WE USE OIL BECAUSE IT'S CHEAP, NOT BECAUSE IT IS IRREPLACABLE

It may well get dearer, in which case we will use one or several of the many alternatives -- though nukes and ethanol are the obvious alternatives. At the moment a large slice of what you pay at the pump is tax anyway

For decades environmentalists have been warning that we are "running out of resources." The 1960s Club of Rome Report was the classic document of this genre. The authors were computer jocks at MIT who tried to build the first model of the world economy. They programmed in dozens of factors - resource supplies, technology improvements, pollution outputs - and then tried to project the whole thing forward 40 years to see how the world would make out.

The model kept collapsing. Try as they might, they couldn't program a "stable world environment." They decided that because they couldn't build a prosperous, pollution-free world on their MIT computer, the world itself wouldn't be able to produce one, either. So they wrote a book predicting disaster. It was an absurd exercise, yet it captured the imagination of millions of people eager to believe the worst.

The great Julian Simon refuted this kind of thinking. He proved, without doubt, resources are constantly growing more plentiful and human ingenuity is "the ultimate resource." Putting his money on the line, he won his famous bet with Paul Ehrlich about future commodity prices. Simon proved what economists since Adam Smith had been saying all along - certain activities are "profitable" only because they save people time, effort and energy. Left unhindered, the market will take us where we want to go.

Peter Huber and Mark Mills have reiterated Simon's argument in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, The Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. Sticking it right in the face of environmentalists, Huber and Mills argue the more energy we consume, the better off we are. The world is awash with low-level energy. "What is scarce is not raw energy but the drive and the logic that is able to locate, purify, and channel it to our own ends." Waste - i.e., low-grade energy - is good because it means we are creating greater order somewhere else. That's the trade-off in the Law of Thermodynamics. The high-level order created by computerized seismological imaging, for example, enables us to hunt more and more inaccessible oil, which gives us more energy to hunt even more oil, and so on.

Now contrast this unbridled optimism with the book party at the National Press Club last week for Matthew Simmons Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy.

Simmons is not an environmentalist. He's a Houston investment banker with a degree from Harvard Business School who has been intensely involved in the oil business for thirty years. He thinks environmentalists are a bit kooky. "They seem to relish the idea that world oil production may peak and are gleefully looking forward to it," he says. Yet Simmons' argument is not terribly different from that of the Club of Rome.

Thoroughly versed in the geology of oil exploration, Simmons makes one simple point that is beginning to reverberate around the oil world these days: We may be running up against the limits of easy oil. Sure, there will still be trillions of barrels of oil in the tar sands of Alberta -Huber and Mills' point - but it will not be easy to access. For the last thirty years, we've been living off Middle Eastern oil that essentially rose to the surface when you stuck a pipe in the ground. Now those fields are aging. Simmons thinks the Saudis and Aramco damaged them considerably by pumping too hard in the 1970s and early 1980s so that extensive water and gas injection will be required to access what's left.

The example that Simmons and others use to make their case is the United States of America. In 1970, we passed "Hubbert's Peak," the point where oil production leveled off. Looking at the rate of new discovery in 1956, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert predicted domestic oil production would peak in 1969. He missed by one year. Sure, we have discovered new oil in Prudhoe Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. And new technology allows us to extract more oil than previously possible. Still, domestic production has never gotten back above the 10 million barrels per day we pumped briefly in 1970. We now produce 8 billion bbd - while demand has nearly doubled. That's why we imported 15 percent of our oil in 1970, as opposed to 60 percent today.

That the entire globe will eventually reach its own "Hubbert's Peak" now seems inevitable. It may happen in 2040, or it may happen in 2010. (Simmons thinks it's even closer due to vast overestimations of Saudi capacity.) Once again, this doesn't mean we're "running out of oil" - only easy oil. The 500,000 wells operating in America still produce oil. Every last one. They just don't produce as much as they did in 1970.

And so the question arises, where will the world go to "import" more oil? Economic theory has a simple answer - substitution. Whale oil ran out around 1850 but "petroleum" took its place. We'll think of something else. Nuclear power is the obvious answer - unless you prefer the idea that we'll all ferment "biodiesel" in our backyards like hillbillies brewing their own whiskey. Or maybe we'll just cover North and South Dakota with windmills.

Nuclear power seems the obvious scientific solution. Yet it is still having a terrible time getting past political and environmental objections. And that's the one thing that enthusiasts of the "bottomless well" of human ingenuity commonly miss. Human beings also have a seemingly bottomless capacity to make a mess out of issues that, on paper at least, seem like they should be the easiest things in the world to resolve.

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EXCEPTIONALLY LONG WINTER IN UTAH -- MUST BE GLOBAL WARMING

There aren't too many places where you can celebrate the 4th of July weekend by hitting the slopes, but Utah is one of them, thanks to a record amount of snowfall. Typically, skiing and snowboarding ends by mid-to-late April. One area, the Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, often stretches it to late May. But on Thursday, Snowbird announced it will be open weekends until Independence Day. That has happened only once before, in 1995. "This is awesome," said Greg Sperry, a 33-year-old snowboarder from Salt Lake City. "If anyone would have told me I would be here skiing in summer, I wouldn't have believed it. It's like a bonus round."

