Addicted to Apocalypse

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, February 03, 2025

 

One sign that always makes me think I’m dealing with a conspiracy theory is when people keep telling me it’s not a conspiracy theory. Take “peak oil,” for example. “It’s not a kooky conspiracy theory,” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones wrote in 2013. You can find almost the same words repeated over the years elsewhere: “This is not some crackpot conspiracy theory”; “Peak Oil is not a conspiracy theory at all, but a fact related to discovery and production.” To be fair to Drum et al., “peak oil” is not a whole and entire conspiracy theory in and of itself—it is conspiracy-theory adjacent and a component of several conspiracy theories. The Internet is full of things such as: “War-for-Oil Conspiracy Theories May Be Right”; and this is not limited to the kooky corners but can be found in, say, the Guardian: “The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying”; or, if that’s not to your taste, the Telegraph reports the story from other conspiracy theorists: “Peak oil is a fraud concocted by the oil industries to increase prices amid concerns about future supplies. The oil industry is aware of vast reserves of untapped oil, but does not utilise them in order to maintain the illusion of scarcity, they claim.”

 

But what is it really all about? 

 

The father of “peak oil” theory, M. King Hubbert of Shell, predicted in 1956 that U.S. oil production would peak no later than 1971. That isn’t what happened: In October 1971, U.S. oil production was 9.162 million barrels per day; in October 2024, it was 13.457 million barrels per day. Worldwide, oil production doubled from 1971 to 2023, going from 48.5 million barrels per day to 96.4 million. Oil is plentiful and relatively cheap, while we’re producing so much natural gas at such a low price that the oil-and-gas guys have ended up doing more than anybody else to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions by financially undercutting coal. We’ve got more oil than the Trump boys’ combined coiffures and more gas than a lactose-intolerant dessert fiend at Dairy Queen. 

 

Why were Hubbert et al. so wrong? 

 

Turns out there’s a little nuance in the theory: Hubbert knew very well that there were vast untapped oil reserves that were not part of his calculation. That oil was there, but experts believed that there was no way to get at it economically. Which was true, until it wasn’t. Thanks to what we call “fracking”—a suite of sophisticated extraction techniques involving hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—we can economically harvest oil and gas that would have been a lot harder and more expensive to get at a few decades ago. Economics alone did not ensure that outcome, because there was technical work that had to be done. (For comparison: We don’t have a cure for cancer even though it would be wildly profitable; the economic incentives are there, but economics alone isn’t enough.) But the economics drove a lot of capital and energy into doing that technical work. When the supply of a commodity starts to become more scarce relative to demand, that puts upward pressure on the price of that commodity. 

 

Even without improved extraction techniques, higher prices would have made oil and gas deposits that were not economically viable to exploit more marketable, because “economically viable” at $x per barrel is different from “economically viable” at $7x per barrel. But, in fact, that isn’t what happened. Complicating the story is the fact that the federal government engaged in price-fixing regulated oil prices until deregulation in the Carter and Reagan years, but oil prices in December 1981 (as deregulation took effect) were considerably higher ($117.53/barrel in inflation-adjusted dollars) than they were in December 2024 ($71.87). Oil is more plentiful—and less expensive—than it was at the end of the decade when we were supposed to start running out of the stuff. 

 

People in the oil industry talk about “depletion,” which is a real thing and part of their business models; people who want to convince you that some catastrophic convulsion is inevitable talk about “peak oil.” 

 

Or peak . . . whatever. 

 

Oil wasn’t the only thing we were supposed to start running out of in the 1970s. “In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now,” author Paul Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. That didn’t happen, but Ehrlich wasn’t discouraged (if that word may be permitted). In the 1970s and 1980s, Ehrlich insisted that the United Kingdom would be brought to its knees by famine no later than 2000—and that it would literally cease to exist as a polity—and that technological advances such as nuclear fusion would be irrelevant because “the world will have long since succumbed to overpopulation, famine,” and related troubles. Ehrlich’s argument might as well be called “peak food,” because he was wrong for the same reason the peak-oil guys have been wrong: He assumed that changes in supply and demand would produce no changes in production and investment. In fact, food production radically improved in efficiency right around the time all the smart people were talking about The Population Bomb. As Noah Smith put it: 

 

The most important principle here is just that extreme projections of recent trends tend not to come true. The scientific “models” that Ehrlich and the other enviro-catastrophists of the 60s and 70s relied on were very basic things — they were really just drawing exponential curves and then saying “See, line go up!” That sort of simple projection ignores all the various countermeasures that people will take against emerging problems, and all the ways they’ll adapt to new conditions. Countermeasures and adaptations act as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits — sometimes, though not always, slowing it enough to avoid catastrophe entirely.

