Reason #1 Why I Love To Read -- Feedback And Recommendations From Readers -- May 28, 2019

Updates

Later, 8:15 p.m. Central Time: see first comment --

Thanks for the like feelings. Yeah, Adelman is really good. Every now and then he went a little overboard. But I'm about 95% aligned with him. And way better than James "hundred dollars here to stay" Hamilton.

One good remark Adelman had was that oil depletion (drilling it out) tends to move the cost curve up. But technology (broadly defined to include discovery, drilling, completion, etc.) moves it down. So he actually acknowledged the peak oiler argument. He just said that you can't consider only one side of things. This is the main error of the peak oilers, including light peak oilers like Hamilton.

A couple more oil economists I really like: James Griffin (Texas A&M) and Fereidun Fesharaki. Both think in terms of supply and demand, rather than time series. 

Original Post

If you have time for only one thing today, google "morris adelman."

I was unaware of Morris Adelman until a reader mentioned him in a comment. It is so incredibly rewarding to find someone much, much smarter than I am to be in my camp.

The NY Times obit headline for Adelman who died at age 96 back in 2014: he said oil was inexhaustible. A crackpot? Hardly. A long-time professor at MIT.

Some google hits:

• The real oil problem, 2004.

There is not, and never has been, an oil crisis or gap. Oil reserves are not dwindling. The Middle East does not have and has never had any oil weapon. The real problem we face over oil dates from after 1970: a strong but clumsy monopoly of mostly Middle Eastern exporters cooperating as OPEC. The biggest exporters have acted in concert to limit supply and thus raise oil price - possibly too high even for their own good. The output levels they establish by trial-and-error are very unstable. OPEC has damaged the world economy, not by malice, but because its members cannot help but do so. 

• The economics of petroleum supply, papers by Morris Adelman, 1962 -  1993.

• OPEC, citations, undated, probably 2005 or 2006.

• OPEC stability, an empirical assessment, citations, July, 1988. Wow, that goes back a long, long way.

It's amazing. John Kemp loves to read, and he loves to post his book recommendations. To the best of my knowledge, based on his tweets, the Reuters oil analyst has never read or recommended anything by Morris Adelman.

The more I read, the more I see "face news" and "disinformation."

I fell for that meme, "peak oil," years ago. It took a long time to be woke.

My generation fell for the "peak oil" story; the current generation is falling for the "global warming" story.  CO2 as a toxin. Wow.