You've Got to Do Somthing

Praying to the Idol

Oh, no! Another calamity is coming. Climate change is now passe, deja vu. People have got over all the tingly feelings of apprehension and dread. Copenhagen was a blast, but the sceptics are now running the show. The party's over.

But, on cue Richard Branson and fellow concerned citizens have discovered another apocalyptic threat. Peak oil. The good old Guardian's headline gets the terror tingles going again: Branson warns that oil crunch is coming within five years.

Chief prophet Branson really gets our attention when he says that it is going to be worse than the credit crunch. And like all card carrying prophets, he then turns to the West's god and intercedes earnestly for its help.

Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years. . . .

"The next five years will see us face another crunch – the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well," Branson will say.

"Our message to government and businesses is clear: act," he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. "Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did."

Oh, goody. The gummint will save us. The prophet has prayed to the ministers of the idol. "Most glorious gummint--in the past when we have called upon you for help in our troubles, you have heard and answered. You have always delivered us from our desperate needs. Dearest lord, you have passed laws, made regulations, taxed, bestowed grants. You have always saved us. Now, we need your mercy again. Peak oil will overwhelm us. A short five years and it will be upon us. Oh, lord hear! Oh, lord, act! We beseech you, do not delay. Deliver us from our darkest enemies."

Those enemies are devious blasphemers: they serve another god. They conspire to hide the threat until it is too late.They are breeding an army in their caverns--and army which has but one purpose--to destroy our way of life.

Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called "peak oil" to avoid panic on the stock markets.

Ministers have until now refused to take predictions of oil droughts seriously, preferring to side with oil companies such as BP and ExxonMobil and crude producers such as the Saudis, who insist there is nothing to worry about.

What on earth is "peak oil"? It is an artificially manufactured crisis. But it has its uses. It shows once again that the West has become a worshipper of governments while its peoples live in profound, self-willed ignorance. Ah, oil. The rumours of your death are greatly exaggerated, but they give us the willies, and we like that. And fears of your death give us a reason to evoke our god with passion, urgency, and great pride. We like that too.

The canard of peak oil compares daily world consumption with known oil reserves. Sooner or later the oil is all going to be used up. As that happens the price of oil will explode, leading to economic dislocations fearful to contemplate. Act, oh government. Act now. Save us.

The direction of the price of oil is a very useful thing. It tells us whether demand for oil is exceeding supply, or the reverse. But peak oil theories bring in another assumption: a freeze frame view, which declares that the amount of energy in the world is known, fixed, finite--and it is what we know now. So, according to this pagan world-view when the price of oil is rising, it tells us that its supply, which is fixed, is coming to an end.

Peak oil doomsaying is not new. Consider the following:

We don't just figure out how to use resources more efficiently. We discover, and create, fundamentlly different types of resources. A every stage, some doomster can do a little math and predict that the current resource will soon be depleted. And he will almost be right. In fact, people in every era of recorded history have worried about running out of whatever resource they're using at the time. England began to experience lumber shortages in the 1600's. They got so severe that in the 1700's that the island came close to being stripped of its forests. People feared a complete loss of wood. So what happened? Wood became too costly to use as fuel in most places. That encouraged innovation with other resources like coal. The English eventually switched to coal, and over time, English forests returned.

The process was hardly inevitable. It involved all manner of effort and ingenuity, usually brought on by rising scarcity, which led to rising prices. Because of the role of prices, scarcity and crativity conspire to get us to the next level, to the next resource, or the next technological breakthrough. . . .

So, after the switch to coal, did all of England rest easy and quit worrying about running out of resources? Hardly. In 1865, a prominent social scientist named W. Stanley Jevons wrote a book proving to his satisfaction that England would soon exhaust its coal, and the economy would grind to a halt. It didn't happen, and there's still plenty of coal available more than 140 years later. [Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed and God, (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p.190]

Richard Branson is channelling the ghost of W. Stanley Jevons. He will go the way of Jevons, being consigned to the dustbin of history, nothing more than an eccentric curio. Sadly, however, it is likely that his government god will endure for the foreseeable future and continue to do great damage,being dumb enough to respond to the intercessions of eccentric prophets like Branson.

Peak oil is a pseudo-threat, unless government "acts" in response to the wailings of chicken littles and makes it real. As Sheik Yamani astutely observed, "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."

And there is an additional, very important consideration. "Peak oil" dreads are always based upon known oil reserves. Peak oil is never based upon how much oil actually exists in the world. No-one knows how much oil actually exists. It is costly to find that out--very, very costly. As Thomas Sowell astutely observed, "How much of any given natural resource is know to exist depends on how much is costs to know." (Richards, p. 187) Crudely put, if the price of oil were to rise, we would soon discover more of it.

Long before oil is exhausted, superior sources of energy will have been exploited to take its place. The last thing we need is for governments to "act". But as the proverb says, never get between a fool and his folly; it would be better to hug a bear robbed of its cubs.