Benjamin Phelan worries that Scotland may run out of peat for making smoky whisky, discovers there’s little risk of that happening but writes an article about it anyway. The first page of the (two-page) article sets up the faulty premise, and the second page explains why it is faulty. And then we have this exercise in implausibility to justify the whole thing:

In fact, the coming fossil-fuel crunch could make the peat situation—and therefore the Scotch situation—a whole lot worse. As the price of oil and coal rises in concert with scarcity, peat could well be reassessed as a source of energy. Peat consumption could skyrocket, ringing down the curtain on peated Scotch forever. Meanwhile, its combustion for fuel would fill the air with ever more carbon dioxide, making the Earth uninhabitable.

Along the way, he randomly insults the appearance of a helpful cashier at a Duty Free shop (whose prognosis of the peat situation turns out to have been correct) and furthers some low-level misinformation about Scotch whisky:

The diminutive, knowledgeable clerk—basically Gimli from Lord of the Rings in an O’Hare-issue waistcoat—told me that back when Ardbeg was first becoming commercially available, he’d see avid Scotch drinkers, used to the unpeated, floral malts produced in other parts of Scotland, spit it out in disgust.

In fact, there is almost no unpeated whisky produced in Scotland. Glengoyne does not use any peated barley but, with the exception of particular expressions (Springbank’s Hazelburn range, for example), almost every distillery uses malted barley that has been peated to some degree or the other. And notably peaty whisky has long been available from regions other than Islay (not all of whose distilleries have historically been known for peaty whisky either).

Thank you, Benjamin Phelan!