METHANE HYDRATES

As the enviros lurch from one doomsday scenario to another, we often lose track of the many fearsome myths that they have created and then abandoned in the past. One of the most infamous was the hydro- carbon fuel crisis of the 1970s. With one voice, academic doomsayers and professional enviros informed the world that it was running out of hydrocarbon fuels. We would all, it seemed, soon freeze in the dark.

One of the delightful companions to that crisis was a series of editorials in  The Wall Street Journal which told the truth about world resrves of hydrocarbons. My favorite of these editorials was entitled "A Thousand Years of Natural Gas."

Now "The Mother Lode of Natural Gas" by R. Monastersky, Science News 150, No. 19, pp 298-299, November 9,1996, reports about reserves of methane hydrates, compounds of methane and water that exist at high pressures and low temperatures deep under the oceans.

It is believed that the methane hydrates are the largest reserve of carbon now known oh earth. Current estimates put this reserve at 10,000 gigatons or 10 tons of carbon, which is double the known reserves of coal, oil, and conventional natuml gas combined.

Meanwhile, "Clinton's Stealth BTU Tax" by Jonathan H. Alder, CEI Update 9, No. 10, pp 1-9, available from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Suite 1250, Washing- ton, DC 20036, reminds us that naturaI resource shortages are actually made in Washington.

Currently, Clinton Undersecretary of State Tim Wirth is negotiating "verifiable and binding" reductions in the use of hydrocarbon fuels to be enforced by international treaty. This is the same Tim Wirth who, in 1988, said, "What we've got to do in energy conservation is to try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." How much weight do the many research papers showing that global warming is wrong have with this "policy maker?" None at all.

Nor is Wirth's real interest energy conservation, either. As is abundantly clear, the earth's resources of hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels are so great that they can easily sustain all possible human development for many, many centuries and probably for several millennia. Long before the exhaustion of these resources becomes a significant problem, technological developments should provide new sources of energy.

The "energy conservers" like the "DDT banners" and the "environment conservers" have in common one central goal They wish to deliberately lower the human population ofthe earth by whatever form of legal genocide that they have at their disposal.

Meanwhile "What the Starvation Lobby Eschews. . ." by Julian L. Simon in the Wall Street Journal, p A12, November 18,1996 reports that world per capita food production has risen by 50% over the last 45 years and is still trending steadily upward. Simon compares this fact with Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book,  The Population Bomb which warned, "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich is still writing this sort of nonsense.

The people killeis are in a quandary There is an essentially unlim- ited supply of energy, the food supply keeps increasing at a rate far faster than population growth, and science and technology provide continuous upgrades in the quality and length of human life. Moreover, population growth is beginning to limit itself as people prefer fewer children when their society becomes more technologically advanced.

The killer's last hope is in outright lies about environmental science within a forced atmosphere of political correctness and media spin. In the midst of this come the technologists to put personal computers in every home which completely shatter the information control neces- sary to propagate these lies. The pseudoenviros are going to lose! The prospects for the future of mankind are bright indeed.