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DrumBeat: July 15, 2007
Posted by Leanan on July 15, 2007 - 9:13am
The impending doom and gloom from the world oil peak is ominous. There has been so little preparation and yet, if I am correct, the peak is upon us. We're feeling it now. The US government tried to cushion the bad news by introducing a “core inflation rate” which excludes energy and food. Word is getting around. The July 2, 2007 cover of the New Yorker shows the Statue of Liberty holding up a torch consisting of a fluorescent light bulb. It looks as if we will go through another US presidential election with no candidate calling attention to the world oil problem, or to the North American natural gas problem. My only hope is that a candidate, who learns from private polls that he or she is behind, will drop the oil bomb into the debate.
Peak Oil Passnotes: Peak Oil Zombie Attack
As we have made clear many times in this column we hold little truck with many of the whackos who inhabit the wondrous world of ‘Peak Oil’. Yes, despite the title of the column. No sooner do people start talking about energy supply crunches, plateauing production or acreage inflection then a host of bedraggled crazies rise forth from their graves to tell us a number of scary items.Firstly, we are often told humanity is going to “die off.” What a great idea. It could almost be a book, or a series of books and a website. Oh wait. It is. Like an energy-related version of the film 28 Days Later. Every lazy person around the planet can argue how many people will be alive in 2050 or 2100 and no one can prove them wrong. Ker-ching!
North Dakota gas retailers lack answer for high prices
North Dakota gasoline prices are reported among the highest in the country, and retailers say they have no idea how long the surge will last.“We don’t have an answer,” said Perry Palm, an operator at the Magellan Pipeline Terminal in West Fargo, which is facing its second shortage of supplies in a month. “At this point, I can’t really tell anything.”
Old oil fears don't match 2007 reality
Evidence less than a quarter-century old indicates that years of warnings about the nation's troubling vulnerability to oil price shocks have turned out to be seriously overstated. Consider the most obvious fact: From 2002 through 2006, the price of oil nearly tripled. And what were the observable macroeconomic impacts? What crippling effects did this unprecedented price run-up produce?
The only thing standing between the U.S. and access to huge oil deposits far off the coast of Alaska is an unratified treaty.Russian scientists are hard at work trying to prove that a big chunk of the Arctic Ocean -- and the billions of tons of oil underneath it -- belong to them. The U.S. could counter this claim, but it doesn't have standing to do so because this nation hasn't ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Energy price gains curious following bearish inventory report
In spite of what we viewed as a bearish inventory report last week, prices bounced off their intraday lows to post gains late in the week.The price action is curious. While renewed unrest in Nigeria can prove supportive, as kidnappings go, they don't typically lead to export shut-ins.
Worse Than Gasoline: Liquid coal would produce roughly twice the global warming emissions of gasoline
Lawmakers of both parties are proposing amendments to the so-called energy independence bill that would massively subsidize the coal industry to produce liquid coal as a replacement for foreign oil.
Since the close of the cold war, we have been growing used to threats such as terrorism where the enemy has no state or territory. But soon we will have to get used to new strategic challenges, such as energy security, where fossil fuels will be used as weapons to achieve political ends. Energy security will be synonymous with national security and economic security.
Iranian economists blame president for economic woes despite huge oil revenues
Iran's state-run television said Saturday the government would soon respond in writing to scathing critics made by leading Iranian economists who blamed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the country's growing economic woes.A panel representing 57 economists made its plea for Ahmadinejad to change economic policies during a five and a half hour meeting with the hard-line president on Thursday.
Iran to sell shares of 17 energy companies
Iran plans to sell shares of 17 energy-related firms on the country's stock exchange, an Iranian official was quoted as saying yesterday, part of a long-running effort to sell off state assets.
Tehran needs to import fuel with rationing
Gasoline rationing in Iran has dampened consumption but the world’s fourth biggest crude exporter will still need to import 10-20 million litres a day at current usage rates, an Iranian oil official said yesterday.
A Guide to the Struggle Over Iraq's Oil
Your guide to the ongoing dance between Bush, the Congress, and the Iraqi government; an update on the current status of the proposed oil laws; and some steps you can take to stop the hijacking of Iraq's oil.
North Korea`s reactor produced plutonium, not power
North Korea's Yongbyon reactor was ostensibly built to generate electricity but is reportedly not connected to any power lines.Instead, experts say, it has produced enough plutonium from its fuel rods for possibly up to a dozen nuclear weapons over its 20-year history.
Pakistan: More than 60,000 stove devices installed to conserve energy
Ministry of Science and Technology (MoST) has so far installed more than 60,000 energy conserving stove devices under its fuel saving technology programme to conserve energy at the domestic level.
Africa: Following Oil Boom, Biofuel Eyed on Continent
While oil profits have flooded into countries such as Angola and Nigeria in recent decades, some African observers see new potential for the continent in the form of increasingly in-demand biofuels.
China booms … we pay the price
ALL OF those cheaply produced goods from China-everything from Nike running shoes to electric kettles - are coming home to roost right here in Britain. As factories multiply there to satisfy the Western world's insatiable demand for consumer goods, they use ever-increasing volumes of fuel.
UK Energy Strategy Calls For Zero Carbon in Twenty Years
The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in Snowdonia, Wales has released a position paper and accompanying website titled zerocarbonbritain, which proposes and promotes a strategy to halve the UK’s energy needs and reduce its carbon dioxide output to zero within two decades via a choreographed combination of policy and technology.
For those drivers who fall in love, buying and selling Smart car is a lot of fun
The business got its license Friday. The first eight cars hit the lot Saturday. By Monday, Dick Adams Automotive had sold nine Smart Cars into a market hungry for fuel-efficient vehicles.
For Prius owners, the message is important
A riddle: Why has the Toyota Prius enjoyed such success, with sales of more than 400,000 in the United States, when most other hybrid models struggle to find buyers?One answer may be that buyers of the Prius want everyone to know they are driving a hybrid.
Sick and tired of dumping dollars into your gas tank? A bill before Congress to dramatically increase fuel economy over the next decade for fossil fuel-driven vehicles probably won't make it any cheaper - most authorities don't expect prices at the pump to drop below $3 a gallon again - but it could stabilize the cost until alternate fuel technology becomes more widely available.
BP gets break on dumping in lake
The massive BP oil refinery in Whiting, Ind., is planning to dump significantly more ammonia and industrial sludge into Lake Michigan, running counter to years of efforts to clean up the Great Lakes.Indiana regulators exempted BP from state environmental laws to clear the way for a $3.8 billion expansion that will allow the company to refine heavier Canadian crude oil. They justified the move in part by noting the project will create 80 new jobs.
FARMING is in the blood for Stephen Rash. His is the fourth generation to run Hall Farm in Suffolk: 970 acres growing cereals, field beans and oilseed rape in the sleepy parish of Wortham. Rash, 51, describes himself as an eternal optimist but during the last decade it has not been easy to maintain enthusiasm as grain mountains sprouted in Europe and cereal prices plunged. Despite his working sometimes 90-hour weeks, Hall Farm barely scraped a profit.Now, however, booming demand for biofuels – green fuels that make energy from crushed rape and wheat – has combined with global population growth to generate soaring demand for cereals just as droughts and storms have inhibited global crop production.
Interest in solar energy seems to be everywhere, from government to commerce to consumers, with new manufacturing and new jobs on Tucson's horizon.
Sky-high oil prices signal higher rates
Rocketing global oil prices could force the Bank of England to keep interest rates higher for longer to stamp out fears of spiralling inflation, analysts have warned.
Sustainable Living: Environmental benefits of eating local
What is the single most important thing that one person can do to curb global warming?Some people might say permanently parking your car. That would stop about a fifth of America's greenhouse gas emissions if we all did that. However, agriculture produces more greenhouse gas emissions than our automobiles. The single most important change we can make is to eat locally. That means eating in season, what is grown and produced locally, including meats and grains.
Turbine shortage knocks wind out of projects
The race to build new sources of alternative energy from the wind is running into a formidable obstacle: not enough windmills.
Energy solutions: We should prioritize nuclear power and clean coal to tackle the energy crisis
The G8 agreement sounds great in theory. But in practice how can we reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by such massive amounts, while at the same time meeting the ever-growing demand for energy, particularly from the developing world? One important response will be to limit our consumption of energy as much as possible. But it is also essential that we develop environmentally friendly sources of energy and make improvements to those sources that are already in widespread use. This special issue of Physics World examines a few of the areas in which physicists are making – or can expect to make – significant contributions to these challenges, namely by carrying out research into solar and fuel cells, nuclear power, clean-coal technology and energy storage.
Learning to live with fossil fuels
As much as we welcome this rising tide of global-warming awareness, it is drowning out a disturbing reality: our world's likely dependence on coal, oil and gas for the next 50 years. What's more, our discussions with well-informed people show that most are unreasonably optimistic about the role alternative energy sources will play in the near term.
US Southern utilities, lawmakers resist call for renewable power
Six of the United States' 10 largest sources of carbon dioxide emissions are coal-fired power plants in the South, but year after year Southern lawmakers balk at pushing utilities toward cleaner renewable energy.
Climate Change Debate Hinges On Economics - Lawmakers Doubt Voters Would Fund Big Carbon Cuts
Because of the enormous cost of addressing global warming, the energy legislation considered by Congress so far will make barely a dent in the problem, while farther-reaching climate proposals stand a remote chance of passage.
US, China to get unique climate change chance at summit
The world's two biggest polluters, the US and China, will have an unprecedented chance to thrash out action on climate change at an upcoming summit in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard said Sunday.
Any average hump with a decent computer, internet access, a modicum of curiosity, and a willingness to avoid averting their eyes upon reading bad news could have told you years ago that we, the people of the United States, needed to start preparing for a post-petroleum lifestyle, but even amongst those who fancied ourselves as aware, well, at least some of us kinda hoped the worst of it might lie a few years off in the future, sometime later on, maybe after we got the kids through high school and college.
A Little-Known Group Claims a Victory on Immigration
The organization wants to reduce immigration — as Mr. Beck says in the subtitle of his book — for “moral, economic, social and environmental reasons.”He contends that immigrants and their children are driving population growth, which he says is gobbling up open space, causing urban sprawl and creating more traffic congestion.
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How Long Before Net Exports Decline by 50% in Selected Countries?
I have suggested that we will see Phase One and Phase Two Net Export declines in exporting countries. Phase One would be characterized by stable to increasing cash flow, even as net exports decline, because of increasing oil prices. Phase Two would be characterized by declining cash flow, as increasing oil prices can’t offset the declines in net exports.
Probably a good dividing line between Phase One and Phase Two will be when the country’s net exports decline by 50%
Note that the Export Land Model (ELM) suggests an initial net export decline rate of 15% per year, to the halfway point, and then about 45% thereafter, with an overall decline rate of about 30% per year, for my hypothetical country.
If we assume a 5% production decline rate for Saudi Arabia, and a 5% rate of increase in consumption, their initial net export decline rate would be 8% per year, declining by half in 9 years.
If we assume a 10% production decline rate for Russia (roughly based on the HL model) and a 5% rate of increase in consumption, their initial net export decline rate would be 40% per year, declining by half in about two years.
If we assume a 10% production decline rate for Norway and a 5% rate of increase in consumption (both consistent with 2005 to 2006 data), their initial net export decline rate would be 12% per year, declining by half in about six years.
Note that the EIA showed, from 2005 to 2006, declining net exports for all three of these countries, which accounted for 40% of world net exports in 2006.
When an exporter stops exporting and starts importing, ie the UK, it seems this will compound the ELM numbers
or
where is mexico going to import oil from when the time comes? Or seeing this, why will they continue to export oil?
Ed
Off Grid, Off Mainland, current profession:Beach Bum
The US and the overall world industrial economy are both based on an assumption of an infinite exponential increase in exported crude oil and petroleum products, when the new reality, IMO, is an exponential decline in world net oil export capacity. And I anticipate that the net export decline rate will accelerate with time.
All I can do is to suggest ELP as a response to the ELM, and suggest, when people finally realize what is going on, that we implement Alan Drake's plans. I strongly advise that people start thinking about trying to lock in access to food supplies.
... when people finally realize what is going on...
Are not exporters smart enough to ANTICIPATE and minimize exports asap for their own survival, if not also to mitigate global consequences? [excepting only exporters prevented from doing so by their foreign handlers].
"where is mexico going to import oil from when the time comes? Or seeing this, why will they continue to export oil?"
..as in ANTICIPATE and so withhold exports?
I have a problem with the ELM as is. It is too simplified. It is good from a theoretical / formal point of view, but lack of predictive power, because it don't take in account the other real life conditions.
ELF can work in a model where the exporter(s) have an economic advantage to keep the oil extracted for internal consumption instead to sell it and buy goods with the revenues.
This is true for USA, Canada, EU, Japan; but is it true for Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria and others?
The differences are that the firsts are rich countries able to pay more the oil than other and developed countries able to turn more value out of the same oil.
The first thing to remember is that exporter (all of them, whatever goods they export) do it with the aim to import something in exchange like drugs, cars, airplanes, weapons, food, cloths and so on.
Saudi Arabia and Iran governments export oil to be able to pay their polices, armed forces, clerics and keep them happy. So they will have a strong incentive to keep up the exports of oil and try to reduce the internal use of oil.
With the revenues from oil they can continue to hire their gunmen to crack down against the opposition (or they can try). If even they try to keep the oil for internal use, they will need to combat against smuggling (they do it just now in Iran).
Many big exporters like Saudi Arabia and Iran are big food net importer from the West. So they will need to sell oil to buy food. Linking oil prices and corn (food) prices is good from a geopolitical point of view, because put Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others between a rock and an hard place. Rising prices of oil will force rising prices of food. And what they will gain from higher oil prices they lose twice from higher food prices. This will force the political collapse of these nations, because they lack the internal trust and the economic productivity needed to sustain the strain.
I am suggesting that most net exporters' cash flows from export sales will increase (at least in Phase One), even as their exports decline, because of rapid increases in oil prices.
For example, let's assume that Matt Simmons is right and oil prices in 2010 are at $200 per barrel, in constant 2005 dollars, and let's take a look at Saudi Arabia.
Let's assume $60/BOE in 2005, and ignore operating and other costs. Saudi Arabia exported 9.1 mbpd in 2005. So, let's call it about $200 billion in total liquids sales. ( BOE = Barrel of Oil Equivalent)
Let's assume $200/BOE in 2010, again ignoring costs, and let's assume an 8% annual decline rate in net exports. Saudi Arabia would export 6.1 mbpd in 2010, and let's call it $450 billion in total liquids sales (constant 2005 dollars).
So, a 33% decline in net exports would, with rising oil prices, yield a 125% increase in total liquids sales (again, constant 2005 dollars). I wonder what effect this would have on internal Saudi consumption?
In any case, the aggregate increase in total liquids consumption by the top five net exporters (half of net exports in 2006) was 5.5% from 2005 to 2006.
If you were in charge of the Saudi oil industry, would you confess that you can't increase production--and thereby encourage emergency conservation measures and efforts like Electrification Of Transportation--or would you constantly claim massive productive capacity, and thereby encourage energy consumption and discourage conservation and discourage alternative transport and energy options?
Edited to correct some numbers.
One bright spot in Zimbabwe:
Financial troubles lead to less HIV
Confound the doomers. Let’s hear it for life after oil.
This post is in response to an earlier post by Cherenkov who accused me of “Engineer Tunnel Vision”, or ETV for showing dangerous signs of techo-optimism. I know he loves to dismiss the engineers view about future energy with a TLA but at least the engineers are trying to come up with solutions for peak oil. The alternative is to throw your hands in the air and say we are all going to die (true but so what?).
I totally agree with him that the gap between what can be done physically and what is likely to be done may be unbridgeable. Public life is innumerate. Most politicians are lawyers and want proof which can only come post peak. Most voters haven’t a clue about the size or scale of things. Both groups see the world in terms of human interactions rather than the physical interactions with nature that make life possible. Both groups will look for someone to blame and grab what they can for themselves rather than engage in a common effort to overcome difficulties.
Delusions aside, the engineers’ case for life after oil is based on four things - sufficient alterative energy supply, greatly increased energy efficiency, the realisation that everything must change, and the need for much reduced CO2 emissions. The following points give a taste as to why one engineer at least thinks there are solutions with sufficient scale to allow us to leave the oil age in an orderly fashion. All numbers are approximate but it’s the scale I’m trying to convey.
There is enough energy
This was Euan’s point when he stepped us through the electromagnetic, weak and strong forces of nature. Incoming solar energy to the flat deserts and the rooftops of the world is orders of magnitude greater than total human energy usage. Add wind and tidal power to that. STAR reactors* (Sub-Critical Thorium Accelerated Reactors) haven’t been developed yet but the basic physics works. They are inherently safe and can burn off the radioactive waste with high energy neutrons. There is 500 times more energy to be had from thorium than from uranium. Alternative energy can meet all future energy demand and is not the limitation on human population or the size of the economy. Other factors such as water supply and food production come into play earlier.
Alternative energy is affordable
The most versatile energy isn’t oil. It’s electricity which is what alternative energy is best at. What’s more, alternative energy capacity is additive to future supply unlike burning oil which subtracts from future supply. Ten years ago wind power was hopelessly uneconomic. Now it’s fully competitive and is attracting growing billions of dollars of investment every year. Wind and wave power are just second order solar energy. Solar electric (and solar thermal) is the really big one and is more reliable than wind. Efficiency is 15-20% which is plenty. It’s still currently uneconomic but that is artificial due to scarcity pricing - the supply chain has fallen behind demand. People need to see and touch a 5GW solar farm in order to understand. How about TOD composing a letter to the Gates Foundation stating the case for funding? It would change the world more than Windows ever could.
I see solar panels as being like computers. When computers cost $1m, a thousand a year were sold. When they cost $100,000, a million a year were sold. Now they cost $1000 and 100 million a year are sold (all very round numbers but the scale is the thing).
There is plenty of materials
Solar cells are less than ¼ mm thick so you get about 2000 square meters per ton of silicon. It takes only 4000 tons of silicon to make a 1GW solar farm. The rest is glass (silicon, sodium, calcium and oxygen mainly) and aluminium. Silicon is the most common metal in the earth’s crust and there are plenty of the other elements. There is no shortage of materials.
Solar energy uses the land that nobody wants
There is plenty of flat desert in the world for solar farms. The drier the better. Incoming solar radiation (insolation) is up to 1GW per km2. That can be converted in 150MW of peak electricity per km2 at 15% efficiency. You need about 7km2 of panels to produce 1GW of electricity. If you double the area for spacing between panels there is still plenty of desert. At 15km2 per GW, a terawatt (1000GW) needs about 75x75 miles of desert.
Electricity can be distributed on a planetary scale
Electricity grids can now transmit at 825kv DC. Losses are quoted as about 3% per 1000 km. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HVDC. There is talk of such an undersea cable from Iceland to the UK to supply geothermal electricity. This allows electricity to be transmitted from the equator to the poles. The sun is always shining somewhere. Renewable electricity supply can be smoothed by dispersing geographically as is already being done with wind power in Scandinavia.
Some temporal shift of electricity use will be needed – like charging your battery vehicle at work during the day and not at night. But electricity can also be stored indirectly by pumping water up hill. This has been in use for 100 years so there is nothing new. Two global power nets will be needed, one for the Americas and the other for the Europe/Asia/Africa/Australia.
Manufacturing is huge
This is an issue that doesn’t get much coverage in TOD. Obviously replacing the energy infrastructure with solar will require a major manufacturing supply chain. But manufacturing is huge. I’m using automobile manufacturing as an example. There are about 60 million automobiles made each year weighing about 100 million tons. Solar farms weigh between 100,000 and 250,000 tons per GW – much less for thin film. A terawatt of solar farms would require 100 to 200 million tons of metals and glass which is what the car industry gets through in a year or two. Solar farms are much simpler to manufacture than engines, gearboxes and all the other stuff that goes into a car so the cost of the manufacturing base should be less.
