The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

I was involved in one of those periodic discussions that spring up about "The Limits To Growth" recently (one of my eternal bugbears) and found myself wondering, not for the first time, if other people have read a completely different version of the book to the one I possess.

In this case, the remark that prompted this was an assertion that the book only mentions energy once - when it actually mentions energy at least 40 times. However, most misconceptions about "Limits" fall into one of 2 categories:

1. Doomers and cornucopians alike claim the book makes a prediction that industrial civilisation will collapse, as we overwhelm our resource base and the environment (the doomers view this as a correct prediction, the cornucopians as a prediction that has been proved wrong - see this article at The Economist for a classic example).
2. Conspiracy theorists claim the book advocates world government and forced population reduction in order to avoid the collapse that it predicts.

Both of these views are completely false, yet I have never come across a rational discussion of what the book actually describes - which is a number of scenarios involving population, economic growth and resource consumption that have been generated using a computer model (known as World3) operating under various sets of assumptions and looking at a timeframe spanning the next 100 years.

The book doesn't actually "predict" anything. The authors explicitly note that it is not a forecast, and that they do not believe the available data and theories would enable an accurate prediction of what will happen to the world over the next century. The scenarios are simply a range of different examples of how the world might evolve.

Given this, I wondered why so many people have misunderstood what the book actually says...

[The graphs below display part of the output for scenario 9 in "Limits" - the forgotten scenario that I am complaining about.]

Peak oil coverage in the mainstream Australian media has generally been quite good in recent years - while the idea of an imminent peak is far from the accepted wisdom, pretty much every major news outlet has provided decent coverage of the subject at some point or another (see the Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, ABC, Melbourne Age and Brisbane Courier Mail for a random set of examples)

While I tend to regard The Australian's Nigel Wilson as the best journalist covering energy news in the country, his column in The Australian ("Long-term oil prophecies proven wrong") this week left much to be desired.

IN the early 1970s the end of the world was predicted when a group of Middle East oil-producing countries decided to use their product as a political weapon.

At the time, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries controlled more than 80 per cent of the world's traded oil, which was being sold at about $US7 a barrel. By 1978 oil was traded at around the equivalent of $US120 a barrel - and the end of the age of oil was widely predicted.

The Club of Rome predictions of the late 1960s, based on the idea that there is a limit to global economic expansion because of scarce natural resources such as oil, have not eventuated, and today there is scepticism about OPEC's ability to dictate oil prices.

And the political choices facing the OPEC members - 11 of them if you include Iraq - are nowhere near as simple as they were four decades ago.

OPEC oil ministers will meet in Abu Dhabi this week to consider a crude market that is again testing $US100 a barrel, and there is no certainty about what will happen. Theoretically, the OPEC members could just turn up their taps: more oil would flow and the world would be an easier place. ...

While its very easy sitting in an office in downtown Sydney to say that OPEC has as much oil as we could ever want and all they need to do is open the spigots a bit further and we'll be drowning in cheap, sweet crude, there doesn't appear to be a great deal of evidence for this theory if you look reasonably hard for it.