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The World is Finite, Isn't It?

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders.  In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau."  I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert's approach to support my arguments.


I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.  Their arguments were as follows:
King Hubbert tried to address the question of finite resources and today we know he was wrong.Even though Hubbert cycles emerge for individual oil provinces, they cannot emerge for the world.  We have been predicting the peak of global oil production for a long time and it never happened up until now.Technology will always be ahead of geology and, therefore, we will continue to produce ever more petroleum each year, just from different places, and at a higher price.Oil shale…
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Natural Born Fools

Dr. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate and professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, wrote this in his Op-Ed, entitled "Natural Born Drillers":
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.

Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer. His piece was followed by 554 reader comments, many of which read like this:
...They (the R…
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Let's bet some more...

Almost a year ago, in The Global Las Vegas, I told you how the runaway betting on imaginary things screwed up real people. Today I was reminded that nothing has changed, and Goldman Sachs continues to do what they've always done, ripping off clients, while disparaging them verbally. Goldman Sachs, an evil twin of Federal Government, remains the dominant player in our crazy megalopolis, the Earth-encircling Las Vegas.  There is no place to hide anymore, unless we wish to escape into the past.

In the meantime, the real world economy continues to consume Earth's resources at an ever-increasing rate as more of very desperately poor people are now just poor, and want to have some of the same amenities we take for granted. The results are predictable and the price you and I pay to commute in the U.S. is at an all-time high.

To put this price index into perspective, it now costs 10 times more to move from point A to B in the U.S. metropolitan areas than it did 60 years ago.  And the …
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Rush Limbaugh & Co. Very Limited

Rush Limbaugh is a drug-infested, lying high-school bully, who - for the reasons explained below - has been getting away with uncontrolled outbursts of hatred and verbal abuse of others. Recently, I watched a video tape of Rush drowning in self-importance, while dreamily talking dirty about a young woman, who dared to assert that she was in control of her body and destiny. He reminded me of a teenager who was jerking off while cursing. But Rush's age is 61, not 16, just like 1984 is not 1948.

On a fourth wife, roughly half his age, Rush still seems to be incapable of controlling rage when he senses a challenge to his male dominance. I would advise Rush to work out issues with his snow white manhood, drugs, and aggression towards women with a psychiatrist or psychologist. The whole world doesn't need to participate.

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