Investment is huge
Is there enough money to replace the energy infrastructure over 20 years? Well, global GDP is about $45 trillion and investment is about 10% of that. So $1 trillion a year spent on a great build out of renewable energy is perfectly feasible. Remember money is a proxy for resources. If unemployment rises post peak (most likely) then costs come down.
Current energy efficiency sucks
Current energy efficiency is nearly an order of magnitude worse than best practise. The current automobile is a creation of the oil industry as it is. As more oil became available cars got faster and bigger. But we don’t need 200hp moving 2 tons of steel for transport. The Fiat 500 was 12hp and that was enough to get Italy motoring. We’ll all miss 0-60 in 8 seconds but it’s not the end of the world if every car journey becomes a cost/benefit trade-off and fuel price becomes the number 1 priority in choosing a car. I reckon you need 2hp per person for transport – slow but safe.
I posted before that annual oil use per capita in the US and Canada is 25 bbl compared with 12.8 bbl in Western Europe. If US/CA had the same oil use as Western Europe then the US and Canada would still be net exporters of oil. Europe did it partly by higher taxes on fuel but mainly through regulation of fuel efficiency standards – CAFE. What a price the US is paying for not updating CAFE!
Heating and cooling efficiency is even worse. Simple technology like better insulation, reverse flow heat exchangers and efficient heat pumps allow big reductions in energy use. Ship transport can go back to sail for most of its energy. We use 8% of electricity keeping mobile phone chargers and cable boxes warm for heavens sake. OLED panels 10 times more efficient than LCD. Vacuum insulated fridges 8 times more efficient. Why aren’t we using vacuum ‘filled’ honeycomb panels to insulate houses? The list goes on and on.
Will it happen?
Can this brave new world happen and could all the birds sing happily in their stable CO2 world? YES. Will it happen in time? Well, I think we call the obstacles ‘above ground factors’ in TOD. Some countries will make it but it doesn’t look promising for most. But at least the engineers are trying to come up with solutions, which is more than you can say for the doomers. Which brings me to my last point:
Everything will change
As stated in a previous post, the nature of predicting any variable forces you to keep all other variables constant. Peak oilers can’t model the responses to declining oil supply. Economists tend to think the global economy will double in the next 40 years without any regard to resource limits and so on. They also tend to think that 4% compound growth is a steady state condition but that’s another story.
Personally, I believe that peak oil and other resource limits will change everything. I just hope that the response to it will be new supply and ‘good’ demand reduction rather than ‘bad’ demand destruction via economic contraction. Either way, there are engineering solutions of sufficient scale for us to exit the oil age.
Regards and keep posting TODers,
Alan
* You won’t find ‘STAR reactor’ on the web. It’s my invented name for accelerator driven systems. Great marketing name though!
Alan,
Great post! Our world crisis is a failure of imagination and leadership, and its by all the political entities. Now if you'll put a bowl of crawfish etoufe on every table as a plank, I'll support you for President
!Bob Ebersole
Thanks Bob. I agree totally with you about the failure of imagination and leadership. If you had European CAFE levels then US/CA would still be a net exporter. What a different world that would be.
We've been mislead by bad data on oil and gas and it may be too late in spite of my optimism above.
Thanks. That was great.
WR
Alan: Great post.
Wow. Thanks, Alan.
I guess we're saved. No need to worry about food, water, the oceans, shortages of materials, pollution, disease, and overpopulation as long as we have engineers!!
That we can do the things you advocate is quite frankly tediously obvious. I have never said we could not trip the techno-fantastic given an infinite planet. I've always pointed out the inherent physical problems with techno-fetishist's grow-at-any-cost scenario.
Why are you trying to save the technology? That's my question. It seems weird that engineers are more concerned with keeping the technology than working out truly sustainable systems. Why don't you try to work out engineering solutions that work with nature rather than against nature? Here is a test of each engineering solution: All of its components must be one hundred percent renewable. All effluvia that is poisonous, or does not occur in nature, must be used in some other process until the only effluvia created is completely pure. In effect, pure water or air. All energy used must come from the sun (not fossil sunlight), yet must not negatively affect the environment. For example: tidal energy will change many organisms' environments. Will this negatively affect the environment? All tech must be locally produced. Each micro climate must be assessed to determine optimum human population, the more tech, the less people.
I realize that many technophiles love to point out that anything created by man is "technology," and I agree. But there are qualitative and moral differences between technologies that destroy the environment and those which are part and parcel of the environment. (It is here that many "scientists" and "engineers" love to quibble over definitions.) To these people I say, go ahead, play your games. Meanwhile, the adults will be over here talking about serious things.
Clearly any man-made chemical that leads toward the destruction of an exquisitely complex life-support system is bad. Chlorofluorocarbons are a good example. Carbon in the atmosphere is another. Some people will say, as a few have, that the earth is warming due to natural factors, believing that that gives them leave to produce more CO2. But the logic here falls down. If nature is causing warming, dangerous warming, why in the world would we want to increase that warming by introducing even more carbon into the atmosphere?
The same sort of thinking prevails regarding "technology." The immature "scientists" and "engineers" who would pooh-pooh those who wish to limit technology lay claim to the same absurd argument: to wit, if any human creation is technology, then if we ban the technology we want, we have to ban ALL technology. Again, I have always admitted that my suggestions for sustainability necessarily include technology. The difference is that, in my thinking, technology must be considered within the totality of its purview. A dam built at one end of a river system affects the entire system. That affected river system will affect the entire watershed. That affected watershed will affect neighboring watersheds. And, ultimately, it will affect the entire world. Luckily, for us, the world is a large place and if we were to only build one dam, the averaging effect of this one variable introduced into a sea of variables, would seem to have little consequence. But, we are no longer a planetary population of one billion. We are 6.5-6.8 times that and rising on an exponential curve. Without the mechanical leverage of fossil fuel/sunlight, we will fall back within normal population levels. The only question is will we destroy the earth as our population declines? We have already decimated the seas. Desertification proceeds apace. Water woes are ahead.
Will we continue to work against the flow of nature and by doing so destroy it, or will we embrace our nature, embrace all nature, and in doing so enrich it and ourselves?
While the issue of technology is not a black and white issue, destroying the environment is.
Remember, no environment means no people, let alone tech.
There. I have offered solutions.
I think that my suggestions may help to prevent an engineered apocalypse. (Though I think it may be too late.)
Cherenkov: If you insist on writing nonsense try to keep it brief.
I understood what he wrote. If you don't, just refrain from posting a response at all. Your post has much less value per linear inch than his.
Well, at least Brian lives up to his own credo, and keeps it brief. And Cherenkov was so civil compared to his usually more hard hitting style.
What engineers, and I know that is a gross generalization, are emblematic of is the belief that man is smart. And that belief may need some inspection.
It's based on the fact that we are capable of making things, machines, gadgets, medicines, chemicals, the vast majority of which are pretty blindly assumed to be positive additions to our lives. Whether that is always true remains to be seen, and moreover, the questions regarding their influence on our biosphere stay too far in the background.
Symbolic is that Alan writes:
Now, the response to the first question, instead of YES, of course should be: "maybe that ones that remain". Just saying yes is not very useful, since many bird species are already dead or on the brink of extinction, and many more will go, simply from what lingers of what we have added to their living environments in the past. Their song is over or fading past. And since there is no sign of this coming to a halt, it's safe to assume many more will die off, at an exponential rate.
Relating birds happily singing to stricter CAFE standards is the worst of the engineering view. Looking around me, I can no longer keep up the faith that man is smart; if he were, he'd keep his house in order. But this house I see is in terrible shape. We should really tear it down and build a new one, but we don't have engineers smart enough to do that second part.
The second question, "will it happen in time"?, is linked by Alan to "above-ground" factors, once more a sign of the belief that we can solve this. But you run into the quintessential problem for engineers: they cannot create life, and they cannot bring back the life that's been destroyed, nor the ecosystem it lived in.
The faith-based reasoning (which, ironically, is what the engineers' view boils down to) that we could reverse the wildlife die-off process by fumbling around with solar panels and automobile efficiency standards does not bode well for that wildlife. And not for man either.
Another thing Alan writes:
That is a man-centered view if ever I saw one. And it is this view that has gotten us into the mess we're in, the idea that we're somehow alone here. We need desperately to leave it behind, or we'll engineer ourselves into huge unmarked mass graves. Yes, above ground.
HeIs: Look, mankind is screwing up the planet, has been doing this for a long time and will continue doing this until the planet is pretty well wrecked. I don't disagree with this sentiment and I would be surprised if Alan or anyone else does. Having said this, Alan was talking about possible real life outcomes arising out of global oil depletion. He was discussing the world as it is, not as it should be. If you want endless discussions of how the world "should" be, where does it end? Everybody wants the whole planet to be one big happy Garden of Eden, but what we want has nothing to do with what is coming down the road.
Brian, with all due respect, I think what it comes down to is that Alan proposes a response to the wrecked planet based on trying to solve problems by us continuing to be the same "smart" creatures that caused them in the first place.
I think it's high time to stop that religion, to recognize our limits, to quit thinking we're so d*mned smart, and to realize we're not fit to be the masters of the house. That humility is the best and only hope we have.
I think the problem here is that you damn the entire human race for the failures of some. The alternative is a view where some are capable of making sensible and reasoned decisions WHILST believing that development is a prerequisite for our continued survival as a species. It doesn't view the human race as one undifferentiated mass, just with the misguided in control.
I agree with that view.
Ecology and sustainability as a science defines the consequences of actions and the need to develop sensibly (and get off this planet to continue to grow).
Ecology and sustainability as a religion defines we should go backward towards some arable idyll that never really existed.
Both can generate a situation where we live in balance with our environment, but to me only one is a tenable path to take. Unfortunately we are tending to swerve off the paths entirely - unless we are very lucky.
Agreed.
At PeakOil.com, my sig is a quote from Einstein:
"The problems of today will not be solved by the same thinking that produced the problems in the first place."
Snap! :)
Although I notice the wording is slightly diffrent - but I have seen many versions of it...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
wording I've seen:
"Everything has changed, except our way of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
Please feel free to post an actual rebuttal of what was 'nonsense'.
Cherenkov's post made perfect sense to me. And he's no more verbose than Alan was.
Ah yes, the arbitrary definition of what is and what is not technology. All tools are technology - some technologies may be more dangerous than others, but that is not the issue. Humans need very little in the way of technology to destroy an environment. It is not the technology that is the problem, it is very simply just us. Too many of us is the problem. There is a finite (and I believe quite small) density of population that is "sustainable" (which just means that the damage a population does is not bad enough to matter).
You seem to think that if we abandon tools defined as "technology" by you (and therefore "bad"), then we can all do fine. This is nonsense, as we can destroy entire ecosystems with some wood, leather, skins, and bits of sharpened stones - we've done it before. Appropriate technologies will play a key role in making the transition to a smaller population tolerable, while poor ones will make it worse. The key difference between the two is a societal one, not the technology itself.
That's a point I've wanted to make for quite a while.
All the apparently "anti-technology" folks here seem to think that we could even exist at all without technology. Yet, as you say, even stone flint arrowheads are technology. Human beings are always going to invent, refine and use technology.
The trick is making sure we remain in control of it for as long as we can (which, as I've said elsewhere, will not be indefinitely, but no species lasts indefinitely anyway).
Agreed.
However, the whole idea of working towards having real sustainability (and technology that works in greater harmony with nature rather than against it) also implies a change in us, in our attitudes.
It is always the inner world that must change before the outer world changes though, so in essence we do need to concentrate on changing us first. The rest will follow naturally.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
No disagreement there, but there's little evidence community attitudes are likely to change except in the event of a direct, immediately visible threat to our way of existence. And Peak Oil and GW are just not that direct or immediately visible yet.
CRASH OF WORLD MODELS
Two posters.
Both believe in Peak Oil.
Yet they have very different models of how the world works.
The Engineer (thisisalan) sees all the world as an engineering nail and his engineering skills as the hammer.
The socialist (cherenkov) sees all the world as filled with ignorant humans (including engineers) who cannot see the planet is finite.
This is what we're dealing with folk.
Each one of us has an internal model of how we think the world is put together. Each of us is 101% sure his (or her) model is the correct one. (Me? I'm 102% sure mine is correct.)
Anyway, the grand challenge is to move the models into convergence.
Not only into convergence, but also into one that properly aligns with the laws of nature and the limits of human nature.
When you approach a non-believer (one who does not know of, or believe in Peak Oil) realize that his/her world model is so foreign to your own that the other's model makes thisisalan and cherenkov look like identical twins.
I see people who use the obvious fact that the world is indeed finite to bash engineers who are attempting to try to push to make things better, which might actually work and be implemented---imperfectly---in the real world.
The "more sustainable than thou" coalition appears eager to drown any principally technology and engineering-oriented improvement from generally sympathetic quarters in pettifoggery and hectoring nihilistic criticism. Anybody sufficiently motivated and misanthropic can find an environmental critique for everything except stone age hunter gatherers plus mass cremation for the rest---integrated combined gas cycle of course.
In the actual, real world, this means that the "I love the smell of carbon burning in the morning" crowd wins.
It's good to be honest, thoughtful and careful. That's what good engineers and scientists do. Let's not turn it into "how dare you want to use technology for anything!"
bash engineers who are attempting to try to push to make things better, which might actually work and be implemented---imperfectly---in the real world.
Because sometimes 'imperfect implementation' could really be the end of the world as we've known it.
http://www.saynotogmos.org/klebsiella.html
As an ex-engineer, I come not here to bash the profession or those who toil in it.
However, in retrospect I realize that I was trained to have Tunnel Vision while I was going through engineering school. No, not the choo-choo Charlie tunnel vision of train engineers. What I mean is that electrical engineers are brainwashed into believing that every problem is one that has an electrical solution because that view point is good for the EE community. Chemical engineers are brainwashed into believing that every problem is one that has an chemical solution because that view point is good for the ChemE community. And so on.
Very few engineers receive a cross-disciplinary education where they can hold their own talking social sciences as well as Maxwell's equations. They have been molded into cogs within the machine that simply can't step back to comprehend the whole of the machine.
The biggest laugh of all is that most engineers believe they are "rational" creatures.
Alan wrote:
For those who do not what TLA stands for, well, I think it stands for "Total Lack of Alternatives". Well, no, that's probably not right. It is probably "The Life After (oil)". Well no, that's probably not right either. After all, he is talking about engineers and their view so it must stant for "Total Lack of Ability". Yeah, that's it, Total Lack of Ability.
And I have a Total Lack of Ability to read your mind and understand acronyms that are often used by posters but never defined.
Ron Patterson
For those who do not what TLA stands for, well, I think it stands for "Total Lack of Alternatives"
TLA three Letter Acronym
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-letter_acronym
Actually, the TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) have been much improved today ... most people seem to be trying hard to define them ... my thanks to all for making the effort ... it makes things much easier to read and is altogether more 'professional'.
Xeroid.
There was life before oil -- good life. Bach and Mozart were before oil. Shakespeare and Rubens were before oil. Etc.
There was plenty of imagination then, and I think a case can be made that although there was plenty of misery as well, quite likely the worldwide misery index is worse now than it was pre-oil.
Clearly, there will be an imaginative life after oil. It just won't include noisy, smelly, dirty internal combustion engines on the scale we have been saddled with. Everywhere I walk in my town I watch people using gasoline leaf blowers when a rake would be more useful, and weed-eaters where a scythe or sickle would work better. Kids on tiny gasoline scooters belong on skateboards or bicycles, and jet-skis are an abomination.
The whole enterprise is profit-driven, of course. When it is more profitable to make solar cells, then solar cells will be made-- and by the same people who now sell us gasoline. And as long as the taxpayer subsidises gasoline production in so many ways, it will not pay its own way, but will remain profitable long past its natural life.
And what was the population of the Earth in the days of Bach and Mozart? Do you, Mr. NeverLNG, believe we can return to the days of Bach and Mozart with an earthly population pushing 7 billion or more?
Ron Patterson
Not likely, is it Mr. Darwinian? But what living, breeding population of any species whatever doesn't exceed its resource base and die back?
Also, Mozart and Bach lived on the fruits of empires that were despoiling overseas colonies and abusing natives in remote regions.
But that is putting too fine a point on my point.
There was life before oil -- good life. Bach and Mozart were before oil. Shakespeare and Rubens were before oil. Etc.
And there will still be a 'good life' for the moneyed classes after peak oil.
This good life you speak of before oil - where people lived in one room with a stove and many froze to death in the winter - will return for many with the end of oil.
well, yes.
However, then proportion of people who are miserable now is quite likely higher now than it was in the 17th and 18th centuries -- despite the promise of abundance from cheap oil.
True degradation of the human species started with multiplication of human energy and imagination through industrial processes.
Back To the Future!! -- Long Live the Paleolithic!
NeverLNG wrote:
Not by a long shot. Most of humanity in those days lived very close to edge of survival. In fact that is what kept the population from exploding, deaths equaled births.
Sennely was a typical French village. It was not much better in the cities. People lived close to the starvation level. Children were typically put to work in the mills and factories well before they reached the age of ten. It was a miserable time all over Europe and even worse in most of Asia.
And this is the kind of life we hope to live after fossil fuels, but it will take a long time to get back up to the prosperity level of Sennely. The coming anarchy, the collapse of law and order as we move into a dog eat dog world, will make make life miserable for many decades.
Ron Patterson
we are a long way from the message -- peak oil
The reality is that oil is peaking and declining, much of our way of life can be said to be dependent on that which is declining. That might be a bad thing, but other populations of other organisms crash when they outgrow their resource base, yet they go on as species, and sometimes improve and sometimes, we believe, might develop into new and more fit species. Who knows where human populations will be in 50 years? For sure, very few of us living now will be there.
I do not believe that all pre-industrial populations were miserable, in fact, there is good evidence to the contrary. Misery increased with the advent of industrialization, though no doubt it was present before that, especially in marginally productive areas.
Maternal mortality is a product of poverty and malnutrition -- and is more pronounced in poor groups in industrial civilizations than it is in pre-industrial civilizations that have not outstripped their resource base. Epidemic disease is the result of crowding, poor sanitation and malnutrition -- i.e., cities.
I maintain, and I believe it is supported by evidence, that oil energy has made the rich unbelievably richer, allowed for a temporary middle class, and impoverished the multitudes. Loss of oil will not necessarily make the human race miserable
This is a tough question. Radical as I am, I don't know how to define misery well enough to be sure that the number of miserable has risen as a proportion, not just an absolute.
I like to think that the innate dignity of the human, or his ego, requires that he have some say in the form of his life. So if I lived as a herdsman in 1700, I was short on material goods but had a lot of autonomy. I could beat the crap out of my wife without state punishment. If I was being cheated by my neighbors I could go to tribal authorities where I represented a large % of the political class, instead of modern state authorities where I represented 0.000001% of the citizenry and might lose my case because the state signed some pact with the IMF. Failing that, I'd shoot it out with the guy using unrifled muzzleloaders. Modern people seem frustrated at losing that option, but look at the guns we have now.
Most of all, I think humans could reconcile themselves to "Acts of God", which we now recognize to include many of the ecological restraints to growth. But the rise of Progress by definition involved the canceling of Acts of God with new Acts of Man. So the more people see the world around them as being man-made, the more angry they get that they are deprived. If you're poor because of a drought, religion tells you how to deal with God's will. If you're poor because a banker or foreign investor devalued your life, you want to pick up that muzzleloader and - oh! The man-made state backing that rich guy has man-made Maxim guns. Too bad. You now know your enemies are mortal and defeatable, but you'll have to organize a cataclysmic revolution to get at them.
