That High Dismissive Tone

My Father recently sent me a copy of "Oil in troubled waters: A survey of oil April 30th 2005" in The Economist. My Dad had scrawled on the top: "thought you might be interested they don't see oil running out soon." My initial thought was that I was grateful to my Father for his kind gesture. And, indeed, if the article was right--as I came to understand--we will be considerably better off than the "pessimists" and "pipsqueaks" assert. The tone of the articles--and there were five of them in this special survey--had that dismissive but incisive high magisterial tone. The articles were fair in that they gave equal air to the pessimists and the optimists view, however, in more than a few places their analysis of the data tended towards the dismissive and magisterial.

When I hear that dismissive and magisterial tone my ears perk up for I am instantly aware that for some reason that person believes that she is epistemically entitled to that attitude towards her subject. That means usually she knows what she is talking about or, at least, she believes she is . Maybe I too, after having learned what she knows, may be entitled to that attitude about the subject matter. And it sure would be nice to be able to take that attitude with respect to the catastrophe scenarios associated with peak oil.

The anonymous author has written 5 sections. One of them is called curiously, "The bottomless beer mug: Why the world is not running out of oil". The title is a clear reference to Colin Campbell's glass of guinness analogy. In this piece the tone was particularly facile. For instance, the graph of worldwide proven reserves in btrm is titled "Have your cake and eat it". Another shows us "Getting less thirsty". Petro-pessimists are described as those who author that "flood of gloomy books with such titles as "out of gas" and "the end of oil"." But the hubris of this writer does not become fully manifest until she begins making her case that we will sustain the level of output long past the peak by uses of new technology (like 4D seismic imaging and multilateral well drilling technologies). In a subsection devoted to petro-pessimism, the writer maintains that "the underlying assumption that the recoverable reserves are fixed might be wrong itself. A fatter straw could end up producing more oil both now and later."

The idea that reserves can grow is, with respect to a finite resource like oil, a ringing fallacy. There is the idea that abiotic or sequestered oil will refill the pockets of used-up wells and that we can extract that. There is evidence of this, but noone is claiming that that amount even approximates what will be needed. Some have challenged the hypothesis as outright absurd. See: http://fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100404_abiotic_oil.shtml"Smart" oil fields will not overcome this depletion. Matt Simmons in a recent talk at the Hudson Institute maintained that with newer technologies total percentage of actual extraction under the best case scenarios (new "fatter straws") can yield a marginal jump of about 15 points, bringing the total percentage up by only about 10 or 15 points. But that is with intensive capital investment, investment that is not happening even as The Economist admits.

Ah, here is the rub of the whole issue. Even under the best of foreseeable circumstances--assuming that newer technologies will be able to generate newer oil fields and continue to extract from declining fields--the cost of development of these resources will necessarily be reflected in the costs associated with oil. You can't just gesture in the direction of technology and expect a miracle. Its still going to cost at the pump.

The writer suffers from what Kunstler describes as 'organizational hubris'. And, indeed, it can only rest upon a predisposition latent in Reason itself, namely, to think that the future will always reflect the past. But, we must recall David Hume's discussion on the principle of sufficient reason, viz. that there is no rational reason why the future will resemble the past. See Kunstler's essay on this fallacy of reason: (link). There is a particularly pernicious American form of this that consists in the belief that technology will continue to save us and that we will prevail.

While earlier pieces had appeared in The Economist on peak oil in 2000, the tone was then even more dismissive, calling Campbell and his people, "a cabal of doomsdayers". At least there appears to be here and now a more serious assessment of the issue but it was not at all clear, even from the data that the writer adduced, that serious objections about the feasibility of maintaining cheap oil against the background of diminished discoveries and diminishing wells worlwide were addressed. I wondered what dinner club this gal was off to that she so abruptly ended her piece. Slick, slick, slick.