The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming
The Myth of the Oil Crisis: Overcoming the Challenges of Depletion, Geopolitics, and Global Warming – Review
[...] A deadly myth has newly re-emerged: that oil is running out’, that total production will soon peak and enter inevitable decline. What is the good response to peak oil’ – to attempt energy self-sufficiency, or to take military management of oil currently producing regions before the Chinese or Russians get there? The current great energy prices appear from a long episode of small prices and under-investment, itself the crop of the analysis of global energy relationships in the oil crises of 1973-4 and 1978-80. Contrary to vocal peak oil’ claims, great prices are not due to a lack of resources in the finely ground. There remains vast potential around the world for rapidly increasing recovery from free fields, discovering original oil, as recently in deepwater Brazil, or in the largely untouched US offshore, and for unconventional’ sources such as Canada’s famous oil sands’, biofuels, fake fuels from natural gas and coal, and others. Ideas about possibly forestalling an oil crisis by energy independence’, or by armed action, are therefore mistaken. Indeed, such solutions’ are likely to create the crisis they take to mitigate. Energy independence’ for the United States was touted by Nixon in 1974, by Ford in 1975, by Carter in 1977, by Reagan in 1981, by Bush Senior in 199