Saturday, October 26, 2013

The Myth of the Vanishing Resources

According to author and engineer, Peter Huber, the tar sands of Alberta alone possess enough raw energy to power the world for at least another century. Couple that with the fact that the International Energy Agency now says that the world possesses some 30,000 trillion (just try and get your mind around that number) cubic feet of natural gas (enough for another two centuries) and the optimism grows even more. I mean, I know that the radicals have an affinity for scarcity and all (though I doubt that they would ever want to give up their plush locations in New York and Washington and live in a hut themselves) but windmills and ethanol are just plain dumb and anybody with even half a brain knows it. You want to subsidize it? Fine. Just don't make the rest of us.

2 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

IMO, if they are gone in a century or two, they are vanishing...sort
of the long view here.

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Back in the '70s Jimmy Carter said that we only had 10 more years of oil. Here's how it basically works. The more expensive that a resource becomes, the more profitable that it becomes to go after it in places which were heretofore considered too expensive. That and the fact that the technology continues to make everything much more efficient. My suspicion is that we're going to be using inexpensive (relatively speaking) carbon-based energy for centuries and if we ever do have to make a transition, that transition will be to thorium-based nuclear and hydro with maybe a little solar. Food-based power and windmills, not so much.