Peter Huber/Mark P Mills: The Bottomless Well

Peter Huber/Mark P Mills: The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run out of Energy (paperback, 2006, Basic Books)

I took a look at a book Peter Huber and Mark Mills tonight, called The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. It seems to be one of those books that presents as mythical one set of stereotypical arguments, then counters them with another set of counterarguments that smell even fishier. But it doesn't make the argument the cover implies: that the supply of oil is infinite. It says that it won't matter if we run out of oil (not that they expect that to happen anytime soon) because what matters is energy, and there's energy everywhere -- we just have to keep figuring out better ways to harness it. The parts that strike me as most likely are that there are going to be more viable fuel reserves than we're aware of now, that conservation in itself won't reduce demand, that renewable energy sources aren't likely to be significant for quite a while, and that an artificial energy diet would slow down the economy. Of course, their statement of these points is far more sweeping, but I'm interested less in them than in what parts of their arguments might be right. I didn't dig into the parts on new technology, and didn't follow whatever they were trying to say about entropy and waste, but I noticed one argument that is intriguing: that despite its extravagant use of fossil fuels, the U.S. is actually a net carbon sink. If this is correct (or even close) it is an argument for revamping the Kyoto formulas, but to do so someone needs to validate the assertion and build a better model of how nations or regions actually impact the carbon cycle. Among other things, this needs to explain where the measured carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere worldwide comes from, and how policies beyond fuel limits actually affect the carbon cycle. (The authors argue that a net increase in forest cover in the U.S. acts as a sink. The implication is that deforestation in the third world may be a larger contributor to carbon concentration than increased fossil fuel use.) I'm skeptical on these points, but doubt that we really understand how the carbon cycle works any way near adequately.

Back in the '60s Paul Ehrlich wrote a book called The Population Bomb which made many alarmist assertions about how global increase in human population will soon lead to various disasters, including a collapse of the food supply. John Simon wrote a rejoinder, attacking all of Ehrlich's claims with well-founded skepticism and an even more astonishing blind faith in the ability of growing populations to find whatever technological solutions they would need to sustain population growth indefinitely. Ehrlich's book was a bit like Marx's prognostics for the end of capitalism: rigorous given limited assumptions that history did not adhere to. The effect was to give Ehrlich a bad name, even though there can be no doubt that there are limits such as he described out there somewhere in the future. In view of this I think we have to be cautious about our doomsaying, and search out options within the system that allow us to mitigate and possibly avoid likely disasters. In particular, we need to be wary of proposing political programs that we don't adequately understand as solutions to problems we don't adequately understand. (And this includes much of what Democratic politicians like John Kerry and Al Gore Jr. have proposed, especially in terms of alternative energy sources and self-sufficiency.)

On the other hand, Huber and Mills veer toward Simonesque rhapsody, and in doing so they miss things. The most obvious one is economics. As they point out, one way to reduce fuel consumption is to arbitrarily make it more expensive, such as by levying taxes on it. They don't like this option -- in their argument it leads not to conservation but to lethargy. This ignores the fact that most of the efficiencies that the authors tout were motivated or accelerated by rising fuel prices. But increased lethargy is an interesting economic concept -- one that I suspect has a future. In part that's because I think that limits on exploitable resources will force us to adapt to more moderate ways of living; in part because slowing down a bit seems like a pretty good idea. The big problem with slowing the economy down is that at present so many people fare so poorly in it that it promises to lock them into a permanent dungeon of poverty. But why isn't that another problem for human ingenuity? We think we can engineer everything in the world except human relationships.

posted 2005-05-03