From Palladium Magazine, August 16:
For centuries, men have believed that rising wealth and population would soon deplete all available resources, causing mass death and social collapse. For centuries, they have been wrong. Predictions of imminent collapse have been a constant since Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus claimed that lowering birth rates would help prevent, or at least mitigate, this mass famine and suffering. His heirs say the same thing today. Today there are eight people for every man, woman, and child alive in Malthus’s day, and the eight eat better than the one. The days have passed when a bad winter in Europe or a megaflood on the Yellow River would cause starvation deaths by the hundred thousand. Now even the worst backwaters fear only “food insecurity” and fractional chances of stunted growth.
Claims of resource depletion and collapse have accompanied industrial society on every step from steamboats to container ships, from hot air balloons to Mars rovers. Of the many such arguments that have been put forward in our long history, the best was made in 1865, when William Stanley Jevons published The Coal Question. This book argued that industrial society was eventually doomed because of the limited supply of coal for power. Because consumption grows exponentially and supply is finite, we will eventually run out of coal and be unable to power our machines.
It’s true that the supply of coal is finite. What Jevons missed, understandably in his own time, is that coal is not the only possible source of industrial power. When he published, effectively all industrial power came from coal. In 2023, this was down to 26%. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, the first oil-producing megacorporation, five years after Jevons finished his book. A century after Jevons’s argument, in the 1960s, oil finally surpassed coal as the world’s top power source. Today coal, oil, and methane gas each provide about a quarter of the world’s power, with coal providing a bit more power than methane gas and a bit less than oil.
Peak Energy is Far in the Future
After World War II, as oil power approached and overtook coal power, the world saw similar predictions for the imminent arrival of “peak oil,” the forecasted point when oil production reaches its maximum and begins to decline. These prognosticators were more reckless and aggressive than Malthus or Jevons, in part because their motives were more ideological, and predicted that peak oil would arrive very soon, in some cases as early as the 1960s. This was bound up with the anti-industrial turn of the environmentalist movement, and rising activism for the dismantling of industrial society, which has since been euphemized as “degrowth.” Among the profusion of warnings from academics and activists, the most influential was 1972’s The Limits To Growth, which argued that exponential growth in resource demands would exceed the world’s possible supply while exponentially increasing pollution would destroy the biosphere, together causing “a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”Since then, oil and coal production have both increased over time, sometimes with decade-long plateaus or minor dips, in defiance of these “peak” forecasts. There are two main reasons that the 20th century models and computer simulations underestimated production, even when they were done in good faith. The first is the ongoing discovery of new deposits. The Earth is incredibly, incredibly huge, and we are nowhere close to finding all of the stuff we can use. In May 2024, a Russian survey reported the discovery of Antarctic oil fields with estimated reserves of over 500 billion barrels. If these early estimates survive deeper investigation, it would be by far the largest oil discovery ever, three to five times bigger than Saudi Arabia’s world-record Ghawar field. “There are more things in … earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The other factor is that new technologies periodically turn useless rocks into economically valuable resources. The development of hydraulic fracturing—fracking—made it possible to extract oil from previously worthless shale, turning the U.S. from a net importer of oil to a net exporter and undercutting the economic base of rival exporters like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. As of 2022, fracking accounted for 66% of U.S. oil production and 80% of U.S. methane gas. Earlier improvements like the invention of offshore drilling platforms had similar effects, and future technologies will no doubt continue the trend. From the 1865 vantage point of William Stanley Jevons, the 19th century technology to refine and exploit oil, or the 20th century technology to cryogenically liquify methane gas for transport and storage, also counts as turning useless rocks into new energy. It remains to be seen what advances will come in the 21st century, or the 22nd, or the 23rd.
Of course, none of this changes the fundamental logic of Jevons’s argument, it only pushes the timelines around. However gigantic the deposits of fossil fuels may be, they are still finite. If future technologies increase accessible reserves by a factor of ten, or a thousand, or a million, the underlying point remains the same: if exponential growth continues, it will use these deposits, not necessarily on the timescale of an individual person’s life, but certainly on the timescale of civilizations.
If fossil fuels were the only source of energy, this would be a civilization-shaking concern....
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