Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, right?
So right off the bat, I’m going to offer up a couple of mea culpas from my journalism over the years.
More than a decade ago, I became keenly interested in the topic of peak oil. It began after I read The Party’s Over by Richard Heinberg. My fascination carried on for several years, thanks to a bunch of other books.
I wasn’t alone. Authors Michael Klare, Kevin Phillips, Dmitry Orlov, Jeff Rubin, Jeremy Leggett, Matthew Simmons, and others also banged this drum. One of the earliest Cassandras was Scientific American, which published a very influential article on this topic in 1998 called “The End of Cheap Oil”.
There were graphs like the famous Hubbert curve, created by U.S. geologist M. King Hubbert, that declared an inevitable crash in oil supplies. The resulting high prices would grind the world economy to a halt.
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But it turned out that HIV was indeed the cause of AIDS. Thanks to some brilliant Vancouver researchers, HIV/AIDS has been converted into a chronic disease rather than an automatic death sentence. And one day, Vancouver’s Dr. Julio Montaner may win a Nobel Prize for this accomplishment.
It demonstrated once again that sometimes the experts know a lot more than lay people about complicated subjects.