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Vogt and Osborn were also the first to bring to a wide public a belief that would become a foundation of environmental thought: consumption driven by capitalism and rising human numbers is the ultimate cause of most of the world's ecological problems, and only dramatic reductions in human fertility and economic activity will prevent a worldwide calamity.
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Charles C. Mann |
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I have omitted the numbers to highlight that the basic argument is as simple as it was in Vogt's day. Stay within the limits, and people can develop freely. Go beyond the boundaries--exceed carrying capacity--and trouble will ensue.
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Charles C. Mann |
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dfafc4f
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To the question of how to survive, his work said: be smart, make more, share with everyone else. It said: we can build a world of gleaming richness for all. And the concomitants of this world--the giant installations, the whirring machinery in the garden, the glare of artificial light in the night sky--are to be embraced, not feared.
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Charles C. Mann |
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dbbb8cd
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Prophets smite their brows in exasperation at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farming systems wholly in terms of calories produced--in terms of usable energy--is a perfect example of the flaws of reductive thinking. It does not include the costs of overfertilization, habitat loss, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse; it doesn't account for the destruction of rural communities; it d..
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Charles C. Mann |
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2d429a9
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The better way, he decided, was to raise yields all over the nation--to target Mexico as a whole, rather than only the Bajio. As Vietmeyer put it, Borlaug thought the objective should be to "feed everyone; not just the hungry. Opt to feed the whole populace." Produce enough not only to feed every man and woman in Mexico but also to export to other food-short nations."
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Charles C. Mann |
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Borlaug thought, the process would be too slow. As a rule of thumb, wheat breeders needed ten to fifteen harvests to select, test, and propagate a new variety. The process couldn't be hurried; farmers could grow only one crop of winter or spring wheat a year. But the Rockefeller Foundation wasn't going to wait fifteen years. And the farmers needed help now.
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Charles C. Mann |
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376e204
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In November, after the harvest, Borlaug would take his four surviving varieties to Sonora, where he would breed them with each other and many other cultivars in an effort to produce new cultivars that both resisted stem rust (as the four survivors did) and produced a lot of grain (as the other strains would if they didn't succumb to rust). In April he would harvest the seed from the best plants and take it to the Bajio, where he would perfo..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Elvin Charles Stakman,
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Charles C. Mann |
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Stakman did not view science as a disinterested quest for knowledge. It was a tool--maybe the tool--for human betterment. Not all sciences were equally valuable, as he liked to explain. "Botany," he said, "is the most important of all sciences, and plant pathology is one of its most essential branches."
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Charles C. Mann |
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fa991e2
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Vaclav Smil has calculated that fertilizer from the Haber-Bosch process was responsible for "the prevailing diets of nearly 45% of the world's population." Roughly speaking, this is equivalent to feeding about 3.25 billion people. More than 3 billion men, women, and children--an incomprehensibly vast cloud of dreams, fears, and explorations--owe their existence to two early-twentieth-century German chemists."
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Charles C. Mann |
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9914c01
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About 40 percent of the fertilizer applied in the last sixty years wasn't assimilated by plants; instead, it washed away into rivers or seeped into the air in the form of nitrous oxide.
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Charles C. Mann |
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185b6c6
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The scientists had taken a route through Mexico that was much like the route taken by Bill and Marjorie Vogt two years later. Both groups wrote reports documenting the same terrible poverty and eroded land, but their ideas about the remedy were starkly different. To Vogt, the basic problem was land degradation, and the primary cure was to ease the burden on the land. By contrast, the scientists believed that Mexico's issues were caused, at ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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a992f7b
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Some flows, like sunlight or wind, cannot be affected by human action. No matter how many solar panels I put on my roof to absorb sunlight, they will have no effect on what the sun does tomorrow. But other flows--"critical-zone resources," in the jargon--can be exploited to exhaustion. Consider an archetypical critical-zone flow: the run of salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Drop a net across the watercourse and the fish will swim right int..
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Charles C. Mann |
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f3b221a
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When people pump too much water from coastal aquifers, saltwater can rush in. Thick with salt and minerals, seawater is denser than freshwater; once in an aquifer, there is no known way of flushing it out. Coastal aquifers are imperiled from Maine to Florida; on the Arabian coast; in the suburbs of Jakarta (metropolitan population, more than 10 million); throughout the Mediterranean; and in a host of other places.
