchased a piece of ground. Not a cylinder of area reaching from the Earth's core up to the edge of the known universe. You have rights in the immediate vicinity of your house, but not far above it. As it should be.

A drone (or anything that is designed to fly) is supported in the air by the air going over it's airfoils.

The amazon drones are quadcopters. They have no airfoils other than the propellers (rapidly rotating airfoils, moving at speeds faster than even tornado-force winds).

A tree branch, barring some insignificant wind resistance

Last I checked, tree branches breaking and falling into houses during windstorms is not a myth, so I'm not sure what exactly you're going on about.

No matter it's horizontal or rotational velocity, if unsupported, it will accelerate to terminal velocity straight down

You'll find that the terminal velocity of a branch is far higher than the terminal velocity of a quadcopter. Even completely unpowered, propellers undergo autorotation when falling, which acts as a brake.

However, the air around it is not still, it can move in any direction. And the drone will move with the air, even a slight breeze, since the air is the only thing supporting it. An airplane flying at 50 MPH airspeed in a 60 MPH headwind will be traveling over the ground backwards at 10 MPH.

Meanwhile, windblown debris will be moving at up to 60 MPH with 36 times the kinetic energy per kilogram.

And seriously, are you so daft as to think that Amazon and others would be licensed to launch drones in a hurricane? Launches would very obviously be limited to times where the peak anticipated gust speed is still with a large margin of error controllable by the craft; it's absurd to think licensing would allow anything else.

It does not take much wind to blow a drone off course

Actually, drones that lock to GPS positions are incredibly hard to blow significantly off course (look at how little the drone has to rotate off the vertical to hold position - it could easily tolerate winds far stronger than that). You clearly know nothing about drones if you think they're easy to blow off course. If they have to use their whole power output to hold position, they do just that.

go watch small aircraft take off and land at an airport in a 10+ MPH gusting wind

Quadcopers are not light planes. You might as well start comparing quadcopters to eagles next. "Look, Amazon's drones are going to steal all of our salmon! Look at what eagles do!"

and they are 20 times as heavy

With many hundreds of times the surface area, with no ability for rapid changes in angle or power output, and no computer control system to do so automatically.

with a much more powerful engine than any drone.

Power to weight ratios on drones are many times higher than on light planes. Which is obviously what matters, and I certainly hope you're not daft enough to think that absolute power is what matters.

It takes far, far, far less wind to blow one off course than a falling tree branch

Do I really need to reiterate my entire previous post?

A 10 MPH gust can happen without being forecast and will absolutely toss a drone

Yes, about 10 centimeters before the control software compensates.

See the post immediately above yours. It only works if you don't factor in inflation.

The "economists" claim is not directly cited, only indirectly referenced (no source given in the indirect reference), and the economists in question are implied by the indirect source to be "environmentalists" who have "tended to deny the significance of the Ehrlich-Simon bet".

(for those who are curious, here's the long-term pricing on the minerals in the Simon-Erhlich wager, inflation-adjusted).

Keep getting your news from Russian media.

Note, of course, that the emphasis is on mineral resources - not biological. Biological resources don't follow a "the harder it is to extract, the exponentially more is available" curve. Rather, they're just the opposite - the more you extract, the less the total for you to extract in the future; the less you extract, the faster new resources become available.

"We're now forty years after the first oil shock ... How come peak oil isn't listed?"

Your post contains its own answer.

People have been screaming "peak oil" since the late 1800s. Meanwhile, oil resource estimates just keep rising.

It's a naive perception of how the world works that envisions that mineral resources are like some cup with some fixed, limited quantity of a resource, and once you take it all it's gone. The reality is that for every resource, there's unthinkably, mind-bogglingly vast quantities available in total. The ease of extraction generally follows an exponential curve: the easiest stuff is incredibly rare, the next easiest an order of magnitude more common, the next easiest yet another another order of magnitude, and so forth. The amount you can produce depends on your technology and your current price point. Any hike in your price point or increase in your technology consequently puts exponentially more resource onto the market. Likewise, any hike in price leads to significant increase tech research to develop new types of resources, as the potential payoff becomes massive. The exponential scaling factor of difficulty of extraction versus availability strongly discourages supply peaks.

Now, the sort of resource availability curves aren't completely smooth - some order of magnitude transitions can be easier to achieve than others. Likewise, resource markets are always going to be inherently vulnerable to long-term price swings because you have such a long lead time between the start of new projects and the reaching of full production, and even longer time periods before the start of work on new technology and it becoming commercially viable. But regardless of the swings, the long-term picture is never one of scarcity. Making the scarcity bet is not a good idea.

Now, minerals can and do peak - but rarely from supply peaks. Rather, demand peaks are far more common. The stone age didn't end because people ran out of stones.

Straw man. First off, any commercial drones are going to have to be able to prove that they can cope with whatever conditions they're permitted to fly in (and not fly in conditions they're not approved for), as well as to gracefully handle failures. And secondly, even a piano won't crash though the roof of a house - let alone a couple dozen kilo (tops) drone. Roofs are not as weak as you seem to think they are - unless your house is condemned or something. And third, if the wind is strong enough to blow a drone into your house, it's also going to be throwing all sorts of other debris into your house as well; at least the drone would be actively *trying* to resist and/or gain altitude to safety (with a powertrain that can do 50+ mph). When was the last time you saw a tree branch or piece or other debris do that?

Lastly, while an out of control drone may not be able to go through the roof of your house, let me assure you, an out of control delivery truck absolutely can go through your walls.

Yep, treating them like an other vehicle sounds like a reasonable approach, as does banning storing of recorded images without extenuating expressly-permitted/licensed circumstances.

The barrier for getting to fly delivery missions should be compared to delivery vehicles: if the per-package rate of collateral damage can be shown to be similar to or less than that of delivering by truck, and likewise with emissions, then it should not have a bunch of legal barriers put in front of it. Drone manufacturers should have a straightforward process to demonstrate their safety to gain approval (demonstrating acceptable results in realistic failure scenarios), and statistical data on drones in real-world usage should be collected to handle the adjustment of the safety standards that future drones have to meet.

Even if in the beginning they can't quite meet the safety levels of ground vehicles, that doesn't mean they should be totally banned - just not allowed to go widespread until they can (pilot programs only). Unless there's a sizeable hazard to the public, one generally allows a little leeway with new technologies. One can just imagine where aviation would be today if the earliest planes had to meet the safety standards of ground-based vehicles, for example.

1. Actually, it's often pretty easy to spot satellites. Visibly. There's 100-ish that are brighter than mag 4 (the limit for unaided vision in perfectly dark skies is 6, about 100-fold dimmer). If the position and angle are right the ISS can be mag -5.9 - an order of magnitude higher than the peak brightness of Venus, and readily visible during the day if you know where to look. Most commonly it's -2 to -4, so roughly between the average brightness of Jupiter and the average brightness of Venus. Iridium flares can get on rare occasions up to a staggering -9.5, though they usually max out at around -8.

2.Whether you're talking about radio or visible is irrelevant. What's relevant is that you're changing the angle of the "sight", from the horizontal to the vertical.

if there must be a line of sight between the operator of some monitoring equipment and the equipment itself, it's much harder for that equipment to be used to invade a person's privacy.

Really? So if I run a spy satellite and it's currently above the horizon where I am then it's "much harder for that equipment to be used to invade a person's privacy"? Really?

There's a world of difference between "I can see what you're doing" versus "I can see something that can see what you're doing."

Because traffic and diesel fumes and road noise from surface delivery are a-okay in your book?