[vsbuffalo]

> But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland.

As an economist, how can the author not see that the hidden environmental costs are growing? As markets demand natural gas within a cost range while resources are limited, the solution becomes to pass this cost off on the environment. The environment doesn't have a powerful advocacy and can't fight back.

I am disappointed that economists buy these models so readily without doing real accounting as to all costs. I think this is a problem in modern economics — we can easily measure monetary costs through accounting and prices, but other costs are hard to measure so the model treats them as residuals. Then, they run predictions with their models that completely ignore environmental costs. Don't argue markets don't have a cost on the environment when you've failed to include environmental costs in your models.

[beat]

The author's view is terribly shortsighted. "I'm going to run out of money next month" versus "I'm going to run out of money next year". Same outcome.

His fallacy, and it's a common one, is thinking that because the problem may be postponed past his own lifetime, that it doesn't matter. What about a hundred years from now? A thousand? Ten thousand?

I for one don't relish leaving my descendants a future in which environmental equilibrium is reached by starving or shooting a few billion surplus people.