Disqus - Friends of sprague

Re: What If We Never Run Out of Oil?

Charles C. Mann — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:17:53 -0000

@Quin MacKeen:

1) Actually, in Canada the great majority of petroleum reserves are owned by the provinces. There is some private ownership, but it's minor. To cite one example, the oil and gas beneath ~10% of Alberta is privately owned; the rest is controlled by the province. There is even an association of "freeholders," as they are called, which is dedicated to complaining about the poor treatment they receive. The US is unique in allowing extensive ownership, as I stated in the article.

2) The IEA report does include coal. But if you read the report, the new supplies -- the ones responsible for changing IEA projections -- are largely from shale, as I stated. The whole report is very long, but you can see what I'm talking about in this article by one of the report's authors: http://www.iea.org/newsroom...

3) The key is not that crude oil production goes up but that a) energy efficiency increases; and b) unconventionals, especially natural gas, go up, and people switch to them. As stated in the article, the IEA predicted that in theory the US would not need to import anything, but that it would still continue to do so because in some cases it would be cheaper and easier. As the IEA said, the US could therefore be "almost self-sufficient in energy, in net terms, by 2035."

4) Indeed, North Dakota has a lot of wind. That's great. But wind power, like solar, is hard to integrate into today's grid. I spend a fair amount of time in the article describing this.

5) The Soviet Union and its allies collapsed in 1989. The fall in oil prices began well before that, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1986 they fell by two-thirds, to levels last seen in the early 1970s. The fall of the Soviet Union somewhat increased oil prices, because production fell there. You can see the numbers in lots of places, but I like the BP historical workbook available here: http://www.bp.com/sectionbo...

6) My article never said that natural gas would "save us on the gasoline-vehicle front." I am not sure where this came from.

7) As my article states, the US is not likely to benefit as much from any methane hydrate boom as the rest of the world. The US already gets lots of natural gas from fracking. But this is not true for other countries. The thesis of the article is that methane hydrate might have some of the same potential for nations like Japan, China, and India. So I guess I have to say that I don't "see the problem here."

8) For what it's worth, it is not hard to find people who actually work in the big power utilities who don't believe that "big, continent-wide systems are actually much easier to add wind and solar to than smaller, localized, national or sub-national systems. so most of the U.S. can manage massive renewable expansions just fine. Really. Check it out." I *did* check it out in my reporting. Your statement is incorrect. If you want details, you can read Maggie Koerth-Baker's "Before the Lights Go Out," also based on first-hand reporting, which explains the problem in considerable detail.

Thanks for your comment.

Re: Revised estimates for the number of human and bacteria cells in the body

Charles C. Mann — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 12:12:02 -0000

Interesting paper. I suspect the Luckey estimate (1972:1292) is actually taken from an earlier Luckey paper (Luckey, T.D. 1970. Gnotobiology is Ecology. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 23:1533-40), see table 1.

Re: If Not Darwin, Who? - Issue 43: Heroes - Nautilus

Charles C. Mann — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 13:18:05 -0000

Fun article, Mr. Ball. I would have liked to see a tip of the hat to Robert Merton, the eminent sociologist of science, whose article, "Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discovery," appeared in the "Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society" in 1961, and presents a more extreme version of this thesis. In the article, Merton puts forward "the hypothesis that, far from being odd or curious or remarkable, the pattern of independent multiple discoveries in science is in principle the dominant pattern, rather than a subsidiary one. It is the singletons--discoveries made only once in the history of science--that are the residual cases, requiring special explanation. Put even more sharply, the hypothesis states that all scientific discoveries are in principle multiples, including those that on the surface appear to be singletons" (473). Charmingly, Merton includes a list of previous thinkers who had anticipated his own ideas about multiple discoveries.

Re: How Best Help Distant Future?

Charles C. Mann — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 20:26:50 -0000

Dear Prof. Hanson:

Many thanks for your interesting and fair-minded remarks about my book and article. Thanks, too, for the kind words.

You've hit upon what I regard (hope?) is the single weakest passage in my book-- weak because it is based on an intuition, rather than something I can document. You argue, contrary to me, "that people just don’t care that much about the distant future." From this it is straightforward that "global warning concern is a smokescreen for other policy agendas."

For what it's worth, my own experience is that as far as I can
tell most of the climate activists I have met are actually motivated by fears for the distant future. Indeed, this perception is what led me to work on this section of the book, because it seems so strikingly different from what economic theory and most other experience tell me. I'm saying that climate change might be an exceptional case, and Scheffler's ideas may give some explanation of why.

This doesn't go far to refuting your argument, I know. From what I can see both your view (people are not motivated by the distant
future) and mine (people are motivated) are based on experience, rather than something more satisfactory. In that case, the presumption would be that the normal case (people don't care about the distant future) is more likely.

I take issue with your save/lobby distinction, if I understand it correctly, for two reasons. First, I think most ordinary
people would find it challenging to imagine how they could personally follow the save path and do some good. The lobby path--join the Sierra Club and yell--is easier to envision. Second, it is widely believed that the effects of rising CO2 levels are easier to prevent than to undo. The lobbying path would seem a simpler, faster way to prevention.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, though.

In any case, my thanks for your thoughtful attention.

Charles C. Mann