A recent story (http://liberty.pacificresearch.org/blog/sid.green-jobs) notes layoffs in the renewable energy business and laments the oft-heard call for expenditures on ‘green jobs’. The author notes the potential ‘explosion’ in clean jobs, but also the wasteful practice of low productivity investment. Solar power especially is very expensive and hardly a cost-effective way to spend taxpayer or consumer money.
Amazingly, a number of Congressional leaders such as Harry Reid and Bernie Sanders point to the struggles the public has had with higher energy costs, and then turn to renewable energy as a solution, without mentioning its (higher) cost. This is rather like Marie Antoinette’s supposed comment that the poor who had no bread should eat cake. Arguing for ‘clean’ energy over ‘dirty’ energy is one thing, but proposing to solve the problem of expensive energy with even more expensive (but ostensibly cleaner) energy is at best disingenuous.…
The above link takes you to a story about how oil production has peaked, specifically, “The oil is almost gone. The hourglass is about to run out. It’s time to create a utopia.”
Realizing that no one on this blog is likely to take the Huffington crowd too seriously, but I guess there are those who do.
That said, can we encourage these people to move to a post-oil utopia, say, Somalia?…
For several years now, a number of peak oil advocates such as Matt Simmons, T. Boone Pickens (aka “I believe in free markets, but give me subsidies”) and Ken Deffeyes have been arguing that May 2005 was the peak of world oil production. They arrived at this by noting that crude plus condensate (excluding natural gas liquids, biofuels, etc) peaked and declined in that month. Matt went so far as to wager with me that we would never surpass that amount.
Aside from the fact that C+C production has peaked and dropped several times in the past 2 decades, only to recover, it has, on preliminary data, surpassed that again this July. However, there is a distinct possibility that the numbers will be revised downwards leaving May 2005 as the highest point to date. …