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At the same time, those rising prices have spurred exploration and reexamination of known deposits off the coast of Japan, in the midwestern U.S., and elsewhere.

Alex King is director of the Critical Materials Institute, a part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. CMI is heavily involved in making rare earth minerals slightly less rare by means of supercomputer analysis; researchers there are approaching the ongoing crunch by looking both for substitute materials for things like gallium, indium, and tantalum, and easier ways of separating out the individual rare earths (a difficult process).

These are excellent examples of why, over the medium and long term (10+ year granularity) prices in these things tend to come down, rather than become problematic and scarce. It isn't just finding more, it's finding substitutes and alternatives all along the path of progress.

The Ultimate Resource is the cleverness of free people in a free society, which not only includes, but depends on economic freedom, leading to this counter-intuitive and well-established phenomenon.

Here are some related things about the benefits of an open society, and conservatives could learn a thing or two, too, about increasing rather than stifling immigration.

At the same time, those rising prices have spurred exploration and reexamination of known deposits off the coast of Japan, in the midwestern U.S., and elsewhere.

Alex King is director of the Critical Materials Institute, a part of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. CMI is heavily involved in making rare earth minerals slightly less rare by means of supercomputer analysis; researchers there are approaching the ongoing crunch by looking both for substitute materials for things like gallium, indium, and tantalum, and easier ways of separating out the individual rare earths (a difficult process).

These are excellent examples of why, over the medium and long term (10+ year granularity) prices in these things tend to come down, rather than become problematic and scarce. It isn't just finding more, it's finding substitutes and alternatives all along the path of progress.

The Ultimate Resource is the cleverness of free people in a free society, which not only includes, but depends on economic freedom, leading to this counter-intuitive and well-established phenomenon.

Here are some related things about the benefits of an open society, and conservatives could learn a thing or two, too, about increasing rather than stifling immigration.

So much hot air. So few control groups. If only there was an economist who made multiple loud public predictions against other standard economists. 10 year predictions. What of these predictions were counter-intuitive at that? And they came true and the blustery, book-selling, talking head economists were wrong?

If only such a man existed. You'd think people would adopt his proven theories instead of ignoring them in place of the same failed ones.

If only such a man existed.

If only such a theory existed.

So much hot air. So few control groups. If only there was an economist who made multiple loud public predictions against other standard economists. 10 year predictions. What of these predictions were counter-intuitive at that? And they came true and the blustery, book-selling, talking head economists were wrong?

If only such a man existed. You'd think people would adopt his proven theories instead of ignoring them in place of the same failed ones.

If only such a man existed.

If only such a theory existed.

> urban populations using 10% of the water.

Things like limit discs and small-tank toilets were idiotic at the time. By using them, you save maybe 20% of that 10%, i.e. 2% i.e. push off need for increased. supply by about a year or two, assuming an overall 1% annual need for growth.

Just stupid. But it was done, and acknowledged as such, for the purpose of getting a population pliant with this quasi-emergency for further legislation (and, I might add, based on disproven 1970s-era theories of shortage. Disproven via actual predictive experimentation over and over again.)

The worst-case scenario here is ending up like North Korea because of too much government controls. Compare vs. South Korea.

A free people will find solutions and keep ahead of the problem curve as measured by quality of life and costs. This has been proven over and over and over again against the predictions of physical scientists, who erroneously make predictions into how things will affect humanity.

They have been predicting shortages, wrongly, sinct the 1970s. This theory predicts that only happens with government intervention in the ecenomy.

This theory iz always right, like quantum mechanics or relativity.

Physical scientists are good in their domain, but they learn the hard way over and over again through the decades that they cannot predict economic impacts. That is the job of economists.

Physical scientists have been proven monstrously wrong, repeatedly and predictably, regarding dire warnings of impact on human life and society. Based on Simon's repeated successes in predicting results the exact opposite of physical scientistscin the 1970s and 1980s, I predicted the Peak Oil BS would not pan out either, in its context of impact on humanity. I was right.

It's very tiring to see this stuff continue to rear up over and over given this theory which is as predictively solid as quantum mechanics or relativity is, with just as strange, but successful, counterintuitive predictions.

In this particular case, their belief doesn't make sense even in their own realm -- a fraction warmer means a fraction of a fraction more energetic or prevalent. If it amounts to two more hurricanes a century I'd be stunned. And they would be no more energetic on average, like 1% maybe.

Learn2chaos theory, you terrible, incompetent so-called climatoligists.

It's not blind faith. It provides reliable predictions that, in a free society, people will invent solutions, and do so faster than problems become big problems, defined as impacting actual measurements of human longevity and average wealth.

This precautionary principle, insofar as it interferes, apes the control of dictatorships, from central planning to kickbacks dragging things to a halt. Don't believe it? Wanna bet?