Instead of a world of thousands of little economic pyramids of serfs, small landowners, and big landlords all trembling under the unstoppable power of God, the global marketplace has piled all those pyramids on top of each other to build one great temple to growth. Like the Tower of Babel, it worships man. But if the American pyramid is on top, imagine how frustrating life must be for those in the pyramids stacked below us, whose states obey America and the banking system, whose status as leading citizens of tiny states has been devalued. If our herdsman's descendant is lucky, his turf is a fraction its former size, the government wants to build a dam to flood him, and Archer Daniels Midland has USAID cash backing to replace it all with a plantation. If he's not lucky, he lives in a refugee camp, or works in a sweatshop or on that plantation, no unions allowed. Cashwise, he may be better off. As a person, well, he's really more like an insect, isn't he?
The reason I can't quite conclude that the % of people in misery is actually greater is that this descendant of herdsmen might feel very differently about his fate if he worked at a factory that built cheap exports to suck out the wealth of former colonial masters, and felt sure that the profits would be used by the state to further stick it to whitey. He might have less autonomy, but nationalism gives him a sugar rush of mass aggregation - our mob will soon rise and crush the other mobs. I must do all in my power to make our mob stronger. And I got a 10% pay raise.
This is why I think workers in China are a hell of a lot more motivated than workers in our stooge states like Mexico. China has more than offset the explosive growth of extreme poverty (<$1/day) in neoliberal Latin America and abandoned Africa. Acts of Man look damn good to them. They really believe they're gonna come out ahead in the progress game.
But you and I know that the oil isn't there to make it happen.
Human happiness is only about meeting expectations. If your expectations only include eating and getting laid occasionally, and it all happens, you're probably pretty happy.
If your expectations include a Lear Jet, well, you may never be happy because of what you have to do to get it and keep it.
And what do you suppose will be the reaction of those who have seen "the beutiful land"as america is called in china,use of every last bit of the black goo that is the lifeblood of civilization.And that they have "crapped in their own nest" with industrial pollution,to supply that same country with toys?
We will see biblical payback I fear.
I hate to repeat the obvious, but ain't it true that what we have to do is just one thing:
MAKE THE PRICE EQUAL THE COST
Then the economic system will work, and we go on from there. As it is, the price of oil/transport/air conditioning/kids, etc, does not come close to equaling the cost. And so we get "cheap" transportation and ruin the world by not paying its true cost. Sigh.
I get my fun (and money) from inventing things, so I tend to think we can invent our way out of anything. But lately I am getting forced into the view that Homo Sapiens is done for. Too bad, some of HS was worth saving, not to mention all those other lifeforms that are going down with us. Stupid, stupid.
Great post Alan! One question, how do you see your huge manufacturing effort effecting CC?
Bravo. It's about the above shoulders factors rather than the above ground, after all. I'll even forgive you for inventing an acronym. Two thumbs up.
There is enough energy
Nope. Wrong. Not with the reality of energy tied to the economy, money supply and growth patterns.
Because the reality is there is not enough CHEAP energy to keep the economy going the way it it structured.
Somethings gotta break, be it the financing structure, the lower class that gets cheap food due to cheap energy, the government size, (on and on and on)
Solar energy uses the land that nobody wants
There is plenty of flat desert in the world for solar farms.
Funny thing that.
Many of the deserts used to be covered plant growth. And many of the same groups of scientists who make the claim of past growth ALSO note that Man's actions made the deserts we now have. Other life has moved into that desert.
When you can show that your 'panel plan' can reduce the desert and return it to lush vegetative growth, you might be able to get humans to approve destroying another ecosystem.
Show how doing what you propose will return the desert to lush growth.
(At least one can show that sea based wind turbines can be used to rebuild the coards via electrifying the coral bed so its placement becomes a win-win.)
Good stuff. But I think it is a mistake to frame this as engineers vs the unwashed. There are a helluva lot of non engineers out here who understand this stuff and support it -- no use alienating everyone. This engineer meme comes off as very arrogant. In my town, I am the one who is pushing the engineers to do something, not the other way around.
This is a clash of our brain-internal world models.
As an ex-engineer, I can empathize with thisisalan's belief that engineers can come to the rescue (technology will save us).
As one who has put in many flight hours here on TOD, I can empathize with cherenkov's world view as well. This is a finite planet and after all, we are old chimps with no new tricks up our sleeves.
My emphasis is not on technology per se (especially not new over the horizon technology) but on other societies (including our own) that have rapidly implemented solutions.
Some examples,
France has 5 towns over 100K without a tram or plans for one. And two below 100K with one. France has been on a tram building spree for the last 15 to 20 years. They can build one from concept to ribbon cutting in 3 to 4 years. Lyon built two new tram lines in 3 years, 5 months.
The United States via gov't policies and subsidies, trashed virtually all prime commerical real estate (aka "downtowns") and many established neighborhoods and created a new, dominant urban form in just 20 years (about 1950 to 1970).
Now just throw that into reverse.
The USA (a 2/3rds smaller and x30 poorer USA) built subways in their largest cities and streetcars in 500 cities and towns in just 20 years (1897-1916)
Switzerland showed that, with proper preparation, it can exist on almost no oil (less oil per Swiss in 1945 (all year) than the average Americna uses in a day.
Swiss voters approved a 31 billion Swiss franc 20 year program to approve their rail system in 1998. No wolf at the door, etc. Adjust for population and currency and it is like US voting $1 trillion.
Spain (especially Madrid) have built wonders with their Urban Rail in 12 to 15 years. FAST and affordable ! (Still getting stats).
Thailand has done some interesting things.
Best Hopes for Popular and Political Will,
The Other Alan
Alan,
I agree that we can do these things. The larger question is will we do these things in time?
And further, let me remind you that peak oil is not occurring in a vacuum. Peak oil is not the only resource constraint arising at the current time. Plus we have the issue of global warming to deal with and if Dr. Hansen's latest comments are any indication, the situation is going to become extremely bad within decades, not centuries.
So, given the above, and given the current political climate where the United States has shown that its initial reaction to resource scarcity is imperialist military action including the threat of preemptive nuclear war, how do you expect a technical program which is predicated on the complete repudiation of the existing way of life in the world today to be successfully sold to the very people who make these decisions?
Your technical solutions are worthless unless or until you can sell them politically. Right now the leaders of the world do not want to hear you. Hell, the people of the world do not want to hear you. How do you expect what you are selling to get done? Your post is another example of Techno Geek Optimism. You don't want to admit that They took the blue pill.
So far there has been no serious reaction to peak. Everyone keeps talking about peak in the abstract, as if this is a debating society and peak is something for their grandchildren to face. What if peak C&C was May 2005? What if peak liquids was in 2006? What if we are on the downslope now? What do you do? And when do you say enough is enough, that you can no longer waste your time trying to save those who have deliberately chosen death and must instead concentrate on more local and immediate needs (like your own)? Or do you even have the guts to consider when that question becomes more important than saving humanity as a whole? Will you defer it, hoping against hope, clinging to some faith instead of reality that everything will be ok just because it could be ok in some hypothetical world that is not real?
Ghawar Is Dying as we slide Into the Grey Zone
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Grey: Peak C+C likely was May 2005. Global oil supply growth (on a % YOY basis) has been slowing for an awful long time now. It has now been on a three year plateau. How do you reconcile continuing strong global economic growth with steadily declining EROEI?
In my mind "growth" has been articulated in terms of unsustainable financial bubbles, disconnected from reality, and fueled by artificially low interest rates. I think this gives the illusion of economic growth.
I have a copy of Hansen et al. (2007) just out of my printer right now, though I read it a couple of weeks ago. I'm amazed there has been little MSM comment on it, even in "popular science" journals, though journalist George Monbiot wrote about it in his column (www.monbiot.com).
Basically it examines the historic record of sea level rises (i.e. ice caps melting) against major temperature changes and found no significant delay between one and the other. Rises of 2-3C - maybe less - would set in train feedbacks that would lead to rapid collapse of much of the Greenland ice sheet and maybe West Antarctica too, and this could occur in a timescale of several decades rather than a few millenia as previously thought.
The result would be sea levels as seen in the mid-Pliocene period about 4 million years ago when temperatues were 2-3C warmer than now, 15-35m above current levels. As Hansen says, that would be a climate different to that in which human civilisation developed. I would suggest that it would also be incompatible with the continuation of it.
Hello Doctorbob,
Thxs for the info. Although rising sea-levels are very ominous--I suggest very few will die by drowning. The true problem with Global Warming is the shifting climate pattern across the globe: droughts and extended periods of elevated heat that leads to crop failures, increased deforestation, then desertification.
Fragile soils with very little mulch then cannot withstand even a moderate rainstorm as caliche buildup and compaction processes preclude normal soil absorption rates. Yet, the experts predict the rainfall, when it does occur, will generally be in sudden large amounts: easily stripping off the loose silt to accelerate flash-flooding and other ecologic blowback forces. I have posted much on this before here on TOD. Recall the expert discussion by TODer Bostongeologist on flash-flooding and Gonu.
Animals can migrate quite easily, but plants and trees cannot if the change is too rapid in comparison to their reseeding rate in the now shifting ideal eco-geography. This animal-plant lagging effect thus becomes inverted, leading to even more animal-plant blowback; more rapid extinction as the habitat degrades to a new equilibrium.
Recall my earlier postings on how the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone are dramatically restructuring the whole habitat. What will be interesting to see is if TPTB will want to continually expand the park to accomodate climate change; maybe the park needs to be expanding north 5 miles/year in combo with a exhaustive tree-planting program to optimize the habitat?
Recall my posting on the crucial San Pedro habitat: the human-caused decimation by aquifer extraction and diversion of surface water is dramatically reducing North-South continental bird migration.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
No they won't die by drowning, Bob, but imagine 2 billion people fleeing, their reactions to ineffective government and the reactions of those in the areas to which they flee. That is the real problem, along with the loss of those lands which supported those 2 billion. The huge variable will be time. Rapid flooding will mean rapid relocation of people coupled with declining energy resources at the same time.
Ghawar Is Dying as we slide Into the Grey Zone
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
There is no such thing these days as strong global economic growth.
That remains hidden from view for now by insane increases in money supply and cheap credit, as well as fabricated economic statistics. But it won't last much longer.
The fall-out of the subprime crisis on home-owners is but a first, and very small, indication of the unraveling of the illusion. It will soon become clear that the entire "growth" has been borrowed.
Think coal and lots of it.
China averages at least 500MW's addition power from coal per week. The actual number is probably higher.
In emergency management training,you are taught to expect the worst.In spades.With every bad variation.
Peoples nature isnt like that,tis expected we will "muddle through"somehow.
Greyzone,your eval/description is probable spot on.
It wont change folks nature.Nor the fact that TPTB will not allow Alans ideas,or any ideas that will change the way of things,here in America.Because thats what they are paid to do.The wealthy and powerful in this country would rather see a crash,and reboot,with them in charge,than the slimmest of chances that they will lose their and their offsprings"position",and makeing sure that thee and me stay exactly where we are in the food chain.{food,for the powerful}
I am starting to see that they may have made a serious mistake by playing games in the mex. elections.Remember all those political advisors that Bush sent down south to help the technocrates/right of center politicals?Those with the same gamebook as Karl Rove?.I think they made a bad call when they thought the mex. population would rollover the same way as the americans did when bush was "selected"by the supreme court.
A very large portion of the mexican population does not see this goverment as legal.La Revolucion is never far from the mexican heart.My wife is mestisza,a indian/spanish mix,and her grandfather fought in the revolution,and these boyos have no idea what kind of a can of worms they opened up when they de-legitimised the mexican .gov in the minds and hearts of the mexican people.
Bushs "base"as he like to call the "haves ,and the have mores" are going to see there carefully constructed trade deals,manufactureing centers,factories,with the next thing to slave labor ,quickly become nearly worthless when power shortages,labor unrest,and supplyline disruptions start to show the design flaws in their schemes.
For those of use who lost their jobs to mexico,After the first 20 min. of laughting their tails of,a large supply of popcorn will need to be put in to watch the show.
The other side effects that may come,Who knows? but I dont think even bush is stupid enough to put troops in.
Some have talked about their forming a union with canada,and mexico.I know a lot of mexicans who belive that america is corrupt beyond words ,and will not bring their famly here to see disrespectful children,and parents that are "disposible"in a nurseing home.
I dont know how this will shake out.Peak will completely roll the boat.Who will get up for air on the other side is anyones guess,but I think luck will have a lot to do with it. And the REAL crimes and damage that bush has done to this country will not be known untl he is out of office.If he leaves office,which wont be known until 08 will it?
Hi Grey, thanks for the interesting link to Dr Hansen's paper.
As you say though, the reality of polical and social make-up is what will influence mitigation possibilities more than any techno hope.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
alanisthename, thank you
Sooner or later we will come to realize there is no direct replacement for oil, now is the time to plan for the future.
INTO THE RHETORICAL BUZZ SAW FOR ANOTHER FIGHT WITH THE ASCETICS!
Alan,
Great post, and no ill intent intended, but it is a bit of fun to watch someone else step into the buzz saw I have stepped into so many times!
Yesterday there was some discussion among myself and others concerning the exact amount of solar energy extractable per acre. The number came out to something around 1 megawatt if averaged over 24 hours, maybe 3 or 4 times that at peak times. A megawatt is about 1300 horsepower. Do you think humans will ever go back to horses, if they know this? How many live horses can you feed and water on an acre? My bet is that 4 or 5 would be a high side number, without carrying feed to them from yet other acres...
There is often talk here of "energy slaves". It is a useful visualization. The sun could be a fantastic energy slave if we are willing to use it. There are clean and "elegant" design alternatives which drawf the horse or the human slave by orders of magnitude. If ANYONE in the world knows this, then Pandora's box is open. They will attempt the alternatives. If America is too frightened or lazy, that is her choice. But do not assume that others in the world will willingly choose the ascetic path and live like dogs. More likely, they will pass us by and treat us like dogs. It will be a fate of our choosing.
What you saw was a lot of BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything)
eric blair went even further, demanding of alternatives:
"Many of the deserts used to be covered plant growth. And many of the same groups of scientists who make the claim of past growth ALSO note that Man's actions made the deserts we now have. Other life has moved into that desert.
When you can show that your 'panel plan' can reduce the desert and return it to lush vegetative growth, you might be able to get humans to approve destroying another ecosystem.
Show how doing what you propose will return the desert to lush growth."
Gee, funny how solar suddenly must restore deserts! Why is that little task never asked of the oil and gas industry? And we would really need to see evidence that using the desert for solar panels would "destroy ecosystems", given that the we test and land jet aircraft out there (Edwards Air Force Base), race automobiles out there (Bonneville) and a vast array of other desert activitiies occur already. Would solar panels be a poorer use of the desert than what we already do there?
On and on it goes, around and around....we must do something to get off fossil fuels, but we must do nothing that has any "effect" on anything, ever.
At a certain point it just becomes foolish to continue the line of discussion given that you are trying to persuade the Ascetics
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Ascetic
It becomes a question of philosphy and belief, not one of science and physics.
What I would like to see is some way to create a tab, so that when one comes to TOD, they would get those great articles that show up here, such as the recent one on concentrating mirror solar, and other options (there are hundreds of them, by the way) under a tab "humans can do something" and another tab for articles about the return to horsedrawn vehicles, eating crickets, and living happily in cardboard boxes would be under the "Death of all civilization" tab.
That way, we could find the really useful information about alternatives which TOD so often distributed, much more easily.
But Alan, again, great show, and like you, I will periodically step into the buzz saw to remind the remaining TOD'ers that have not lost contact with the world we live in that yes, there are fascinating thing that can be done to end our slavery to the fossil fuel industry. It is ending this slavery and the fossil fuel industries absolute power over us that seems to terrify many here the most. As long as we absolutely dependent on fossil fuel, WE are the energy slaves.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
(if freedom is what we want)
Gee, funny how solar suddenly must restore deserts!
Let me be more clear:
Putting PV panels all over the desert will destroy the habitat and the various species who only have that ecological niche. (it looks like Man created the desert with man's last 'lets harvest from this place without regard for the future')
If one can show that putting PV in a certain way would turn back the desert via de-desertification - you'd find FAR more support for the plan than the present 'put PV in the desert' without any plan for the effects.
The guy wants his plan to move forward, its gonna have to be something that is not "more of the same"
given that the we test and land jet aircraft out there (Edwards Air Force Base), race automobiles out there (Bonneville) and a vast array of other desert activitiies occur already.
http://www.pclfoundation.org/projects/offhighwayvehicles.html
The damaging effects of off-road vehicle use are clear. There are numerous examples:
* Tracks made in the 1940's by General Patton's army maneuvers are still visible in the desert.
* In the Dove Springs Canyon, more than 1,000 acres have been severely damaged and nearly 500 acres are now completely barren.
* Ruts and gouges from off-road vehicles are still highly visible, although the area has been closed since the 1970's.
* In the Lake Tahoe Basin, there are over 400 miles of roads, which are both legally and illegally created routes for vehicles.
* In addition, 200 miles of off-road vehicle trails cover the basin. Tons of sediment has been washing into Lake Tahoe as a result of severe erosion in recent years, which is gradually changing the color of the lake.
* In Clear Creek, about 160,000 tons of soil are lost each year, which is 45% above natural erosion rates in that area. A tremendous total of 38,000 cubic yards per square mile of sediment is eroded into Clear Creek each year. This erosion is so pervasive that it is affecting neighboring citizens, who must risk the hazards of asbestos in the air during the dry season.
http://www.blm.gov/education/00_resources/articles/mojave/mojave01a.html
This is particularly significant because disturbed desert soils can take thousands of years to be restoredI've shown that your claim of 'no damage' is rather suspect....And I've already answered your question "Would solar panels be a poorer use of the desert than what we already do there?" by observing how any PV in the desert plan should show how the plan will reclaim the land destroyed by man thousands of years ago.
Destroying the desert ecology for JUST human harvesting of power has far more hubris than converting the desert back into the lush greenscape of years ago. And if one wants buy in to do the task - converting desert into greenscape (thus killing off the desert ecosystem) will go father than just killing off the desert ecosystem for electrical power.
In response to eric blair
Now let me be more clear...
You said,
I've shown that your claim of 'no damage' is rather suspect
I reread my post and did not find that I claimed "no damage" or used those words anywhere in it.
I also want to be clear that I have never defended the use of fragile desert for off roading or other recreational uses that may indeed be very damaging.
There is no point in the supporters of PV or Concentrating Solar being dishonest: Placing solar panels in the desert WILL have an impact. The question is, do we prohibit the placing of panels there IF other activity is already present and allowed there. I used the example of Edwards Air Force Base for a reason. It is huge. There have already been runways built, buildings built, roads built, etc. If there was an area of Edwards that could be used for solar panels, would we suddenly turn around and oppose it on the basis of impact?
We have already had a very large impact there. I simply think it is holding the solar industry to standards that no one else seems to have to live up to.
I do think that impact on the desert is of great importance if we must use it for large scale location of solar panels (we may not have to on as large a scale as some think, but I will get back to that)
I said all of the above to avoid being accused of marginalizing the need for great caution the use of the desert, and the need to handle it in a as gentle a way as possible, in preparation for the following:
I must refuse to accept the opening sentence in your post, "it looks like Man created the desert with man's last 'lets harvest from this place without regard for the future'). While mankind has been a factor for thousand of years in the growth of deserts, it is not really plausable that mankind "created" the deserts. The most obvious demonstration of the fallacy that man "created" the desert is the plant life there, cacti in particular, which would have taken a timespan far exceeding the history of mankind to evolve to it's current specialized nature"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Baja_California_Desert.jpg
http://cactus.biology.dal.ca/evolution.html
Cacti have an evolutionary history at least some 50 million years old, as does other desert flora and fauna.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification
Desertification is a historic phenomenon; the world's great deserts were formed by natural processes interacting over long intervals of time. During most of these times, deserts have grown and shrunk independent of human activities. Paleodeserts, large sand seas now inactive because they are stabilized by vegetation, extend well beyond the present margins of core deserts, such as the Sahara. Many deserts around western Asia came about because of an overpopulation of prehistoric species and subspecies during the late Cretaceous era.
