I have a big collection of doomster books, too, and of course they were mostly wrong. For example, the advice to buy bags of "junk" U. S. silver coins and store them in a bank vault in Switzerland would have been a financial disaster, a great inconvenience, and perhaps worst of all would have made one into an object of derision. Luckily I paid no attention to such suggestions and instead went 150% into the stock market in the early 1980s. Unfortunately for me, however, when silver had crashed to about $6.00 an ounce I thought its time had come around again. I did not buy silver coins, but I did lose a lot of money on one futures contract and on Coeur d'Alene mining stock.
Yes, I have about 20 of those books from the 1970s and 1980s, most of which I got for less than a dollar on some sales table or in a used book store. There's very little of value in any of them. The one that did me the most damage was "Paul Erdman's Money Book." I must have thrown that one away.
Matt Simmons's book has various defects. It is redundant in places. But as a general expression of skepticism about the ability of Saudi Arabia to keep supplying all the oil that humanity wants to consume, it is persuasive.
We have already seen oil production in the United States peak and go into an irreversible decline, starting in 1970. It is only a matter of time before the same thing happens for the planet, and that time may have come. |
