PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

In 1919, the director of the U.S. Bureau of Mines offered a dire warning for the future. "Within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production, and from that time on we will face an ever-increasing decline."

Nearly a century later, in July 2010, The Guardian ran a story with an ominous headline: "Lloyd's adds its voice to dire 'peak oil' warnings." Citing a report by the storied London insurer, the newspaper warned that businesses were "underestimating catastrophic consequences of declining oil," including oil at $200 a barrel by 2013, a global supply crunch, and overall "economic chaos."

I thought of these predictions on seeing the recent news that the United States is on the eve of breaking a 47-year production record by lifting more than 10 million barrels of crude a day. That's roughly twice what the U.S. produced just a decade ago, and may even put us on track to overtake Saudi Arabia and even Russia as the world's leading oil producer. As for global production, it rose by some 11 percent just since the Lloyd's report, and by almost 200 percent since 1965.

Call it yet another case of Apocalypse Not. In his fascinating new book, "The Wizard and the Prophet," Charles C. Mann notes that President Roosevelt -- Teddy, not Franklin -- called the "imminent exhaustion" of fossil fuels and other natural resources "the weightiest problem now before the nation." Prior to that, Mann adds, there were expert forecasts that the world would soon run out of coal. Later on, the world became fixated on the fear of running out of food in the face of explosive population growth.

With milk prices declining to levels seen 20 years ago, the dairy co-op Agri-Mark this month sent farmers phone numbers for suicide prevention hotlines and other mental health services along with the latest market forecasts.

The regional cooperative, which serves the six New England states plus New York, notified members in a Feb. 1 letter that prices for milk -- usually the largest part of dairy farmers' revenues -- were forecast to fall for the third year in a row in 2018.

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