Section » Quote of the Week
James D. Hamilton
“Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will
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IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol
“In the next 10 years, more than 90% of the growth in global oil production needs to come from MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries… There are major risks if this investment doesn’t come in a timely manner.”
Chris Skrebowski
“Unless and until adaptive responses are large and fast enough to constrain the upward trend of oil prices, the primary adaptive response will be periodic economic crashes of a magnitude that depresses oil consumption and oil prices. These have the effect of shifting consumption from incumbent consumers-the advanced economies-to the new consumers in the developing economies.”
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Jan Lars Mueller, ASPO-USA Executive Director, in WSJ Letter to the Editor
“With demand for oil and all forms of energy continuing to rise exponentially, and with huge uncertainty whether fossil fuels can keep pace, business as usual isn’t an option.” WSJ Letter to the Editor
from Daniel Yergin’s essay “There Will Be Oil”
“There Will Be Oil” “Things don’t stand still in the energy industry. With the passage of time, unconventional sources of oil, in all their variety, become a familiar part of the world’s petroleum supply. They help to explain why the plateau continues
President Bill Clinton in a 2006 Keynote Speech
“A significant number of petroleum geologists believe that in this decade, and perhaps already, we have reached global peak oil production, something that happened in 1970 in America, where half of all the oil that we can get out of the ground has been taken out… that’s a cause of great concern independent of global warming….”
from the recently translated Peak Oil analysis by the German Military
“When considering the consequences of peak oil, no everyday experiences and only few historical parallels are at hand. It is therefore difficult to imagine how significant the effects of being gradually deprived of one of our civilization’s most important energy sources will be. Psychological barriers cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to
Matthew Nisbet, Associate Professor at American University
“A strong majority of Americans say it is likely that oil prices will triple in the coming five years and that such a tripling would be harmful both to the economy and to public health. Conservatives and those dismissive of climate change are among the most concerned by the threat of a major spike in oil prices, suggesting that a broad cross section of Americans may be ready to engage in dialogue
Jeremy Grantham, quoted in a NYT profile
“People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change. Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”
