Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last?

New at Reason: Ron Bailey gives 'em hell at the House of Representatives.

Comments

[JD]

Corvid: I agree with your sentiments, but I'd like to offer a slightly different view. We probably never will run out of oil (or whatever): not because it's inexhaustible, but because it will stop mattering at some point. We used to use wood for fuel. This has largely stopped, but not because we ran out of trees. We used peat moss for fuel, and stopped, but there's still peat moss left in the world. We used whale oil, and stopped, but it was before we'd killed off every last whale in the world.

When the supply of a resource becomes limited but the demand remains the same, the price goes up. This encourages the use of alternative resources, as well as research into new sources and resources. Long before the last tree has been cut down, it's become more efficient to use something else. In the end, humans don't care about oil or anything in particular, they care about energy. And that is unlimited.

Remember, one hundred years ago uranium was a useless geological curiosity. Two hundred years ago, no one was drilling for petroleum. People complaining today that we're going to run out of oil should rightfully look as silly as someone from 1700 complaining that the world will soon run out of peat moss.

[fredH]

For another example of what JD is talking about, take that alleged 14-year supply of silver. About 90% of the market for silver is photo film and photo paper. The sale of digital cameras has now surpassed the sale of film cameras. Eastman has already announced that they are quitting the film business. My prediction: in ten years the film market will bear the same relationship to the total photography market as the artist's oil paint market bears now to the total paint market - it will be an insignificant little niche. Silver will be so cheap that we'll be making coins from it again.

[Jean Bart]

Someone needs to read Julian Simon. 🙂

Oh, and Say.

[Russ D]

Mr Bailey, I would gladly pay you a large fee if you would bore them...to death.

[Larry]

Oh if science only had the same respect as sports. Every time I surfed past the Superbowl a commentator was saying something like, "Joe holds the record for left-handed interceptions inside the ten yard line during full moons."

Picture it: "Doctor Joe (Ph.D.) has an earned run average of..."

[John Kluge]

This testimony proves that being leftist means never having to say you are sorry. These people have been spectacularly wrong in every prediction they have made for the last 40 years, yet the doom business continues in full bloom today. The reason is that environmentalism has ceased to be science and become a religion.

[nobody]

"...environmentalism has ceased to be science and become a religion."

Also, evolution has failed to eradicate stupidity.

[Mark Anderson]

"People complaining today that we're going to run out of oil should rightfully look as silly as someone from 1700 complaining that the world will soon run out of peat moss."

That's reassuring. I guess all those people saying we are going to run out of oil are just plain stupid. Hey, maybe my car can run on stupidity and we will all be OK. Was there a huge peat moss subsidy discouraging innovation?

[Corvid]

JD wrote:

When the supply of a resource becomes limited but the demand remains the same, the price goes up. This encourages the use of alternative resources, as well as research into new sources and resources.

I agree. But far too often, I see the science used to debunk eco-hysteria turn into its own form of hysteria, one that equates alternative fuels with communism and scoffs at even the simplest efforts to make energy companies take responsibility for the pollution they create. And I worry a bit about the viability of the market mechanism in a system where fossil-fuel companies are supported (if not subsidized outright) by the government. That doesn't seem like much of a free market to me.

[Jason Ligon]

"I guess all those people saying we are going to run out of oil are just plain stupid. Hey, maybe my car can run on stupidity and we will all be OK."

Heh. The Perpetual Motion Machine Redux.

[nobody]

Mark A,

The point is: cars of the near future will not need gasoline (from oil). Oil will not run out because its value as a commodity will have been greatly diminished by newer methods of energy conversion. Just like whale oil as a lighting source was replaced first by petroleum oil, then electricity.

Does this help?

PS
Being stupid isn't a crime. But your sarcasm needs work.

[dlo]

"one that equates alternative fuels with communism "

Which reminded me of the crackdown the Brits made on people using old cooking oil as petrol. These innovators were breaking the law by avoiding taxes, even though they weren't using the product that was taxed anyway.

[Mark Anderson]

Nobody,
What I (and Corvid) are trying to say is that oil and auto industry subsidies along with this environmentalists = incompetent, attention grabbing, loonies, is not hurting innovation in energy production.

PS. Stupidy isn't a crime, you are correct about that. yep, and my sarcasm is not that good. Right on! Keep em coming!

[JD]

Mark Anderson asks "Was there a huge peat moss subsidy discouraging innovation?" I dunno, but there might have been - look up the Corn Laws (http://www.victorianweb.org/history/cornlaws1.html) and Frederic Bastiat's "Candlemaker's Petition" (http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html). Subsidies and protectionist legislation aren't so new. Don't get me wrong - I'm entirely against subsidies, and I think they do slow down the adoption of new technologies. But I think that in the long run, they're not going to make that much difference. Our government can subsidize things, but it can't magic up resources out of thin air, nor can it make the whole rest of the world play along. Sooner or later reality will overtake them. (You know, the older I get, the more I feel like a historical materialist. It's a strange feeling.)

[joe]

Our society is much more energy intensive than during the days when peat moss or whale oil were popular. The rising oil prices you welcome so glibly would cause much more economic dislocation than shortages of those products would have in their own day. Most Americans would lose their ability to put food on the table if oil became cost prohibitive. 100 years ago, they would have just gone to bed earlier if the whale oil ran out.

[Shady O'Grady]

So...Where there any questions?

[Ron Hardin]

> As Harvard University demographer Nicholas Eberstadt puts it: "Global population increased not because people started breeding like rabbits, but because they stopped dying like flies."

A quibble, but both rabbits and flies breed like rabbits and die like flies.

[Overtime]

You said all that in five minutes?

[Ron Bailey]

You've gotten a preview--I'm actually giving the testimony at 2 pm EST. If there are any interesing questions, I pass them along.

And no, I will not be saying all that in 5 minutes--that's the written version. The oral version is just 2 and half pages. Wouldn't want to bore our hardworking Congresspeople with too much information, would we?

[Corvid]

I'm against resource hysteria. But I'm just as suspicious of people who say "Relax, we'll never run out of oil, it's as plentiful as rain and chock full of nutrition" as I am of people who say "We're running out of oil tomorrow! The world is doomed! Run for the hills!"

[Overtime]

Ron,
I suspect their eyes will glaze over regardless of the length, but good luck.

[alkali]

JD writes:

When the supply of a resource becomes limited but the demand remains the same, the price goes up.

That assumes that the resource in question is a commodity, i.e., something that can be bought or sold. That the ozone layer is being depleted does not make it more expensive to the consumer to use chemicals that deplete the ozone layer.

[Sam]

I suppose it's good to have a place for people to expend their verbal energies, that way they don't have to irritate friends, families, and neighbors so much.

I had a thought recently, people buy into doomsaying because they are naturally pessimitic, and perhaps others of us are just optimistic.

I've yet to see any dicsussion that changes minds, especially in the eco-doom debate.

I guess if you are a pessimist, it's nice to have reasons to back up your pessimism.