Didn't think so.

Supply and demand. You lower the costs is, economically the equivalent of increasing supply, and people will find a use for it.

Jevon's Paradox seems rooted in a static rather than dynamic analysis.

There are other concerns, like pollution, but as shortages go people in a free society solve problems faster than they become serious.

This is why I laughed at the whole Peak Oil bullshit, a tired retread of 1970s shortage scares. Note Simon's minimum 10 year granularity though.

Gas had to get over $4 a gallon to make ethanol even remotely competitive, which would pull in productions of scale. Except $4 isn't all that much as far as economic disruption feared by gloom and doomers would suggest.

Shortage is an economic concept, and needs to be understood in that context. It can be treated as more or less synonymous with cost, higher is less supply, lower is more. There's a little more to it than that, especially boundary cases, but for mass-produced things like oil and gas, it's intensely accurate.

This needs to lower price to get into competitive range. As it will be pulling carbon out of the air, rather than re-introducing long-buried carbon, it will be much better and environmentally neutral -- burn to your heart's content.

Speaking of hijacking, it was noticed in the 1970s that Ecology, as environmentalism was then known, was being adopted as a political cry by the same people whose hard-left stance, "workers of the world unite!", was now faltering at the polls, thus giving them a new rationale to try to control business in a socialist sense.

Back then it was all "there's too much garbage!", a falsehood based on innumeracy, and "we're running out of stuff!", also based on a simple-minded view of static development that ignores actual, repeatedly successful predictions of the opposite.

Few people do, in spite of repeated counter-inuitive predictions that came true over and over again. He's currently body-slamming the Peak Oil crowd, the latest incarnation of this 1970s nonsense.

As physical constraints tighten, in a free economy, people will produce alternatives, called substitutions, all along the use chain. Net effect is they keep ahead of he shortage curve, and things get cheaper and cheaper -- sans government market interventions like rationing and (market-limited) licensing.

We aren't ruining the planet. By all measurements of health, wealth, and longevity, we are doing better than ever before.

The counter-intuitive reality is that, in an economically free society, people will solve problems faster than they become serious. This theory has successfully made predictions over 10 year periods over and over again.

The days of politics as memes figting in your brain should be over.

So yes, death to the false meme that we are ruining the planet, as vector to massive government control of the economy, with attendant slowing of it.

He bought into the shortage gloom-and-doom of the 1970s. Unfortunately a lot of people did back then even though. it was famously disproven in repeated 10 year experiment bets.

He also listened to Nobel-winning economists who told him stagflation was fine for the working man, given nobody, Carter, Ford "WIN whip Inflation Now", nor Richard "Wage and Price Control" Nixon could seem to halt it. Then Reagan did.

And the hostage rescue failed miserably.

Probably the biggest problem humanity faces os that your political narrative still carries weight. Actual measured results dictate otherwisr, that your concerns are not just unfounded, but that political activity based on them is counterproductive.

All measurements show quality and length of life increasing as this process occurs. It is bumpy with minimum granularity of 10 years, but it is inexorable and demonstrated, predictively, over and over again.

In a relatively free economy, problems, counterintuitively, are solved faster than they become serious issues.

Assuming the year 2100, and the years leading up to it, are relatively free of both general warlordism and corruption, requiring kickbacks for everything, and overbearing government (rationing, or cumulative regulatory weight people give up as in a warlord state) we can indeed expect plenty.

Julian Simon made a career of making 10 year bets on issues of shortage, longevity, and general health, vs. gloom-and-doomers.

Another way to phrase it is people invent ways to compensate for easy fruit picking getting harder and harder, and do so faster than the difficulty impacts the economy in gloom-and-doom ways.

After the results of the first 10-year bet, a complete disaster for the doomsayers of the 1970s, Isaac Asimov, one such, admitted he was wrong, even if he didn't understand why.

Remember: This isn't a political narrative. It's actual scientific theory verified time and again by counterintuitive predictions.

I used it to predict the Peak Oil concept was, in fact, BS, and it's indeed turning out to be.

One more thing, adaptation and invention are not instantaneous. His bets were 10 years, which was a granularity so small he was still uneasy.

There's a granularity to advancement as it is made of discrete units of advancement and invention.

Also, I wouldn't pooh pooh the use of other techniques to keep things moving. In the terms economists use to analyze advancement, this is called "substitution", and is the source of the counter-intuitive but powerfully predictive observation that, in a free economy, people can invent ahead of the curve faster than things become problems, like shortages.

'We won't survive another 1,000 years without escaping our fragile planet.'

If 1,000 years from now, we aren't all brains in vats living in literally fantastic virtual worlds, then we've failed somewhere along the line.