Through dated fossil pollen, it's found that today's Sahara desert has been changing between desert and fertile savanna. Studies also show that advance and retreat prehistorically varied with on yearly rainfall, whereas a pattern to increasing amounts of desert began with human driven activities of overgrazing and deforestation.
-----
Now back to an earlier point. Given my preferences, I do not like going to the desert for solar power as a first option. Much better is the roof area of the millions of buildings in he U.S. If one counts the commercial roof area in the U.S. and the world, it is huge. The "million solar roof" initiative in California is the correct path to take, as it distributes the power production in such a way as to create a very flexible and durable power grid.
Next would be the vast "brownbelt" areas around almost every modern city (even modest sized cities. This is the thousands of square miles that was concreted over, buildings and railyards built, warehouses, industrial plants, steel mills, on and on. Most of these areas were abandoned in less than 50 to 70 years, as economics changed the nature of heavy manufacturing.
This is one of the great wastes of history, (even greater I believe than the "suburbs" which James Howard Kunstler makes such a scene about, but which are still in use some 55 years after the first ones were built, and still provide humane living space, which the inner city cannot seem to do)
These industrial belts combined with the roof space of buildings and houses combine for more than enough space to provide all of the electricity we use.
And IF we incorporate full energy efficient appliences, proper use of daylighting techniques, ground coupled (geotherma heat pumps), and the solar panels get more efficient over the next decades (as projected) and batteries become more efficient per pound and per per cubic meter on th basis of power output and durability (as projected) then using vast areas of the desert for solar panels would indeed be a waste. The cutting edge of the managing of our energy crisis is solar, battery, electrification of transportation. Many of the other options are much more dangerous and essentially useless. Which do you think will contribute to more desertification, solar, or biofuels, ethanol in particular?
Why do we support the worst options but find any grounds possible to suppress the better ones? Worse yet, why do TOD posters seemingly assist in the effort to do that?
So, go to the desert on a large scale as a last resort, but, and this is my view, it is of the greatest unfairness to hold any industry that could reduce the grip of oil and gas producers on us to a far higher standard than the oil and gas industry have ever or are now being held to. It is just such a horrible injustice to America to do that.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
I must refuse to accept the opening sentence in your post, "it looks like Man created the desert with man's last 'lets harvest from this place without regard for the future')
The eye opener for me was the claim that Australia's desert looks to be the result of man's action to kill off the mega fauna.
Why do we support the worst options but find any grounds possible to suppress the better ones?
Because the worst options cost $0.10 a cup? Because the 'worst option' represents what we already have - and when one argues for change one has to show benefits. Just saying 'oil sucks' won't have man change 'till the oil is gone.
Ok, to flip this on you, why aren't you singing the praises of placing wind turbines in the ocean where they can electrify the seabead and build coral reefs, not to mention adding structure for fish ecosystems?
So, go to the desert on a large scale as a last resort, but, and this is my view, it is of the greatest unfairness to hold any industry that could reduce the grip of oil and gas producers on us to a far higher standard than the oil and gas industry have ever or are now being held to. It is just such a horrible injustice to America to do that.
And if you are going into the desert (with the end result of destroying the ecosystem of the desert) why not be able to show that you can reverse the desertification and re-green it? The large man-made surfaces strike me as a way to collect the water vapor from the large temp swings - so why not use that to try to promote desert life, if not re-green the desert?
The hypothesis that humans were significantly responsible for the death of mega-fauna in Australia is still highly controversial. For a start, it seems unlikely there was ever a sufficient population of Aboriginal settlers around the time the mega-fauna went extinct.
And irrespective of the role Aboriginal people played in the extinction of the mega-fauna (although it seems very likely), the loss of such browsers changed forests from temperate broad-leaf to fire-tolerant eucalyptus, but did not in itself lead to desertification. The climate did that.
Anyway this debate amounts to sophistry - the percentage of "deserts" that would be required for sufficient and efficient solar power to run an adequate electricity grid would be negligible - there is a lot of desert out there.
Agreed...lack of space is hardly an issue as far as building solar farms goes. But the difficulty and expense of building and maintaining massive farms in extremely remote areas, and the necessary infrastructure for carrying it to population centers (not to mention the lossage involved) will surely make the really big deserts an unattractive choice for the most part anyway. In Australia I can see areas like the Little and Big Desert in Victoria being likely targets, within 500km of Adelaide and Melbourne. There's more than enough room there to build solar farms capable of supplying sufficient peak load to both cities. The base load could easily come from geothermal sites in NE South Australia, which would require significantly longer transmission distances, but apparently not all that long by world standards. At this point they're only estimating 10% of load requirements by 2030, which seems a little unambitious - not sure what sort of timeframe would be required to hit 100%.
", to flip this on you, why aren't you singing the praises of placing wind turbines in the ocean where they can electrify the seabead and build coral reefs, not to mention adding structure for fish ecosystems?"
I have absolutely NOTHING against sea based windmills. But, apparently, many people do. The NIMBY problem with windfarms are becoming more and more pronounced daily. It is becoming obvious that even those folks who call themselves "green" and "energy aware" will fight them to the bitter end.
I have always been a student and fan of wind I even have a website devoted to it, but it is a website that I am going to soon change. Despite my ideas on wind and belief in it, I am absolutely convinced that solar is soon to pass wind by. Quiet, clean, and and almost invisible on rooftops and in greybelt areas of every major city, I am convinced more everyday that it is a revolution.
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Roger,
It has been a long day in the garden and I'm not into a verbosity contest with you.
What kind of bullshit is that? Anyone who gives a crap should be doing it now...and should have been doing it for years. GZ is right on as to how things are going to play out - down the tubes. The blue pill wins.
Todd
Todd
You would accuse me of verbosity, with a sentence like,
"GZ is right on as to how things are going to play out - down the tubes. The blue pill wins."
To me, the number of words are not as important as whether or not they mean anything. I have been hearing something about a "pill fight" here on TOD for several days, blues and reds if I remember correctly. This is apparently some sort of reference to something I am not privy to, so that has been meaningless to any of my discussions.
"GZ (I know you are referring to GreyZone with that one)
is right on as to how things are going to play out - down the tubes. The blue pill wins."
"Down the tubes" to me is not a scenario based on any evidence or even rationality, but is a subjective view on your part....pointless for me to argue with that one...believe what you want to believe...
My closing remark was,
"there are fascinating thing that can be done to end our slavery to the fossil fuel industry."
Your reply was "What kind of bullshit is that? Anyone who gives a crap should be doing it now...and should have been doing it for years."
My remark was in context as a reply. Since I have been coming to TOD I have not seen ONE SINGLE alternative to oil and gas that was not ripped apart, slandered and ridiculed by at least half of the "pundits" here. If I didn't know better, and didn't have high regard for the few who have at least a fractionally open mind to the possibility that there may actually be alternatives to oil and gas, I would just go ahead and lobby for a name change here:
"The Oil and Gas Industry Protection Blog" might be fitting.
If anyone is "doing it" to refer to efforts to reduce dependence on oil and gas, tell them to drop by here to be made fools of.
As for me, I will keep driving my Diesel car (gets about 30 MPG, but I am shopping to do better) and leaving the air conditioning off (not on once again this year as we make mid July), and working on the options at solar/wind I am working on....but to the doomsters here, of course, all of that is pointless isn't it, as they dream of a future behind a horse or harvesting crops by hand (for those who have ever done it, they know why such things as the solar option are not just fvckin jokes....it's hard work at 22 (I know from experience), it's a death sentence to a bunch of aging plump baby boom office workers with their down on the farm fantasies.
Bullshit? In that contest, my stuff couldn't hope to compete here....I concede the fight to the masters.
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Mooo!
This kind of reply really pisses me off. If you cannot answer a man's argument then just shut up and admit defeat. Such a reply as this just let's everyone know that you have not the innelectual ability to answer the man so you just try to look cute with such a very stupid reply as this.
I am a doomer but I believe all cornucopian arguments can be answered logically and rationally. A little scarcasm has its place I often use it. But "Mooo" is not scarcasm, it is just silly.
Ron Patterson
Agreed. Darwinian is right. Terse replies are fine, but when they come in the form of "mooo" or "you suck" then things have devolved into eight-year old school yard land... what's the point?
If you even want to consider this place above "debate club" level I suggest you don't tear it down to one-liner absurdities in an effort to take us back to the playpens of our adolescence with classics like "doody-brain!" or baaaahhh baaaah. Yes, guess what? The internet is large a giant cesspool of childishness for you yo moo at ... but at the very least the cornucopianesque TOD'ers--and optimists--are aware of the problem, and are trying to engage in, at the very least, a debate.
If you want to mock people either
A) Do it in a more nuanced, humorous way so that you aren't flamed you for acting like an ass...
B) Go elsewhere on the internet for mooing at the herd! Pure ignorance abounds, go moo at the freepers or something.
Mooing at people only will weaken your argument. Respond, or don't respond, but certainly don't moo. I really don't mind abrasive comments, but at least put some shine on them--to reiterate and conclude, Darwinian is correct.
Roger's reply was really just a strange jumbled pissy rant, it deserved a good "moo"
Agreed. Nothing wrong with "Moo." It's terse, it gets the point across, it's not obscene.
I must have missed the time when Mooo! was cool.
The people that use it just sound like Mooo!rons to me.
Almost every forum has a way of responding to trolls without feeding them. At DailyKos, for example, they post recipes in response to posts they find trollish.
This has the benefit of being actually useful, in that some of the recipes are pretty good. But it's hell on bandwidth.
Here at TOD, they've adopted "Mooo!" instead. Which is not as useful as recipes, but is succinct.
Starving the trolls with recipes. Only relativist liberals could come up with that! Heh. =]
I stand corrected... Peanut gallery: Mooo all you want!
Leanan,
Notice I did not complain about the "Moo". If that's his position, I will land him stand by it! :-)
My post, while a bit edgy and ironic, was very coherent. It just did not abide by the party line.
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
"a tab "humans can do something" and another tab for articles about the return to horsedrawn vehicles, eating crickets, and living happily in cardboard boxes would be under the "Death of all civilization" tab."
Hi Roger,
I understand you may have been trying to emphasise a point, but that is just silly. I'm sure most people who advocate powerdown (and I am one) also understand that technology is a powerful tool.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Say, is there an agreed-upon definition of what a 'doomer' is, so I can know when and to what extent to be insulted? The way it's used often seems similar to the way the jews were portrayed in pre-WWII germany, or the "Polocks" of Polock jokes - that is, caricatured archetypical strawmen who seem - by definition - to be misanthropic luddite masochists who hope against hope for disaster, and are therefore drawn disproportionately to 'peak oil' as a rallying point.
Or is a 'doomer' just someone who thinks that, at the end of the day, we're probably fucked? As in:
I'm a techie guy who invents things and was educated in the hard sciences, and I have great appreciation for what tech and engineers can do. However, too often I've found that some are "engineering only" in their thought processes, which is to say finding technical answers which may be either unscalable in principle or just flat-out stupid to actually go ahead with. Reductionism is a useful tool for solving engineering problems, but it is often poorly suited to making decisions in the complex real world.
There is a simple question I often pose when thinking of tech solutions: what hidden assumptions are embodied in them? Continuity of an advanced alloying infrastructure? Social order? Continued international trade in strategic materials? Intact roads? Continuty of institutional knowledge to maintain them? And a thousand others. What is the "tech fix", for instance, for the warlords of Somalia, or for Balkanization and ethnic cleansing? We need good engineering, and that means realistic engineering. And 'realistic' needs to include "how does this get done and replicated?". Currently, money is causing US engineers to build corn ethanol refineries, because most engineers will do what you pay them to do, even if privately admitting that it makes no sense, and yet still often maintaining a sense of superiority over non-engineers.
A number of the members of this list have read "The Mote in God's Eye", and any who haven't, should. The Motie engineers are wizards, but are kept from making non-engineering decisions. Then there's the "watchmaker" class, monkey-sized engineers with technical brilliance who breed like rabbits and must be periodically exterminated lest they over-engineer their environment into collapse by building stuff ceaselessly for the hell of it.
We could do with a few less watchmakers in human society. The problem is human overshoot from breeding too much, and odds are we won't engineer our way out of that problem... at least not in a pleasant way.
Say, is there an agreed-upon definition of what a 'doomer' is, so I can know when and to what extent to be insulted?
This is a pretty decent definition:
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Doomer
Doomer noun,
Someone who does not believe in magic.
Someone who believes that when a large proportion of the enegy supply disappears, a large proportion of the food supply must also disappear and likewise a large proportion of the population.
Someone who does not believe that "X" will save us, where X=God, Providence or Science.
Ron Patterson
Assumption 1: Peak oil will result in a large proportion of the energy supply disappearing
Assumption 2: Food production requires a large amount of energy to sustain
Assumption 3: We need all the food we currently produce in order to survive
Assumption 1, I largely agree with, however I believe it will be temporary. That is, we won't be able to ramp up alternate energy sources in time to cope with the loss of energy from oil and gas, but eventually there's no reason they shouldn't be able to supply more than enough energy.
Assumption 2 is patently false. The proportion of the world's energy (even of the world's energy gained from oil/gas) currently required for today's levels of food production (including distribution etc.) is no more than 10%, and quite possibly less. Not only that but there are numerous techniques available for producing/distributing just as much food using even less energy, e.g. using eletricified rail for shipping, use of organic/permaculture techniques, less meat production, more vegetable/grain production etc. etc.
Assumption 3 is also false, at least for developed countries. Almost all Western nations suffer obesity, and waste huge amounts of food that mostly ends up in landfills, or at best feeding scavenging animals.
So, I'm sorry, I don't believe for a moment that a significant loss in energy supplies means a significant loss of population due to food production difficulties.
Loss of population is far more likely occur due to:
a) Increased crowding in third-world cities leading to increased disease
b) The effects of oil depletion on the ability to provide medical care, both directly (e.g. blackouts in countries using oil for electricity, cost/difficulty of manufacturing drugs/medical equipment) and indirectly, as economies enter recession and money that currently goes towards medical funding (including overseas aid money) dries up.
c) Ecological damage: soil degradation, lack of water, increased temperatures due to Global Warming etc., which all affect food production just as much, if not more so, than oil depletion.
All these are going to be very real phenonema in the coming decades, and will also contribute towards population loss. But even so, the sheer weight of the current world's population pyramid means that even with death-rates doubling, the population will continue to increase for quite some time. At most peak oil might drag what would have been a peak of 9 billion by 2050-60 down to 8.5 due to b) above, and a certain amount of food production drop-off in countries that are unable to adapt their agriculture to a post-oil world quickly enough.
I'm willing to bet with anyone here who can reasonably expect to be alive in 2050 that we will see the population hit 8 billion easily, with no solid evidence it is about to reduce suddenly. Almost the only thing that would prevent it is out-and-out nuclear or biological warfare (which I certainly wouldn't rule out as a possibility).
Wiz, argue with this guy.
David Price
That was written in 1995 so the population is now 6.5 billion. But the idea that without the aid of massive farm machinery, chemical fertilizers, and all the other things that liquid petroleum has brought us, we can still feed 6.5 billion people is just silly. But then as I said, non doomers believe in magic. William Catton, in “Overshoot” called them “Cargoists” after the cargo cults of the Pacific.
But as far as your assumptions go.
Assumption 1. YES, beyond any shadow of doubt, the decline of petroleum (not peak oil, that was two years ago), will result in a large proportion of the energy supply disappearing. After all, that is what is meant by the word decline. The decline in fossil energy will mean, by definition, decline in a energy. That is just plain damn common sense!
Assumption 2. YES, food production, on such a massive scale, does require large amounts of energy to produce. After all, only a few people produce most of the food. Now you may say everyone on earth could plant gardens, and a lot of people could. But a lot of people could not. And the storing of food over the winter requires equipment and skills that have long disappeared except for large food factories. These will disappear when the supply of food from the factory farms disappears.
Assumption 3. We do not need ALL the food we currently produce to survive but we do need most of it. True, we throw a lot of food away buw “WE” are only a small percentage of the world’s population. Much of the world lives very close to the edge. Two billion people are malnourished and another two billion get only an adequate diet with little left over. People are starving today, not because the world does not produce enough food but because they have nothing to buy food with. That situation will only get worse, much worse, when millions of people are laid off from their jobs as we slide down the back-slope of Hubbert’s Peak.
As I said, doomers do not believe in magic.
Ron Patterson
Of course sustaining our current population requires more energy than would be obtained purely from photosynthesis...I don't believe anyone is seriously arguing otherwise.
But if only 10% of our current "extrasomatic" energy is required for our current levels of food production, then we could lose 90% of that energy and still have enough for food production. More realistically, we'll lose as much as 50%, and that will mean less driving, less luxury consumerables, less air conditioning etc. etc. Governments are hardly likely to let their voters starve to death in the face of declining energy supplies.
Yes, there will be increased levels of starvation in the coming decades. Peak oil will be both directly and indirectly to blame. But it certainly won't cause a "large proportion" of the population to die off.
Where on earth did you come up with that figure? I suppose you ara assuming that we would stop using energy for anything else except to produce food and no energy for anything else. What about people getting to work? What about work? We would have no energy so there would be no production. People do not only starve because of a lack of food, people starve because they have no money to buy food.
Realistically we will eventually lose all fossil energy. Energy supplies will decline....forever. They will not reach a 50% plateau and stop there. What an absurd idea. But the us will likely lose, within less than two decades all petroleum imports. And by that time domestic production will be down to about three million barrels per day. Our farming industry and all our other industries cannot possibly survive on that. Unemployment will reach 75% or better. And we will be better off than most other nations that produce NO petroleum, and some no coal. What will Japan do?
Well hell, we have another "X" to add to our formula. We will be saved by X where X equals God, Providence, Science or Governments. Governments can produce oil out of thin air you know.
Ron Patterson
To state that energy supplies will decline forever is in plain contradiction to the facts. Did you not even read the "What Energy Crisis" thread?
There will almost certainly be populations, perhaps even entire nations, that will struggle to maintain their food output in the face of declining oil and gas supplies.
And yes, it will be difficult to maintain current volumes of food shipping to countries that are not self-sufficient. Inevitably people will go hungry and people will die. But to extrapolate the fact that oil/gas supplies are set to run out over the next few decades to the idea that most of the world's population will die off for lack of food is simply not justified.
Sadly, the US and EU governments are subsidizing turning food into fuel. So the exact opposite of what you are claiming is the course of action being taken. You need to be able to explain that discrepancy to defend your position. (try lack of representation).
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
The US and EU governments are hardly letting their own voters starve...not even close. I'm talking about the point where it becomes obvious there is simply not enough oil or gas available as imports in order for it to provide all its current uses. No sane government is going to allow the agriculture and food distribution industry to collapse due to lack of oil & gas. A starving population is a recipe for revolution.
Of course, there will always be insane governments, but democracy is usually pretty good of getting rid of them eventually.
I agree 100%
Now all we need to do is find us a sane government.
BTW the US did let its own voters starve in the 1930's even with plentiful oil and gas.
Indeed, drought and economic collapse is far more likely to cause food production and distribution issues than oil or gas depletion.
But anyway, the 30's made not a dint in the US's population, so it was hardly a case of voters starving to the point of dying off.
BTW, the only year in the last century that the population of the US has dropped was 1917.
Don't change the subject Wiz, you said no sane goverment would let its voters die. You didn't say anything about a signifigant drop in population.
You must have missed the sarcasm in my last post. Governments often fail their people and very often act in insane ways. Placing your hope in the government to protect you post peak is just ridiculous.
And democracies are the worst way possible to choose a sane government. Do you want Joe sixpack in his McMansion driving his H2 picking our leaders?
