Today, the Chronicle editorial board returned to a favorite topic, Hubbert Peak alarmism, with an editorial entitled “Energy crunch: It’s coming, the experts say, and much sooner than you think“:
Last week two energy experts addressed the World Affairs Council of Houston. Matt Simmons, a Houston investment banker, and J. Robinson West, founder of a Washington-based consultants group, warned that soon global oil and gas production will be in irreversible decline. The reason an exact date cannot be known is that the data on nationally held fields and reserves, such as those in Saudi Arabia, are kept secret.
Those are two “experts,” yet the Chronicle chooses to portray their alarmism as a consensus view.
It’s not a consensus view. As I’ve pointed out previously, a more celebrated authority (Daniel Yergin) has come to very different conclusions than the Hubbert Peak alarmists. And as a result of the IHS Energy acquisition of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, Yergin does have access to the world’s foremost oil and gas E&P database, so one might regard his perspective more highly than that of two “experts” who admit they don’t have access to data on Saudi Arabia.
The Chronicle editorialists may be enamored with the Hubbert Peak alarmists — just as the editorialists have previously been enamored with nonexistent treaties and a false history of the Middle East — but their alarmism is hardly a consensus view. It shouldn’t be presented as such.
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