Also, Mr. Hawking, L2Economic Avancement. Yes, some economists actually make predictions, counter-intuitive ones, that come true again and again and again.

China is the future as long as they remain, ironically, more economically free than the US.

Of course, the entire idea we need government to research alternatives to ostensibly reduce oil costs is historically 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

With economic giants like China, and a lesser extent, India, coming online, capitalism is rising to the occasion quite nicely, thank you. Some of you perhaps missed the last 100 years of human history vis-a-vis government intervention in the economy.

Having said that, government can force into existence things capitalism doesn't generally buy directly, like nuclear missiles and fighter aircraft technology, and faster than it would develop without financial prompting, but, as anyone here knows, you have to keep a close eye on government waste, kickbacks, Congressional directives as where research should be done, and so on.

But in the case of oil prices, it's going nowhere as help. What help vs. giant stabilized robot ships that go down through miles of water, drill down miles, make a right turn and drill even more miles, making rigs obsolete? Or fracking, which made low-hanging apples of the "hard-to-get high-hanging apples" chicken littles screamed about?

A theory that makes counter-intuitive predictions which come true over and over and over again, through the decades, should be given high value, and those who say things which turn out false over and over again should fall into the category of extraordinary claims, as in "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Simon's theory predicts, and if you are intellectually honest, you must consider it at least, that oil prices will drop sans intervention, and natural gas prices, and that Peak Oil will turn out to be yet another corps thrown on the heap of history. By capitalism. Minimum granularity 10 years, and ideally more, especially given unprecedented things like China coming online.

Don't rub your chin and argue. Write it down and watch as history unfolds. Again

> share of income accruing to the top 0.1% of U.S.
> families ... 12.3% by 2007 before falling to 9.2% due to the 2007-2009

So...when times are good, companies earn money and those who own them earn more, and when times are bad, it collapses rapidly. Meanwhile, fairly static income of those who don't own corporations shifts much more slowly.

It also blathers on loudly about "income disparities", which is a related irrelevancy. What matters is quality and longevity of life on average, number of calories or wiis per person, not whether a rich person's income as multiple of "average worker's" skyrockets in good times, which you would expect it to.

The realities of Julian Simon's theories, being proven as having tremendous predictive power again and again through the decades, don't make for good disasterbation, nor a good rallying cry if you're a politician seeking power.

Boy, it's a good thing this guy's theories, demonstrated to have great predictive value, are being followed rather than a politician's theories about the impending Moore's Law crash.

It's why I create karma in the first place.

What's not funny:

> Climate Change Finally Impacts Important Industry

and

> Climate change to impact beer: scientist

What's not funny is nobody listens. In 20 years, when this doesn't happen (in the absence of government controls) because capitalism has risen to the occasion, will anybody remember?

Of course not.

Yet Australian beer will be cheaper and plentiful in Australia then, presuming the government doesn't put in price controls, or mandates on hops production, or some other BS.

But nobody listens.

Nobody cares.

Nobody remembers.

Destroying our environment and chances for survival?

Please list measures of actual human prosperity that are decreasing rather than increasing in support of the proposal that humanity is in danger, from anything other than government intervention. Please allow a granularity of at least 10 years, and preferrably somewhat longer.

I won't be holding my breath.

> "Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted," according to an article in Science Daily.

A prediction by this guy: Barring government intervention, we will not have such a shortage.

Of course, 9 years from now, when this occurs, there won't be any headline retractions about it. Such is the way of life.

> you have to concede that human damage to the environment can have
> severe - and as in the example above, lethal - consequences to humans

You have to concede that human damage to human lives via government interventions is even more severe.

Imagine the problems as seas rise over the course of a few decades. Now compare that to the death and murder and starvation if a North Korean style government ruled the world.

That was the point of Julian Simon -- if there are detrimental effects, they must show up via degraded quality or length of life of actual humnans -- and this is brutally established as an effect with hundreds of millions of deaths last century as hundreds of "economic experiments" were run (the majority on unwilling participants, keep in mind.)

Regulation slowing the economy does have an exceedingly murderous effect as it slows technological development -- even if not one single death due to lesser technology ever shows up in front of the cameras with an outraged politician standing next to it.

This is nothing new, though. In the olden days, they used to say "What this country needs is a good war," with the implication being that the country is derailed focusing on minutia to the exclusion of any truly important problems to focus the attention.

In the absence of a WWII, or even the six months 9/11 through Afghanistan, god damned OJ trials and crap float back up as "important" on the news channels. "Breaking news! Britney shows her cootch! Was it an accident or a calculated move to restore her post-marriage prominence in the news?"

BTW, I loved Paris' hand over Britney's legs in the first shot, as if to say, "Not yet, hon. Not yet. Ok...wait...ok...ok...now!"

> Crichton doesn't even dispute global warming.

