A senior economist listens to a junior colleague’s proposal, frowns, and says: “That’s all very well in practice, young man, but does it work in theory?” Readers of the Daily Sceptic are about to see what happens when two economists debate.
I’m grateful to Tilak Doshi for a review that is generous, careful and, in places, right. He read the book closely, he quoted it at length, and he took its argument seriously enough to attack it properly. That is the best thing a reviewer can do for an author. We agree that oil is finite; we disagree about how soon that matters and what to do about it.
What we agree on
Start with the common ground. Unless you believe that oil is continually replenished from deep in the Earth’s mantle (a theory with few followers in the industry either of us worked in), oil is finite. Tilak accepts this. He writes: “This is not to argue that we can never run out of any particular resource.”
Anything finite that we use at an expanding rate every year must one day run short.
He also accepts the stakes. Modern life runs on hydrocarbons: steel, cement, ammonia and plastics “cannot simply be electrified away”, and he agrees that abandoning fossil fuels abruptly would be catastrophic. So if the cheap oil is going, when it goes matters a great deal.
Where we part company
So the question between us is not whether we will have to adapt to less and dearer
Discussion
Comments
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Thank you Richard and Tilak for these very helpful articles.
https://www.withouthotair.com/ This free work is also very helpful but epically comprehensive.
A very interesting riposte to the original article. Would be interested to know where both authors stand on using coal given that the UK had several hundred years of reserves remaining before it decided to stop using them for idealogical reasons.
Exactly, we alone have a thousand years of coal, the South Africans used coal, to produce oil and with robots about to appear en mass, there is no need to use humans to dig coal.
Our biggest problem is the people in charge and the fools who belie e them