Negative Oil Prices, End of Environmentalists' Peak Oil Theory

People who read my article Italy Coronavirus Lockdown, No Cars, Pollution Up were surprised to find out that, in the absence of car traffic during the pandemic lockdown, the air pollution all over Italy increased rather than decreasing as expected according to the current views.

But contra facta non valent argumenta, as the Latin expression goes, there are no valid arguments against facts. Perhaps the pet, fashionable ecologist theories consider only some causal factors and not others, they overestimate human activity to the detriment of natural phenomena, they focus too much on cars and industries and too little on the weather.

Indeed we should consider another case in which a theory long supported by the fans of Malthus has been debunked for the umpteenth time amid - but not because of - the coronavirus crisis.

Now, for the first time in history, oil prices have become negative. That means that oil producers and traders are paying market players to take oil off their hands. They got stuck between a gigantic oversupply of oil and an absence of places to store it.

The BBC blames it on coronavirus, but while the lockdown may have been a contributing factor, this historic low is not just the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the oil price has been going down for years.

As Capital says,

it may prove to be the case that the coronavirus crisis accelerated and deepened a recession that was due anyway after a prolonged upswing.

...Finally, for all the talk of renewables and of carbon fuels being “stranded assets” that cannot be used, it is widely accepted that oil will remain one of the highest value cards in the energy deck, alongside gas and nuclear power.

A Colorado paper alerts: "Oil price: futures markets warn it won't recover after coronavirus".

You may have heard of the peak oil theory. It was one of the environmentalists' many neo-Malthusian ideas holding that, due to the fact that the earth's resources are finite, we'll get to the point that oil, after a "peak" of production, will become scarce and oil price will skyrocket.

In fact oil prices have gone down over time, and now they have even become negative. Peak oil theory has been repeatedly refuted again and again. But how could environmentalists, who supported a false theory, ever predict that? They foresaw exactly the opposite of what has happened. Similarly, those ecologist theories have turned out to be fallacious or at least doubtful about cars being the only or main cause of air pollution. This is what evidence and data show. Do we prefer fantasies instead?

Julian Lee on Bloomberg, declaring that the current crisis of negative oil prices is not an anomaly, has got closer to the explanatory cause much more accurately than those who blame the coronavirus lockdown:

If oil producers don’t cut supply, negative prices will come back to force them.

Crude oil's collapse into negative prices on Monday was a clear warning of just how scarce storage space for oil is getting. Prices below zero are the market's way of telling producers to stop pumping, now.

...with the world awash in oil, there was nowhere for them to store it. So they had to get rid of that obligation, at almost any price.
The situation has arisen because there is still simply too much crude being produced in a world that can’t use it.

The problem seems to be that oil producers are not cutting supply quickly and aggressively enough.

Compare this reality with the fiction of the greens' theory of peak oil that describes an enormous demand of oil confronting a very low and ever-decreasing supply.

What happened? Fracking happened, and electric cars. It's man's ingenuity and human choice, not geology, that governs.

This is what occurs when a theory, whether it is cars as a major responsible for air pollution or it is peak oil, is put to the test: this is the scientific method. Otherwise, it's pure ideology with no foundation.

What Is Natural, and Is It Better?

The word “natural” is treated in a way peculiar in the extreme. This perhaps reflects our confused ideas about nature, or perhaps darker, more sinister misconceptions are at work.

There is a strange dichotomy between the positive connotation of “natural” in one realm (that encompassing health, food, medicine, environmental management, and the like) and the negative connotation of “natural” in another realm (social and political organization).

If you use the adjective “natural” in conjunction with objects of the first group, eg natural remedies, natural substances, natural environment, it is almost invariably taken as a virtue, a good qualitative appreciation.

If, on the other hand, you use “natural” in discussions of the second group of subjects, for example regarding differences between sexes, sexual orientation or a thorny question such as war, its use is at best controversial, and at worst considered a threat against the march of progress.

In expressions like "natural foods" or "natural medicines", "natural" is taken to mean, among other things, "good" and "not harmful". In the case of remedies or drugs of natural source, the idea is that they shouldn't have the nasty side effects of other drugs.

In fact, there have been cases of harmful side effects of so-called natural and herbal remedies, much the same as the risk exists with all medicines.

And, if you think about it, there's no reason why it should be otherwise. Poisonous mushrooms are natural, and so is snakes' venom.

The idea that substances occcurring naturally should necessarily be good is a fantasy, but a widespread one. “Nature knows best” is the dogmatic slogan in this field of thought.

But, when we discuss sexual roles, the natural, biologically determined forces moulding the behaviours of men and women are treated as demonic entities to be fought tooth and nail. Something similar applies to many explanations of social facts, events and behaviour in terms of nature, including class differences, race differences, sexual orientation, violence, war.

In all these areas “we know better” than nature, we can improve on it, or this is the received wisdom.

We don’t know whether our view of social organization is indeed better than a more natural one. Of course, the dispute is often about what is natural, but frequently that simply shifts the question, because the sort of people who have utopias and are certain about what the best society would be are also people who defy the most compelling scientific data and reject the most overwhelming empirical evidence when these don’t conform with their own pet theories.

I think that both attitudes are wrong, or rather that this dichotomic attitude, which expresses itself in the two faces of the same coin, is wrong. There should not be an a priori value judgement about nature and what is natural, in either direction.

Each situation where we compare something “natural” with something artificial, or created by human individuals and societies, should be considered according to the particular circumstances of the case and judged accordingly.