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Charles C. Mann |
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a49d4dd
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Today, according to the International Water Management Institute, a Sri Lanka-based cousin to IRRI and CIMMYT, one person out of every three on the planet lacks reliable access to freshwater, whether because the water is unsafe, unaffordable, or unavailable. The problems are not restricted to poor nations. By 2025, the institute predicts, all of Africa and the Middle East, almost all of South and Central America and Asia, and much of North ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c4120ac
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Agricultural losses are costly to prevent. Most irrigation is deployed through canals. They lose water because it seeps through the bottom, evaporates during transmission, and spills out at junctions; a rule of thumb is that almost two-thirds of the water is lost, and often much more. (The figures are imprecise, because some of the "lost" water flows usefully into neighboring fields or percolates back into rivers.)"
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Charles C. Mann |
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e6a596e
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To survive, Weaver said, humans have a single basic need: "usable energy." That energy comes in two forms: energy for the body (food and water, in other words), and energy for daily existence (that is, fuel to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make essential materials like cement and steel). "In the United States," Weaver estimated, "each person uses, on the average, 3,000 calories per day for food, [and] 125,000 calories per day..
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Charles C. Mann |
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b2abb10
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Weaver could say something about the sun, though. In principle, the sun pours onto Earth enough energy--vastly more than enough--to provide all humanity with the necessary 128,000 calories a day. "If solar energy could be utilized with full efficiency, the United States alone could sustain, energy-wise, a population over 40 times the present total population of the planet." The global population then being about 2 billion, Weaver was sugges..
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Charles C. Mann |
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922e04e
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The true problem was not that humankind risked surpassing natural limits, but that our species didn't know how to tap more than a fraction of the energy provided by nature.
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Charles C. Mann |
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Weaver never published his ideas. His memorandum lay unnoticed in the archives of the foundation, now stored underground on one of the Rockefeller estates. And his dream of reworking photosynthesis would be almost forgotten for sixty years, until it was revived by the descendants of the molecular biologists whom Weaver had funded and the successor to Rockefeller as the world's biggest charitable foundation.
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Charles C. Mann |
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c3c2096
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Today the concept of global carrying capacity has evolved into the idea of planetary boundaries. The boundaries set the environmental terrain "within which we expect that humanity can operate safely," a team of twenty-nine European and American scientists argued in an influential report from 2009. (It was updated in 2015.) To prevent "non-linear, abrupt environmental change," they said, humankind must not transgress nine global limits. That..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Today most historians and economists instead view the oil shock as a product of mistaken government policies.
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Charles C. Mann |
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777b0b2
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More than 80 percent of the world's energy now comes from fossil fuels, and every bit of it is mined from the earth.
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Charles C. Mann |
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all the fossil fuels humankind will ever have are already here, waiting to be extracted from the ground--in contrast to food, which is grown every season from the soil, and freshwater, which is drawn in constant but limited amounts from rivers, lakes, and aquifers.
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Charles C. Mann |
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food and water can be thought of as a flow--or, more precisely, a critical-zone flow, a current with a volume that must be maintained. By contrast, fossil fuels are like a stock, a fixed amount of a good. Few dispute that the flow of food and water could be interrupted, with terrible effects. But people have disagreed for a century and a half--since the days of Pithole--about whether the world has an adequate stock of fossil fuels.
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Charles C. Mann |
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Coursing through history like waves of panic, the conviction that civilization was hurtling toward an energy disaster has become embedded in the culture. Time after time, decade after decade, presidents, prime ministers, and politicians of every party have predicted that the world will soon run out of oil and gas. Time after time, decade after decade, new supplies have been found and old reservoirs extended. People forgot their apprehension..
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Charles C. Mann |
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ff79ed7
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Far too often, we have been told that the future will be wracked by crises of energy scarcity, when the problems our children will face will be due to its abundance.
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Charles C. Mann |
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e07ff67
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Perversely, the most enduring consequence of the 1970s belief that energy supplies were running out was not to use less, but to look for more. In this quest, Jimmy Carter, arguably the most ecologically minded president in U.S. history, endorsed policies that today seem like environmental folly. Notably, his administration sought to offset the approaching decline of oil and gas by tripling the use of coal, a much dirtier fuel. Just as peak ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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c62da42
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Today, about 85 percent of Israel's wastewater--more than 100 million gallons a year--is used for irrigation, according to Seth M. Siegel, the author of Let There Be Water (2015), a study of Israeli water use that I am following here.
