A Maggie's Farm twofer - Peak Oil and Malthusian Predictions
Hat tip to
Maggie's Farm for these two links:
From
Dust My Broom comes this bit of Malthusian cheerfulness:
The science of gloom
A list of past Earth Day predictions from the Washington Policy Center (h/t Tim Blair):
�...civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,� biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.
� By 1995, �...somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.� Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.
� Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor �...the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,� Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.
� The world will be �...eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,� Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.
� �We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,� biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.
� �Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,� The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.
� �By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...� Life magazine, January 1970.
And that was only about half of the list...
Brings to mind the old truism that there is more money to be made fixing imaginary problems than there is fixing real ones.
Item two is from
The Daily Standard:
Peak Oil Panic
There's plenty of oil for everybody.
There are more misunderstandings about the oil market than perhaps any other. In America, drivers are fuming and politicians are demanding explanations because gasoline has hit about $3.50 per gallon. That's less than half the price being paid by motorists in most industrialized countries. High to us is low to them. Then there are the oil refiners. Relative to the $120 price of crude, $3.50 for gasoline is so cheap that their margins have virtually disappeared. So "high" in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Oxford, Mississippi is "low" in similarly named cities in the UK, and "high" for motorists is "low" for refiners. It depends where you live, and at which point in the supply chain you find yourself.
But assume that prices are "high", which indeed they are by historic standards. We are mistaken when we think these "high" prices are causing inflation. High oil prices can force consumers to spend more on gasoline and heating oil, at the expense of other purchases. Ask any suffering restaurateur or clothes retailer if you doubt that. But high oil prices can't trigger a rise in the general price level--inflation--unless someone pumps money into the economy so that, to use an oldie but goodie from the economists' lexicon, there is more money chasing the same amount of goods. If you want something to blame for inflation, don't look at oil prices, look at the billions the Federal Reserve Board's monetary policy gurus and their confederates at the U.S. Treasury are pouring into the economic system.
The cost to taxpayers of saving the financial services sector from ruin is not only making good any collateral the Fed has accepted that might prove worthless, but the run-up in the rate of inflation.
Another myth: we are running out of oil. According to WorldPublicOpinion.org "majorities in 15 of the 16 nations surveyed around the world think that oil is running out. . . . Only 22 percent on average believe that 'enough oil will be found so that it can remain a primary source of energy for the foreseeable future'." Those majorities who think we are running out of oil include 76 percent of the American citizens polled. Luckily, they are wrong.
Good stuff...
Posted by DaveH at April 29, 2008 2:38 PM