That environmentalism, in the '60's and '70's called ecology, has become the new home for economic leftists as a new argument to control business, largely having failed in the class warfare rhetorical arena, is itself not a new observation either. Ayn Rand, among others, noted as much in her writings from the '60's.

And Julian Simon pointed out over and over again that government intervention in the economy can, and has been shown to be, detrimental to technological development, and therefore to quality of life, if you are not careful. Even well-meaning regulation can have a net detrimental effect. If socialized medicine slows medical development even 10% a year, the society, even with "free care", will lag further and further behind where it otherwise would have been, giving a net effect of a more miserable life, in spite of the best of intentions. "Oh, you get free care for disease X? Too bad my parallel world cured it 50 years ago." :bummer-for-your-world

Other sources of ethanol are only now beginning to be developed. It is very reasonable to expect that some of the sources will be crops that can grow on land that isn't well suited to growing foodstuffs. Second, that 19% is the amount of land actually under active cultivation, not the amount that could be brought under cultivation. It took me a while to run that down, but look at page 3 of this pdf http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_pro files/agr_cou_840.pdf [wri.org]. Third, you assume that the same land - even the same crop - can't generate both foodstuff and fuel. Think about using cornstalks as a driver for fuel. Fourth, you make the assumption that the yield will remain constant. In only the last few years the yield from corn has gone from 400 g/acre to over 500 g/acre. Some people expect that the yield will rise to 2000 g/acre in the next 20 years. Last, you make the assumption that the inputs will only be crops. Non-agricultural inputs can also be applied. For instance, suburban lawn clippings and leaves.

Boy! Your system sounds awesome! It's as if a free market economy was total crap compared to systems of massive government intervention.

If'n only we'd'a just come out of, oh, I don't know, a century of hundreds of different economic "experiments" demonstrating government intervention caused greater shortages in commodities and products than doing nothing in an otherwise free economy.

Golly!

There's an old saying, If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Hmmm, link didn't work.

Let's try again...

"If you made a mistake, well, you should have used a more modern BBS system with an "Edit" button."

A billion will starve? Bzzzt! Sorry, that's not how that works. This is an economics question, not a climate one.

Which, of course, is why Julian Simon, bless his soul, has destroyed climate scientists decade after decade as they made their grotesquely wild predictions.

It's government intervention that causes economic hurt and mass starvation on all but the shortest of time scales. And on the shortest of time scales, a throbbing economy is best fit to respond to emergencies.

> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.

This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.

> If he is correct,

Don't worry, he is not.

> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.

Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?

> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.

The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.

Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.

> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.

This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.

> If he is correct,

Don't worry, he is not.

> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.

Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?

> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.

The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.

Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.

> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.

This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.

> If he is correct,

Don't worry, he is not.

> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.

Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?

> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.

The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.

Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.

> If oil is getting cheaper, it means that we aren't running out.

And yet some people spend more money on their Starbucks or Timmy Ho-Ho's every week than they do on gas, and still complain.

Barring government intervention, prices do tend to fall as a reflection the power of capitalism.

Government intervention includes environment laws (regardless of the "goodness" or "necessaryness" of the law), so you'd better make sure what you're preventing with the draconian environmental laws is worse than the de facto catastrophe of heavy handed socialism or communism, because that's what you'll bring on.

These are the same folks who predicted that the world would run out of food by 1980, then predicted we'd run out of oil by 1985.

And of course Thomas Malthus predicted imminent mass starvation in the early 1800s.

In the 1970s, they predicted:

"The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000
and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend
two facts. These facts are (1) World food production cannot keep pace
with the galloping growth of population. (2) 'Family planning' cannot
and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth."

"Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food
supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30
years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be
alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed.
Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it
is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally
impossible in practice."

Except, here we are in 2002 and those 6 or 7 billion people are eating better than any of their ancestors in all of human history, even in the poorest countries.

For more info, see The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon, and The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg.

These are the same folks who predicted that the world would run out of food by 1980, then predicted we'd run out of oil by 1985.

And of course Thomas Malthus predicted imminent mass starvation in the early 1800s.

In the 1970s, they predicted:

"The world as we know it will likely be ruined before the year 2000
and the reason for this will be its inhabitants' failure to comprehend
two facts. These facts are (1) World food production cannot keep pace
with the galloping growth of population. (2) 'Family planning' cannot
and will not, in the foreseeable future, check this runaway growth."

"Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food
supply of the world will be necessary in the next 30
years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be
alive in the year 2000 are to be adequately fed.
Theoretically such an increase might be possible, but it
is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally
impossible in practice."

Except, here we are in 2002 and those 6 or 7 billion people are eating better than any of their ancestors in all of human history, even in the poorest countries.

For more info, see The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon, and The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg.