The Questioning Librarian

I thought that I had heard enough hair-brained schemes through that purveyor of nonsense, the random email, to last me a lifetime. As if it wasn't bad enough getting emails telling you to boycott a certain gas company in hopes that they will lower their prices and have the others follow, as if Facebook users saying "Don't buy gas for a day," to hurt the gas companies wasn't utterly stupid enough (there is no other term to describe it), now we have the best advice on lowering gas prices. Ever. From Donald Trump, no less. The Donald seems to think that all we have to do is just "tell" OPEC to lower prices, and they'll do it. But this makes no sense, you say. Ah, but The Donald is here to remind us that it just takes the right messenger, something we all should have learned from The Godfather . His point is that Obama is the wrong messenger, and I assume he wants us to believe that it is he  who would make a good messenger. But if the special pleading...

I recently finished David Goodstein's Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil . It made for a few more sleepless nights as a whole, to say the least. It was more technical than other pieces I've read on peak oil, with most of the book being devoted to the technical aspects of engines (more than I wanted to know) with the first and last parts of the book looking at first Hubbert's peak, then ending with alternative sources of energy. For those out of the loop, Hubbert's peak was developed by a geophysicist M. King Hubbert, working for Shell Oil, in the 1950's when it seemed that America's oil boom would never end, with frequent discoveries in Texas, etc. He correctly predicted peak oil for the continental U.S. (Alaska excluded), in which new discoveries peaked in the 1950's and peak production was reached in the early 1970's, declining perpetually afterward. His model has been used in countries and, more importantly, for the entire world. We know, of cour...