Peak Oil Denial: Abundant Nonsense 9

We don’t like bad news, particularly when it has very long term implications. Individually and collectively we tend to slip into denial mode, focus on diversions, become numbed to the reality of the situation, cling to anyone willing to assure us it just ain’t so, that things are going to get better. You can’t live your life in crisis mode.
We have, in recent decades, turned this into a political institution; the denial industry. The primary objective of the denial industry is not clarity but rather to create confusion and conflict in the minds of the public by creating the impression that there are legitimate differences of opinion between experts and scientists. It is a strategy honed and perfected around the issue of smoking, a strategy they have continued to use, often with the same players, on issue after issue and now dominating the debate over global warming and peak oil.
But it is a generational culture shift that has facilitated the success of the denial industry. With the growth in accessible information through the media, the internet, cell phones and more, people have abandoned seeking answers to their questions through independent thought and instead turn to various media for those answers. They have abdicated to others the right to tell them how and what they should think, to define truth. It has been a key part of the technological dumbing down of society, nowhere more obviously than in North America. [1]

This is a continuation* of my discussion of yet another article by Robert Bradley attempting to again debunk the concept of peak oil and its certain impact on our future. [Links and citations can be found in Mr. Bradley’s article, from which quotes and comments below are taken.]

His purpose:

Given the upheaval in ‘official’ or ‘mainstream’ thinking, it is worthy to look back at the intellectuals who bucked the (old) orthodoxy and were ridiculed for seeing minerals, and oil in particular, as an expanding resource, not a fixed, depleting one. This post looks at M. A. Adelman….
[I]n the field of petroleum, MIT economist M. A. Adelman reigns triumphant. Here are some quotations from his writings from previous decades that have come of age.

COMING OF AGE TO WHAT END?

Let’s continue with a few related Adelman quotes cited by Bradley, who did not offer any accompanying comments or context. Apparently he’s satisfied that the quotes on their own serve the purpose of debunking peak oil. If only….

Oil and other minerals will never be exhausted. If and when consumers will not pay enough to induce investment in new reserves and capacity, the producing industry will dwindle and disappear. Nobody will ever know, or even want to know, how much is still in the ground. Only cost and price matter.

‘Is there enough oil and gas in the world’ is a nonsense question and has yielded many a foolish answer. In fact, we shall never know our endowment in fluid hydrocarbons. It is trivial that they are limited because the earth itself is limited. Long before we get to the end of these resources, we shall have ceased to use them, either because the cost has become so impossibly high or because a better and cheaper source of heat has been found.

[We] ignore these far-off possibilities and deal only with shale oil, tar sands, coal, and to a minor and dispensable extent, uranium. The only difference between oil and these other combustibles is that oil is cheaper to extract and use. When and as it becomes more expensive, people will give over the search for it and we shall never get to the end of the stock of oil. In that real sense oil is inexhaustible.

MISDIRECTION AS A STRATEGY

A variation on the same, tired right-wing meme about “running out of oil.” No credible advocate of peak oil and its challenges makes the claim, but by alleging that we do, deniers are then able to offer up a carefully-crafted nugget of truth about massive, vast this’s or thats and thus (apparently) debunk the entire concept with just a few words. If facts don’t matter, then it is a great strategy!

So the first of those three quotes above is irrelevant—nothing more than stating the obvious. The second and third are no less irrelevant.

We’re not anywhere near close to figuring out what Plan B might be for providing heat on a broad, cost-efficient, effective, easily supplied, and easily-transitioned-to scale. It’s going to be that much more challenging to provide that Plan B when those in the know don’t share what they know with those who don’t know….Self-serving statements and actions carry a cost. The consequences may not play out for some time to come, but reality can be ignored only for so long.

To explain the price of oil, we must discard all assumptions of a fixed stock and an inevitable long-run price rise and rule out nothing a priori. Whether scarcity has been or is increasing is a question of fact.

Quite true, of course. But cherry-picking some facts to suit an ideological and self-serving narrative is fine and dandy if educating the public is not high on your list of priorities. To that misleading end, offering up partially-true nuggets of facts about the massive this or that resource without providing definitions or context can (and does) skew the public’s understanding about the energy supply challenges ahead.

Without the proper—full—set of facts about the realities of supply and production, the public continues to be lulled into a false sense of assurance that we can just merrily roll along with Business as Usual, crossing off “energy supply problems” and its assorted components and concerns … until reality dictates otherwise.

But why plan ahead, Right?

One more on the way….

Peak Oil Matters