George Stigler on Thomas Malthus – with relevance to his modern day successors
18 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
W.S. Jevons and peak coal
24 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in energy economics Tags: peak coal, peak oil, pessimism bias, W. S. Jevons
HT: The Oildrum
In The Coal Question from 1865, William Stanley Jevons examined for how long British prosperity could rely on cheap supplies of coal. His estimate was that within a hundred years, or perhaps one or two generations, coal production would decline due to increases in the cost of mining.
Given that coal was a non-renewable energy resource, Jevons raised the question
Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?
His central thesis was that the UK’s economic prosperity was transitory given the finite nature of its primary energy resource, which was coal.
I must point out the painful fact that such a rate of growth will before long render our consumption of coal comparable with the total supply. In the increasing depth and difficulty of coal mining we shall meet that vague, but inevitable boundary that will stop our progress.
Although British coal production peaked in 1913, plainly Jevons got peak coal wrong in terms of limiting economic growth and this Industrial Revolution.
Jevons failed to appreciate that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a growing incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternatives, use coal more efficiently and develop technologies that cut the cost of discovering and mining resources.
No One Cares How Many Predictions Earth Day Founders Got Wrong
13 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, development economics, environmentalism Tags: Earth Day, pessimism bias
“Air pollution… is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
Paul Ehrlich
“By… [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
Paul Ehrlich
“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa.
By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…
By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support… the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
Life magazine, January 1970
via No One Cares How Many Predictions Earth Day Founders Got Wrong.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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