PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

11. FORECASTING DESTINY
The country’s leaders failed in their attempt to enforce what they
thought was a “good” level for oil imports. As demand increased and
could not be met cost effectively by domestic production, the quota law
had to be relaxed, and the energy independence project proved ineffective.
The leadership’s only achievement was short-term deviations from
what should have been a natural course.
Ten Years Later
In fact things got worse. The ceiling of 34 percent oil imports
proved to be only an intermediate step. As America became
more dependent on foreign oil, a second niche was opened
with a higher ceiling estimated at least 60 percent (see small
circles in the figure). This is a rather embarrassing result for
the project of the Nixon administration to render the country
energy independent.
In discussing this example of the ultimate futility of attempting to
alter the direction of a natural course, Marchetti presents a satirical image
of the world’s most powerful man, the American President, who is
“like Napoleon in Russia, sitting on a white horse pointing east while
the army is going west; and that’s not the best image for decisional
power.”
War has been held responsible at times for starting new trends and
establishing new processes; however, it provides conditions that can
hardly be considered natural. We saw earlier that during World War II
natural rubber became in short supply and efforts intensified to fabricate
synthetic rubber. The feat was accomplished, and natural rubber
began to be rapidly replaced by synthetic. But as soon as the war was
over, production of synthetic rubber dropped, despite the acquired
know-how and the ability to produce it in large quantities. Natural rubber
appeared again in the market, and the substitution process
continued at a slower, more “natural” rate. The ratio of synthetic to
natural rubber reached the World War II levels again only twenty years
later, in the late 1960s.
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