Post peak collapse will be a tangled web of failures and gas/oil shortages will only magnify the problems.
Think of it this way. No one ever dies directly of Aids. Its always something else like a simple flu that gets you in the end. Does that mean Aids wasn't the cause?
I was responding to Darwinian's stated belief that
"when a large proportion of the enegy supply disappears, a large proportion of the food supply must also disappear and likewise a large proportion of the population", so we are very much talking about a drop in population.
Yes, governments often fail their people: there's plenty of evidence they're already doing a perfectly good job of it. I certainly don't place much hope in them bailing us out of the inevitable mess peak oil will cause, but they inevitably will enforce some form of rationing to ensure limited oil/gas supplies go to the most critical services, as occurred during past shortages.
As far as Joe Sixpack picking our leaders, what makes you think you're really likely to be any better at it? In a world where we can't even be sure if there's going to be enough food on the grocery store shelves the next day, you may find more in common with Joe Sixpack than you otherwise care to admit.
No doubt democracies are the worst way possible to choose a sane (or any) government. But as Churchill would say: except for all the other ways.
Not if your government is a democracy. That that oil will just go where the majority of people want it to go. And Joe sixpack is shortsighted enough to make sure that oil goes into his H2.
Democracies are nothintg but the lowest common denomonator.
You don't trust the government to get us out of this mess? I trust the government to make this mess much much worse. Look at Carter. He had a clue and told the American people what they needed to hear not what they wanted to hear. So we dumped him and got us Reagan. Any politician that tells Joe sixpack what he doesn't want to hear will find him/herself out a of job and some new idiot in his place giving Joe exactly what he wants. Not what he needs.
It's useless to argue with wizofaus, he seems to have a strange contrived agenda, singularitarian like.
And he carefully avoid to engage on the matter.
If you honestly think people would rather starve to death than not be able to drive over-sized vehicles (and what percentage of Americans actually own Hummers*, BTW...1%?)
then you have a strange view of human nature.
As I've stated before, the upper limit on the quantities of oil/gas required to produce and distribute food is about 10% - which could easily be lowered significantly with more efficient distribution chains. So let's imagine in 10 years time there is even as much as 50% less oil/gas available on the market. A) there's not going to be enough for everyone to keep driving anyway B) explicitly redirecting a relatively small percentage of that to ensure vital services can continue to be provided is going to make very little perceptible difference to Joe Sixpack, who is mainly pissed off that he can't drive all the time, any time he wants, something no alternative government can possibly hope to fix.
The situation with the oil shocks in the '70s is not a valid comparison to what will happen as oil gradually becomes less and less available, year after year.
* GM sells about 30000 Hummers a year, out of 15000000 vehicles sold nationally by all makers. You do the maths.
I actually think you're the one with a strange view of human nature.
You are right, people don't want to starve to death. But they are just so short sighted that they will do it anyway. Ask the guy that cut down the last tree on easter Island if he wanted to starve to death. Ask the Viking in Greenland who refused to fish to find food for his family. Or the guy that steals the copper cabeling out of the substation when the power goes out. Or the guy that decided to install broken pumps into New Oreleans.
This is how Joe Sixpack acts.
If you don't like me using a Hummer as an example, how about a ford F150? Same gas milage and that one is the best selling vehicle in the US.
And if you think that post peak is going to be a nice gentle decline that I must reiterate you have a strange view of human nature. It'll take but one tiny spark in the middle east to knock 20mbd of production offline perhaps permantly. Plus a good old fashion economic collapse will stop all those new deepwater developments. Look at Russia in the 90's, and take note of their oil production. And that was easy oil too.
I absolutely never said post peak was going to be a nice gentle decline. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see imports decline as rapidly as 10% a year. The follow-on effects could well be devastating. My only issue is the assumption that it will necessarily cause mass starvation to the point of population die-off.
Picking random examples like Easter Islanders, Vikings, and cable theives is no evidence of how most people would act in a situation where there is a fairly straightforward choice between "gasoline to drive my car to work" and "food to feed my family".
There are substitutes for the former, there are no substitutes for the latter that don't involve death.
You said:
"The situation with the oil shocks in the '70s is not a valid comparison to what will happen as oil gradually becomes less and less available, year after year."
And you were also changing the subject. I wasn't talking about the 70's oil crisis. I was making the point that Americans choose a politician that told us what we wanted to hear not what we needed to hear. That's the problem with democracies, they give us what we want not what we need or deserve.
Why not? Seems pretty straightforward to me. If you want I could pick thousands of examples of everyday normal people making stupid choices because they discount the future. What about the idiots that everyday rent their funiture!?! People almost always choose the short term over the long term. Its human nature. I do it. You do it. We all do it.
And the choice between gasoline to drive my car to work" and "food to feed my family" is not a straightforward choice. Its rather convoluted. Farms and farmers are very much removed from our everyday existence. Do yo thing Joe is going to support rationing that would mean he doesn't have enough gas to get to work? He'll lose his job. Of course he'll choose refilling his SUV over some hick farmer in Iowa. Do you think Joe has any real idea where his food comes from?
And Joe Sixpack is already making that decision when he supports grain ethanol. Its a boonedagle and the only outcome is less food for the world. In this case he's choosing gas for his SUV vs someone who relies on the US's exported grain. But in your mind people wouldn't make that choice would they?
I think you're the one with a strange view of human nature.
How are "gradually becom[ing] less and less available, year after year" and "nice gentle decline" equivalent?
Oil supplies could decline as much as 50% in a single year and it would still be gradual: 1.3% a week in fact.
But 1.3% a week over a whole year would certainly give us anything but a "nice gentle" decline of our economies and way of existence.
As I said, there is already not going to be enough gas for Joe to get to work, well before there is insufficient oil to produce food.
At some point, the government will introduce rationing to ensure critical services can continue.
At the subsequent election, any alternative government is not going to be able to offer anything better, so why do you think Joe Sixpack's short-sightedness is really going to matter that much?
Honestly, the idea that oil depletion itself will necessarily lead to mass starvation and die-off is so patently absurd on so many levels that it almost baffles me that otherwise intelligent people would seriously consider it...and I say almost, but I will admit that when first came across the concept (from LATOC) it did seem to make sense, and I seriously started to believe it for a while. But a bit of reading, research and number crunching of my own was more than enough to dispel the idea.
Why do I get the feeling we keep going in circles?
You miss the point. That alternative government is not going to offer anything better, its going to offer what Joe wants. You and I both know what Joe wants isn't what Joe needs but there are a thousand Joes for everyone of us. And they all get to vote.
Besides a lot of things can happen to disrupt critical services, PO is only the root cause.
Then explain this.
That doesn't seem so laughable to me. Famine is a very common event in even recent human history. When the system breaks down post peak it will be world wide. Wars will destroy harvests. Lack of fuel will prevent delivery of harvests. People out of work can't afford to buy food even if rationing allows it to be grown. A population teetering on the edge can be done in by a single season's crop failure.
Think 1930's dust bowl. Think 1990's N Korea or 1980's Ethiopia. Any of these events shouldn't have occurred since all you needed was a little rationing and planning to prevent them right?
I can't tell if you are serious anymore. I just don't understand you or your position and I am learning nothing from our conversation anymore.
You seem to boil everything down to it takes X amount of oil to grow and distribute food. Therefore people will be rational enough to ensure that X amount of oil will be dedicated to food production and distribution and no other variables will disrupt this production/distribution.
Take a step back from that tree. There is a whole forest out here.
The 1930's dust bowl event did not reduce population.
The 1980's Ethiopian famine did not reduce the population there.
It's unknown whether the 1990's N Korean famine reduced population, but it certainly wasn't significant.
That is, the most extreme examples of famines you can find did NOT reduce population.
The article you linked to I had read, and it indeed is concerning. However, I have never claimed that peak oil will not lead to food shortages. It will almost certainly contribute towards a certain amount of starvation in very poor parts of the world.
But starvation to the point of it actually reducing population requires food shortages of such extremity that you really have stretch to come up with possible reasons we could get to that point. Probably our best model for the level of economic hardship we might expect to see as result of peak oil is The Great Depression - during which period there was NO population loss at all. I'm willing to accept it could be twice as bad and last 3 times as long as that. At that rate, I might expect to see a slight population decline over a 30 year period, of which the effect of the lack of oil/gas for food production will almost immeasurably small.
I'll say it again - the only thing that could possibly cause mass die-off before the end of the cenutry is global nuclear or biological warfare.
Yes, Peak Oil could trigger such a thing, but I'm not lying awake at nights worrying about it.
Just because modern famines didn't lead to significant population loss in and era of relative stability and abundant cheap energy is not proof famine won't lead to significant population loss in an era of instability and limited energy
But according to what you have written none of these famines should have ever occurred right? Just a little rationing, some reasonable planning from our government, some long term thinking by our citizens and famine averted. Right?
You say Joe will be rational enough to choose food over filling up his SUV? But that wasn't the case in the above famines and it isn't the case with ethanol. That Viking and that Easter Islander made the same stupid decision that Joe is making now. This isn't a limited phenomena but fundamental to human nature.
Ha! I wish. I really do. The Great Depression came during a time of plenty. It came at a time of cheap abundant energy and yet the system still fell apart at the seams.
During the great depression most people still made a living from the land and world population as 2 billion.
Today 7 billion people are 10 steps removed from the land and subsequently 100 times as vulnerable. Think of all that farmland turned into McMansions in the last 50 years. Think how much more dependent 7 billion people have become on Oil. Think how much the green revolution (powered by oil) has increased the carrying capacity of the land.
You saw a 2 story house get knocked down in the Great Depression. Now we've built up a 100 story tower made all that much more unstable by globalism.
Open you eyes. The great leap forward and the Great depression are just a warm up for what's coming. What do you think world oil production will be in 30 years? It'll be where it was 30 years ago at best(assuming only geologic decline not "above ground factors)". Only this time the population will be 2 times what it was 30 years ago.
You can only cut the pie so thin before the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Those famines occurred for any number of reasons, but the fact of the matter is that they were relatively localized, small scale famines. You are talking about a famine so bad that billions could die within the space of a few decades. It just isn't going to happen.
I expect oil production in 30 years to be at most 50% of what it is now. And I expect the global population to be closing in on 8 billion. Yes, millions will be starving (as they are now), but we will still be reproducing and growing in population.
Which, just to clarify, is not something I see as a good thing. But the sheer weight of numbers practically dictates it.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Think N Korea only this time no one steps in and ships food to stabilize the country. Think The Great Leap Forward only this time without the easy access to energy to jumpstart the economy. Think Rhwanda without the military intervention ... Oh wait, nevermind.
Why? Cause you don't want it to?
And you don't see this as a serious problem? At what point (pop growth vs energy decline) does a problem occur? What exactly is the carrying capacity of the Earth at 75mbd? At 37mbd?
And if you think that the world is just going to gradually slip down to 35mbd you are delusional. There will huge disruptions (war, depression etc) that will exacerbate the decline. Like I pointed out before, a small war in the middle east could easily take 20mbd of production off line permanently. Remember the Tanker wars?
You increase the population, but decrease the energy available to it and that precludes a population drop via famine?
Or do you think its just impossible for that many people to die of hunger? Why would there be an upper limit to famine?
It seems to me that just the exact opposite would occur without outside intervention (not likely post peak). Who dies in a famine? Children, elderly and women. You have a famine that goes on for 5-7 years at the death rate seen in Korea or China and without foreign intervention than you could loose an entire generation. Nothing left but gangs of unemployed angry young men.
Is isn't going to happen because the world is a much bigger place than any one localized famine event.
It's not run by a single government, and it's not dependent on a single agricultural industry.
We honestly and simply do not know what the carrying capacity of the Earth is. I agree that 9 billion of us will place a tremendous strain on the ecosphere and on our agricultural systems. If I could wave a wand and magically reduce our numbers down to 1 or 2 billion (without anyone noticing) I would. But no-one can, so we will have to just make the best of it. And if humans are good at anything, it's making sure we keep ourselves alive. Unfortunately it will inevitably be at the expense of many other species.
No, but its all run by oil. Take away the oil and you take away the ability to produce food at the tremendous rate the world makes food at.
Look at N Korea, after the eastern block fell, it was isolated in the world. That means oil imports to N Korea vanished almost overnight. Resulting in tremendous famine for two years until other oil rich nations stepped in and gave N Korea food.
What happens in those oil rich food producing nations suddenly find themselves in the same boat? Struggling to produce food. Who'll Save N Korea then? No one. The die off in that region would be tremendous.
Then it spreads as the oil crisis spreads. As war and economic collapse disrupts food production in other regions. Africa. S America. Mexico. The Middle east. Eastern Europe. Asia.
The common thread between all these famines? Oil, or more specifically the lack of oil and the disruptions that follow it. But no one will be able to step in and stop the next Ethiopia or Somalia famine.
Wait till governments start to collapse. Transportation and economic systems start to collapse. It'll get worse and worse and the well off (still not starving nations) will just ignore the starving regions of the world. What else can they do? But surely and slowly that crisis will work its way up the food chain.
Its not like the US doesn't have enough domestic production of oil to feeds its people. Its the US's economy collapses. Mexicans flee the remnants of the old Mexico state. The US dollar collapses. Eventually the government collapses. Who's rationing oil consumption now?
Australia is fighting a massive drought. When Asia's economy goes under so does Australia's. Australia, a net oil importer, finds itself in bad shape. Just like during the great depression unemployment soars. But unlike the great depression Australia finds itself way past its carrying capacity (desal plants without cheap oil hah). With out the importation of cheap fossil fuels it can't feed its people, even if they could afford to buy the food. Farmland dries up, dead sheep litter the outback because it costs too much money/oil to move water around. Farmers give up and move into the cities living in Howardvilles.
I think you are still stuck on the idea that there is some upper limit to famine. Somehow you can't or just don't want to imagine destruction on such a large scale and just block it out of you mind.
But you are right, it won't be one massive famine. But lots of regional famines as each region crosses that magical carrying capacity line as available energy continues its relentless downward plunge (helped along by war and economic collapse). And as each region slips past that line everybody else is just gonna stand there and watch. Pretty soon it'll be their turn as well.
Do you really think GM crops or permaculture is going to make much of a difference?
You guys have a testable thesis here. Instead of banging heads, why don't you collaborate to find supporting data until you reach a real conclusion.
Start with the energy bulletin article "the oil we eat" and also look at the depletion curve and see when we decline down to the 17% level or so that the current agricultural system uses (17% data from Portland Peak Oil document). Figure out when oil will be low enough that either the farmers or the buyers won't have oil (and thus no money or food). Go for it!
Because that assumes that everything will be fine and dandy all the way down the depletion curve.
I contend that the system will break down long before that. Normal food production and distribution will be impossible long before natural decline says it would happen.
"above ground factors" as it has so quaintly been termed.
Unfortunately, while dependable, human stupidity isn't testable.
Well, exactly. There's no way you can prove that there will be sufficient energy/land/food production to keep 8 or 9 billion of us alive, even if oil depletes by 50%. I can show that given what we know today, it's technically possible. Of course what's technically possible and what's likely to occur due to "above ground factors" are not the same thing, but as far as the issue of ensuring there is enough food for everyone to at least survive, that's a fundamental driver for all species, and hunger will eventually overtake any foolish desires to hang on the status quo.
Yes, the system *might* break down completely, and globally, but it is just a contention, as you say. There's really no way of proving it's likely or even assigning much of a probability to it.
On that basis, Rethin's hyptothesis is completely untestable. I mean admit it Rethin, there is no amount of research I could do that would provide information to convince you that we are not likely to see billions die in the next few decades due to peak oil.
I never said it wasn't technically possible to feed x billion of people at XXmbd oil production either.
That said
Like I said, you have a strange view of human nature. How you can read Diamond's Collapse and still hold that view is mind boggling. Joe Sixpack will live in his McMansion and eat his 5000mile salad while people in Africa and Asia are starving and he'll never loose a wink of sleep over it. It won't be a problem till it effects him personally. Course by then it'll be too late.
If you think the world is going to ride the depletion slope peacefully all the way to the bottom you are delusional. We are already fighting wars over oil control.
Humans are just big hairless apes. We've been consuming to the utmost and fighting over resources since we fell from the trees. There is no way in hell Joe Sixpack is going to give up his F150 and sing Kumbaya with some Chinese peasant that just wants clean drinking water and perhaps a TV.
Diamond's Collapse is part of the reason I hold the view I do. He makes some good points at the end as to why modern civilisation is not likely to succumb so easily to the forms of collapse that took over much smaller, more primitive societies that were highly dependent on their surrounding ecology. On that basis, he openly considers himself a "cautious optimist", a position I also subscribe to.
BTW I agree entirely that affluent Westerners will survive largely at the expense of those in developing countries whose agricultural systems collapse as oil supplies decline.
One last point I feel needs clarifying:
My main objection is to the idea that oil/gas depletion on its own will have such an effect on food production that billions will starve to death. This appears to be the view of posters here like Darwinian, and, as I understand it, Colin Campbell also.
I fully accept that oil/gas depletion will lead to a certain amount of economic collapse, which will have significant impact on our ability to keep the population well fed, and well provided with medical care. But again, I find it unlikely that it will lead to significant die-off, certainly not in affluent Western nations. We all be certainly eating a good deal less, but we won't be dying from it. I wouldn't be surprised to see life expectancies fall somewhat however, due do compromised ability to provide medical care. Note of course that Western populations will start to decline in the coming decades anyway due to low fertility rates.
On the other hand, a significant possibility of "die-off" exists in a number of poorer nations due to ecological damage and changing climate. I would expect to see this start to kick in around the middle of the century, and will almost certainly pull back the maximum population (of 8 or 9 billion) at a significant rate. However this has little to do with peak oil.
BTW, I personally think the above is a pretty "doomerish" assessment of how much of the 21st century is likely to unfold. Given that I will probably be alive for half of it, and my children for 3/4ths of it, it's not much of a future to look forward to, from a global perspective. As I've said before, my main hope is that I live long enough to see the first signs of recovery and a new realisation of the need to change our ways.
Why do I get the feeling we keep going in circles?
Told you so...
He'll never relent, don't feed the troll!
.
And exactly what do you contribute besides off topic character attacks?
Will you ever relent?
Though I am not a native english speaker I think in the first sentence you should write beside and not besides, check your grammar! :->
No; The statement is missing a comma, semicolon, or elipsis but 'besides' is appropriate for the sentance as an alias for 'aside from.' English is funny that way.
If you want to drive a copy editor crazy, ask them when you're supposed to use the comma.
The statement is missing a comma ...
May be but that wouldn't make the spelling of "beside" consistent, as an alias for 'aside from.' beside doesn't take a final 's'.
Only the following turn of sentence would allow for besides :
"... what do you contribute, besides you blah ... (another sentence with a verb) "
And, "sentence" isn't spelled with an 'a' ;->>
Er, no.
http://www.usingenglish.com/articles/beside-besides.html
Darwinian,
Very terse definition. I like it.
I'm sure you, or for that matter anyone else, doesn't want to hear my two definitions of the inverse terms, so here it goes anyways...
Cornucopian:
One who enjoys pissing up a rope and denies critics who state they aren't going to get anything (except wet).
Doomer:
One who enjoys pissing up a rope, and states for the record that they're getting soaked and it is only going to get worse.
We are all pissing up a rope when we have these "debates". But, we have to pass the time somehow, right? The comment section is going to be filled up with something, so why not this?