July will mark the ninth consecutive month of skiing at the resort, located about a half-hour south of Salt Lake City. A combination of early and consistent snowfall, a lack of powder in the Northwest and a residual tourism bounce from the 2002 Winter Olympics have combined to make this the longest and busiest season in Utah history. Attendance is up 12 percent over last season's record of 3.4 million, according to Nathan Rafferty, a spokesman for Ski Utah, a marketing association that promotes the state's skiing industry. "It's just one of those seasons where all the pieces fell into place," Rafferty said. "You would have to go to Mt. Hood, which is on a glacier, or Saasfee in Switzerland to be skiing this late in the year."

The season got off to a rousing start on Nov. 5, when Snowbird had its earliest opening ever. The most recent dump--a half-foot--fell June 12. In between, storms regularly blanketed the Wasatch Range, and a chilly spring has insulated the snow that was already on the ground, maintaining the base. From start to finish, the mountain received 633 inches--a whopping 52 feet of snow. The result? A scene that is eerily out of sync with the calendar: jammed parking lots, long lines for food and a bustling singles scene. "I was here on Memorial Day . . . and I plan to celebrate July 4th here, too, " said Julie Williams, 25, of Los Angeles, relaxing before she took the tram up to the top of Hidden Peak, which is 11,000 feet high. "This is where all the guys are . . . which is why I took up snowboarding. You can't ask for much better odds than this.".....

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DDT: DEBUNKING A GREENIE SAINT

DDT came to be seen as an enemy of the environment following the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. My younger brother - who despite his denials is an out-and-out green (if it quacks like a duck and waddles like a duck, it's a duck) - recently sent me a new copy of Carson's book, published by Penguin Classics. And after re-reading it for the first time in years, I am amazed that so many people found it credible.

We used to have a slogan in the Royal Navy: 'Bullshit Baffles Brains.' In her book, Carson lumps together chemicals used for fighting weeds and insects that were proven to have sometimes terrible side effects - such as 2,4-D, DDD, DDE, BHC, aldrin, lindane and heptachlor - with DDT, for which there was little proof of such side effects. Even her dedication to Albert Schweitzer is a distortion. She quotes him saying: 'Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the Earth.' The implication is that Schweitzer was opposed to insecticides; in fact, he was talking about the dangers of nuclear warfare, not DDT. Indeed, in his autobiography Schweitzer wrote: 'How much labour and waste of time these wicked insects do cause us…but a ray of hope, in the use of DDT, is now held out to us.'

Carson focused much of her attention on the apparent harm caused to birds by DDT. She wrote about robins at Michigan State University that were apparently dropping dead as a result of DDT. Michigan ornithologist George Wallace theorised that the robins were dying because they had eaten earthworms contaminated by DDT. Neither Wallace nor Carson bothered to mention that there were high levels of mercury at Michigan, as a result of soil fungicide treatments on campus, and that the dead robins displayed symptoms of mercury poisoning. At the EPA hearings on DDT in the late 1960s, Joseph Hickey of the University of Wisconsin said that, in tests, he had been unable to overdose robins with DDT because they passed it through their digestive tracts and eliminated it in their faeces.

Carson also wrote of Dr James DeWitt's 'now classic experiments' which showed that, while DDT may cause no observable harm to birds themselves, it may seriously affect their reproduction and reduce the number of eggs that hatch successfully. In fact, DeWitt came to a very different conclusion. He reported no significant difference in egg hatching between birds fed DDT and birds not fed DDT. Carson also omitted to mention DeWitt's report that DDT-fed pheasants hatched about 50 per cent more eggs than 'control' pheasants.

In the late 60s, Dr Joel Bitman and his associates at the US Department of Agriculture found that Japanese quail fed DDT produced eggs with thinner shells and lower calcium content. Yet further examination of Dr Bitman's study revealed that the quails under experiment had been fed a diet with a calcium content of only 0.56 per cent, where a normal quail diet consists of 2.7 per cent calcium. And calcium deficiency is known to cause thin eggshells.

After much criticism, Bitman repeated the test, this time with sufficient calcium levels, and the birds produced eggs without thinned shells. Following years of feeding experiments, scientists at the Department of Poultry Science at Cornell University 'found no tremors, no mortality, no thinning of eggshells and no interference with reproduction caused by levels of DDT which were as high as those reported to be present in most of the wild birds where "catastrophic" decreases in shell quality and reproduction have been claimed'.

Various things cause thinning eggshells, including season of the year, nutrition (in particular insufficient calcium, phosphorus, vitamin D, and manganese), temperature rise, type of soil, and breeding conditions (for example, sunlight and crowding). But environmentalists, it seems, rarely let scientific evidence get in the way of their campaigns against DDT and other 'modern evils'.

Carson died in 1964, two years after her book was published. So she missed the demolishing of her theories by the scientific community. Yet her book became the bible of the greens and Carson their Holy Mother.

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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