apeiron said:
You might want to check my maths but the story for 2009 appears to be an annual consumption of 30 billion barrels and an annual reserve increase of 10 billion barrels. Which if right, would rather undermine your position?
You are quoting a net figure. That is, discoveries - production = net +10 bbl, for example.
A growing share of the additions to reserves has been coming from revisions to estimates of the reserves in fields already in production or undergoing appraisal(reserves growth) rather than from new discoveries...
This is hair-splitting. How does one differentiate between "new discoveries" and "estimate revisions"? Whether newly "discovered" oil is in existing or new fields is irrelevant to the point (which is, is that oil economically exploitable today).
There really is no distinction. It is a semantic argument, and serves no practical purpose except to reveal subjective biases in the authors. All other "conclusions" in the quoted paragraphs follow from this bad reasoning.
Imagine if I have a bag of peanuts. I cannot say how many peanuts are in that bag, but based on a survey of its contents, I reasonably estimate that it contains 1,000 peanuts. Some time later, after eating 900 peanuts, again I gauge the contents of the bag, and find that it still seems to contain at least 1,000 peanuts. I report my peanut reserves at 1,000 initially, and 1,000 later. Both estimates are "accurate", in that they represent my best guess given the data and methodology available to me at the time. You can argue until you are blue in the face whether I actually "discovered" more peanuts, however, or had at least 1,900 peanuts the entire time, but this makes
no practical difference; it is a philosophical argument, at best.
I hate to play the stratification card, but in my perception middle-class people were largely insulated against having to radically alter their lifestyle practices as a result of high gas prices.
Sure; I would agree. The share of an American middle class households income which goes towards fuel costs is pretty small. It would take a dramatic change in fuel prices, and no corresponding change in consumption patterns, before fuel prices would begin to have the kinds of dramatic effects you seem to want.
This will never happen. As transportation becomes more efficient, the share of household income devoted to fuel consumption should decline further, not increase. It would take a catastrophic reversal of this technical trend for this to change (as with food).
but business investment simply hasn't responded by generating more consumption and leisure opportunities that make these people as happy to live-local as they are to get in the car and go have an adventure, or at least go someplace else with something interesting to do
This is a reverse-causal argument. Business do not define the environments that make people happy; they respond to consumer demand for "happiness" to the extent that it is a marketable commodity by supplying luxury goods.
Consumers define what makes them happy. People prefer to drive than walk. This has always been the case, and will always be the case. All things being equal, driving or any other form of privatized transit (private planes, yachts, etc) is considered a more "luxurious" form of transportation than a public alternative. People are willing to pay for their privacy, and their exclusivity. You seem to imagine that this is the case because car dealers sold people cars. That is wrong; it is the case because consumers
bought the cars. The supply
always follows the demand, for obvious reasons.
If people would rather walk to the movies than drive to them, business would be happy to respond by building more theatres within walking distance. However, this would have a number of unintended effects which consumers would not like (and which I don't think you are considering). There would be fewer showings per theatre, and individual ticket prices would go up. Centralized megaplexes are more efficient than local boutiques. Movies being a normal good, consumers would rather have more of them than less; therefore we prefer a megaplex within driving distance to a boutique operation within walking distance. This would only change if the transportation costs became so expensive and/or unpleasant (ie, less luxurious via car and more painful via public bus) that it just wasn't worth the hassle of traveling to the megaplex uptown, and we settled for the neighborhood boutique. But clearly you can see how such a society is "less luxurious" (in that consumers are settling for less utility from their same, fixed normal consumption) than the one we have currently?
Again, businesses do not drive the environments we live in; consumers do. Businesses just respond by giving people the products they want. To the extent that governments force non-market models on consumers due to motivations which are political, rather than economic, the consequence tends to be a lower standard of living, as in the crude "trip to the movies" example above.