"Cornucopians" can make strawmen out of the word "doomer", and likewise "doomers" can make strawmen out of "cornucopians". (Just watch me now!) But, alas, nothing can be ignored (even it is futile). Like I've said before, if certain "engineers" can't see the scale of the problem--or can't acknowledge the intractability of it, or have an abundant faith that the massive problems spelled out at TOD can be rectified with out dreadfully increasing stress to human societies, then this only goes to reinforce whatever the word "doomer" is supposed to mean, as the implication seems to be that "saving the world" is possible. Maybe happy-go lucky faithful engineers should read the paper more--or perhaps go talk to the guys who designed the World Trade Center Towers. Engineering, like life and politics, is a messy business. "Cornucopian" means "political optimism", to me--the inverse of the term "doomer". Personally, I am very pessimistic about political prospects in my country (the US) in trying to "fix the problem". Democrats have no plan except strawman extraordinaire "conservation", and "green cars". Republicans have a very starkly clear plan, summed up by "The Global War on Terror". On top of that, I'm a realist in that I believe that even though geological predictions have been wrong before, it is only a matter of time--and the more time the passes the more difficult it becomes for our wasteful developed economies to run in place. Some fat can be trimmed off, but that still misses the overriding point which displays the aforementioned gullibility, faith, or for lack of a better word, like I said before, childish naivete of the cornucopian engineers. Techno-fixers always make claims in a vacuum ignoring political realities (usually, again-again it must be stressed, because of humble naivete....)
Of course, TOD is not supposed to be political--right? So I'll stop, since anyway, I don't have anything to add except that politically, I believe, we are totally screwed. But now, we aren't in engineering anymore, all of a sudden we get into the "liberal" social sciences which quickly turns into another bad debating game...
Alas, sorry for droning on, and if anyone wants to fire off some flak at this, be my guest.
Agreed. Look at what happened in Japan last night. A relatively mild earthquake (6.6) caused a lot of destruction. Even though we engineers thought we understood earthquakes, and Japan is supposed to have the best earthquake engineering in the world.
I also think you're onto something with the "scale of the problem" comment. Not all engineers are alike, but I've had a lot of career counseling over the years, and one thing that comes through is that the vast majority of American engineers are detail-oriented. They see the trees, not the forest. This has been backed by my personal experience, as an atypical big-picture engineer. I drive my coworkers nuts, because they'll spend hours arguing over what size screw to use, and I take one look and say, "We can't do it, it won't fit in the space available." This ticks them off, but to me, if it can't be built, there's no point in arguing over screw threads.
They see the trees, not the forest.
Not only engineers, alas!
How much blather on TOD is about "the trees"?
Well, the trees are also important. Ideally, you'll look at both the trees and the forest.
Unfortuanately, many - perhaps most of us - tend toward tunnel vision.
My tunnel vision sees an oncoming headlight coming down the tracks.
Must be Alan's light rail ;-)
No, that one would be dead in its' tracks from political wrangling.
One individual that I respect a lot for his economic point of view, has worked in venture capital, has a degree in Resource Economics, is a judge at UMass for Alt Energy spin off companies that are developed using the college's intellectual property, works with VCs like Charles River Ventures, and fully believes in peak oil made one comment that will stick in my mind for awhile: "There is too much money to be made in finding a solution(s)". He has his pulse on the hedge funds, private equity, and venture capitalists, and they are placing their bets now.
Will we have pain, yes; as America is to stupid to get serious about anything and form a coherent program until a crisis has hit a boiling point. But once that does, watch the Federal Government kick off an investment program in Energy and Infrastructure so large it makes Apollo look like cakewalk.
America is a bubble economy. It needs successive bubbles, each one larger than the next, to keep everything chugging along. The Federal Reserve, the Secretary of the Treasury, and our other leaders in the Fed Government know this. The next bubble needs to be in a sector/industry that is scalable, is ripe for government subsidies, is timely, and sets off another bubble large enough to offset the losses in mortgage and housing markets. Alternative Energy and Infrastructure programs meet the bill.
I’m sure there will be pain; I’m sure that massive adjustments to life will need to take place. But there is too much money to be made trying to solve the problem.
BTW… this bubble is already starting to take place throughout Europe and other parts of the world.
I can see this scenario playing out.
The problem is that with each successive bubble the disparity in standard of living increases and at some point the former middle class has to say enough.
It's either ballots or bullets, and we already know the ballot doesn't work in the US, as we continually choose between two proxies of the same force.
The Europeans are smarter, they cut the middle class in.
It's either ballots or bullets, and we already know the ballot doesn't work in the US,
The ballot for 'elected leadership' does not work. But the ballot of how and where you spend your money does have an effect.
Besides, you can't really vote by buying bullets as they seem to be in low stock.
I'll bet you that the next credit bubble, if it forms at all, will be in carbon credits.
Ghawar Is Dying as we slide Into the Grey Zone
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
As others have said, great post.
The idea of petitioning Gates to better fund renewable energy I think has a lot of merit. He's already put something like $84 million into...ack...corn ethanol. What a waste of money...and of course $84 million is pocket change to Gates.
I don't disagree with your estimates of available energy. The problem I see is one of reconfiguring the established infrastructure in what seems to be a relatively short time. Even if we assume that this is a solvable crisis it will involve a troublesome transition. Just how troublesome is the crux of the debate.
alan,
Doomers, like engineers, are a varied lot. Speaking for and about myself, I suppose I am one of these "doomers" you wish to confound. Well, I assure you I am not "confounded" in the least by your engineering smarts or your energy proposal. If anything, it is you who is confounded as it is not us alleged doomers (truly a small feeble lot we are in the grand scheme) who are stopping you (or anyone else in your 'we-can-do-it' category) from implementing your engineering plans.
As others have noted in agreement, and with which I concur, it is not for lack of technological know-how that our present fossil fueled energetics can not theoretically be substituted. However, it goes without saying that such techno-fixes are not being implemented at the rate and scale that bodes well for our presently enacted globalized form of civilization. Even you acknowledge this.
Maybe they will, and maybe they won't. But aside from consideration of the "above-ground" problems (the list of which is practically limitless and hence more than enough to thwart such engineering plans), as a self-proclaimed doomer the primary problem I have with such an engineered future is that is is predicated on 'control'.
It is precisely this lack of control that confounds you, and anyone else who presumes mankind can control this earthly creation with an engineered -- be it technical, social, political, whatever -- solution. It is thus that my primary sentiment of "doom" is soundly based; it has nothing to do with your technological solution.
"We just do not have the control -- the control is the lie."
[The above quotation is taken from David Ehrenfeld's tour-de-force, The Arrogance of Humanism
I recommend you read it, after which you should be able to fully grasp the underlying cause of me being the type of doomer I am.
I also largely agree with what Cherenkov, HeIsSoFly, and GreyZone, have written in that they lend details to my broader point.
Worse than us "doomers" is the reality that gets dissected here on a daily basis. But good luck trying to confound that.]
Alan, please consider that your "solutions" are more of the same worldview/philosophy that got us into the present mess.
For example, you glibly state that a 1GW PV power plant would require "only 4000 tons of silicon"! Good God man, you're talking about separating 8,000,000 pounds of silicon from tightly bound oxygen, plus more energy to recrystalize it to the ultrapure state necessary for photocell use! But wait, there's more: "The rest is glass (silicon, sodium, calcium and oxygen mainly) and aluminium, There is no shortage of materials". Please read this carefully: the problem is NOT "materials", the problem IS process energy. Will the sand be mined and transported by solar electricity? Will the soda be made with solar electricity? Will the glass be melted with solar electricity? And what of the CO2 emissions to make that aluminium? Without a cheap source of process energy, this system would be VERY difficult to produce and close to impossible to maintain.
I'll assert that soon enough folks are going to be concerned with how to feed the masses without cheap fuel for agricultural mechanization; they won't have the resources to try to build solar PV systems with solar PV electricity.
Finally, to me it appears to be the pinnacle of arrogant presumption to assume that the flash-in-the-pan clever monkeys know better than the trial-and-error results of three billion years of experimentation. There already exists a solar energy collection system that is:
Self-replicating
Self-repairing
Produces no waste by-products that are not biodegradeable
Dude, borrow a quarter and buy some humility!
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
This is the trick. The EROI on PV is low. In HT Odum's research (now dated) it was always negative. And that did not require creating high purity silicon, because PV demand was lower, and high purity supplies existed.
Engineering is about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Any proposed energy source solution requires these things to be considered:
EROI analysis (essential).
Total Quantity of the energy source in quads (to find the bounding limits).
These two together provide the net energy contribution to society that this new energy source can provide.
A great graph with both values for many technologies plotted on the same graph can be found here:
http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/aspo5presentations/Hall_ASPO5.pdf
Then there needs to be:
Limiting Resource analysis (no point in proposing something that uses pounds of platinum, because the solution won't scale. Or lithium, etc). Things that use steel and wood are nice. Aluminum or stainless are at greater risk of EROI issues.
Time to Implement analysis. How fast can the technology scale up? Has it been done before? What is the current production rate? What doubling rate can be sustained? For energy sources, this will be EROI constrained once the investment levels get significant (you can only reinvest "profit" energy without taking energy from some other sector of the economy).
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
In HT Odum's research (now dated) it was always negative.
Odum's work also assigned a value to the 'mental work' that went into the creation of the product.
Modern analysis claims an under 5 year EROEI for PV.
Thanks Eric, do you have a good reference on that modern analysis for PV?
Jon Freise
Analyze Not Fantasize -D. Meadows
1) Before he died, Howard Odum, calculated an EROEI of less than 1 for solar PV, however we can see with hindsight that he over-estimated the energy costs of administration and maintenance. New thin film methods are more efficient with materials also. Sergio Ulgiati, one of Odum's most prominent followers has recently computed a much more positive EROEI using Odum's emergy methodology. I don't know if the study has been published yet -- but I'm trying to find out, and will publicise it on energybulletin.net if it's out. I think Odum used price-estimated energy costs, but also built databases based on more refined, but equally whole-economy methods. So probably Ulgiati's study does not suffers from the criticisms of other research you mention. Which isn't to say case closed, but definitely an important study. There's also this very good round up of current research here: http://www.energybulletin.net/17219.html
That comes from Adam Fenderson over at energy bulletin.
Via http://www.jeffvail.net/2006/11/energy-payback-from-photovoltaics.html
You'll note that this works out to about 4.4 kWh per solar cell. If the cell is properly installed at an average location in the United States it will recover that energy in less than 18 months, even after accounting for electrical losses in the PV system. Sure, that only covers the energy used to convert quartz to silicon wafers, but as I've said that is the single largest energy sink in the process.
And who knows - perhaps one day stirling based solar concentrators will ship.
Is this the paper?
"Life cycle assessment and energy pay-back time of advanced photovoltaic modules: CdTe and CIS compared to poly-Si"
Here is the abstract. The full article is behind a paywall.
"The paper is concerned with the results of a thorough energy and life cycle assessment (LIA) of CdTe and CIS photovoltaic modules. The analysis is based on actual production data, making it one of the very first of its kind to be presented to the scientific community, and therefore especially worthy of attention as a preliminary indication of the future environmental impact that the up-scaling of thin film module production may entail."
Jon
Thanks for posting that link. I have printed off pages 12, 37, and 38 for my files. It seems like anyone who doesn't "get" PO, would "get" it by showing them page 38. Of course, if the subprime woes trigger an economic meltdown, I'd expect the line to go even steeper.
And thanks for stating that the solar PV EROI is low. Too many PO newbies always pin their hopes on solar PV.
Would you people please quit equating solar energy to PV!
IT IS NOT
there are lots of ways to get electricity from solar that are intrinsically less expensive- in the full meaning of the word expense. Look up solar thermal, like on the front page of the NYT of today, as just one big fat obvious example.
Damn!
Wimbi
My comments were directed towards solar PV EROI, as I stated. If the way I stated it can be confused with solar thermal, please inform me and I stand corrected. (I am not an engineer, just a housewife with a strong science and math background obsessed with energy issues.) That said, I enjoy all of your posts and continue to look forward to hearing how your solar thermal/sterling projects are going. Perhaps you could guess at gtrouts suggestion below about the EROI of your own project being equal to or greater than 5. I'd be interested.
I subscribe to Solar Today and Home Power and was disappointed this week when the new issue of Home Power was filled with mostly solar panel PV ads and articles. It seems that's where the industry is currently headed, market and profit wise. I also know that solar thermal is much more worthwhile.
Kalpa. my apologies for any offense. My extremely sane wife does not let me get away with any overwrought verbiage in everyday life, but sometimes I lapse when I think she aint looking, as on TOD.-------dang.
Anyhow, will think about the EROI of my little games, but not now- bedtime.
Wimbi
I'd be happy to help keep you in line around here--if it would help your wife out. Besides, I'm pretty talented at that sort of thing myself ;-)
Kalpa---- that's what the "dang" was intended to suggest-- , can't get away with anything, anywhere.
but I did think a little about EROI for stirling vs PV, trying to do as little work as possible, of course. So, thinking about a direct comparison of concentrating stirling systems vs concentrating PV, the major difference is the thing actually receiving the solar energy and turning it into available electricity. The both of them have a lot of the stuff in common- mirror, mount, tracker, cooling system and all that- presumably a tossup.
I have never got a clear picture of just what energy costs are for those multi-junction high efficiency solar cells, but I do know what goes into a stirling. Per kilowatt of delivered power, a stirling takes about 3kg of stainless steel, about 4kg of carbon steel, and the equivalent of what goes into a 1kWwater turbine- alternator. So, all somebody needs to do is find the energy costs of all those bits, and compare the same with the multi-junction PV.
And as the old cop-out goes, that is beyond the scope of this paper, or more precisely, this geezer.
PS- it helps to remember that stirlings are just common stuff like unto, say, a lawn mower-no magic. Multi-junction PV takes a quantum mechanic to keep it going.
Wimbi
Thanks. Actually, I think the inventor should just invent. Don't let anything get in your way. Your project sounds hopeful to us here. Keep working away buddy.
It is a good presentation. There is one by Dennis Meadows on the same site that is also excellent. He pointed out the EROI limit on building new energy infrastructure.
The value of EROI of 5 or better to support industrial civilization has been posted. I have not read the papers that support that thesis, but if anyone has, a summery would be nice.
this system would be VERY difficult to produce and close to impossible to maintain.
Any of the systems proposed have external dampers in the form of taxes and interest. Taxes and interest have allowed a whole class of people to come into existence who will not wish to change what they have.
Eric, while we're on the subject, lets do talk about the "investment" structure.
Sure, given a choice between conservation and a huge centralized PV system, the Powers That Be (PTB)will of course choose the centralized system and encourage more consumption. This centalized power permits centralized control of the citizenry. The PTB will use their "capital" to facilitate the transfer of wealth to them.
Again, AlanIs is proposing that the solution to our present problems is more of the same, done bigger and faster.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
Again, AlanIs is proposing that the solution to our present problems is more of the same, done bigger and faster.
Perhaps you should spend some time reading about the tapeworm
http://www.solari.com/learn/articles_risk.htm
Finally, to me it appears to be the pinnacle of arrogant presumption to assume that the flash-in-the-pan clever monkeys know better than the trial-and-error results of three billion years of experimentation.
Yes, I made a few calculations when arguing against creationists and ID-ers and it seems engineers, scientists and more generally "clever monkeys" are overlooking much of the same complexity when pretending to "control" the mess.
People obviously have no idea of the amount of information possibly encoded in the smallest quantity of matter, nor of what duration means.
Have they ever heard of Avogadro's number?
For 18 grams of water this means more than 600000000000000000000000 molecules of water, each of which can be in a slightly different state than another (necessarily so for its physical location), which makes for an unmanageable amount of information just to describe the "current state" of those 18 grams of water.
This is even more unimaginable for more complex molecules like proteins.
All molecules are thermally agitated (except at a temperature of zero kelvin) and undergo brownian motion, however molecules are not billard balls or grains of sand, chemical bonds make or break hapazardly and some bonds and also complex patterns of bonds are more stable than other, i.e. once set they will not easily break unless the temperature goes outside their stability range (usually up to higher temps), therefore they are bound to survive and thus complex molecules are necessarily created out of which some longer time scales purposeless selective process can further sort out the "winning" combinations i.e. just those which happen to last longer because they benefit from self-reinforcing feedbacks which favor their own reproduction.
All this happens over the whole earth biomass (anywhere from 75 to 422 billion metric tons) and WE, clever monkeys, pretend to figure out what's going on inside this and somehow "recapitulate" what this process has been doing over more that 3 billions years and "make it better" with our puny 1.5 kg brains!
Dude, borrow a quarter and buy some humility!
Agreed, but they won't.
Alan,
I love technology as well, perhaps more than most. And, as an Engineer, I can say there is a deep need to find solutions.
But, as many know, it's not really about ENERGY/OIL...It's all about population.
So, unless you have a techno-fix for that can of worms, all our dreaming is useless. Another 75 million this year, and the next...that's why we are starting to see PEAK everything.
There are no real solutions to slowing down, reversing population growth...as they cannot be implemented in any reasonable way.
So, it's all up to Mother Nature. The only tunnel vision around here is Oil Tunnel Vision.
As I have stated repeatedly, the real problem is not technical or economic, it is social and political. I have said repeatedly that if a bunch of us were to meet together for a week, we could come up with a very good action plan. Your post above is a good start toward an outline, add in Alan Drake's EOT and we're well on our way there.
The problem is that it wouldn't get done. Nothing is getting done. And it is not for lack of ideas or know-how or investment capital. The problem is entirely one of social inertia and wrong-headed thinking and dismal leadership in a dysfunctional political system.
If some of us sound negative, it is not because we are unaware of the possibilities that you have outlined, it is because we are all too aware of how our society and our political systems work (or maybe I should say, don't work). If some of us are talking about things that sound infuriatingly suboptimal, it is because we have concluded that it is wise to assume that human society and its political system are incapable of making an optimal response to this crisis. We are thus looking for transitional tools and strategies that may indeed be suboptimal, but may at least be possible to do even given a dysfunctional society and political system. In other words, sometimes a poor solution to a problem is preferable to no solution to a problem.
I would counsel caution lest the perfect become the enemy of the good enough.
re; Deffeyes and the peak
We've apparently passed the peak in crude plus condensate, and the government of the US has done nothing except try to hide it. Deffeyes points out, quite rightly, that they've only tried to hide the peak by changing the inflation statistics to exclude energy and food, the two things that all of us use every day, and he also notes that none of the Candidates for the presidential election next year are even talking about the problem. Its discouraging.
WestTexas's ELM model shows that world exports will decline by half in the next 10 years, and I think he's conservative in his projections. Its the biggest national security problem in the US, the biggest economic security problem, and resource wars are the biggest threat to the freedom of the world.
Bob Ebersole
Continuing clarification: the ELM applies to a hypothetical country. Khebab is working on the models for the top 10, but a 50% reduction in net exports in 10 years, especially by the top 10, probably is conservative (UK went to zero net exports in six years).
The Net Present Value (NPV) of an oilfield in the North Sea is highest if you extract the oil as fast as possible because the cost of operating the platforms is so high. As a result the UK will tend to deplete one of the fastest. I tell people the one thing we know for certain about the future in the UK is that we will be trying to import 80% of our oil and 90% of our gas in 13 years time. The situation is dire.
FYI. Europe is pushing the car industry for average fleet CO2 emissions of 120 gm/km but 2012. Only the smallest cars meet this now and it doesn't make any sense for the car industry or CO2. It must be a proxy policy for peak oil. They know.
Was that from peak export date to net import date?!?!
[Don't mind me, I'll just be here in the corner shivering and mumbling for a while]
The market recognizes peak oil.
Run that back 5 years if you really want to be impressed. Average annual return close to 30% over the 3 year period, and I think it was 27% for the 5 year period.
Peak Oil was a very big part of my decision to go to work for an oil company. I figured in a world with diminishing fossil fuel reserves, my company and my skills would be very valuable for a good while.
I do not think that the "oil bomb" will make it into the Presidential debates because Iraq is front and center. The fact that Iraq is mainly about oil makes it all that much more ironic.
