Does Udall Still Believe in ‘Peak Oil’?

After bottoming out, in the fracking era, at 359,000 barrels per day in December 2015, field production of petroleum in the Land of Enchantment rebounded to 439,000 barrels per day in March. The Permian Basin, primarily located in Texas but spilling across the border into southeast New Mexico, is booming. The Bakken is coming back. Nationally, rig counts are up. The Wall Street Journal reports that the “global oil glut is proving immune to the limits set by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.” And last week, it must have stung for The New York Times to run a story headlined “Drivers Head Into Summer With a Gift at the Gas Pump.”

In other words, it’s a terrible time to be a peak oiler.

The assumption that global production of petroleum — or at least, affordable petroleum — would soon crest, and then collapse, has been eco-alarmist theology for decades. It’s always been nonsense, since its adherents are unable or unwilling to grasp that humanity is relentlessly finding new ways to extract and efficiently consume oil.

So Errors of Enchantment has question for New Mexico’s senior senator: Do you still believe in peak oil?

U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, while a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was instrumental in forming the “Peak Oil Caucus.” In 2005, the group of towering ignoramuses decreed that “United States domestic production” had peaked in 1970 and would not recover, and that “the peak in the world’s oil production … is likely to occur in the next decade.” What was needed, of course, was “an energy project with the magnitude, creativity, and sense of urgency of the ‘Man on the Moon’ project to develop a comprehensive plan to address the challenges presented by Peak Oil.”

Almost a dozen years later, it’s more clear than ever that the hysterics were wildly off base. So is Udall willing to come clean with his constituents, and admit he was duped?

That’s probably asking too much from a fedpol who’s cozied up to the corporate-welfare-grabbing, politically savvy folks behind “green power.” But Udall’s junk science is something to remember the next time you hear him weigh in on energy and environmental issues. If he could be so spectacularly erroneous on such an important matter, what else is he getting wrong?