In a post on his blog and then again on the Huffington Post, Joe Romm challenged me to a wager on oil prices, claiming prescience concerning the price rise in the past decade compared to my 1996 forecast of low prices for two decades. He seems to be implying that that I have refused to wager him, having closed the webpage to any further comments.
I find myself taken aback, as my experience with the blogosphere is somewhat limited. My experience is primarily as an academic, writing articles for refereed journals and books, as well as working papers, with an intention to make them carefully sourced and referenced. A blog can consist of nothing more than a rant, and the comments appended to them often worse (and usually anonymous). I will not however yield to the temptation to follow suit (even if our illustrious moderator would permit it, which he won’t).…