Moore: Welcome to the Age of Energy Abundance

For decades, political pundits and even quite a few presidents have been saying we’re on the verge of running out of oil. Fortunately, as Stephen Moore recently explained in The Washington Times, America’s shale revolution has ushered in an age of energy abundance. Below is an excerpt from Moore’s piece:

Welcome to the age of oil and gas abundance. One of the people who predicted all of this 40 years ago was the late, great economist Julian Simon. When cultural icons like doomsdayer Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University were assuring us that the end was nigh when it came to oil, food, copper, tin and farmland, and that the earth would soon be freezing over because of cooling trends, it was Julian Simon who declared they were all wrong. He was regarded as a lunatic, in today’s left-wing jargon, a “denier,” but he was right, and the “scientific consensus” was entirely and almost negligently wrong.

The experts at the Institute for Energy Research recently published an inventory of American energy given current technological capabilities. The accompanying graph shows that we have 500 years worth of coal and natural gas and at least 200 years worth of oil. The wellspring of energy in America will never run dry.

The reason we never run out of “finite” resources is that human ingenuity runs forward at a far faster pace than the rate we use up oil, gas or food. The shale oil and gas revolution — thanks to fracking technologies — nearly tripled overnight our oil and gas reserves. We now produce three times as much food with one-third as much manpower at one-third the cost than we did in 1950.

America’s energy boom has lowered prices, created jobs, and revitalized our manufacturing sector. In other words, it has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise sluggish economy.

Click here to read the rest of Moore’s article. You can find out more about America’s vast energy resources here.