Projecting the Future

I got a kick out of reading this bit in a posting by Anthony Watts in his Watts Up With That? blog:

World oil reserves are over 20 times greater now than they were when record-keeping began in the 1940s; world gas reserves are almost four times greater than they were in the 1960s; world coal reserves have risen fourfold since 1950. Political events can drive supply down and prices up, but the raw mineral resource base is prolific—and expanding in economic terms thanks to an inexhaustible supply of human ingenuity and exploratory capital.

Record energy consumption has been accompanied by improving air quality. Urban air quality is significantly better today than in the 1970s in the United States.

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There is much to be thankful for this holiday season with our energy economy. But thoughts about the less fortunate should be with us too. An estimated 1.5 billion people do not have electricity for lighting, heating, cooling, cooking, or water purification. A Christmas tree for us is likely to be firewood for those living in energy poverty. For these people, there could be no greater holiday gift than affordable electricity itself, explaining why the developing world has flatly rejected proposals from environmental elites to forsake future energy usage in the quixotic quest to “stabilize climate.”

This reminds me of a book I read many years ago, Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource. The second edition of this book is available on line and is worth reading. The message is simple: humans are clever and will find ways to cope with looming resource shortages. The doomsters who claim that the world is coming to a "point of no return" just haven't looked at humanity's history. There have always been looming shortages and reason to be gloomy. But there have always been clever people who found new ways of doing things, new resources, and new technologies that get around the seemingly impassible hurdles.

My father was taught in the 1930s that we were coming to "the end of oil". I remember teaching a social studies class in a secondary school in the 1970s that we were coming to "the end of oil". At the time I didn't know that the gloomy prediction had been around for 40 years and that it was based on a simple-minded, but wrong, reading of the facts. The oil companies generally report a potential of 20 years of oil because they don't explore for the sake of exploring. They only find enough oil to satisfy markets for the near term future. Therefore, there is alway "just twenty year's supply before we run out" as the gloomster tell us. But the doom-and-gloom crowd doesn't understand that there never will be more than 20 years supply in the ground because it doesn't pay for oil companies to explore beyond that amount.

So the "peak oil" crowd keep projecting exhausing just around the corner. But I wouldn't bet on it. It is already pretty clear that we will wean ourselves off carbon-based energy over the next 30-40 years. The new energy technologies are blossoming all around. They will displace the old fossil fuel energy suppliers except in special industries, e.g. transportation will always need something like oil, but I'm willing to bet that it will be supplied by algae in 2050 and not by punching more holes in the ground.

I can't pass up a chance to tweak the nose of the "global warming" crowd. They are hysterics who are closely related to the "peak oil" crowd, i.e. they are linear extrapolators of the present into the future. They have no sense of technology and change. Their "solution" is to stop growth. That is crazy unless you are already rich (like most of the leadership of these 'environmental' groups). The future will be green, and it will be greener sooner if we invest in science and technology and not into rules and regulation and lots of busy bodies going around making sure that nobody is using more than their allotment of fossil fuel.