Good comment. It'll be fascinating to see how it pans out. I also think the irony spellbinding. I wonder, if prices do end up going to the moon before the election, it would be even more ironic (and perhaps approaching "unlikely") if the two did not "touch", so to speak. Ummmm, "Messrs X and Y, what do you think about oil prices and the War in Iraq?" Awkward! (For the media.)
Unless, Big Oil will do its best to bring prices down right before the election--which seems to be the cycle of choice, if they can pull it off, politically. Get prices high then bring them down, "feel-good-relativism", what I like to call it. It seems to work in politics.
Because of a "cultural barrier", no one can honestly say the US in in Iraq for oil-related reasons--because, again, like always it's not a problem with oil--No! No!--it's a problem with "security". Really nice how this same story will kill multiple birds, isn't it? On top of that, we Americans are benevolent and always have good, irrational motives like "helping people"! (That's why we're really in Iraq, didn't you know? So, school children can learn and women can, eh, be blown up... Violent inappropriate sarcasm aside...) The question will be "how to bring our troops home"--whom any intelligent member of the armed services will see as more disingenuous crap from the Democrats. We're just "spreading Democracy", nothing to see here--except 14 permanent bases and a multi-billion dollar embassy. Iraq is not going away anytime soon, as long as this government is able to create and sell debt.
Re public reaction to rising gasoline prices, here in Toronto we are currently at 4.14 US a gallon with zero discussion of gasoline prices in the media or among the public. Seems to be a total non issue.
Local price here (Wales, UK) is $7.62 a gallon. Likewise a non issue.
JN2: That is impossible. I thought the sky fell and civilization came to an end at $7.62 a gallon. I forgot- civilization only ends when Americans have to pay $7.62 (quick pan to Soccer mom sobbing while she fills up her brand-new SUV).
I don't think price alone will pry the SUVs from America's corpulent fingers, but make them wait 3 hours on Saturday morning for gas, and you'll see kids walking to soccer practice.
"$7.62 a gallon". That equates to about 97p/litre, about 2-3p off the peak price reached just after Katrina. Whether a headline price of £1/litre would ring any alarm bells, I doubt - I think it would need to go well above that and stay there or even continually rise, for people to get the message. It just illustrates the lack of price/demand elasticity in our "developed" countries.
I think in richer European countries where taxes account for about half the price of motor fuel, reduction in demand will come not so much through motor fuel price increases - which are about halved percentage-wise compared to oil price rises - but through general economic decline. Certainly in UK, oil and gas imports will create a huge trade deficit over the next few years.
Taxes (fuel duty, VAT) account for about 70% of the UK fuel price, taxes which go to pay for politicians, infrastructure, social programs, healthcare, etc., supposedly to benefit the country's people.
So in the future when Americans are paying $7.62 a gallon, as higher component costs snake through the system and the economy, people in the UK will be paying $12 to $16 a gallon. And they'll also be getting a lot less "bang for your buck" on all the subsidies and benefits provided by gas taxes. And paying more out of pocket individually for everything else.
Here in Sweden the gasoline price is cheaper then it was last august or so. Everything is OK and wonderful, nothing evil seems to be happening. Maybe this talk about ELM and so on is only doomer porn??
Petrol is quite a bit cheaper here than last year in Aus too, mainly due to the US dollar slide.
Which is a bit of worry, because it's going to give people the impression that last year's higher prices were temporary.
More people living like this would help: an 84 square foot home! Smaller than a parking space:
http://www.katu.com/news/local/8499817.html
The video gives a good look at it, nice job!
(#1 at reddit)
One problem with energy-saving replacements for current goods is the energy cost of building them. Subdivision of existing houses would be the model for a crisis. People wouldn't buy or build houses this small because they'd assume the crisis was only temporary. So they'd subdivide apartments, and then get used to it. However, good research on how to do this is valuable. IKEA catalogs have featured extreme space-saving projects, and I took a close look at a demonstrator at their Houston store. This was a 3-room apartment of a couple hundred square feet, small enough to build into an existing room. It beats the hell out of survivalism.
Not only that, but there is already a trend of children staying in their parent's homes longer - if things get bad enough, a certain percentage will probably stay indefinitely, even raising their own kids there etc. After all, it happens in plenty of other cultures all ready. Increasing the average number of dwellers per household will go a long way towards reducing energy requirements. And despite the often heard aversion we often seem to have towards the idea, it has obvious social and other benefits.
I have neighbors who have their married daughter, her husband and children living in a 14x60 mobile home. 3 or more generations in a single dwelling is the norm in much of the world.
it happened here in America too not too long ago, only a generation or two or so.
From "Old oil fears don't match 2007 reality
U.S. vulnerability, economic threat are largely overstated"
Is the "less than a quarter-century old" evidence supposed to give me a warm fuzzy? I mean, come on, isn't this guy really smarter than the, "It hasn't happened for a while, so it definitely won't happen" mentality? You know, being an assistant professor and all that...
Sigh...
It's because the Arabs are paid dollars for their oil, and immediately invest it back in the US. The more oil costs, the more Arabs lend us. We've moved the problem from how much we can pay before we break to how much we can borrow.
API web site: http://www.energytomorrow.org/
I saw this web site advertised on CNN this morning.
Lots of "slanted" info with a cornucopian (CERA) outlook.
Blames "environmentalists" for energy problems.
API Launches EA Website “Energytomorrow.org”
American Petroleum Institute
2/22/2007
As part of its ongoing Educational Advocacy initiative, API launched a new website, “Energytomorrow.org” designed to educate viewers about the dynamics, challenges and future-vision of America’s leading oil and natural gas companies. The Feb. 20th launch was timed with Red Cavaney’s address to the National Press Club. The new site – rich in graphics, video and text – features these core sections: Oil & Natural Gas 101; Energy Issues; Industry Priorities; and Media Center. As a supplement to api.org, the site is meant to appeal to a broad national and international audience in fostering understanding of these core industry goals: increase energy efficiency; increase investment in new technologies; increase and diversify U.S. oil and natural gas resources; and increase and diversify global oil and natural gas resources.
DoubleD
The American Petroleum Institute is a trade organization of the big oil companies. They've been around a long time-I can't find a date, but since the 1950's at the least. They've established many industry standards, and have lobbied for the major oil companies interests in legislation.
Bob Ebersole
You might be interested in this article I wrote recently about the API "Energy IQ" quiz.
'Coast in Crisis: The coming rise in ocean levels will reshape our shores - and our lives'
http://www.wilmingtonstar.com/article/20070715/NEWS/707150350/-1/State
Are people smarter than lemmings???
'If you only had one word to describe the North Carolina coast, you probably couldn't do much better than "change."
Populations are increasing, property values are soaring and the sounds of construction are as common as a seagull's shrill squawking.
Brunswick County is now the 14th fastest growing county in the country. Though it's cooling now, Carolina Beach issued more building permits in the five years since 2002 than during the previous two decades combined. The average selling price of homes in Wrightsville Beach has nearly tripled since 2001.
snip
An island of change
Shaped by the winds and waves, Masonboro Island is on the move.
"It's pretty much the bellwether for what's going to happen here to everything if we stop renourishing," said Anthony Snider, manager of the N.C. Division of Coastal Management's southern reserve sites.
The mid-section of the 8 1/2-mile-long nature preserve is migrating toward the mainland at a brisk 12 feet a year.
Neighboring areas of Wrightsville Beach and Carolina Beach, which are managed with periodic beach nourishments, are eroding at a quarter of that rate.
Snider said sea-level rise amplifies Masonboro's natural erosion, although to what degree has yet to be determined. The higher water levels also make high-tide events and wind-driven storm surges more powerful.
Luckily for us, on Masonboro, the waves wash away only sand and dunes.
"These barrier islands all want to go inland, which is OK here," Snider said. "The problem is when we put homes and economic infrastructure down that doesn't move as easily as the islands do."
snip...
'This is certain'
The ocean off North Carolina is rising at about 3 millimeters a year, or about a tenth of an inch - although that figure is expected to accelerate this century.
From most people, that fact might elicit a yawn or a shrug.
That's left scientists and others grappling with a challenge: How do you make people and policy-makers see global warming and all of its environmental consequences, including sea-level rise, as a threat?
"There's no silver bullet for solving this problem," said University of Arizona geoscientist Jonathan Overpeck.
Even if we could magically shut off all new greenhouse gas emission today, Overpeck points out, we're still committed to a certain amount of climate change. "But we need to get our country in a psychological mind set that we need to start working together to solve this problem."
So what should we do? None of the answers to that question - from restricting development or retreating in some areas to defending others from encroaching seas - are easy, cheap or popular.
"Right now I don't see the political will there yet from folks who represent that area to make those tough decisions," said Pricey Harrison, D-Guilford, who serves on the state's Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change and is a former member of the N.C. Coastal Resources Commission.
That lack of will springs, at least in part, from the nature of the political cycle, with elected officials focusing on short-term issues.
In addition, economic pressures often dominate the debate, especially with tourism and waterfront construction holding up many coastal economies.
Yet scientists say we have no choice but to change our development patterns if we don't want to saddle our children and grandchildren with an untenable situation.
"This isn't a hypothetical future," said Doug Rader, a senior scientist with Environmental Defense, an environmental watchdog group. "This is certain." '
snip...
River,
It's probably safe to presume that articles like this, and the scientists interviewed, are relying on conservative estimates of sea-level rise. Therefore, once more attention for James Hansen's latest findings, as related by George Monbiot:
Warming water trends in Maine:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070714/ap_on_sc/lobster_researcher
Recent satellite measurements recorded a 1/8" annual rise in sea level. With warmer temperatures, will there be more water in the atmosphere or less?
Hi HeisSoFly,
As I mentioned a little way above, the big difference with this new paper is that Hansen expects this sort of sea level rise (~25m) to occur within a century or two, rather than over several millenia as was previously thought. You can attempt to cope with sea level rising by about 1m per century (the 25m over say 2500 years), but not with a rise of several metres this century followed by another 20m the next. The loss of cities, land and forced evacuations is too much to cope with.
doctorbob,
The Monbiot article was posted twice in the Drumbeat, and I referred to it in 7-7-7: The Launch of Global Warming Inc on Mondaay.
But you are right, there's a huge attention gap. Climate science is now headlined by Al Gore and the IPCC, and not Dr. Hansen. While it will keep up the positivo look on life, it will make us lose the ten-year window Hansen says we might have at most.
By the way, I doubt that Hansen sincerely believes thare's centuries left for that 2-3C temperature rise, and hence the much bigger sea level rise than predicted by the IPCC. But I have yet to read the PDF. Thanks for the link.
EDIT: This article seems to suggest I'm right, and Hansen sees rising sea levels much faster even than over centuries. Perhaps not the whole 80 feet, but certainly half of that. And that would sink both Western Europe and the US East Coast.
I read the Monbiot article about a month ago, but even that didn't seem to put over the seriousness of what Hansen was predicting - that given anything like a "business as usual" scenario, most of the world's coastal cities would be indefensible against flooding by the second half of the century.
One interesting thing Hansen proposes in the last paragraph of the paper is actively removing carbon from the atmosphere. This would be done by carbon-capture from all fossil fuel power stations plus growing huge amounts of biomass (to extract CO2 from the atmosphere), then burning that for power with carbon-capture as well. Theoretically feasible but with big impacts on energy costs.
Hansen sees rising sea levels much faster even than over centuries.
The halfpasthuman crew (via George Ure) says:
Subscribers to the web bot project (www.halfpasthuman.com) are no doubt looking forward to this weekend's expected Part 3 posting of the current predictive linguistic run. As I've explained, things don't look especially cheery ahead because of flooding, and such, and a '
global coastal event within five years, which has the potential to shut down life pretty much as we know it.http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm
It isn't just Florida that gets hurt by a sudden and substantial rise in sea level -- Eastern North Carolina gets hit hard too.
http://www.cop.noaa.gov/stressors/climatechange/current/slr/nc.html
HSF, Thanks, I read the G. Monbiot article when it was published on Z Net...or it might have been Climate Arc, or one of the other sites that I follow. I also follow what James Hansen, Lovelock, and others have to add. I am acquetly aware of CC because of my location. I believe CC is more of a threat than PO in the near term. I think it is interesting when small costal newspapers like the Wilmington Star publish articles that are not in there best interests. How many complaint calls do you think this article generated from local real estate offices? I have lived in a small coastal town since 1979, it has a liberal locally owned newspaper, and would never publish such an article because of blowback from advertisers. The paper will not even publish my letters to the editor regarding CC.
When dealing with water,the term Phase-change comes to mind.If the climate change happend as a Phase-change,instead of linear...boyo...
Didnt a lot of the Ice-core samples show that Iceage "flips" were like in 10-15 timespan....whoa,I just scared myself
I think I must come to the lemmings' defense here. Their suicidal behavior is a myth: the footage you may have seen came from a Disney crew throwing them off cliffs and filming it in slow motion.
http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/lemmings.htm
Jeeze Louise, give me a break!!! We all know the lemming story is myth but its a wonderful comparison anyway. Try suspending your disbelief for a moment, you might enjoy it.
Hokey smokes, lighten up, I wasn't calling you out on your zoological cred. It pleased me to be the self-appointed speaker-for-lemmings in answer to your rhetorical but explicit question. To wit, humans are in some ways dumber than lemmings and certainly weirder.
The mental image of Disney crews throwing lemmings off cliffs to teach us about nature is surely a nice metaphor for SOME things related to this list, and I don't mean in a peripheral way.
My deep apologies if everyone knew this. Leanan, by all means delete it as necessary; I'll take my lumps like a man.
I'll suspend my disbelief when they pry it from my cold dead cerebrum.
No offense intended. You suspend your disbelief every time you watch a film, play...or especially any professional sport...lol.
Experts see repercussions from oil giants' Venezuela pullout
ConocoPhyllips and Exxon Mobil pulled out of Venezuela but four other companies stayed. Will Venezuela be able to turn her bitumen belt into massive amounts of exportable oil with the experts gone? I doubt it, not much of it anyway.
Ron Patterson
Ron,
I think you need to take into account the increase in net exports from the other major bitumen producer, Canada. Based on EIA numbers, Canada has increased its net Total Liquids exports by about 60,000 bpd per year from 2000 to 2006.
Think about it. Canada's average annual increase in net exports would meet about half of Saudi Arabia's current annual increase in domestic liquids consumption.
Clearly, we have nothing to worry about. "Party On Dudes!"
Ever wonder why no one in the media ever asks Yergin how a net increase of 60,000 bpd per year is supposed to save us? To ask the question is to know the answer.
One does not worry as much when one has oil industry investments, yet it is a bit of a shock to realize what some people are going through. Corn riots in India, gas station burnings in Iran, communist revolution in Venezuela, kidnappings in Nigeria, Argentina closing factories due to shortages of natural gas, Mexican pipeline explosions, Cantarell and Ghawar production in terminal decline phases, irate motorists in the U.S. blaming oil companies for the high cost of oil, Indians taking over pumping stations in Ecuador, Russian seizures of oil projects, OPEC cutting 1.7 million barrels per day of production to create shortages. What next?
I noted that you have been a member for four months.
Starting early last year, I have endlessly and repetitively recommended, begged and pleaded with anyone who would listen to ELP, i.e., "Cut thy spending and get thee to the non-discretionary side of the economy."
What's worse is that, IMO, OPEC is not voluntarily cutting production.
WT,
You articles and comments regarding peak oil are usually right on the mark. However, your comments regarding finances don't make any sense to me.
If the value of money is right now at it's peak, that's when the money should be spent, especially on items such as seeds, books, solar panels, etc. Oh, and a crap load of spare bicycle parts and tires. I highly recommend the specialized Armadillos.
Unless one can pay off their mortgage soon, (and still trusts the government not to tax it away from you anyway) it would be better to refinance at 100% and convert the cash to anything else. After all, the dislocations this site talks of guarantees house price collapses, rapid inflation, and possible currency collapse.
Really, if you're a Peak Oil believer, you might as well spend like there is no tomorrow because, well, there won't be. Really, what is everyone saving for? If the system really is going to collapse, debt is your best friend right now.
Hell, get a Hummer zero down zero interest for 60 months no payments until 08 even if you only plan to use it once to haul all the above purchases to a remote location.
jteehan
What you say makes some sense, but best i believe is to be debtfree, and not belong to the new serfdoom of debt serving.
If you have invested in all those sensible assets, and still have some savings in money left, then i would suggest swapping them for gold. Gold can´t be printed to oblivion, and is the only real money thats left in this fiat money printing world.
Of cource you can´t eat gold, but what else to do if you have savings left??
There is no 'communist revolution in Venezuela.' There was a coup de tat attempt by some Venezuelans backed by the CIA a couple of years ago but that failed.
That should be "coup d'état". Where the "état" is french for "state".
Why is it that there is universal belief that only the "majors" can produce oil in developing countries yet all stand in awe of Saudi Aramco?
JJhman, four manors built Saudi Aramco. That what Aramco stands for, ARabian AMerican oil COmpany. When Saudi Arabia completed the purchase of Aramco in 1980 from the these four majors, the American workers kept their old jobs. They still ran everything and largely still do.
Saudis occupy all the executive positions, like president and vice president. But the engineering, the running of day to day operations is still run by Americans and a few Brits.
Ron Patterson
But if that is so, then why do we not have much more "insider" information about the true state of Saudi oilfields than in fact we do?
PhilRelig,
Very few people are going to take a stand releasing information that will likely cost them their jobs. And I'd say that the articles on the true situation at Ghawar does represent "insider" information.
Bob Ebersole
But what about retirees, and anonymous whistleblowers?
The Chinese are very intelligent. Do not underestimate them. They are willing and able to help Chevez extract his asphalt.
I note turbine shortages for wind mills.
this is a good sign IMHO.
The PV industry has been likewise held up by a shortage of refined silicon for some time now. Once this problem is solved, I would expect the price of PV to drop quite significantly, and more and bigger projects start to come online.
Found an illuminating nice little graph I hadn't seen before, from the German Der Spiegel magazine, apparently based on numbers from the German division of Shell. Click on it to go to the article series "The New Cold War: The Global Battle for Natural Resources" (in English).
NB: It's not entirely clear how old it is, but I'd guess last Dec/Jan.
As far as I can measure from the chart, it shows oil production increasing by about 30% by 2030 and gas almost doubling compared to 2005 output. Was this written by someone whose name begins with "Y"?
The article is very similar to what Engdahl has been saying all along, except it focuses more on China then Russia.
I have a request: Can anyone provide me a link to the chart of average gasoline prices on a country-by-country basis that I have seen linked in the past here on TOD?
Is this what you want?
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2653
BTW I wouldn't recommend moving to KSA just to get their cheap fuel. :-)
Xeroid.
Thanks very much, Xeriod. I appreciate your effort.
I recall seeing another chart on TOD some months back that has more extensive coverage of countries where gasoline is cheaper than in the US. If anyone happens to have the link for that particular chart handy, that would be great!
A recurring question I have been asking is whether Bush will be forced to come out of the "oil closet" and admit that American soldiers are dying and being maimed, in an attempt to keep the oil flowing to the US. He has already said that if we leave, the terrorists will use the oil revenue to finance attacks on the US.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19762057/site/newsweek/
Refusing to Lose
As public pressure to withdraw from Iraq increases, the president is losing GOP supporters in Congress.
Jeffry,
There are still lots of people around who won't admit that the US lost in Viet Nam.
In my honest opinion, Bush doesn't think, and a US loss is unthinkable because God is on our side. He and his cohorts seem to subscribe to a power of positive thinking philosophy, sort of like the children's book "The Little Engine That Could" (I think I can, I think I can).
Bob Ebersole
There are still lots of people around who won't admit that the US lost in Viet Nam.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2766040.ece
A good example of that mindset can be found in Johann Hari's report from the National Review's cruise. Here are just some quotes, the whole piece is worth reading:
There is lots more, so much so that one starts to wonder if some people might indeed not be quite as smart as yeast...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2766040.ece
eric blair, Jussi,
Thanks for the link to that article! I was raised around people of that social milieu in Houston, and that article really caught their mindset. The thing that summed it up was the snippet"the Republican Party is about class, Democrats are loosers, Republicans are winners".
