“Today’s reserve and resource estimates should be considered a minimum, not a maximum. By the end of the forecast period, reserves could be the same or higher depending on technological developments, capital availability, public policies, and commodity price levels.”
“The implication for business decision-making and public-policy analysis is that ‘depletable’ is not an operative concept for the world oil market, as it might be for an individual well, field, or geographical section…. [T]he concept of a nonrenewable resource is a heuristic, pedagogical device—an ideal type—not a principle that entrepreneurs can turn into profits and government officials can parlay into enlightened intervention.”
This essay, published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in the November 1999 issue of The Freeman, was subtitled, “Today’s Reserve and Resource Estimates Should Be Considered a Minimum.”…
…“… we don’t have a first-principles theory that tells us what we have to get right in order to have an accurate projection [of anthropogenic climate change]…. This is sort of an emergent knowledge base. So, that’s the translation of this last statement, ‘To date, a set of diagnostics and performance metrics that can strongly reduce uncertainties in global climate sensitivity,’ a la projections, ‘has yet to be identified’.” (p. 89)
“… if the [temperature] hiatus is still going on as of the sixth IPCC report, that report is going to have a large burden on its shoulders walking in the door, because recent literature has shown that the chances of having a hiatus 18 of 20 years are vanishingly small.” (p. 92)
– William Collins, Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
“To many of us, our current spending of fossil fuels appears as morally correct as did human slavery to the Romans or the Atlantic slave trade to seventeenth-century British businessmen.”
– Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2012), p. xi.
A ran across a 2012 book by Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude, sponsored by the David Suzuki Foundation and published by Greystone Books.
In it, I encountered a unique (okay, strange) application of Malthusianism to energy. And I found the author taking the present author head on. I like that, good or bad.
The thesis of Nikiforuk’s book is that yes, fossil fuels (and oil in particular) has greatly enabled mankind in a multitude of tasks.…