Scarcity alarms over oil proved wrong because fracking unlocked new supply

Evidence

It is possible to trace parallel trajectories: Forty years ago, anxieties about global petroleum and natural gas resources reached market-distorting proportions. People genuinely worried that there wasn’t enough accessible oil in the ground to permit the world (and the black gold industry) to go about its business for the foreseeable future. Enterprising futurists turned their attention to alternative forms of energy and civilizational patterns less dependent on fossil fuels. The perfection of fracking techniques has given the legacy corporate power of Big Oil a new lease on life, and at present, despite mounting anxieties about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change, there’s really no end in sight for cheap fossil fuels. Fracking has turned out to be a way to perform serial cesarean sections on the goose that lays golden eggs—it’s ugly, and the goose isn’t going to live forever, but the eggs do stack up surprisingly fast. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 97

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the alleged 1970s oil-scarcity panic that fracking disproved actually match the historical record (peak-oil debates, Carter’s warnings)?