In the 1920s, Wolfgang Pauli was one of a handful of young physicists who helped overturn our understanding of the physical world with the development of quantum physics. This knowledge quickly beget radical technologies, first the atomic bomb, immediately followed by the transistor. Known for his acerbic commentary, one of the great stories about Pauli is asked for an opinion on a fellow physicist's paper he replied, “It's not even wrong.”
These days, this is how I feel reading most political and economic commentary. Let's take oil. As oil prices surge, DC is increasingly panicked, and that is always an ugly, ugly thing. I'm told Joe Biden, walking the halls of the White House late at night, sees the ghost of his once good friend Pat Caddell tortuously yowling Jimmy Carter's 1979 “crisis of confidence” speech. Supposedly, Caddell looks not at, but through Biden, endlessly repeating, “The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation.”
Carter lost. America did nothing for the next 40 years. Ok, we did spend a lot money blowing up the Middle East and debt funding the Great Shale Revolution. If you remember just two months ago, one of the great shale revolutionaries Pioneer CEO Scott Sheffield scolded the president for not calling on them to help. Yesterday, the CEO reversed himself stating, “'There's no change for us, $100 oil, $150 oil, we're not going to change our growth rate.'"
Better, he adds, “A few private firms are raising output at 15-20% are going to run out of inventory fairly quickly."
Then, most amusing, the CEO warns, “Pioneer wouldn't be able to increase production if the Biden administration requested, high inflation inhibits shale growth.”
For the United States, there's one, and only one, oil solution: we need to reduce our usage by restructuring our infrastructure from farms to downtowns, anything else is not even wrong.
Well said (no pun intended)