Quotes of the Hour

I do commend this post to your attention, not because of the post itself, but because of the eminently sensible and delightfully scathing comments by Eric S. Raymond:

Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about “the terror of the situation”.

And:

>the Peak has already come, right on schedule. (Late 2005 or thereabouts.)

Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later “Peak Oil” models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.

In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I’m not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.

As for copper and platinum — they’re not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that’s better quality “ore” than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.

The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.

And:

They’re staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they’re describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.

I want to have his babies, I think!