patrick.net

Less than 15 years ago, the conventional wisdom was that we'd reached “peak oil,” or that the U.S., and indeed the world at large, had already extracted more petroleum than what remained beneath the ground.

Then, in unheralded fashion and quite silently, American frackers and horizontal drillers made such a term entirely obsolete. The U.S. went from a superpower hobbled by an insatiable need for imported oil to the largest producer of oil and natural gas in the world and, soon, the likely largest exporter of fossil fuels. In the same vein, the Middle East and especially the Persian Gulf transmogrified from being the nexus of American foreign policy to nearly irrelevant in U.S. strategic thinking. If Saudi Arabia was once accused of virtually running American foreign policy, it is now seen at the other extreme as a minor medieval bother. A few thousand people in obscurity in the fracking industry, without government grants and without the media fawning over them as they had green legends such as Al Gore, literally changed the lives of millions of Americans at home and their country's status abroad.

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Most obviously, technology has no limits, either on its ability to transform utterly modern life or the speed at which it accomplishes such changes. Once fracking was mastered, it became ever cheaper and ever more efficient at a geometrical rate — and operated independently, as scientific breakthroughs do, from political consensus and convention.