Author: aspo-usa

Daniel Yergin’s 2004 and 2005 Predictions for Oil Prices, Production and Exports – Three Strikes and You Are Out?
Daniel Yergin, whom the media have consistently designated as one of the world’s premier experts on energy matters–and who has a consistent track record of predicting higher oil production levels–has been very visible of late, especially with a full page essay in the Wall Street Journal, focused on why concerns about Peak Oil are misplaced.

The trouble with apocalypse is that most people have already seen it at the movie theater, watched it on television, read it in a book, or heard all about it from the pulpit. So inundated with the language of crisis, that we have become immune to it. From the perspective of the historian our age has been chock full of “great transformations.” And, it is, after all, the historian’s business to write about great change even if he or she has to invent some.

My friend, Rob Dietz, has reminded me about these words by Aldo Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” But when I mention the assorted causes of my internal bleeding to my wife and friends, they all look at me with disbelief and impatience. They do not feel the way I often do. What if their thinking is wiser and reflects what really can be done in a world overrun by seven billion people, who always want more than they have at any given moment and place? For most people on the Earth, “more” means safe water to drink, fresh food to eat, and a shelter with a cook stove and an outhouse. For the very few “more” means a $2.5 million watch and unlimited access to all conceivable resources to be used at will.