Louis Proyect wrote: > Peak oil is not about the disappearance of oil per se but about > increasing risks due to the exhaustion of traditional sources in > places like East Texas. The oil shale boom is a looming > environmental disaster and a necessary outcome of peak oil in > terms understood by experts such as Michael Klare.
This is not the original view of "peak oil" but the current view (on the left). It makes sense (and more sense than the original view). It also doesn't contradict Monbiot's new perspective, though it says that his view is a little narrow. As I've said before, the market price of oil (the subject of the original theory and of Monbiot's column) may go up and down as new supplies of oil go down and up, with the latter happening partly due to increases in the effectiveness of recovery of oil from existing fields. On the other hand, as Klare and others argue, the _true_ cost of oil is likely to keep on rising, where this "true cost" (or social opportunity cost) includes environment damage. The latter includes global warming along with the direct cost of oil spills, etc., etc. The latter is due to the shrinkage of the availability of (relatively) environmentally-safe ways of extracting oil: the easy ones are largely gone. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