 

The O.G. figure here is, of course, Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, argued that increasing food production would never lead to long-term gains in standards of living because those increases would only encourage the poor to breed more, keeping per-capita production stagnant at best and possibly leading to catastrophic declines in standards of living if population growth radically outpaced gains in food production. Malthus, like Ehrlich and many other modern progressives, believed that the fundamental problem was too many people—especially too many poor and unfit people, as prominent progressive figures such as Margaret Sanger and her fellow eugenicists insisted. As I have argued for a long time now, one of the big differences between the optimistic-libertarian view of the world and the pessimistic-managerial view of the world is the issue of whether one sees human beings as assets or as liabilities. Some people see every new baby as a mouth to feed, and some people see a potential farmer, engineer, agricultural geneticist.

 

Peak oil, The Population Bomb, Malthusian catastrophe, etc. are all popular components of conspiracy theories because they are apocalypse narratives. And apocalypse conspiracy theories are a big favorite—“The world is ending, and They won’t tell you the truth about it!”—except, strangely, in those cases in which they seem to be kinda-sorta true. (Jim Geraghty over at National Review rightly has a lot of “I told you so”s to share vis-à-vis COVID and that Chinese virus lab.) Peak oil and Malthusian famines play into ancient “hoarding” narratives, as indeed does most progressive discourse about wealth inequality in our time: Somebody—the billionaires, the international bankers, the Jews, whomever it is you want permission to hate—is scheming, or is going to start scheming, to control access to scarce resources and somehow shortchanging everybody else. It’s the same story from age to age to age.

 

Another way of thinking about this is that Malthusian panic is a way of converting a challenging technical and economic problem into a more digestible moral problem. Moral problems do not require any great expertise—only sentiment and the urge to denounce, which provides a nice, comfortable, warm glow. If you have the right kind of ears, you can hear everyone from the New England Puritans to Medieval Christian ascetics to the early church fathers to Chaucer (O glotonye, on thee wel oghte us pleyne!) in the sermons our progressive friends offer up on our supposed over-consumption. You may remember how our progressive friends—and our nationalist friends, who are not an entirely separate group—used to talk about our “addiction to foreign oil.” It is true that the stuff that makes whiskey do its thing is the same stuff—ethanol—the do-gooders and the corn mafia put in our gasoline ( please do not try to drink fuel ethanol—it will kill you). But importing crude oil is not much like being an alcoholic or a junkie. That kind of moralistic rhetoric is just a way to avoid talking about the actual complicated issues related to fuel and energy policy. 

 

Consider our Malthusian talk about water in the past few years. There isn’t any shortage of water, and we aren’t going to run out of the stuff, though there are heavy burdens on local supplies such as the Ogallala Aquifer in my part of the world. There is plenty of water out there. But there are problems: For one thing, the water isn’t where the people are and where the population is growing; failure to economically price water makes it cheaper than it probably should be, which is a subsidy for various kinds of suburban-lifestyle stuff and inefficient agricultural practices; desalination is expensive; we probably need a much larger and more robust distribution infrastructure; etc. Without underestimating the engineering and economic challenges, the broad outlines of how we could go about improving access to water can be made out: a handful of nuclear power plants providing the juice for big desalination works and pipelines. (That’s not the only option, of course.) The thing is, that’s wildly expensive, and nobody right now seems to want to undertake that expense, probably for good reason. But as populations grow in arid regions and water becomes harder to come by, we will end up—if we let markets work—with an economic dynamic that isn’t unlike our experience with oil: What once was far from being economically viable starts looking a lot more practical—if prices and innovation are allowed to do their thing. 

