Month: May 2003

Reuters featured a long article on author Richard Heinberg who has written a book guaranteed to attract attention — he’s the latest in a long line of folks predicting that this time the world really is about to run out of oil and all sorts of catastrophes will ensue.

According to Heinberg,

The party, which is the past 200 years of fossil fuels use, is coming to an end, and we have the choice as to how to bring that party to an end. Either we do it voluntarily or it will be thrust upon us.

Heinberg, of course, envisions industrial countries “run[ing] the movie of globalization in reverse” with some sort of ecotopia where urbanization declines, people buy their power from cooperatives that utilize solar power, and everyone abandons cars for bikes and walking. Ugh.

Heinberg, like others before him, insists that otherwise there will be a calamity. Remember, like the calamitous transition from coal to oil in the 19th century. Why do these environmental types always assume that transitioning away from oil will of necessity be calamitous? As Ron Minsk, an economist who worked for the Clinton administration, points out

(An alternative to oil) is presumably going to cost more, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be catastrophic and it doesn’t meant that the change is going to be abrupt, it could be a smooth transition.

In fact it will likely be a smooth transition. Despite Heinberg’s claims, oil is likely to persist at relatively low prices for the rest of this century. But there are numerous other efforts to find alternative fuel sources in progress. These will likely be adopted initially where they offer some sort of benefit to a specific application that oil or other traditional power generation methods lack. As mass production there gears up, the price will come down and the oil alternative will begin to gain ground where previously oil had an advantage.

This is already beginning to happen with fuel cells. Fuel cells aren’t close to being competitive with oil yet, but there are some applications where fuel cells have a clear advantage over other methods of providing power. For example, there are efforts to create a fuel cell laptop battery. What’s the advantage of using a fuel cell-based system? It could last about 10 times as long as a standard lithium ion battery before requiring recharging. Even if it’s more expensive, that’s a benefit that many people would be willing to pay for. And as such products lead to mark, inevitably new innovations and techniques in using the technology will appear that have application in other areas.

Finally, Heinberg uses a very misleading claim about oil exploration. Heinberg quotes geologist Colin Campbell as claiming that, “We now find one barrel of oil for every four we consume.”

But with oil today hovering at $26/barrel and only recently coming out of a period when the price of oil hit record lows, there’s not exactly a lot of incentive to invest heavily in oil exploration. That we consume more oil than we find at the moment says more about the current state of the world oil market than about how much oil is left in the ground waiting to be discovered.

Source:

The oil-consumption party is over, author warns. Reuters, May 13, 2003.

While doing some Google searching on another topic, I came across this tidbit from the Jan. 15, 2003 edition of USA Today,

Panetta says a new war with Iraq has to exceed the $60 billion cost of the last one because combat is likely to last longer than the 43 days of the 1991 conflict: “It has to be more expensive than the Persian Gulf War, and that’s a perfect example of a quick and fast action.”

Oops! Current estimates of course, put the cost of the combat phase of the Iraqi war at $20 billion, and by my count the second war with Iraq also lasted 43 days (from March 20 when the first bombs were dropped to May 1 when Bush declared that all the major fighting was over).

Source:

How much will new Gulf war cost?. Laurence McQuillan, USA Today, January 15, 2003.

Thanks to Henry Hanks for pointing out this LA Times memo about a recent front page story that newspaper did on claims that having an abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer.

Assuming its genuine, the irony here is that the claim that having an abortion increases the risk of breast cancer has been debunked six ways from Sunday. But newspapers like the Times resort to personality smears and other tactics instead of simply presenting the science (probably in part because understanding and writing about the science is hard, but understanding and writing about the political aspect of the debate is easy).

By going with such cheap shots, the Times and other newspapers give the opposite impression — that the science is on the side of the anti-abortion advocates and so a liberal paper like the Times has to avoid talking about it at all costs.

It’s a shame that ideological writing these days generally entails such distortions and gimmicks. It is certainly possible to be strongly pro- or anti-abortion and yet still fairly present the views of the other side — but you wouldn’t know it from reading papers like the Los Angelos or New York Times.

The BBC’s Caroline Gluck recently reported on some astounding birth statistics from South Korea. That country may have the lowest birth rate in the world as new figures suggest the average South Korean woman has less than 1.2 children — well below the 2.1 level needed to maintain a stable population.

South Korea’s population is still growing, albeit at less than 1 percent annually, and will continue to grow for another decade or two, followed by a period of population decline. The United Nations estimated that by 2050 South Korea’s population could be declining by 1 percent annually, and that was before these newer figures were released.

South Korea is leading the way, but Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong are also facing rapidly declining birth rates and the prospect of future declines in population. Many Asian nations are discussing plans to encourage more births. One village head in South Korea, for example, is offering couples US$80 for each additional baby they have, but this doesn’t offset the main reason that couples seem to be avoiding having more children — they’re just too darn expensive. According to the BBC,

More working couples are thinking twice before having a baby.

They are put off by the high costs of raising children and the lack of adequate childcare and social welfare facilities.

Think about this for a second, because it is extremely odd. South Korea today has a per capita income of around US$12,000. But back in 1970, per capita income in South Korea was a mere $248 and the birth rate was an average of 4.5 children per woman.

Now it’s understandable that very poor people would have lots of children, but why would those same people begin to dramatically reduce childbirths as their income exploded. This is the exact opposite of the convention wisdom of overpopulation scaremongers, who insisted that as available resources went up, population would obviously follow. And in some respects, the extreme drop off in births is a bit odd — a couple with $12,000 in income is certainly better able to provide for 4 children than is a couple making $248 and yet the birth rates at those income levels are the reverse of what the population experts like Paul Ehrlich insisted they should be.

The obvious answer to this puzzle is that as people’s income increases their perception of what counts as the “good life” expands as well. This is most obvious in an extremely wealthy nation such as the United States where what counted for luxurious living just a few decades ago would be frowned upon as downright Spartan today. A car in every garage and a chicken in every pot has been replaced with an SUV for every family member over 16 and more calories than you can shake a stick at.

Which is the true irony of the overblown population crisis. Ehrlich and others who claimed the world would soon face its doom constantly cited the tragedy of the commons problem — that each individual acting for his own selfish interest in having more children was imposing externalities that were borne by everyone else. Today, however, the opposite is true — sheer materialistic greed has us limiting the number of children we have so that we can wallow in luxury.

Greed, it turns out, really is good after all.

Source:

South Korea’s dwindling population. Caroline Gluck, BBC, May 2, 2003.