In 1957, Tulsa celebrated Oklahoma’s golden anniversary of statehood by placing in a concrete vault under the county courthouse a host of mid-20th century artifacts, including a 16mm movie, a six-pack of Schlitz better, and a woman’s purse with bobby pins, lipstick, and a pack of cigarettes that retailed for 50 cents a pack.
The beer was packed into the trunk of the time capsule’s centerpiece: a spanking new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe. It was all to be unearthed in another 50 years, so the organizers included a commodity they figured might not be around in 2007: five quarts of motor oil and 10 gallons of gasoline.
For more than two generations, schoolchildren were assured by their science teachers, elected officials, and the media that the world’s supply of oil—the great fuel of America’s car culture, not to mention U.S. economic prosperity—was finite and would soon be exhausted.
This perception that we would run out of oil, and sooner rather than later, became more than a theory, one that went by the name “peak oil.” It became a kind of catechism. It was included in the prayer books of the environmental movement and incorporated into the legislative history and language of U.S. federal energy policy. It became an underlying basis for everything from Jimmy Carter’s admonition to turn down the nation’s thermostats, the enactment of 55-mile-per-hour speed limits, and federal mandates on gasoline standards for cars and trucks.
Today, the question is how policymakers should one react when the conventional wisdom is proven so spectacularly wrong, as is the case here.
Read more here........
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/09/28/whatever_happened_to_peak_oil_131909.html
The beer was packed into the trunk of the time capsule’s centerpiece: a spanking new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe. It was all to be unearthed in another 50 years, so the organizers included a commodity they figured might not be around in 2007: five quarts of motor oil and 10 gallons of gasoline.
For more than two generations, schoolchildren were assured by their science teachers, elected officials, and the media that the world’s supply of oil—the great fuel of America’s car culture, not to mention U.S. economic prosperity—was finite and would soon be exhausted.
This perception that we would run out of oil, and sooner rather than later, became more than a theory, one that went by the name “peak oil.” It became a kind of catechism. It was included in the prayer books of the environmental movement and incorporated into the legislative history and language of U.S. federal energy policy. It became an underlying basis for everything from Jimmy Carter’s admonition to turn down the nation’s thermostats, the enactment of 55-mile-per-hour speed limits, and federal mandates on gasoline standards for cars and trucks.
Today, the question is how policymakers should one react when the conventional wisdom is proven so spectacularly wrong, as is the case here.
Read more here........
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/09/28/whatever_happened_to_peak_oil_131909.html
