13. Aesop Lives
The Boy Who Cried Wolf was one of Aesops’s best known fables. The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly fools villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town’s flock. When an actual wolf appears and the boy calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm, and the sheep are eaten by the wolf. In a later English-language poetic version of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy.[1]
Alarmists are ubiquitous and always have been. Forecasts of oblivion are used for political agendas and monetary gain. Attention is paid more when danger is threatened. One shining example was the “Peak Oil” hysteria. It took an estimate of “known reserves” and divided by annual oil consumption to warn us when all the oil will be gone. The problem was that known reserves kept climbing as exploration and technology advanced. Consumption was miscalculated as more efficient cars and industrial processes required less oil.
Ringing the bells of doom in 2005 was James Howard Kunstler in his book “The Long Emergency”.[2] He postulated that there was 30 to 40 years of oil left. The consensus today, almost 20 years later, is around 50 years. It seems that oil reserves are like a mirage in the desert seen but never reached. Guesses are repeated for natural gas (52.8 years) and coal (153 years).[3]
Nuclear power generation provides 9% of electricity from 440 reactors worldwide. Uranium 235 is the typical fuel source and it’s estimated that there are over 200 years of reserves. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time. [4]
Thorium reactors have been characterized as safer and with reduced nuclear waste. Thorium is reported to be about three times as abundant in the Earth’s crust as uranium. [5] The Thorium Energy Alliance estimates “there is enough thorium in the United States alone to power the country at its current energy level for over 1,000 years.[6]
Stewart Brand was an early environmental activist who later in life became pragmatic. Unlike most activists he wanted solutions that were practical. He changed his stance on nuclear power after realizing that coal was more harmful to the environment and had many negative health effects. New generations nuclear power generators may need no cooling water so could not meltdown. The technology could be distributed so instead of massive nuclear plants you could have small town or even neighborhood installations. The generator could be buried and after at the end of its useful life time simply left there eliminating any concerns about waste transportation, storage and disposal.[7]
The so-called alternative energy sources such as solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, hydro, biomass and more contribute to 30% of overall energy supply.[8] Since these are renewable the “reserves” are unlimited.
The above should illustrate that abundance seems to be built into the universe which is infinite as far as anybody can determine.
[1] The Aesopica (Aesop’s Fables). Ancient Greece, 620BCE-564BCE.
[2] The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, James Howard Kunstler, 2006.
[3] BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2024.
[4] Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), Supply of Uranium Updated Friday, 23 August 2024.
[5] ibid.
[6] The Thorium Energy Alliance (thoriumenergyalliance.com).
[7] Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, 2009, Stewart Brand.
[8] Energy Institute, Statistical Review, 2023.