The Oil Drum | Matt Simmons on Bloomberg: Peak Oil is Now and Oil Is WAY Too Cheap

95 comments on Matt Simmons on Bloomberg: Peak Oil is Now and Oil Is WAY Too Cheap

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westexas on February 25, 2007 - 6:28pm

Note that Peter Huber is literally promising that we can increase our energy consumption--forever.

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Pitt the Elder on February 25, 2007 - 11:13pm

Note that Peter Huber is literally promising that we can increase our energy consumption--forever.

That he is wrong does not automatically make people who disagree with him right, and pointing out that some of the people who disagree with peak oilers are wrong does not make a compelling case that peak oilers are right.

In fact, if criticisms of peak oil arguments are answered with attacks on "cornucopians" - as seems to be the trend - then it gives the impression that those criticisms can not be effectively responded to. That is not a very encouraging impression to give of peak oilers (and is not, I think, necessarily true, either - there are reasonable responses to many of the criticisms I've seen raised, and it would reflect very much better on the peak oil community to develop those answers rather than to say "but the cornucopians are wrong!" and "you just don't get it!")

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slaphappy on February 26, 2007 - 12:36am

Best comment I've seen all day.

From what I can tell, the primary complaint against the "cornucopians" comes from the mistaken belief that world population will grow exponentially past 2050 or so (evidence does not support this) and that it will only be stopped by massive "bad stuff" like nuclear war or starvation, evidence does not support that either. If one is willing to accept the idea that population won't grow forever, then there is no reason why all resources must NECESSARILY be exhaused, and the cornucopians (as they are called) might be largely correct.

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Seth on February 26, 2007 - 1:45am

Sort of.

The "cornucopians"--or at least the serious ones who put their beliefs into empirical practice--are commonly known as the Ecological Modernization theorists. Their basic premises revolve around the Kuznet's Curve, which essentially posits that a country/society will denigrate its environment until it reaches a certain point of economic and technological development, at which point it will begin (for a variety of reasons) to reduce its ecological footprint.

The dominant counter position to this is found in neo-Marxist political economy theories, which include the "treadmill of production," the "metabolic rift," and O'Connor's "second contradiction of capitalism".

We have about 30 years of data to test the propositions of each major strand of theory (i.e. Ecological Modernization vs. Political Economy), and the evidence overwhelmingly undermines the EM crowd (i.e. nuanced cornucopians). Don't take my word for it though--I'm in the politcal economy camp--go out and search the literature and tell me what you find (again, one of the best overviews of the debate was published in "Organization & Environment", Vol. 17, Number 3--Sept. 2004).

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slaphappy on February 26, 2007 - 8:44am

Interesting, so who has the cleaner environment, the US or China? How about East or West Germany? Japan or India?

Doesn't seem so overwhelming to me, but I will take a look at the papers.

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Franz on February 26, 2007 - 9:32am

Interesting, so who has the cleaner environment, the US or China? How about East or West Germany? Japan or India?

Come on, you know that argument is totally bogus. For at least two of the pairs you have cited, one party is able to export most of its environmental degredation elsewhere. For example, I was struck recently when I re-read Diamond's account of forestry in Japan - for one or two milliseconds, until I remembered that they preserve their forests by logging native forests in my own country. Whatever you want to say about India, at least those people are destroying their own environment and not some distant one.

East Germany and West Germany? Same argument I think. West Germany was a major economic powerhouse, East Germany was a small nation of little world consequence except in the Olympics and the manufacture of funky little motorcycles (ah, my MZ250!) How much has the environment of the East been destroyed since the Wiedervereinegung? (the reunification - my apologies to all German speakers for mangling that word). This is a question where I bow to those who know (Expat?)

And China's environment is becoming ever more rapidly screwed since that country's integration into the capitalist system. However much of a nightmare it might have been in the past, it is worse now, and there is unlikely to be any salvation from the destruction as long as the Chinese economy is tied to manufacturing most of the world's goods (for the profit of foreign companies), and taking a large fraction of the world's rubbish.

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PeakPlus on February 26, 2007 - 10:36am

Almost right - Wiederverein i gung.
Cheers, Expat II

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PeakPlus on February 26, 2007 - 9:04am

Can you give me a link to that article or one that discusses the matter in full? Would be great!

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Dezakin on February 26, 2007 - 6:23pm

The "cornucopians"--or at least the serious ones who put their beliefs into empirical practice--are commonly known as the Ecological Modernization theorists. Their basic premises revolve around the Kuznet's Curve, which essentially posits that a country/society will denigrate its environment until it reaches a certain point of economic and technological development, at which point it will begin (for a variety of reasons) to reduce its ecological footprint.

Reducing the ecological footprint is good PR, but really its about reducing ecological dependance.

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slaphappy on February 28, 2007 - 9:18am

Also, you've watched too much nightly news, it's wrecked your ability to reason. This whole A vs. B thing just doesn't work. Just because I'm not a doomer doesn't make me a cornucopian. Even if I was a cornucopian, that doesn't make me an EM guy. It's not the case that either EM or whatever else must be correct, you're setting up a false choice.

The primary position of doomers is that unbounded population growth (which they think we have) automatically causes resource exhaustion. That would be true, if we had unbounded population growth, which we do not. Noting that they are wrong doesn't mean I think the EM crowd (whoever that might be) is right.

The worst mistakes come not from faulty logic, but from faulty premises. Put another way, it isn't what we don't know, but rather what we know for sure that just aint so.

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