Michael Lind, off base on peak oil

Sometimes Michael Lind is great; sometimes he's thought provoking. Occasionally he's irritating. This time, he's all three. He may be right on the abundance of natural gas, but he's "out there" on oil.

In sounding like Daniel Yergin, and in making claims for both crude oil and natural gas that even Exxon won't, he's sounding like a utopian, or Kurzweil, or Michael Shermer.

It's clear that he's overstating the case for future oil reserves. He also, while perhaps quite right on natural gas reserves, overlooks the difficulty of converting an entire infrastructure, and not just an occasional filling station, to natural gas pumping. Finally, he ignores the costs of that, and how much more quickly running cars on natural gas would draw down those reserves.

That said, he is right that hyper-abundant natural gas will put the use of renewables for electricity in doubt. But, if so, especially post-Fukushima, why is he touting nuclear power in the story? He comes off perilously close to being an anti-environmentalist.

Finally, he ignores global warming entirely in this whole long piece. Big fail.

Andrew Leonard, his Salon colleague, has the right reaction today; WTF?

Lind now weakly claims he's "not a global warming denialist." No, just a pooh-pooher of how bad it's going to get.

Right here:

If there were really a clear and present danger of catastrophic overheating ...

Now, "present" isn't in the next 5 years, perhaps. But, a 3F rise by 2050, in the lifetimes of many of us here right now? I'd call that "present" enough. And, catastrophic enough.

Michael Lind, put down the shovel.

Oh, and STOP LYING. Andrew Leonard never called you a global warming denialist, despite your claim in your second column.