This essay, published twelve years ago in PERC Reports (“the magazine of free market environmentalism”), challenged the then-popular theory that oil production would inexorably reach a maximum and decline thereafter. What would become the U.S. and global shale oil and shale gas boom was just getting started.

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“This time it’s for real,” says the cover story of the June 2004 issue of National Geographic. “We’re at the beginning of the end of cheap oil.”

Books and articles written by geologists, environmentalists, and others regularly announce a new era of increasing oil scarcity. 1 Today’s resurrected hero of the depletionists is M. King Hubbert (1903-1989), a Shell Oil Company geologist who a half-century ago presented a bellshaped curve depicting oil production over time. But the theory of a little-known twentieth century economist, Erich Zimmermann, suggests this is unsound.…

The Wall Street Journal is the nation’s most widely read and respected newspaper. It is the ‘newspaper of record’ (not the New York Times) in regard to business and has long been sound on economic public policy matters.

I reproduce two letters I have had published in the WSJ: one recent, one five years old. I believe that time will not significantly diminish either my past or present opinions because they are grounded in energy and climate reality, not hyperbole.

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“Doubts on Climate Are Reasonable” (May 5, 2010)

Kerry Emanuel’s letter of April 28 illustrates some of the major points of Richard Lindzen’s op-ed, “Climate Science in Denial” (April 22). It is bad enough that Mr. Emanuel refers to major misrepresentations, errors and unethical behavior among scientists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as “minor errors.”…

Julian Simon’s The Economics of Population Growth (1977) was hailed as a “path-breaking work” that offered “a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense” (Joseph Spengler, quoted in Simon, 2002: 256).

The overused term “paradigm” must be applied with caution, however, because few new ideas really create paradigms, and paradigms can be wrong. Also, contra Kuhn, there are examples of science cumulatively approaching the truth short of revolution (Weinberg). Still, Simon put together the parts of an alternative worldview that continues to penetrate its way into the scientific orthodoxy, particularly in economics (Bradley, 2000: 19–20).

Simon’s extraordinary science (in Kuhnian terms) reached two major conclusions:

(1) a growing population can improve virtually all environmental welfare indicators; and

(2) scarcity measures of mineral (“depletable”) resources are not qualitatively different from that of other economic goods.…

“Compared to Ford and Carter, the SPR experienced a ‘Reagan Revo­lution’ – although hardly of the free-market variety. Two reasons explained Reagan’s bullish SPR [buy and fill] policy. First, the reserve was the centerpiece of Reagan’s ‘free market’ energy policy, which precluded the need for stand­by price and allocation controls to deal with future emergencies. Second, the reserve was an instrument of foreign policy should U.S. intervention and confrontation lead to re­prisals by oil-exporting countries as it had in 1973 and 1979.”

“With the Reagan acceleration at a time of record crude prices, the reserve program became a major cost item, and with budget deficit problems, a group of pro­posals came forth to reduce cost while maintaining fill rates. Global settlements with refiners accused of product price overcharges was one tapped source.”…