Читать книгу Economically and Environmentally Sustainable Enhanced Oil Recovery - M. R. Islam - Страница 14

For well over a century, the world has been hearing that we are about to run out of fossil fuel in matter of decades. First it happened with coal. In 1865, Stanley Jevons (one of the most recognized 19th century economists) predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a standstill. Today, after over 150 years of Jevons’ prediction of the impending disaster, US EIA predicts that the coal reserve will last another 325 years, based on U.S. coal production in 2017, the ‘recoverable coal’ reserves would last about 325 years (EIA, 2018c).

When it comes to petroleum, as early as 1914, U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted, “The world will run out of oil in 10 years” (quoted by Eberhart, 2017). Later, the US Department of Interior chimed in, claiming that “the world would run out of oil in 13 years” (quoted by Eberhart, 2017). Obviously, the world has not run out of oil, the world, however, has been accustomed to the same “doomsday warning” and whooped it up as ‘settled science’ (Speight and Islam, 2016). Starting with Zatzman and Islam’s (2007) work, this theme of ‘running out of oil’ has been deconstructed and over a decade later, the actual settled science has become the fact that it’s not a matter of if falsehoods are perpetrated it is a mater of why. In 2018a, Islam et al. made it clear that the entire matter is an economic decision, concocted to increase short-term profit. Science, let alone the science of sustainability, cannot be based on falsehood and deception.

It is the same story about ‘concerns’ of climate change and the hysteria that followed. All studies miraculously confirmed something scientists were paid to do whip up decades ago (Islam and Khan, 2019). Now that that ‘science’ has matured into settled science, carbon has become the enemy and the ‘carbon tax’ a universal reality.

If anything good came out of centuries of New Science, it is the fact that this ‘science’ and these scientists cannot be relied upon as a starting point (paradigm) for future analysis because each of those tracks will end up with paradoxes and falsehoods that would reveal themselves only as a matter of time.