 

None of this should be read as magical libertarianism: “Oogedy-boogedy, the free market will take care of it!” The market will help to take care of it, at least in part, but it matters a great deal what kind of institutions and processes we end up relying on, how the public sector interacts with all that, etc. But the first thing we have to do is drag this problem, and other problems like it, back into the theater of technical and economic challenges rather than allowing them to be used as moralistic totems. If you want to be a real friend to mankind, figure out ways to turn moralistic disagreements into engineering problems. You can’t do that with everything, but you can do it with a lot of things—assuming that you actually want to address the practical problem rather than use it to declare something about yourself (“Me good person!”) and about other people (“People not like me bad people”).

 

The world keeps not ending, as much as some of our friends seem to want it to. (That’s another old mythical trope: being born again in holiness after the purifying apocalypse, the cleansing flood last time and the refining fire next time.) But we do have a lot of things that have to be figured out, day to day and hour to hour and year to year. It wasn’t magic that kept Malthus’ prophecy—or Ehrlich’s—from coming to pass. It was, in two words, human action.

 

And human action is a very powerful thing—which is why you should think of people as assets rather than as liabilities. People aren’t the problem—people are the solution. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Here is a discussion of the life and work of David Ricardo that, if you aren’t careful while reading it, will lower your IQ by 5 points. Sand-poundingly stupid stuff, but necessary to see how these people think. 

 

(“Think.”)

 

Words about Words

 

Big props to my colleague Jonah Goldberg for using the words “Donald Trump” and “meritocracy” in the same paragraph without laughing so hard that he wets himself. Not since Jared Kushner was lecturing us about “merit-based” immigration …

 

In other wordiness …

 

These chatbots have come a long way since the buggy Mitt Romney speech module way back when. This “Senator Amy Klobuchar” sounds almost human, and positively Washingtonian, with an imbecilic cliché every third sentence. Nice work. 

 

Also: I’m not sure I still know how to read. From the New York Times: “Rebecca Yarros’s ‘Onyx Storm’ Is the Fastest-Selling Adult Novel in 20 Years.” I’m not sure what an “adult novel” is. When I see “adult” in front of something, that usually means that it is pornography. (Do I dare click that link, right there on the word “pornography” itself?) So is this an “adult” novel like 50 Shades of Grey or 120 Days of Sodom or something like that? I read on a little—apparently not. So, an “adult novel” in the sense of being a novel for grown-ups rather than one for children? Hard to believe, as the book is described as “a romance set at a military academy for dragon riders.” Also, this: “Some booksellers say the fervor around writers like Yarros and Maas, whose fans turn out for midnight release parties and dress up in elaborate costumes, is something they haven’t seen since the days of ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Twilight.’”

 

At one point, Yarros occupied the three top spots on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. For some reason, this makes me think of Hugh Jackman’s great opening number at the 2009 Oscars, in which the man who plays Wolverine sang: “How come comic-book movies never get nominated? / How can a billion dollars be unsophisticated?” 

                                                                                 

Sheesh.

 

Also, from Salon:

 

Next, I’m off on a solo trip to Mexico City, meeting my older brother and some of his friends. I feel both liberated and terrified. . . . But one thing’s for sure: I’ll be soaking up the warmth of the Mexican sun, trading the frigid NYC winter for the desert heat.

 

If you’re meeting a bunch of people there, then it isn’t a solo trip. And don’t expect a lot of “desert heat” in Mexico City, which isn’t in a desert: It is in the tropics but at a high altitude—“subtropical highland” is its climate designation—and it gets more rain than, say, London. It isn’t hot in the winter. It isn’t especially hot in the summer. Overnight lows in the 40s this time of year—bring a sweater. 

 

And Furthermore … 

 

This is the most New York Post headline ever: “Man connected to killer fake-nun cult charged in fatal shootout at NYC baby shower: source.”

 

Detail: “During the bloodbath, video footage captured the elder LeGrand being handed a gun, which he then tried to hide in a tray of rice, according to a criminal complaint.”

 

Enjoy the Glock pilaf.

 

In Closing

 

So, this all going about as well as you expected?