The Outlook for Energy

Ever since Col. Drake discovered oil in Pennsylvania back in 1859 people have been solemnly forecasting that oil is about to run out.

They forecast it back in the 1860s, and they forecast it just before they discovered oil in Texas. Now the current fad is “peak oil,” the idea that we just passed by the peak in oil production and that it is downhill from now on.

Maybe they are right. But it really doesn’t matter.

Actually, the forecast that we are running out of energy goes back even before the oil age. In the early nineteenth century they were worrying about the wood energy crisis in Britain. The iron smelting industry was cutting down all the trees to melt iron, and everyone knew that they would soon run out of energy. Then they discovered coal in Newcastle.

In TCSDaily, Max Schulz does a good job of showing why the peak oil hypothesis has the whole problem upside down.

The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it.

Leave aside that extraction technology is always improving. Leave aside that there is a ton of coal out there, and then there is nuclear.

In a hundred years or less we could be erecting solar panels in space and bringing the energy back to the earth by microwave or down the umbilical chords of space elevators.

Evergy is not a question of finite resources. It is a question of human ingenuity.

And what, you might ask, is really real? Material resources or human ideas? The truth is that we just don’t know.