Huge oil discovery! Doomsters stunned!

The U.S. has discovered a huge oil deposit over 20,000 feet below sea level in the Gulf of Mexico. This oil deposit would boost U.S. reserves by 50%. It is a spectacular find! The oil companies win. Consumers win. The U.S. wins! Everyone wins! Well, not everyone. The doomsters lose. But even if the doomsters won, they would still be unhappy and angry. The reason why I never subscribe to doomsday is not only is it often wrong, doomsters become unhappy at the sight of good news.

[Notice the wording of that article? The discovery ‘underscores the importance’ of supply? What a joke of reporting.]

“But Pook! This is only delaying the inevitable. Oil is finite, and we will soon run out.”

We will never run out of oil. Oil comes not from the ground but from our heads. As we get smarter and more sophisticated, we harvest oil out of the darnest of places. The tar sands of Alberta have more oil than the entire Middle East.

“No!”

Yes!

From the Economist:

So the Middle East remains the only place that really matters in the oil world, right? Wrong, according to the Canadians. For decades, they have been complaining that the official bean- counters have unfairly neglected the energy trapped in the Athabasca tar sands of Alberta—rock formations laced with hydrocarbons that can be mined and processed to yield barrels of oil. Geologists have long claimed that the energy content of these sands is so great that there may be more oil trapped in Alberta than under all of Saudi Arabia. The snag, of course, is that it takes far more energy and money to squeeze oil out of this mucky stuff than it does to pump it out of the ground at a conventional oil field.

The world is full of oil. The question is getting to it.

Did you know that the world is full of gold, too? There are acres of gold in my backyard. The problem is that they are so small that the current technology to get them at profit does not exist.

The tar sands of Alberta are just one small example. The Gulf Oil find just shows how stupid it is to be a doomster. Why bet on disaster? Anyway, do you know how expensive an oil rig is? How about five billion dollars. It takes another billion dollars to install it. Collecting oil is very expensive and takes considerable brain power to make it profitable.

This is why I say oil comes from our heads, not from the ground. The obstacle to us and the infinite oil out there is from our limited Human minds. There is no such thing as limited energy. We can split the atom and harvest infinite amounts of energy. There needs to be no conservation. History shows that the more resources man uses, the more he creates.

“But Pook! We only develop better technology because of supply. The less supply, the more demand for it!”

Yes, but as Julian Simon said, this is an extremely simplistic way of thinking about it and, as he said, very naive. We do not want oil because it is oil. We want oil because it is energy. We are converting black goo into energy. The demand is for energy, and it comes out of our heads. Is it not amazing that as world population jumps up to six billion within a century, we have food and resources to support such a population? And is it also not fascinating that the areas that are impoverished are not by natural means but due to political turmoil. Political instability, not entropy, causes famines and lack of resources. Unleash Humanity. Give them freedom! And watch the world be filled with resources.