They told us we’d run out in the 70’s
From the paper:
Throughout the history of the petroleum industry, there have been written numerous articles or reports predicting an imminent demise of that industry all predicated upon assumptions that the supply of producible crude oil in the world was (supposedly) being rapidly depleted and would soon (therefore) be exhausted.(Campbell 1991; Fuller 1993; Campbell 1994; Campbell 1995) In short, the world was (if such were believed), “running out of oil.” Happily, all such predictions have, without a single exception, been proven wrong.
Contrarily, the statistics of the international petroleum industry establish that, far from diminishing, the net known recoverable reserves of petroleum have been growing steadily for the past fifty years. Those statistics show that, for every year since about 1946, the international petroleum industry has discovered at least five new tons of recoverable oil for every three which have been consumed.
In other words, it was recognized by industry a quarter-century before the 70s that we were not 'running out'.
Recently heard fresh water wasn’t as rare as they say too. Guess you have to have an illusion of scarcity to keep prices where you’d like
I'm of the mind that scarcity is the conspiracy on which all conspiracies are built. I mean, of course it is. To me, most of the history of the last couple of centuries has been surface-level narrative to cover for what has ultimately been a war/negotiation between the world's elite powers over energy control and public energy-perception.
We live in a virtual reality where what we believe is what makes consumerism and spending happen. That's the conspiracy.
Though I don't know how seriously I take it, it's fun to get into the fringes of all of this, such as with Tesla and all of the claims that he understood that energy is ultimately so abundant and so capturable as to completely deflate energy economies - if the technology were actually elaborated and deployed. Thinking about what this would mean for global economies is staggering.
I don't know if it is true, but I do think there is good reason to believe we have been lied to about basic energy for a very long time.
(post is archived)