[300bps]

I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance".

In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.

Your response is to say that it may not be true by Z date. Which is all fine and good but not the point. It didn't help that you offered as proof a link to a web site that states it is "focused on the environment, social justice, indigenous rights and travel" that has an obvious bias against the thing that it is criticizing.

[wcoenen]

I wasn't trying to refute anything. I was just providing some context about the economics of fracking that I believed to be interesting to other HN readers.

Similar remarks have also been made by people in the oil and gas industry, it's not just an environmentalist meme:

> the technology that enables unconventional oil and gas production resulted in a 4-fold increase in oil and gas drilling costs from 2003 to 2014

https://www.forbes.com/sites/arthurberman/2017/07/05/shale-g...

[coldtea]

>I think this type of response should referred to as, "Refutation By Irrelevance". In this case, Person A claimed that X will happen by Y date and Person B proved that literally the opposite happened by Y date.

Or, you know, person A predicted something, and person B managed to avoid it by a kludgy short-lived workaround (that makes things worse, e.g. raises the price of gas to $3+ from it's 2014 price to now), and now people act as A's prediction is not a problem anymore because they want to believe...