Mark Mills over at Real Clear Energy reports that The Oil Drum, a website devoted to the concept of ‘peak oil’ has stopped updating itself and will serve hereafter as an archive of old posts. As Mills notes:
But what peaked instead was the ability to argue that the era of oil, and hydrocarbons, was over.
Today we find the U.S. has become the world’s fastest growing oil & gas producer – on track to becoming a major energy exporter. (More on export implications here.) America is now a net exporter of refined products, gasoline and diesel, for the first time since 1949, and the world’s biggest natural gas producer. Businesses now strain against bureaucratic and political harnesses to be allowed to export natural gas. (Coal exports, by the way, have doubled.) The Energy Information Agency came out with yet another revision to world hydrocarbon resources; dramatically upwards. The International Energy Agency labels America a “new Middle East.”
The only debate now is over how fast hydrocarbon production can increase – or, for inveterate anti-hydrocarbon adherents, should be allowed to increase. Now environmentalists scramble not to promote peak theory, but to promote bans on using America’s productive shale fields lest a bevy of states look like, well, say Texas, and North Dakota with oil and gas gushing out — along with, one should note, a surplus of subsidy-free jobs and tax revenues.
Anyone who has read Julian Simon or, for that matter, has simply followed the track record of “eco-disaster” mongering since the 1960s, is not surprised. I still have my copies of “Silent Spring”, “The Population Bomb”, “Limits to Growth”, “The Coming Dark Age”, “The End of Affluence”, “The Closing Circle” and others, all of which I bought and read back in the 60s and early 70s. They are, in a word, bunk. Their predictions have all failed repeatedly, and vastly so. I’m a big fan of a clean environment, but it’s clear after observing the “environmental movement” for more than 40 years that the agenda of most of these people is social engineering and political control, and their own lifestyles often belie their professed concerns, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted. ..bruce..