Peter von Pinnon wrote:

> Before you say that I will lose in the long term,
> please look at that website.

I looked at the website. It begins "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon." Its errors are numerous, and obvious after reading Julian Simon or Bjorn Lomborg. I've been reading eco-pessimists for years, and Simmons isn't the best.  An eco-pessimist like him who doesn't attempt to address the "cornucopian" critique of eco-pessimism just isn't in the game. The best eco-pessimist attempt I've seen is by Ernest Partridge, and even he is thoroughly confused.  I've been drafting a rebuttal to Partridge's premier anti-Simon paper, but he makes so many mistakes that it's tedious to document them all.  My draft is at http://humanknowledge.net/NaturalScience/Biology/Ecology/Ultimate_Resource_defended.html. But except perhaps for sampling its diagnoses of the mistakes that eco-pessimists habitually make, a far better use of your time is to read Simon or Lomborg directly. 

I can't stress this enough. Julian Simon is required reading for anyone who cares about both liberty and the environment. Simon is going to be to ecology what Hayek and Von Mises are to economics. The ideas of the latter are by now part of the air we libertarians breathe, but you pretty much still have to read Simon directly to access his insights. Fortunately, Simon is very readable, and his book is available online at http://tinyurl.com/53chq. 

To read Lomborg on oil, do an amazon.com "search inside the book" for "Jevons", and start reading at page 124. In particular, see figure 66 (included below) on that page, showing that since the 1950s the world has always been about 30 to 40 years from exhausting its proven reserves of conventionally recoverable oil. There is little reason to think that technological and market forces won't be able to maintain this invariant long enough for substitution and alternative sources to come into play. The standard mistake of petroleum doomsayers (e.g. Campbell and Laherrere, Scientific American, 1998) is to look at both the past and the future from only the perspective of current technology. Geologists don't consider it an effective increase in supply when there are advances in extraction capability or fuel efficiency, but economists do.