Oliepiek weer uitgesteld

Hoe vaak is niet voorspeld dat de olieproductie in de nabije toekomst zal gaan dalen wegens uitputting van de voorraden. Maar steeds weer blijkt dat moment naar de verdere toekomst te verschuiven. Een aantal van onze groene vrienden klagen daarover omdat daardoor de legitimatie van een aantal van hun prioriteiten wordt ondermijnd. George Montbiot is daar één van.

Onder de titel, 'It's a disaster that 'peak oil' is not a disaster', schreef Ivo Vegter:

For regular entertainment, look no further than George Monbiot, the one-time green-leftie who is building a reputation as a master of the candid volte face. Having fallen in love with nuclear power after Fukushima, he has now been convinced that “the facts have changed” on peak oil. But that, he says, is a “disaster for humanity”.

“The facts have changed, now we must change too,” declared George Monbiot, in a recent op-ed for the Guardian, headlined: “We were wrong on peak oil. There's enough to fry us all”.
 
That the facts have changed is news to those of us who never believed that the world is running out of resources. To Monbiot and his fellow-alarmists, however, rising prices were a sign of impending doom. It proved that scarcity was on the rise, and therefore showed that the oil would soon dry up.
 
The error of the peak oil alarmists was not understanding that the cure for high prices is high prices. When prices rise, this may indeed signal scarcity, but if so, it also provides a financial incentive to throw investment, ingenuity and effort at the problem. Moreover, a high price for one commodity makes alternatives more competitive by comparison. ...

De notie 'oliepiek' werd voor het eerst gelanceerd door Marion King Hubbert, een Shell-geoloog. 

Hubbert himself projected an oil production peak, when new discoveries would begin to decrease globally, of around 1995. It didn’t happen.

However, the Hubbert theory, suitably simplified, became popular with environmentalists and left-wing anti-capitalists, who yelled that any day now we’d hit an oil production peak, after which prices would skyrocket, supply would dwindle, and we’d all sit around with stupid expressions wondering what happened to all the cars. And “running out of resources”, as they saw it, would serve the greedy lot of us right.

Ivo Vegter beschrijft vervolgens een aantal voorspellingen van toenemende olieschaarste, die geen van alle zijn uitgekomen. Voor elk normaal mens is dat natuurlijk goed nieuws.

But none of that is good news to Monbiot. He admits he was wrong, but quickly pivots to point out that this doesn’t make the truth any less scary: “So this is where we are. The automatic correction – resource depletion destroying the machine that was driving it – that many environmentalists foresaw is not going to happen. The problem we face is not that there is too little oil, but that there is too much.”
 
Fancy that. For decades environmental activists and government bureaucrats told us to bow to expert consensus, or face impending industrial collapse. Now we discover that we’re swimming in enough oil to roast the planet. Either way, we’re doomed.
 
Sound familiar? To justify his claim that the non-disaster of peak oil is now a global warming disaster, Monbiot appeals to a consensus of a different kind.
 
But that consensus is also on shaky ground. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), despite several scandals that cast grave doubt on the honesty of its members, bitterly clings to its guns. So does the climate science inner circle, despite leaked emails that show them to be more concerned with telling a consistent public relations story and silencing sceptics than with cleaning up their own messy data and figuring out the rather large swathes of climate science they cannot yet explain. .
 
First nuclear power, and now peak oil. At the rate Monbiot is changing his mind, we’ll all soon agree that the disaster of the peak oil non-disaster is not much of a disaster after all.

Lees verder hier.

De bekende Amerikaanse olie-expert, Morris Adelman, zei het al: 'The oil crunch is like the horizon. It recedes when you approach it.'

 

Voor mijn eerdere DDS-bijdragen, zie