One of the most destructive carnards concreted into the mind of greenism and environmentalism is the proposition that natural resources are fixed, finite, and limited. Once gone, they are gone forever. Therefore, conservation of said resources is a moral imperative.

Statists warm to this proposition reflexively, that is, without thinking. To conserve on a grand scale requires big government: to regulate, limit, control, restrict, order, prescribe, proscribe, and ban. Without such a big intrusion into the lives and endeavours of citizens, disaster will fall upon the entire race. Therefore, statists join the moral crusade. Advocating for big-brother government suddenly makes one morally good. Saving the planet and saving humanity has a nice moral ring to it, making big government itself a moral imperative.

Socialists likewise find the proposition of limited resources needing to be conserved a convenient doctrine. It justifies pre-emptive property rights of the state over private citizens. It also gives moral cover to advocating for more government taxation and expropriation to fund things like “green industries” and “green energy”. You just have to take a glance at President Obama’s “new” energy strategy. Instead of “drill, baby drill” it is “spin, baby, spin”, referring of course to the windmills he is spending billions of dollars worth of citizen’s property to manufacture and deploy.

So, we have the ideological Grand Coalition of our times: greenists, environmentalists, statists, and socialists. Ladies and gentlemen put your hands together for “the Left”.

There is one small problem. This monumental intellectual and political construction is built upon a simple fallacy, known as the fallacy of composition. It beggars belief that in a world self-proclaimed to be so smart and so rational that the very same wise-in-their-own-estimation are actually operating with a grand intellectual and political edifice built on more swamps than Christchurch, or more volcanoes than Auckland.

The fallacy of composition assumes or asserts that the attributes of the parts must sum to the attribute of the whole. In this case, since each specific natural resource is clearly finite, natural resources as a whole must, therefore, be finite. Once you explode this childish error, the modern moral edifice for greenism, statism, and socialism is largely exploded, revealing beneath the actual rictal grin of an immoral lust for control and power over the earth and mankind. Babylon redivivus.

So, let’s explode the fallacy. It was neatly done by Sheik Yamani of OPEC when he ironically opined that the steam age did not end for lack of wood (a finite natural resource); the coal age did not end for lack of coal; nor will the oil age end for lack of oil. Technological advances made steam and coal redundantly superfluous. The whole is gloriously far more than the sum of the parts in this case.

To change the analogy: imagine a dining room table on which a finite number of apples is placed every evening for the meal. More and more people come to eat every evening so it is obvious that the size of everyone’s meal will reduce, assuming everyone gets a turn at the table. Until one evening, the table has not just apples, but oranges on it. Then pears are added. Then . . . you get the point. While each of the foods is finite and limited, by being able to add more types of foods, the supply of food becomes functionally limitless. The attributes of the part are not necessarily the attributes of the whole. Schoolboy error.

At this point the Grand Coalition usually retreats to moral mutterings about the need to be prudent, and careful, and risk-averse. All of those Yamani examples are in the past. We face the future. The planet is at stake. It more prudent to conserve rather than consume, we are gravely told. In fact the opposite is more likely. The more society conserves, under the nannying aegis of the Grand Coalition insisting on what’s best for us all, the less likely replacements are to be found through technological innovation, enterprise, creativity, and skills. In other words the Grand Coalition’s doctrine of finite resources requiring conservation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Grand Coalition gets for us all what it has asked for.

Now we know there is currently no shortage of oil in the world. But there is an actual shortage of supply because the Grand Coalition insists upon restricting it. Facing the apples on the table, believing that starvation awaits, the Coalition insists on reducing the number of apples available and putting some into storage (for when the apples run out). The only people benefiting from this nannying prudishness are the apple growers, who find that the price of their apples rises and rises, because they are now in “shorter” supply. “See, we told you that was going to happen,” shriek the harridans of the Grand Coalition.

The Wall Street Journal has just provided us with a perfect case study of the myopic, ignorant stupidity of the Left and the great damage they do to mankind. It is a case of technological innovation that looks to make oil increasingly redundant. It is but one illustration of how, when it comes to natural resources, the whole is very definitely far greater than the sum of the parts.

In the early 1980s, George P. Mitchell, a Houston-based independent energy producer, could see that his company was going to run out of natural gas. Almost three decades later, the results of his effort to do something about the problem are transforming America’s energy prospects and the calculations of analysts around the world.

Back in those years, Mr. Mitchell’s company was contracted to deliver a substantial amount of natural gas from Texas to feed a pipeline serving Chicago. But the reserves on which he depended were running down, and it was not at all clear where he could find more gas to replace the depleting supply. Mr. Mitchell had a strong hunch, however, piqued by a geology report that he had read recently.

Perhaps the natural gas that was locked into shale—a dense sedimentary rock—could be freed and made to flow. He was prepared to back up his hunch with investment. The laboratory for his experiment was a sprawling geologic formation called the Barnett Shale around Dallas and Fort Worth. Almost everyone with whom he worked was skeptical, including his own geologists and engineers. “You’re wasting your money,” they told him over the years. But Mr. Mitchell kept at it.

The payoff came a decade and a half later, at the end of the 1990s. Using a specialized version of a technique called hydraulic fracturing (now widely known as “fracking” or “fracing”), his team found an economical way to create or expand fractures in the rock and to get the trapped gas to flow…

As late as 2000, shale gas was just 1% of American natural-gas supplies. Today, it is about 25% and could rise to 50% within two decades. Estimates of the entire natural-gas resource base, taking shale gas into account, are now as high as 2,500 trillion cubic feet, with a further 500 trillion cubic feet in Canada. That amounts to a more than 100-year supply of natural gas, which is used for everything from home heating and cooking to electric generation, industrial processes and petrochemical feedstocks…

In the energy industry, use of the new technology quickly gathered speed. The know-how was applied across North America, in such shale formations as Haynesville, mostly in Louisiana; Eagle Ford in South Texas; Woodford in Oklahoma; Horn River and Montney in British Columbia; Duvernay in Alberta; and the “mighty Marcellus,” the huge formation that spreads from Pennsylvania and New York down into West Virginia.

Gas output rose dramatically, and the anticipated shortfall turned into a large surplus. As the volume rose, the inevitable happened—prices came down. Substantially. Today, natural-gas prices are less than half of what they were just three years ago.

Suddenly there are not just apples on the table, but now oranges. This pattern has been repeated for centuries. The only impediment is the wowsers of the Grand Coalition, who believe they know what is best for us all. Bless their little cotton socks.

When Christians realise the entire edifice of the Grand Coalition rests upon a basic schoolboy error in inductive reasoning the more distasteful the niggardly faux morality of the Grand Coalition becomes. Moreover, as Christians come to understand and believe in the superabundant generosity of the Living God manifested in the reckless, prodigal, super-abundance of His creation for our exploitation and enjoyment, the insult to the injury becomes detestable.

Cross posted at Contra Celsum

Tags:   Enviro Myths · Greens · Statist Mindset11 Comments