Columnist John Tierney has written a rather smug article about a $5000 bet he made with Matthew Simmons, one-time member of the Council of Foreign Relations and an executive at a Houston bank, regarding the price of oil. In 2005 Mr. Simmons predicted that the price of oil, then about $65 a barrel, would triple in five years. Mr. Tierney challenged him, and Simmons took the bet.
Tierney is happy to report that he won. Oil in 2010 came in below $80 a barrel. Tierney goes on to discuss the ideas of a group called the “Cornucopians,” who follow the philosophy of the late economist Julian L. Simon. Mr. Simon predicted that we would always have abundant supplies of energy and other resources.
For years writers like Tierney and Simon have been deriding Malthus, or Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, or Al Gore and his warnings about global warming. Environmentalists are frequently compared to Chicken Little, running around the barnyard clucking “The sky is falling, the sky is falling.”
But Chicken Little is absolutely correct. Pieces of the sky are already littering the ground. We are in the middle of the earth’s sixth major species die-off and the first caused by humans. The growing desertification and population increase in Somalia and the Sudan have already brought violent conflict. The massacre in Rwanda was largely a result of pressures on a finite amount of farmland by an exploding population. Millions of Pakistanis live on flood plains, the only fertile land remaining. As for the idea that we will always have abundant supplies of resources, are the Cornucopians including clean air or clean water or nutritious food?
If you want to read Mr. Tierney’s article, it was in the December 27 Science Section of the New York Times.
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