Running Out, a Myth?

from John Stossel's web page:

MYTH: We are running out of oil
TRUTH: Not so fast!
"It's going to be a catastrophe!"
When they're not complaining about the price of gas, doomsayers would have us believe that we are burning oil at an "unsustainable" rate.

How can anyone honestly argue otherwise? In this video interview with Peter Huber, co-author of The Bottomless Well, Mr. Stossel asks the right questions such as: Isn't oil finite? Somehow, the answers are unconvincing.

Mr. Stossel goes on to argue:

If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, lots of entrepreneurs will scramble for ways to supply cheaper energy. They'll come up with alternative energy sources or better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At fifty dollars a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their book The Bottomless Well that those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years.

But the media don't pay much attention to that. Not running out of oil is not a very interesting story.

As usual, everyone gets sidetracked by the present (cheap fuel) dollar cost to extract oil, but doesn't figure the actual energy cost to capture further energy, whether tar sands, ethanol or solar.

In another 20/20 piece, Mr. Stossel counts down to two more of his myths related to oil:
MYTH #2-- Urban Sprawl Is Ruining America and
MYTH #1-- Sharing Would Make the World a Better Place.
In that last, he alludes to The Tragedy of the Commons. See my blog entry on this.

Here's how one reviewer characterizes Mr. Stossel's Myths book:

From Publishers Weekly
ABC News correspondent Stossel mines his 20/20 segments for often engaging, frequently tendentious challenges to conventional wisdom, presenting a series of "myths" and then deploying an investigative journalism shovel to unearth "truth." This results in snappy debunkings of alarmism, ...The author's complacent glosses on overpopulation and global warming ("we can build dykes and move back from the coasts") are especially glib and one-sided.

ethanol, the panacea?

on a TV near you
NBC: Dateline NBC but see this MSNBC piece .
CBS 60 minutes but see other CBS piece
ABC: World News Tonight and this
CNN: Presents segment on ethanol in We Were Warned (for more info)

But see the Wikipedia piece on fuel ethanol, and its external links, such as the 2004 scholarly article by Tad Patzek and Pimentel's research. Patzek writes:

In this paper, I will describe in some detail the unfavorable thermodynamics of the industrial production of ethanol from one particular food crop, corn. I will use the Second Law of thermodynamics to track what is happening to us as mere years pass, and the precious resources the sun and the earth have been making and storing for millions of years are being squandered in front of our eyes.

The focus of Patzek's article is corn, but he does briefly compare the net energy of corn to switchgrasses and sugarcane. For more on sugarcane, see this other Wikipedia article.