One of the worst things about human societies is that we all tend to hang out with people that reenforce our ideas-very few people are capable of independent thought, and most of them are too lazy to examine their beliefs in light of the evidence or history. Its probably one of the ways that Richard Dawkin's concept of the meme gets preserved and spread in groups. And thats the wall that we keep running into when we talk about peak oil-few people understand exponential growth, resource limits, the environmental changes that humans are causing. So what they do is associate peakists with various groups that have challenged the devine right of Capitalism and automaticly assume that we threaten them.
Yet the figures are inexorable. Crude production down by 50% in 12 years if you accept Schlumberger's depletion figures, and we've made no plans as a society. Few people have even made personal plans, and I really have no idea about what to do to change things.
Immediately after Saddam invaded Kuwait, and the US very quickly mobilized Rangers to drop into the KSA, I remember James Baker (yes, that James Baker, now of the ISG but then Sec of State) being caught up in a media feeding frenzy. Already there were cries of "No blood for oil" ringing out from the usual suspects and Baker was trying to give a cogent answer on why the US had to respond immediately to the Kuwait invasion.
I remember him trying to explain how oil was the key strategic asset to the world economy (and thus the US) and the importance of the Gulf (all very reasonably presented IMO)... but that proved to be a PR disaster and all of a sudden the official line became one of liberty and justice for Kuwaitis.
Politicians, the successful ones anyway, learn quickly from these sort of things, so I doubt you will see many trying to follow James Baker's original public argument for the importance of the involvement of the US military in Gulf affairs. Certainly in private and amongst serious students of foreign policy the topic is understood, but from a PR view it is very difficult to sell the blood for oil price tag (though again all of human history relates blood-for-resource as a necessary part of human civilization.) Given the very low body count of American soldiers during the past 4 years it also is probably not that pressing.
GWB has made it a habit to mention energy and oil in the SOTU address - everyone so far. That the SOTU addresses have all discussed Iraq, oil, terrorism, etc. in parallel ought to show to anyone who is listening that there are logical relationships among all of them. However, given the poisonous climate in US public discourse, I strongly suspect you will never hear a cogent, public discussion (by someone currently sitting in office) that will satisfy you.
Immediately after Saddam invaded Kuwait,
Don't forget the contribution of April Glaspie
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie
(I still ponder how the diplomatic 'we have no opinion' thing happened)
The other comment I have... is not really oil related, but instead is the continual reference to "war" and "losing the war."
What the US is doing in Iraq is nation building . Probably a futile attempt, but the goal is to build one nation that will operate at least on the minimal level and participate in normal state functions, and of course perform international trade.
Casting the arguments about Iraq into "winning the war" vs. "losing the war" is already an act of avoiding the reality, unless the "war" about which you speak is the GWOT, the Mother of all Wars, the Clash of Civilizations, or whatever grandiose terminology you want to use for the big cultural struggle of our time. However I suspect you are not referring to Islam vs. the West (or variations of such) but simply about military operations in Iraq.
So.... if you are referring about current operations in Iraq, the US is engaged in nation building and using US troops to prevent various groups from derailing that goal. However, if it is impossible to sell "blood for resource", it is also very difficult to sell "blood for nation building".
InJapan,
Sorry, I'm a little more cynical about Iraq. What the US is doing is old fashioned imperialism for the benefit of giant multi-national corporations. They showed their hand with the new "oil law".
I would submit that characterization is rather too flattering to real US intentions. Obviously, if the US's central purpose in Iraq was 'nation building', then we would have left intact the institutions that constituted the core of their national identity. We would have deferred to the judgement of their professional and ownership classes. We have extensive experience in 'nation building' and what we are currently practicing in Iraq could not be considered the equivalent of our previous attempts at 'nation building'. I would suggest it could be more closely identified with 'imperialism'. A harsh word, I know, but a bitter truth and an ugly reflection on all Americans.
I cannot agree with you,Sldulin, or WT. We are not attempting nation building or imperialisim in Iraq. The first would require that we understood the culture of Iraq prior to the invasion and immediately after the initial conflict ended we would have taken the necessary steps to preempt any large scale insurgency from starting. We would have sent competent people to Iraq to insure continuity of the new government and ministeries instead of recent college grads whos most critical qualification was that they had 'voted republican.' The second, imperialisim, is a business model that requires return on investment and when no roi exists the business fails in much less than six years. This leaves a third possibility which is destruction of an existing, functioning state. One can hardly come to another logical conclusion ie,...that state destruction was the goal, if one follows the course of military and political action we have pursued in Iraq. The last possible conclusion, and it is a very long shot imo, is that total imcompetence reigned in the current administration from top to bottom from the planning to the implementation of the war on Iraq. Failure on this scale would itself have required planning and seeding incompetence...Like in 'your doin a hellava job Brownie.'
What we did in the Phillipines was imperialism, and even that looks a lot more like nation building than what we are doing in Iraq.
The thought has occurred to me that the whole Iraq and GWT thing could be an elaborate setup to create scapegoats -- "terrorists", Iranians, Muslims, oil producting countries, countries not part of "the coalition", Democrats, anti-war people, Greens, etc. -- to blame for the decline in oil imports and rising prices that we know are coming soon.
I suspect that is not the whole story, but it could be part of the story.
Hello TODers,
I am certainly no computer or web expert on how best to accomplish this proposal: We all need taglines, or key words to media stars to parasitically ride their google searches to leverage Peakoil Outreach; like a remora attaches to a shark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remora
For example my tagline: Are Humans Smarter than Yeast? generates 88,600 hits in google/web, far more than I expected as people are remora-riding on my posting 'sharkskin'. IMO, we need to encourage this as much as possible.
If every new keypost included the folowing celebrity tagwords: Paris Hilton, Beyonce Knowles, Britney Spears, Beckham, etc-- would that greatly help the unwashed masses inadvertently encounter Peakoil Outreach? Or would the search engines modify their algorithms to kill the google-remoras?
Currently, a google/web of Paris Hilton + Peak Oil = 584,000 hits.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
It's hard to keep up with the trends:
[EDIT: There was a nifty blogpulse graph here but it went way. It showed steady "oil" hits against an "iphone" Hubbert Peak!]
and I'm being serious here.
For fun I decided to post a link to my energy shortage list on diggit and reddit. I was absolutely fascinated by the respone. In the first 5 minutes or so lots and lots of hits, then less, and less, then no one as the story was burried. The list is not interesting, news worthy or relevant to people's consciousness. Even Paris and Britney sink away. That little rodent video captured people's imagination for awhile, but it too will pass from memory.
So, if Apple can't sustain marketing interest I don't think Google or Technorati tricks will work either!
Unfortunately for these African farmers the writing is on the wall:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10451695
Eventually their market will be killed off whatever happens as the cost of air freight becomes uneconomic (one example of globalisation going into reverse).
Paris wants to be 'city of bikes'
Officially, the goal is "designed to lift the city's green credentials". But it's hard to believe this was not implemented with the unspoken acknowledgement of the need to reduce car dependence.
Here's a question for TOD readers...which mega-economy is better posed to deal with peak oil: China or the Eurozone?
Currently I'd certainly put my money on the latter, which would indicate that, assuming things in the U.S. don't turn around dramatically in the next few years, in about 20 or 30 years, the world's economy may well be dominated by Europe. My other two picks would be Brazil and Saudi Arabia. The futures of China, India and Russia seem much less certain.
Paris wants to be 'city of bikes'
Officially, the goal is "designed to lift the city's green credentials". But it's hard to believe this was not implemented with the unspoken acknowledgement of the need to reduce car dependence.
Here's a question for TOD readers...which mega-economy is better posed to deal with peak oil: China or the Eurozone?
Currently I'd certainly put my money on the latter, which would indicate that, assuming things in the U.S. don't turn around dramatically in the next few years, in about 20 or 30 years, the world's economy may well be dominated by Europe. My other two picks would be Brazil and Saudi Arabia. The futures of China, India and Russia seem much less certain.
The problem in continental Europe is population growth. The Europeans are not having enough kids to replace themselves. Immigration into their countries by Muslims will change the demographic of Europe drastically in the next 30 years. Include Russia in the boat. How will that effect the European economy? Anybodys guess.
True, but the issue of changing demographics, especially of previously Anglo-saxon-dominated populations becoming more and more culturally and genetically diversified is occurring almost everywhere. In most places there's no real evidence it's having a negative economic impact. Even the social impacts are usually greatly exaggerated.
If anything, I would think the integration of more and more Muslims into Western society should have an ameliorating effect on Muslim extremism.
Not much evidence so far in support of what you would think. The 9/11 suicide bombers were all well educated and 'integrated' into western society, living in both the us and europe. Same with the spanish bombers. Same with the english bombers. Same as the german bombers. Same as the french rioters. Well, you get the point. I doubt that western europe either wants, or can stand, much more integration... many are wondering how they can get a bit less. I doubt turkey will ever make it into the EU.
Polls indicate the us does not want more, either.
Yes, I agree the evidence is not compelling at this point.
But we just don't know how bad muslim extremism would be if there was no integration at all.
Problem?
The way I see it the three greatest threats to civilization are global climate change, peak oil, and overpopulation.
The three are intertwingled, and depending on what I read on any given day, I point to any of the three as the most urgent.
More population growth isn't going to help them (or all of us) solve the other two.
I won't say that religious fundamentalism (of any stripe) isn't a problem, I just have a hard time placing it in the same order of magnitude as the top three.
I love intertwingled. I just hope you don't get misconscrewed.
Population growth is the one problem that continental Europe doesn't have. All other problems shrink when population shrinks.
There is a problem of immigration mismanagement. But a lot of employers will soon swallow their reluctance for hiring the tan variety of the human species. They'll have to.
The main asset for Europe is culture. On a larger level there are enough achievements that people can pride themselves on that originate from the pre-petroleum age. An oil-poor existence is only a generation ago, many people that grew up without are still alive and well.It's not the great unknown.
Disadvantages are the thoroughly depleted resource base, materialistic habits and population density. The climate in the future is unknown.
Free Right Now political party pushing for a Write In for President of 2008 will have a platform statement talking about Peak Oil. But Word of mouth and free adverts via the world wide web and blogs is a greater tool than most people seem to think.
Recently the Rainbow Family met in upper Arkansas and held a big rally. Their own beliefs mirror many of ours here at TOD and other places.
I have been known amoung the H.U.S.H. Workers to be the guy that speaks softly and Carries and big stick. I have a larger than normal walking stick because I am a larger than normal guy, and my right knee has been aching for a while, along with my right foot.
HUSH is Homeless United to Save the Homeless. There has been a slow but steady movement since 2006, by a lady named Jessie Goodrum contacted at hush_the_homeless@yahoo.com Where newsletters and thoughts can be found. Until I can set up the blogspot site for them you can find news of their activities at http://www.dan-ur.blogspot.com as well as the F.R.N. campaign news.
The Problem we know to be happening is that the men and women in offices now do not want to rock the status quo, nice offices, and nice cars and fat pay checks, good food and good times while claiming to do the bidding of the general populace that has no clue what really goes on in the city and states around them.
The world is a vast place with billions of things going on inside of each and every single cubic acre of the first 20 feet of soil and the next 183.7 feet of airspace above that. Just look at the average back yard and tell me if you know every animal that is back there, what is going on with every plant and every person that walks through there on their way to elsewhere. As several of my jobs required I had to think of all the tied in events that were changing the big picture and handle the results as if I were working on a massive 4-d puzzle and keep everything stright and still get my job done.
I have designed massive systems for sci-fi stories where I knew the whole working processes of the story and the layers underneath but only told my readers the bits and pieces so that I could spell bind them into coming back for more.
The world is to complex for most people and they would rather seek the simple things that the TV world have to offer and just lay back and do nothing much about things.
I have recently housed 2 individuals in my home. Both had their own problems and both were homeless. One had had a job till someone tried to kill him in a hit and run and now he can't work and has to have his legs rebroken and re-fixed and has to re learn to walk again, but his will is strong and he has faith. The other one, has mental problems that can not be solved by simple methods and most clinics can not keep people past a certain point, meds make them stable then they get released then they fall off the meds and bingo back to the mental problems so that fall into the cracks again.
Peak Oil. Climate Change. Homelessness in the richest country on the planet. TV addition, 20 second sound bytes. All this make for anyone running for public office a hard thing to handle.
I understand a lot more about the world I live in than most and I do not worry at night and I sleep soundly. I can also be thrown into most anyplace in this grand Country and told to survive on my own and do so.
Maybe fresh blood needs to run for president for once.
My agenda is going to be rather simple minded, so as not to scare people to much, but someone will hate me for it non-the-less. Ha ha ha, so what. It is a Free Right Now world, and country.
David Strahan is reporting that BP and Shell are rumoured to be about to merge:
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2770...
Bill sent John Sobolewski [born Kakow 1939, lived 10 km from Dresden when it was bombed. BSEE and MSEE U Adelaide. Speaks Polish, German, French and AUSTRALIAN] a link to the electric irp and received in reponse.
Where did I go wrong?
We'll hopefully discuss Sobolewski's position on energy depletion while essential non-gas-wasting salmon fishing at Sekiu, WA in August of 2007.
Yup, my buddies and I from Planet VORTECH (short for VORacious TECHnology) are doomers, but it ain't cuz we're hoping to get laid (already gettin' laid, thank you). Nope, we're just lookin forward to yall's dieoff, so we can sink a hook 'n line into some fat, juicy assheads.
Yup, lookin forward to lazy 115 degree days, driving around in a honkin huge oil burnin flatbed, catching that "lesser" species Homo s. Put a hook in one of 'em, and they put up a hell of a fight! Sure they yell and whine, but your buddies can drown that out with shouts of "looks like you got a big one!" and "drag her up on the bed so I can gaff her!". OF course my buddies will make me throw the little ones back, but a full-grown asshead makes good eatin'! They're so fat and soft, the meat just fall off the bone!
*Sigh* I guess for now we'll just have to satisfy our sadistic impulses by planting OpEd pieces like "Economy great: borrow the money to buy that SUV because you 'deserve' it".
Have a nice day, Earthlings
This is an interesting development:
http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=116758
The EU should wake up and stop pretending there is an infinite supply "somewhere" out there and that it can always find gas at the price it wants. Russia should stop subsidizing its gas exports to the EU which are currently 50% of the price of oil on a Joule for Joule basis. I hope Iran and Turkmenistan get a fair price for their natural gas. EU fat cats don't deserve the coddling they are currently getting in this market.
I bought a paper copy of the Washington Post today (I've lost my online password, so no quotes):
Chinese Farmers Battle Mice, in which dam-building and drought created a dry habitat for eastern field mice. Flood season drives the mice into rice paddies, each acre of which they consume in a matter of hours. The article claims billions of the critters have been exterminated. Unfortunately, the locals accidentally poison their cats along with the mice, have exported indigenous snakes as food delicacies (dragon), and eat owls to cure headaches, so the mice have no natural predators.
http://tinyurl.com/2lvgos
The Potential to Curb Global Warming, has a two-page spread of charts on GG emissions, and a great photo of a fellow standing in the top hatch of an MD77 wind turbine near Eberswalde Germany. The shot gives you an idea of the size of these things.
http://tinyurl.com/2tu3m4
North Korea Shutters Nuclear Facility, in which they agree to dismantle their nuclear weapons program in exchange for fuel oil aid.
http://tinyurl.com/3dyk7e
Aggressive Riders on the Trail, a letter complaining about swarms of upscale cyclists that treat the Mt Vernon Trail as their personal racetrack. "No one is impressed at how fast they can ride." Not to beat a dead horse, but that's another problem with bike paths - they usually are paths for everything from baby carriages and stumbling toddlers to Joe Yuppie on his new Klein. The cyclists who are most at risk on the streets become the greatest threat on such paths.
.
The Sun Never Sets On The Photovoltaic Empire
Q: When we generate all our electricity from solar power, how do we store energy to use at night?
A: We don't.
We put up those 720kV DC powerline with losses of 3% per 1000km. That means electricity has a "half life" of 24,000km. The Earth has a circumference of 40,000km. No point on the planet is farther than 20,000km from daylight. We put in an electric power grid that rings the globe with PV plants on every continent and eat the losses. The alternatives are worse.
Far better to run the HV DC line to the nearest mountain range (some other structures will do as well) and use surplus power to run water uphill. Run it down when you need extra power. 81% cycle efficiency.
And hydro and wind are both "better" alternatives than solar today.
Best Hopes for renewable power,
Alan
Here's one for tomorrow's Drumbeat:
Holy Crap. The Wall Street Journal Discovers Peak Oil!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118454442678367140.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
[edit] I just noticed that if I clicked though the URL above, I only got a preview of the article.
This Link will do a google news search that (probably) shows a link to the whole article. It may be that a referral by Google shows different results than a referal by TOD.
Your search - Potential-Energy-Crunch "Peak Oil" - did not match any articles between Jul 15, 2007 and today.
Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.
Try fewer keywords.
Try Google Blog Search.
Also, you can browse today's headlines on the Google News homepage.
If you really want to read it (it's not that special) just click the first date "JUL" and chance it to "JUN" and then hit search. It'll appear.
Nope, still didn't work. Guess I can live without it.
Fine then, here you go:
http://news.google.com/news?svnum=10&as_scoring=d&hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=Potential-Energy-Crunch+"Peak+Oil"&btnG=Search&as_drrb=b&as_minm=7&as_mind=15&as_maxm=7&as_maxd=16
=]
One More time...
Google Search of Wall Street Journal
The link worked last night, but failed as Google began to shuffle the news. Sorry. This link seems to work (8:06 PDT) if you want to read the full story for free.
No, there's nothing new here to the readers of TOD, it's just interesting when the business publication in the USA publishes anything at all about peal oil.
This morning CNBC mentioned that the gap between supply and demand was the "Big Story" of the day in the markets, but since it was a "long term" story, it was not having an immediate effect on the markets.
It's almost as if they've just received news that the bridge is out, and the train will well ant truly go over the edge, but there's still money in the pot in the club car, so it's someone else's problem.
Leanan may want to pull this one up to Monday's drumbeat:
UN warns it cannot afford to feed the world.
Ghawar Is Dying as we slide Into the Grey Zone
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Hello TODers,
Instead of a full discussion of Malthus and Bartlett's Exponential, Pakistan chooses to continue increasing Thermo/Gene blowback:
http://abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/07/16/1979918.htm?section=world
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Hello TODers,
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1...
----------------------------------
Did Military and Media Mislead Us? Most Outside Insurgents in Iraq Come from Saudi Arabia
-----------------------------------
I guess this answers the question why Asia is on ff-allocation and the US gets preferential pricing.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Hello TODers,
Remember the mud volcano in Indonesia? Things have only gotten worse:
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Water_Spray_Latest_Headache_For_Indone...
http://rawstory.com/news/afp/Indonesian_mud_volcano_victims_down_0627200...
-------------------------
Engineers have spent two months trying to plug the unusual volcano by dropping concrete balls on chains into its yawning crater to no avail, with a plan to build a massive concrete dam 15 storeys high now being mulled.
-------------------------------------
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Looks like the engineers have no grip on the scale of this thing. This failing is familiar, it's the product of a "man will triumph over nature" complex. Nature doesn't conform to man's delusions.
Far more likely, in my experience, is that the engineers have a pretty good grip and know full well that the orders they've been given are delusional. Convincing the delusional to let go of their delusions and deal in reality is not easy, and engineers are usually no more successful at it than TODders.
"Let us wrestle with the ineffable and see if we may not, in fact, eff it after all."
-Dirk Gently, character of the late great Douglas Adams.