Saturday, March 29, 2008

Earth Hour!

In case you did not notice, Earth Hour is today. You are asked to make a difference by turning off your lights from 8pm to 9pm local time.
If the point is to reduce the amount of CO2 in the air, then I guess this might kinda do something I guess. If the point is to save our natural resources, then I don't get it at all. Besides the obvious fact that reduced demand will lower the price of energy.

I think it's time for a generous quote from an actual economist:

"As more and more of the known reserves of oil get used up, the present value of the remaining oil begins to rise and once more exploration for additional oil becomes profitable. But, as of any given time, it never pays to discover all the oil that exists in the ground or under the sea. In fact, it does not pay to discover more than a minute fraction of that oil. What does pay is for people to write hysterical predictions that we are running out of natural resources. It pays not only in book sales and television ratings, but also in political power and in personal notoriety. Even the huge usages of energy resources in the twentieth century have not reduced the known reserves of the natural resources used to generate that energy.

...Moreover, energy usage has continued to escalate... yet the known petroleum reserves have risen. At the end of the twentieth century, the known reserves of petroleum were more than ten times as large as they were in the middle of the twentieth century."

Thomas Sowell, "Basic Economics" 3rd Edition, page 277

1 Comments:

Blogger Mike said...

I wonder how many of the idiots who came up with this idea are living a hunter-gatherer, low impact existence. I'm guessing it is <1. I fear I am running out of patience with hypocritical tree-loving hippies. And speaking of Sowell, do you ever listen to Econtalk? It is a plus plus double good podcast about economics. Sowell has been on a few times.

April 3, 2008 at 7:06:00 PM PDT  

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