Which Perpetually Fails to Eventuate
Crises sell newspapers and provide political impetus. Thus both the press and the political class benefit from crises. One such has been the perpetual pending shortage of fossil fuels:
Awash in fossil fuels
By George F. Will
The Washington Post…in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more [oil] per day than all other U.S. wells combined.
Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies. Repeatedly.
Let that sink in for a bit..
In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said that U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said that the world had 13 years’ worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought, and the postwar boom was fueled. In 1951 Interior reported that the world had . . . 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world’s proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped, and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, scold in chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind “could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.” Since then the world has consumed three times more oil than was then in the world’s proven reserves.
Just how many times do these doom sayers get to call the end of the world as we know it before they lose all credibility?
When added to the increasing evidence that AGW appears to have been a deliberate scientific fraud, and that elements of the Political Class have been milking the issue, it gives one pause to reflect…
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