Oil is a finite commodity, but does that matter?
(By the way, I took a course many years ago
called "Energy, Resources and Policy" or something
like that. It covered oil to orbiting solar satellites.)
We were taught there would be a serious global oil
crunch coming around 1990. The course was in 1977.)
-Stephen
====================================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrlich-Simon_bet
Beginning in the 1960s, an environmental trend which was broadly anti-industrial began to be a major feature of western political thought. Throughout the 1970s it became fashionable to predict general doom for western civilisation for a number of reasons. Concerns about over-use of natural resources were often cited in support of this prognostication, such as the Peak Oil issue. By the end of the 1970s it was common to hear extreme predictions of industrial collapse in a few years due to shortages of raw materials, followed by the fall of western civilisation.
Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990.
The wager
Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.
... Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.
========================================
More if you're still reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian
A cornucopian is someone who posits that there are few intractable natural limits to growth and believes the world can provide a practically limitless abundance of natural resources.
In the Peak Oil debate, cornucopians posit that rising prices make oil deposits which were previously considered too expensive to extract and produce become profitable, and also spurs the development of alternative fuels. Peak Oil critics of the Cornucopian view stress that liquid petroleum is a finite resource, and production cannot be increased above a set amount no matter how much demand increases, because of Hubbert's Peak.
(By the way, I took a course many years ago
called "Energy, Resources and Policy" or something
like that. It covered oil to orbiting solar satellites.)
We were taught there would be a serious global oil
crunch coming around 1990. The course was in 1977.)
-Stephen
====================================
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrlich-Simon_bet
Beginning in the 1960s, an environmental trend which was broadly anti-industrial began to be a major feature of western political thought. Throughout the 1970s it became fashionable to predict general doom for western civilisation for a number of reasons. Concerns about over-use of natural resources were often cited in support of this prognostication, such as the Peak Oil issue. By the end of the 1970s it was common to hear extreme predictions of industrial collapse in a few years due to shortages of raw materials, followed by the fall of western civilisation.
Julian L. Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered in a famous wager in 1980, betting on a mutually agreed upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990.
The wager
Simon had Ehrlich choose five of several commodity metals. Ehrlich chose 5 metals: copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. Simon bet that their prices would go down. Ehrlich bet they would go up.
... Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07 to settle the wager in Simon's favor.
========================================
More if you're still reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian
A cornucopian is someone who posits that there are few intractable natural limits to growth and believes the world can provide a practically limitless abundance of natural resources.
In the Peak Oil debate, cornucopians posit that rising prices make oil deposits which were previously considered too expensive to extract and produce become profitable, and also spurs the development of alternative fuels. Peak Oil critics of the Cornucopian view stress that liquid petroleum is a finite resource, and production cannot be increased above a set amount no matter how much demand increases, because of Hubbert's Peak.
