PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
competitor with the dominant market share, that normally
should feel the competitive squeeze, behaves like a nonparticipating
spectator of the coal-gas struggle. As if natural
gas had become prematurely vulnerable.
The explanation may lie with the intimate relationship between
energy source and means of transportation. We saw
earlier that there is a coupling between energy and transportation
in the sense that each type of transportation is associated
with one principal fuel, even if early and late version of it may
use different fuels. Coal was the principal fuel of railroads and
oil that of automobiles. The principal fuel of the airplane could
well be some gas (natural gas in the beginning, hydrogen eventually).
But the corresponding airplane technology is still not
there, as we saw in the previous section. Lack of important
demand for gas translates to diminished competitiveness so
that when coal persists in the market, gas suffers (out of turn)
before oil.
Environmentalists have been very vocal in their support of natural
gas. I wonder, however, what has really been their role in the greening
of natural gas. The importance of gas in the world market has been
growing steadily for the last ninety years, independent of latter-day environmental
concerns. The voice of environmentalists reminds me of
Ralph Nader’s crusade in the 1960s for car safety, while the number of
deaths from car accidents had already been pinned between twenty-two
and twenty-eight annually per one hundred thousand population for
more than forty years (Figure 1.1).
Environmentalists have also taken a vehement stand on the issue of
nuclear energy. This primary energy source entered the world market in
the mid 1970s when it reached more than 1 percent share. The rate of
growth during the first decade seems disproportionally rapid, however,
compared to the entry and exit slopes of wood, coal, oil and natural gas,
all of which conform closely to a more gradual rate (see Figure 7.6). At
the same time, the opposition to nuclear energy also seems out of
proportion when compared to other environmental issues. As a
consequence of the intense criticism, nuclear energy growth has slowed
considerably, and it is not surprising to see the little circles in Figure 7.6
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