I am considered a leading critic of peak oil, the belief that oil production has peaked, is peaking, or will peak soon. I am a resource optimist in the Julian Simon tradition and believe that resourceship allows so-called depletable resources to expand, refuting the fixity/depletion mindset.

This said, I am empirically oriented. So let’s study and debate the facts, while remembering the record of peak-oil forecasts from the beginning to the present.

For my optimist/resourceship/expansionist position, I get slammed a good bit, such as by Joe Romm and by Gabriel Rotello at the Huffington Post (but also supported there by Raymond Learsay).  I mostly take the fuss, which is two parts emotionalism to one part intellectual argument.

But when David Hughes of the Post Carbon Institute published a piece calling a New York Times story “inaccurate, misleading and unhelpful ‘journalism’” I thought to add a comment.…

Although smart phones and computers make it easier to remember, last month Americans endured the semi-annual hassle of changing their clocks an hour. “Daylight Saving Time” (DST) was originally started during World War I to allegedly save energy. Jimmy Carter gave it to us in peacetime as part of his National Energy Plan. In practice, DST causes needless headaches—and even heart attacks!—and arguably doesn’t even save energy.

Chalk it up to yet another failed government intervention.

 The Hubris of DST

Joe Romm is not afraid to recommend society-changing government intervention in order to achieve a conservation goal, and he proposes drastic carbon legislation to prevent what he sees as “hell and high water.” Yet even this central planner hit the nail on the head when he complained: “You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course.…

Last Wednesday, November 17, 2010, the Subcommittee on Energy & Environment of the Committee on Science and Technology of the U. S. House of Representatives held a hearing on climate change titled “A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response.” In a clear deference to the incoming make-up of the House, there were a relatively high number of panelists that were invited by the sitting minority, which made this hearing more “rational” and fascinating that than most subcommittee hearings in some time.

The Republican invitees were Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels, and Judith Curry.

The first two are stalwarts of the let’s-just-hold-on-a-minute view of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. And, true to form, at the hearing each presented compelling evidence as to why anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions might not rapidly push up global temperature—not now, nor in the future.…

“One of the keystones of the Climate Change alarmist movement was its audacious attempt to create a functioning market by monetizing the atmospheric gas known as CO2…. Certainly, gaming the system has always been at the top on the agenda of the new green eco-trader.”

– Patrick Henningsen, “The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange,” 21st Century Wire, August 28, 2010.

We were tipped off by the August 28th headline, “The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange,” by Patrick Henningsen, editor of 21^st Century Wire. And now it is official as reported by Chicago Business, Fox News , and Crain’s Chicago Business (sub. required): the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) is dead. Trading in carbon-dioxide (CO2) emission contracts at CCX has basically ceased with member emissions-reduction agreements expiring at the end of the year.…