Sure, it is possible to deploy new technologies to extract more fossil fuels. Look at the dirty tar sands. Almost anything is possible if you throw enough money (and energy) at it.

But the price of fracked gas is well below its production cost (John Dizard wrote about this at the FT many times before Chesapeake’s crash-and-burn). Same is probably true of fracked oil.

Fossil fuel nirvana doesn’t exist; it is something peddled by corporations dedicated to maintaining business-as-usual — socialized losses, privatized gains.

This information is so out-of-date. For example, horizontal drilling has been common practice for half a century.

Also, the States have been blocking much domestic drilling because of “frivolous” concerns over the environment for decades. As with fracking, is Congress going to override these concerns?

What about the hundreds of other fossil fuel experts who disagree with the optimist industry spokesman Maugeri? What about all those estimates by all those experts both within and without the petroleum industry that proven oil reserves are declining?

What difference does it make that production goes up or down over a short period of a few years? In a 24-hour newscycle, a few years is an eternity.

Ultimately Freeland is offering energy investors and the public who themselves invest in equipment that uses oil a misleading picture of the “realism” of using oil into the near future. Besides climate concerns, it isn’t “realistic” to project oil use into the future, especially if we believe in concepts like “due diligence” let alone journalistic research. If this is typical of Freeland’s level of engagement with her subject matter, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’d like to sell her!

We may not have time to burn all of the existing known oil reserves, much less the promised excess. Pity this article reads like a fuel company press release, (berating the environmental lobby’s concerns), rather than taking a more balanced view.

Humans are as natural to this planet as is the pondscum the envirofreaks want to replace them.

These people have systematically dismantled America’s previous leadership to help “third world countries” reduce unnecessary, inappropriate and unsustainable “traditional” rates of human reproduction through education. Do not Somalia, Haiti, and other failed “states” prove, again and again, year after year, that God does not “provide” (unless man’s primary purpose is to turn our big blue marble into a big brown marble by covering every open space with human protoplasm)?

At SEVEN BILLION and exploding, the lion’s share of “new earth citizens” lack land, money, skills, education, clean water, basic sanitation, adequate food or ANY reasonable expectation of same. Their “future” is not “equal” because all these multitudes of open mouths and empty stomachs offer their world is more urine and feces.

Their lives are preordained to be as life was for the majority of humans two hundred years ago and before…brutal,nasty and short. They will experience primarily hunger, rejection, envy, hate, pushing and shoving to survive, and killing or being killed.

China recognized the problem and addressed it successfully with their “one child” policy. India has not, and it’s ongoing good faith efforts to raise the standard of living for it’s people will continue to be overwhelmed by their birth rate.

In America we seem well on the way to the day when fertile females must report to have the government harvest their eggs to protect them from any possibility of harm so that every one can be “appropriately” fertilized and brought to term by the most appropriate means. Why?

Isn’t it obvious that the one way this planet can support SEVEN BILLION people is by adopting and enforcing a universal standard of living that, to any American, equates with permanent, hopeless poverty? No thanks!

Got oil?…

Where did the ‘truth’ go?

The writer could start with an examination of the expected EROEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested)from the lauded sources. Note: that’s on energy invested, not dollars invested. Below a certain EROEI, you don’t maintain BAU. As we are witnessing.

One can understand the panic, and the need for such hype-pieces, but we’d be better addressing reality.