Are we running on Empty?

Fire of Liberty

Maybe the folks in academia, Hollywood and in the MSM should take a gander at Max Schulz's piece on oil over at TCS Daily before they keep on promoting their nutty Malthusian projections that we're about to drain Earth of its oil. According to Schulz, we shouldn't be fretting about running out of Uncle Jed's "Texas Tea," due to the advent of better technologies that allow us to explore and retrieve oil from older drill sites, find more oil fields as well as the ability to extract oil from things like oil sands (Canada) and Shell(Colorado). All in all, we'll never run out of sources of energy because man will always find alternatives or improve technology to meet our demands. I recommend you read the whole piece but here's a sample:

Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we're running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation's leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s. President Carter famously predicted in 1977 that unless we made drastic cuts in our oil consumption, "Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil — from any country, at any acceptable price." And so it goes today, where a slew of books and Web sites make fantastic claims about dwindling supplies of crude.

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.

If you want to read more on this argument, I suggest you check out The Bottomless Well by the Manhattan Institute scholars Peter W. Huber and Mark P. Mills. Pretty good read.