Seems like just yesterday, the last time we were told that the apocalyptic exhaustion of the world's oil supply had arrived and that what few of us survived would soon be living in mud huts, eating whatever we could find living under rocks. (Why we weren't going to build homes from the rocks and grow food in the dirt was never quite explained. Apocalypses are like that.)
In fact, it was about 35 years ago. Respectable magazines ran articles describing how we might want to take one last, fond look at civilization. (In one sense, they were right: 35 years ago was about the time when common sense in our national discourse was packing its bags and preparing to head for parts unknown, to be replaced by feelings over fact and political correctness over evidence. Thus did one of the most useful aspects of civilization disappear.) Without oil, we were told, we were no better than the monkeys swinging in the trees, as soon we would find out.
It didn't work out that way, of course. The oil supply remained robust. We did endure times of shortage, as arose in 1974 and 1979, but those were political, not geological, in origin. They were based on the unhappy fact that more than three-quarters of the world's known oil reserves are owned and controlled by national governments rather than corporations. (Which right there ought to put a stop to any ideas that government can somehow "solve" the problem of high gasoline prices. From hurricanes to epidemics -- there seems to be no problem that cannot be made worse by government intervention!)
The experts who warned us a generation ago that the last drops of oil were issuing from the spigot, perhaps realizing that at some point their predictions will have to be right, have dusted them off and reissued them. In a deep and convincing article Reason magazine's science correspondent Ronald Bailey says they're . . . consistent:
The good news is that the peak oil doomsters are probably wrong that world oil production is about to decline forever. Most analysts believe that world petroleum supplies will meet projected demand at reasonable prices for at least another generation. The bad news is that much of the world’s oil reserves are in the custody of unstable and sometimes hostile regimes. But the oil producing nations would be the ultimate losers if they provoked an “oil crisis,” since that would spur industrialized countries to cut back on imports and develop alternative energy technologies.
Why are oil prices so high? The most basic economic theory, supply-and-demand, suggests that demand is such that the market will support the higher prices. That can be no surprise. Nor, sadly, should we be surprised that elected officials, from the president down through a particularly shameless handful of senators, are seeking to replace petroleum with snake oil, promising all manner of investigations and palliatives which will not and cannot solve the problem. The price of our oil is not set here, but by the countries from whom we purchase oil. The developing nations of the world are demanding more and more oil. The solution to the problem is to increase the supply.
Nor would increasing the supply be particularly difficult. There are vast, untapped resources that people who have never been there claim will cause environmental troubles were they to be harvested. These are most notably in a very small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. There is not the slightest speck of evidence suggesting that drilling for and pumping out the oil there would be of any harm to any plant or animal. Yet the government, posturing about the problem, cannot bring itself to do the one thing within its power to help: grant oil leases in ANWR. Add the United States to Bailey's list of nations unfriendly to our oil needs.
The article by Bailey is well worth reading. It's well worth considering, too, just why it is that your elected representatives will not let your country sell some of your oil -- to you. The answer is the thesis of Big Fat Liars and
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