Sustainment

Wanna see something funny? Look up some of Jay Hanson's oldest posts in Dejan... I mean Google groups. There, you may find references to his predictions of oil production topping out in the last century (I mean, "last" referenced to now) and the impossibility of methane hydrates. He has since changed the hallmark graphic on dieoff.org with a chart that predicts the peak sometime near the beginning of the 21st century. But you can find even more references to the impossibility of methane hydrate as a potential energy source.

Then this:

Japanese and Canadian research in the Arctic has proven that economically viable quantities of methane can be obtained from onshore hydrates, he said. While Alaska's land-based Arctic methane hydrates are limited, the amount of offshore marine hydrates there and elsewhere is far greater.

Oh, well. The neo-malthusians never have to quit because their theories have so much intuitive appeal. Consider this exchange:

Q: There are books on that like 'How many people can the earth support' [by Joel E. Cohen [13]. I read it but by the end I didn't feel any wiser. It seems there are too many dials on that panel.

A: Well, the guy was comparing ecologists to economists and so on. It was just a rotten book. A stupid book -- I think it was written by somebody who wanted to get everybody to stop worrying about it. There's a lot of that going on, it's like Julian Simon's work. I have no respect for those guys at all. I mean, you can be a businessman without being a lying son of a bitch. Well, Simon was nuts, he wrote a book about it. He was crazy. This Lomberg guy ['The Skeptical Environmentalist' by Lomberg [sic][14] is probably just a sleaze -- I don't know him. [emphasis added by EH]

That's right - Julian Simon, regarded as perhaps the most overproductive empiricist of our time, is a lying nut, and Lomborg is probably just a sleaze. Based on...? Yet you can easily find Jay criticizing others for not having read a book before criticizing it.

One of Jay's favorite ruses in usenet was to post one of his "irrefutable" parables. My favorite was the rocket: astronauts are travelling through space in a rocket, and they begin to remove rivets and whatnot from the rocket in order to sustain a hedonistic lifestyle. Obviously, one day the rocket is going to fall apart. This is supposed to show that man should not deplete the Earth's resources, because the Earth is simply a rocket speeding through space, right?

Um, well, except that a manmade rocket is made to have just enough material in it to keep it together and just enough supplies on board to get you safely to your destination. Any more than the minimum and you are introducing wasted weight, which requires larger motors, which requires more fuel, which requires .... Nobody designed the Earth (or is Jay a creationist?). The materials that are here just happen to be here. They have no intrinsic value unless and until man gives them value. It was regarded as bad luck to have an oil pond on your property in the pre-industrial era. Silicon was just so much sand.