X-Message-Number: 27102
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 09:29:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: doomsaying
References: <>

In 1970 I bought a copy of "Population, Resources,
Environment" by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. This was a very
carefully researched, academic work by two people whose
credentials seemed impeccable. It was certainly a lot more
carefully written than most current warnings about Peak Oil.
I was certainly convinced, and prepared myself for a future
of economic catastrophe. I also started doing volunteer work
for Zero Population Growth, because Paul Ehrlich said that
nothing was more important. I wrote a bunch of literature for
ZPG--at which point I discovered how organizations of this
type falsify their own data, although this is another story.

Of course the Ehrlichs were utterly and completely wrong, in
almost every "fact," because they did not allow for human
innovation. Other doomsayers have made precisely the same
mistake.

Until very recently there has been virtually no incentive to
develop new forms of energy, because energy has been very
cheap. I had been hoping that gasoline would hit $4 per
gallon, since I believe this would be a psychological
threshold in the United States, and if the price were
sustained at that level, it would encourage serious thought
about alternatives, the most obvious and most primitive being
coal. (I am old enough to remember when *all* gas--not
gasoline, gas--in Great Britain was generated from coal,
before "natural gas" was extracted from beneath the North
Sea. US reserves of coal are very substantial.)

Many other alternatives suggest themselves, and will become
economic as soon as oil becomes genuinely scarce. I have no
idea why Mark Plus (who should really re-rename himself "Mark
Minus" at this point) takes such apparent pleasure in
worrying people with predictions of a future without liquid
nitrogen, but what I do know is that his predictions never
take true innovation into account, because, by definition,
true innovation occurs in unexpected ways, and no one can
take it into account.

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