“For many American families, struggling to make ends meet in the jobless recovery, energy development is an answer to a prayer. The fact that the oil and gas boom has been done without taxpayer subsidies—and despite reactionary public policies at the federal level and in some states (such as New York)—means that more economic opportunity is on tap.”
In this so-called “jobless” recovery, aka the Great Recession, an estimated 20 million American workers are unemployed or underemployed. One out of every two college students cannot find work in their chosen fields. Competition for well-paying jobs is likely to become even tougher when thousands of men and women in uniform return home from Afghanistan and look for ways to support their families.
Although many U.S. industries have been reluctant to hire new workers due to political and economic uncertainty, the oil and natural gas industry is booming worldwide.…
In business and in government, lesson after lesson has been learned against trusting the ‘smartest guys in the room.’
Remember Enron, where doubters were told by CEO Jeff Skilling that they just didn’t ‘get it’? … the alarmist climate scientists who have long stated that the science is settled…. the Obama Administration energy decision-makers who know which technologies are ‘environmentally sustainable’ and are ‘commercially promising’?
F. A. Hayek warned against the ‘pretense of knowledge” where an intellectual elite via government coercion plans for the rest of us. Economist/educator Russell Roberts (Mercatus Center, George Mason University) explained what Hayek meant in a Wall Street Journal piece, “Is the Dismal Science Really a Science?”
…If economics is a science, it is more like biology than physics. Biologists try to understand the relationships in a complex system.
“We are on a collision course to a world without rocks. Only take as many rocks as you absolutely need.”
– Dr. Victoria Merrill, author, No Stone Unturned: Methods For Modern Rock Conservation
“Think about it. When was the last time you even saw a boulder?”
– Henry Kaiser (ge0logist and Onion expert)
The easy oil has been found. There are no more mega-fields. Costs up … prices up … economic stress … crises.
We have such certain knowledge from the smartest guys in many rooms: Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Richard Heinberg, Chris Skrebowski, Matthew Simmons, …. and Kenneth Deffeyes.
Oil output peaked on December 16, 2005, in case you did not know it, according to geologist Kenneth Deffeyes in his 2010 book When Oil Peaked, available at Amazon in hardcover for one penny (yes, one penny!).…