“Many of the writers about ‘peak oil’ have moved on to ‘peak everything’ (Richard Heinberg) and ‘peak food’ (Paul Roberts). They apply the same flawed model that treats resources as static and ignores investment and innovation. This is especially telling since the model has failed so abysmally in the case of food and famine, as the record of Paul Ehrlich and his followers has shown.”
In his excellent book, Future Babble, Dan Gardner demonstrates empirically that the neo-Malthusians who have plagued us for the past half century have not only been egregiously wrong in their predictions; they have tended to insist that they were, in fact, correct, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. They accomplish this primarily by selective memory, such as greatly understating their original claims, or treating minor, regular difficulties (such as local famines) as confirmation of their apocalyptic visions.…
To: Abraham Lincoln
From: Sherman Johnson, National Bovine Resources Defense Council; Harris Rutherford, Cowpeace International; William Oaks, Prairie Defense Fund
Dear Mr. President:
Of late, you have been asked to promote the construction of a massive transportation project connecting the East Coast to the Pacific and rumor has it that you are planning to embrace the technology of “railroads” which rely on steel rails and coal-fired steam engines. We urge you to reconsider this in favor of an approach which has many benefits: ox-cart transportation, or OCT, and implement a BTC or bovine transportation credit.
The advantages of ox-cart transportation include:
Sustainability: Railroads rely on steel and coal, both of which are finite, meaning that a peak in their production is inevitable. OCT uses only products (oxen, wood, oats) which are renewable.…
“The truth is that, just as so many did in the 1970s, a commodity cycle has been confused with a ‘new paradigm’ and (neo)Malthusian biases have cherry-picked data and made vague pronouncement (“the easy oil is gone”) with little more than some curve-fitting to support their conclusions.”
“We now have an elephant in the room, and its name is peak oil,” states Kjell Aleklett in an interview with James Morgan in ScienceOmega (June 10, 2013). Interviewer James Morgan adds: “Of course, it is possible to argue over the exact point at which global peak oil will arrive, but at some time in the not too distant future, we are going to have deal with this problem.”
And so here we go again on the trial of exhaustion theory, one step removed from the scientism of central planning where decline rates are projected and a social cost of depletion is calculated for an extraction tax.…