Reisner v. Mitchell

The only thing, said Marc Reisner, in Cadillac Desert, his seminal work on the arid American west, that we are running out of faster than water is oil. Mr. Reisner's view was common among Malthusians of the 1970s, who liked to say that America had reached the era of limits. Reisner's belief was that the water necessary to settle the eleven western states was over-allocated by the 1970s, and that the extractable volume of fossil fuels used for energy had peaked. I don't know where we are with water, although I do know that the western states have added approximately 20 million residents since Reisner wrote his book. But, the thing that really struck me as I read his comment was that America is, today, on the cusp of energy independence, and will likely become a net exporter of energy soon. This is, admittedly, something that could not have been foreseen, even ten years ago, and Reisner has been dead longer than that, but it gives fresh strength to one of the key arguments against Malthus: That he failed to account for human ingenuity.

Likewise, Reisner. While he was writing his book, George Mitchell was working to extract oil and gas from the Barnett Shales beneath Fort Worth, Texas. For thirty or forty years Mr. Mitchell labored to perfect a pair of drilling techniques—directional drilling and pressurized rock fracturing (fracking)—which have come to revolutionize energy production, not only in the United States but around the world. There is now essentially no limit to the volume of fossil fuels available to provide energy to the American public. Mr. Mitchell is dead now, too—he died last month—but, in an obituary, The Economist noted that, before he died, he changed the world. Whether that change is "good" or "bad" will undoubtedly be debated for many years: Burning fossil fuels is blamed for climate change, and fracking is blamed for water pollution. (These are problems that, evidently, concerned Mr. Mitchell, too.) The fact, however, remains that where Mr. Reisner saw limits, Mr. Mitchell saw opportunities.