My friend and colleague Marianne Kah, the chief economist at ConocoPhillips spoke recently about the perception that energy companies would find their reserves had lost their value, since climate change policies would result in them being left in the ground. Jeff McMahon wrote a nice piece titled “What Carbon Bubble?” outlining her views, and I will take a slightly different approach to her argument that oil company reserves, in particular, should not be affected by such concerns. The fact is that there have been repeated “threats” to the oil industry over the years, none of which has proved out. During the first half-century of the oil industry many were convinced that oil resources were limited and the industry would not persist, but the 1901 discovery of Spindletop changed that view. There was a ‘peak oil’ scare after World War I, followed again by large discoveries such as […]