[ED by PG: Comments are now turned on for this post, and I am repromoting it. Apologies--a setting was missed.]

This is a guest op-ed by Charles Hall and Nate Gagnon.

Dr. Charles Hall is a Systems Ecologist who has written seven books and 200 scholarly articles; Professor Hall teaches Systems Ecology and Geographical Modeling courses and workshops at SUNY-ESF and in many locations in Latin America. Nathan Gagnon is a graduate student in the Graduate Program in Environmental Sciences at the State Univ NY College of Environmental Science and Forestry; his interests are the changing EROI of global and US oil.

The recent front page article “Oil innovations pump new life into old wells” by Jad Mouawad (March 5 page 1) is dangerously misleading. The author would have us believe that technological innovations will increase the proportion of oil recoverable from known fields sufficiently to compensate for the dearth of new discoveries. It gives a false sense of security about our difficult oil situation based on a very selective interpretation of data.