THAT OLD OIL SCARE AGAIN

That pesky oil:

"Fears about running out of oil have become widespread in America. A slew of books have recently put forward the imminent oil depletion argument: Hubbert's Peak by Kenneth Deffeyes (2001), The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg (2003), and Out of Gas by David Goodstein and The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, both published this year. Like earlier concerns about oil depletion, the current panic has little basis in the geology of oil. The argument that we are about to run out of oil has been around for as long as oil has been produced....

We apparently have both too little oil and too much. The most pessimistic forecasters argue that, not only is industrial civilisation about to collapse as it runs out of oil, but it will be tipped over the edge by global warming as a consequence of past energy use.

On a technical level, the new pessimism about oil draws heavily on the work of two retired petroleum geologists, Colin Campbell and Jean LaherrŠre, and the earlier work of Shell geologist M King Hubbert. But the theoretical basis of the pessimistic predictions is weak; and the empirical track record of their approach has been a failure.....

In his paper 'The New Pessimism about Petroleum Resources', Michael Lynch, president of the consulting firm Strategic Energy and Economic Research, illustrates how Colin Campbell's ongoing predictions of an imminent peak in production have consistently proven wrong while his estimates of total reserves have had to be revised upwards.

Also, in order to create a crisis, the pessimists have to discount so-called 'unconventional' sources of oil, such as tar sands, as too dirty or uneconomic; methane hydrates are apparently too speculative; coal liquefaction would take too long to come on line; and so on. Every alternative is shot down.....

A far more sensible approach would be to see potentially declining oil supplies as simply a practical problem. From this perspective there are reasons not to panic. Headlines suggesting that prices are at record highs are misleading, since they do not take inflation into account. Corrected for inflation, today's prices are around half the high of the early 80s price spike. Also, today's economy is less dependent on energy in the sense that it is much more efficient; we get much more useful work out of the same amount of oil..... As long as we feel guilty about improving our lives, energy will always seem to be a problem. But running out of oil isn't something we need to worry about."




The Campbell/Hubbert scare is also debunked here. Summary:

"Recently, numerous publications have appeared warning that oil production is near an unavoidable, geologically-determined peak that could have consequences up to and including "war, starvation, economic recession, possibly even the extinction of homo sapiens" (Campbell in Ruppert 2002.) The current series of alarmist articles could be said to be merely reincarnations of earlier work which proved fallacious, but the authors insist that they have made significant advances in their analyses, overcoming earlier errors. For a number of reasons, this work has been nearly impenetrable to many observers, which seems to have lent it an added cachet. However, careful examination of the data and methods, as well as extensive perusal of the writings, suggests that the opacity of the work is- at best- obscuring the inconclusive nature of their research".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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