“In the end, perhaps the most misleading claim of the peak-oil advocates is that the earth was endowed with only 2 trillion barrels of ‘recoverable’ oil. Actually, the consensus among geologists is that there are some 10 trillion barrels out there. A century ago, only 10 percent of it was considered recoverable, but improvements in technology should allow us to recover some 35 percent — another 2.5 trillion barrels — in an economically viable way. And this doesn’t even include such potential sources as tar sands, which in time we may be able to efficiently tap.

“Oil remains abundant, and the price will likely come down closer to the historical level of $30 a barrel as new supplies come forward in the deep waters off West Africa and Latin America, in East Africa, and perhaps in the Bakken oil shale fields of Montana and North Dakota. But that may not keep the Chicken Littles from convincing policymakers in Washington and elsewhere that oil, being finite, must increase in price.”

— Michael Lynch, New York Times, August 24, 2009

…with yet another incomparable, iconoclastic article. Peter Huber gives us the facts of life on carbon, oil, coal, nuclear, wind, and solar, with a grasp of economics no other energy commentator can match.

Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots.

But even though the world will continue to use massive amounts of carbon, we also will be able to mitigate its effects or sequester it far more rapidly than most believe.

If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.

Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that neither man nor nature will disturb. It’s keeping nature’s black gold sequestered from humanity that’s impossible.

This profile of Freeman Dyson is must reading for all those who admire creative — and courageous — thinking. It’s even more important reading for those who tend to toward group-think.

Beyond Dyson’s scientific genius, John Tierney admires his “humanism and optimism.”

Energy conservation? Forget it. The goal, says Bob Metcalfe, should be to produce “squanderably abundant, cheap and clean energy.”

That’s exactly right. No one can understand the energy debate — or any technology or policy debate, really — without understanding this fundamental Metcalfe insight, which is also the big theme of the best book on energy, Peter Huber’s and Mark Mills’ The Bottomless Well.

Squanderable abundance. Supply creates its own demand. That is the motto of this blog.

“Cap and trade, in other words, is a scheme to redistribute income and wealth — but in a very curious way. It takes from the working class and gives to the affluent; takes from Miami, Ohio, and gives to Miami, Florida; and takes from an industrial America that is already struggling and gives to rich Silicon Valley and Wall Street “green tech” investors who know how to leverage the political class.”

– The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2009

Environmentalists love the idea of milking Mother Nature for power, but they hate the hardware needed to make it work: huge windmills, acres of solar panels, high-voltage transmission lines to connect them to the places where people live. Of course, they still totally, absolutely, wholeheartedly support green energy — as long as it gets built where someone else goes yachting.

– editorial, The Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009

Mark Mills reminds us of the fundamental physics of energy and why the difference between atoms, electrons, and photons is so important. 

But in the world of atoms and aircraft, not bits and YouTube, things tend to expand, not shrink. The energy needed to move a ton of people, or heat a ton of steel (or silicon), is fixed by properties of Mother Nature. Moving 1,000 pounds 1,000 miles at 50 or 500 mph has a specific, knowable, and immutable minimum energy requirement, dictated by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass, heat transfer, and the like. An aircraft’s or car’s engine is not about to shrink in size a thousand-fold and be etched onto a sliver of silicon, or increase in power similarly.

Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post is on Charlie Rose right now saying the U.S. trade deficit was a chief cause of the present financial crisis. He’s got it just backwards. It was our overreaction to the innocuous trade deficit — namely, inflationary weak-dollar easy credit, designed in part to close the trade gap — that brought us here. The weak-dollar Fed juiced oil and home prices. High oil prices boosted the trade deficit — just the opposite of the weak-dollar advocates‘ intent. Skyrocketing home prices required, and were fueled by, hyper-aggressive and unsustainable mortgage lending.

Pearlstein then said we needed an international regulator to stop this from happening. This entity should have stopped the U.S. from buying so much from China. Wrong again. We needed the Fed and Treasury to maintain a stable dollar. A stable currency is the ultimate financial regulator and disciplinarian. If we had ignored the trade deficit and focused on stable money, there would be no financial crisis.

What should be first on a new President Obama’s agenda? Merely an 

emergency rescue of human civilization

That’s all.

You can already see what’s going to happen. They’re going to put up some solar panels in the Arizona desert and some windmills in North Dakota. Then, after the Sun changes cycles and we get global cooling in about 10 years — as many scientists predict — Al’s going to crow like the rooster, thinking he saved the world.