Category: Science

Peak Oil

I scared a member off of Liberty List (a Yahoo!Group I once moderated) today by posting the following in response to his query,

What do you think of Peak Oil?

If such a thing did occur (sudden collapse of the economy due to lack of oil) there wouldn’t be much left that is worth living for, much less investing in. Thankfully, there are replacements for natural oil that are making headway in the marketplace. Biodiesel is one example. 

When I first stumbled across the doom and gloom mantra being preached by modern ‘environmentalists’ (I was recycling when recycling wasn’t cool, BTW. I don’t think much of today’s crop) I did some research into the subject of shortages and what has happened through history when they occurred. 

The one that seemed most similar was the period when we shifted from whale oil to crude oil (the IMHO misnomered ‘fossil fuel’) there were similar predictions of doom and gloom, none of which came to pass because the markets simply shifted to crude oil.
I was unable to track down the articles I originally referenced for these facts, they have been covered up by thousands of repetitive articles on ‘Peak Oil’. That fact says more than any number of historical links. It’s the ‘in’ idea of the moment, and that’s all they are talking about. But it isn’t convincing to me.

To quote Steven Levitt:

What most of these doomsday scenarios have gotten wrong is the fundamental idea of economics: people respond to incentives. If the price of a good goes up, people demand less of it, the companies that make it figure out how to make more of it, and everyone tries to figure out how to produce substitutes for it. Add to that the march of technological innovation (like the green revolution, birth control, etc.). The end result: markets figure out how to deal with problems of supply and demand.

Freakonomics: “Peak Oil”:Welcome to the Media’s New Version of Shark Attacks

This observation sums it all up for me. I just don’t have time to contemplate end of the world scenarios, I guess. And the guy bailed on the whole group after I posted that. Do you think I was coming on too strong?

Postscript

Query answered. No, I was not coming on too strong. People want to believe that fantasies can occur in the real world:

Grand Conspiratorial Fantasies

…and it is someone’s task to relieve them of this misunderstanding. It might as well be me.

The Cost of Manned Spaceflight

It is today that we remember and honor the crews of Apollo 1 and Challenger. They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives and service to their country and for all mankind. Their dedication and devotion to the exploration of space was an inspiration to each of us, and still motivates people around the world to achieve great things in service to others. As we orbit the Earth, we will join the entire NASA family for a moment of silence in their memory. Our thoughts and prayers go to their families as well.

STS-107 commander Rick Husband

I saved this quote on the day it was uttered by Rick Husband. I’m backdating this blog entry to the day he said it. I put it into a calendar entry that I made to remind me of the anniversary of the Challenger disaster. I made one for the Apollo 1 disaster at the same time, making note of the names of the three astronauts that died that day.

I remember watching the Moon landings on our black and white television in the little wood paneled room next to the kitchen, in that house in Leoti that I still think of as home, even though that place hasn’t existed for about 35 years. I remember it as clearly as anyone can remember something that recurs to them time and again over the span of decades; which is another way of saying, I probably have invented most of the details of what I remember, but I know that I watched the events of the Apollo program unfold on television in breathless anticipation. I’m sure I watched the news the day that Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom died, and I’m sure I cried at the news.

I probably cried as much as the day that I watched the space shuttle Challenger disappear into that infamous ball of smoke that nearly every person alive can probably picture just by reading the word Challenger. I didn’t watch it live. I know that much. I was out driving in my car that day with some of my friends, and we heard it on the radio. When we got back to the house and watched the news, that is when we finally saw the horror that most of us remember from that day. I wrote an article for the blog on the thirtieth anniversary:

Challenger 30 Years Later

A gushing, emotional piece that I desperately want to rewrite but refuse to touch because those were the emotions that motivated me that day to write it. The emotions that motivated me to put the events on my calendar. The emotions that continue to motivate me to mark the anniversaries with a moment of silence even to this day. In four days Rick Husband and his crew would fall victim to the same human errors that caused the deaths of the Apollo 1 and Challenger crews. That is the real tragedy of the words he uttered that day.

Featured image: arstechnica.com