Tuesday 13 November 2012

62. The benefits of technology

According to International Energy Agency, the US will become the biggest producer of oil in the world by 2035. This is because of two developments: fracking technology that allows to get oil and gas trapped in rock formations (this technology s so new that the blog's spell checker does not know it) and horizontal drilling (no idea how they do it) which allows to extract up to four times the amount of oil from oil fields than earlier techniques.

When I was a student, a report of the Club of Rome painted a picture of resources being exhausted in the not too distant future. According to the report, it would have happened by now. But, as Yogi Berra famously said, "predictions are difficult, especially about the future"(actually, the first person attributed with this comment is the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr - see here).

That, of course, does not mean that we should not conserve resources. While techonology helps, resources are finite. The International Energy Agency report takes into account conservation (for example fuel consumption standards) in its forecasts.

By the way, who is Yogi Berra? A baseball player with a fine sense of humour.




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