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Charles C. Mann |
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893bd66
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Israel provided incentives for farmers to switch to drip irrigation, in which pipes with tiny holes provide small, precisely adjusted flows of water. Ideally, drip irrigation provides water at just the rate at which it can be absorbed by plant roots. Invented by the Israeli engineer Simcha Blass, it can use half or less of the water used in ordinary irrigation to nourish the same number of plants. At the same time, drip irrigation is one of..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8782fc1
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Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine--more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced that the hostility was due, in part, to the region's lack of resources; the immigrants were exceeding Palestine's "absorptive capacity" (that is, its carrying capacity). The limit to absorptive capacity was water--British experts argued that re..
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Charles C. Mann |
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da43e4b
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Britain had just converted its entire fleet from the unsteady power of wind to the constant force provided by coal. Now, Churchill declared, Britain had to transform its navy a second time. Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. An oil-fueled ship could thus travel roughly twice as far as a coal-fueled ship of similar size. Oil's greater energy density meant that it, rather than coal, was..
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Charles C. Mann |
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Typically such reports focus on urban water supplies. The emphasis is understandable: most people live in metropolitan areas and water from their taps is what will make them sick if contaminated. But most freshwater is actually used by agriculture--almost 70 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Just 12 percent goes to direct human consumption: drinking, cooking, washing, and so on. (Industry takes the rest.) Fo..
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Charles C. Mann |
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5b75d0b
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the world of 10 billion, water experts project, the demand for water could be 50 percent higher than it is now. Where will it all come from? New supplies will not be easy to find. Few lakes and rivers are unexploited, and aquifers are being depleted. Equally difficult would be stretching existing water supplies by reducing waste and encouraging thrifty use. Adding to the pressure, climate change is shrinking glaciers and drying streams.
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Charles C. Mann |
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01d9384
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To overcome rubisco's lassitude and maladroitness, plants make a lot of it. As much as half of the protein in many plant leaves, by weight, is rubisco--it is often said to be the world's most abundant protein. One estimate is that plants and microorganisms contain more than eleven pounds of rubisco for every person on Earth. The biological chain seems clear: more nitrogen = more rubisco = more photosynthesis = more plant growth = more food ..
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Charles C. Mann |
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8703bd5
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This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once.
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Charles C. Mann |
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295b727
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This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once. But this single incident had huge effects--it is responsible for the existence of plants.
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Charles C. Mann |
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921b335
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Lacking a real theory of petroleum formation, early petroleum geologists had assumed that oil and gas deposits must be located in zones similar to those where oil and gas had been found before. They looked, so to speak, for more Pitholes. Because few such areas were known, researchers believed that petroleum deposits therefore must be rare. In reality, new oil was found repeatedly--by wildcatters who, unaware of expert opinion, searched for..
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Charles C. Mann |
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78c96fe
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To Hubbert, this kind of thinking was sheer mysticism. Earth, being finite, contains a finite number of hydrocarbon molecules in a finite set of locations. Supplies are therefore limited
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Charles C. Mann |
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dfdf155
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the production curve of any given species of fossil fuel will rise, pass through one or several maxima, and then decline asymptotically to zero." Decline asymptotically to zero! The potential consequences were vast. Hubbert believed that the fossil-fuel explosion had created the population explosion--that consuming coal, oil, and gas had provided the impetus to drive our species up Gause's S-shaped curve. Because the amount of the world's o..
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Charles C. Mann |
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117faa2
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Hubbert's views echoed those in The Road to Survival, published the year before, except that he thought in terms of physical limits, rather than biological limits. Still, he ended up in the same place: capitalist-style economic growth was not only unsustainable, it was actively driving humankind beyond its limits to disaster. "The future of our civilization largely depends," he wrote, on whether humanity will be able "to evolve a culture mo..
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Charles C. Mann |
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a79749d
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Propelled by the oil shock, fears of scarcity wafted across the nation like a bad smell. Rumors of shortages in any number of goods--gasoline, salmon, cheese, onions, raisins--caused brief, unwarranted episodes of anxiety, some of them about commodities one would never imagine could run out. The Great Toilet Paper Panic of 1973 occurred after talk-show host Johnny Carson joked about a shortage, causing frightened consumers to buy out stores..
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Charles C. Mann |
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6b77391
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As the Yale historian Paul Sabin has written, the oil shock "seemingly confirmed the thesis of The Limits to Growth."
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Charles C. Mann |
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26abcf4
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Both Hubbertians and McKelveyans agree that an oil reserve is a physical stock: a finite pool of hydrocarbon molecules. To Hubbertians, the implication is clear: pump out too much and you will eventually empty it. How long you can pump depends primarily on the size of the pool. To McKelveyans, though, what matters most is not the size of the pool, but the capacity of the pump. The reason for this apparently counterintuitive belief is that a..
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Charles C. Mann |