George Monbiot has written a delightfully hysterical account of the religious right’s influence on American foreign policy, standard issue for the muesli-eating snobs who go to Guardian breakfasts to bask in their supremacy to cowboy America, but I much prefer Mark Steyn’s account of the influence of bonker-mindedeness on the Left:
In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
In 1972, in their influential landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States (incredible as it may seem), confidently predicted that “we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”
Now, in 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled.
Happy Earth Day, everyone.
On the other hand, it is reasonable to believe that world oil production is about to peak (http://www.telepocalypse.net/archives/000352.html). The prediction is based on the same methodology that successfully predicted the peak in US production in the 1970s. Not an “end of the world we’re about to run out of oil”, but does indicate exploding demand in India and China is likely to be checked by the economics of fairly static supply. There may be 150 years of oil left, but that doesn’t mean it can be extracted at current prices.
Oil production peaked in the US in the 70s because of a world-wide glut and corresponding price cuts. As prices go up, it becomes economical to extract from oil shale and all that sort of nonsense.
Personally, I’d rather have fuel cells, but they’re still not economical.