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Drumbeat: June 25, 2010
Posted by Leanan on June 25, 2010 - 10:21am
Rational Optimism: Hope and Foreboding
So what's wrong? In Ridley's words, "The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and messages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity." If we are living in Ridley's world of "rational optimism", why are we hearing a rising chorus of concern from learned scientists, philosophers, academics and authors who are warning us of impending disaster? The palpable sense of foreboding doesn't match the affluence and success of our time.The paradox confuses Ridley. And it should give us pause for consideration, too. So here are some possible explanations.
The Doomer is motivated by much more than a perverse sense of altruism. He mainly desires to see everyone brought down to his level. His fondest wish is for everyone to be as emotionally crippled as he is, and, if they could also be paralyzed fiscally, that would be great too. The argument for the necessity of disaster is merely an excuse for his vindictive fantasies. This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.
Dark Mountain Project: Defining the mountain
For us, the Dark Mountain Project is an invitation to face the converging crises of our century as a cultural challenge – rather than only a technical or political one. We use the word ‘cultural’ in several senses. In the sense that anthropologists use it, since this is about changes in our way of being in and making sense of the world. In the sense, too, that the Culture sections of the newspapers use it, because writers, artists and musicians have a particular role in the way we make sense of the world and find meaning in it as it changes. But our list of those who work in the field of culture would be broader, taking in craftspeople and those with practical skills, and embracing, too, the need to move beyond the ‘Two Cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities famously identified by CP Snow. (We find it encouraging that responses to the manifesto have come from mathematicians, psychologists, engineers and biologists as well as poets and songwriters.)
State Giants Lured by Shale Gas Potential
China is playing catch up to Asian rivals in the race to buy into North America's shale gas sector, underlining how the world's second-largest energy consumer is waking up to the potential of a technology that could unlock a massive resource at home.
EnCana, China National Petroleum May Form Gas Venture
(Bloomberg) -- Encana Corp., Canada’s largest natural-gas producer, may form a venture with China National Petroleum Corp. to produce the fuel from shale formations in northeastern British Columbia.
Iraq cuts officials’ privileges amid power crisis
BAGHDAD - Iraqi Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani on Friday revoked electricity privileges enjoyed by government officials as he took temporary control of the power portfolio amid public fury over rationing.Shahristani, a key ally of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said his measures would redirect much-needed supplies to a national grid that currently provides ordinary citizens with power for only one hour in every five, or less.
Petrobras Bonds Tumble on Concern Delay of Stock Offering Will Swell Debt
Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s benchmark dollar bonds are posting their biggest weekly decline in almost two months on speculation the Brazilian state-run oil producer will be forced to increase debt financing after delaying a planned share sale.
Russia, China to agree gas price by mid-2011
The price of Russian gas exported to China must be agreed by the middle of 2011, deputy head of Russian gas giant Gazprom Alexander Medvedev said Friday.Actual supplies of gas to China would start five years after the price was agreed with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), he said.
Family: Oil disaster devastated captain who committed suicide
Kruse told his family that he believed the gusher had effectively killed his livelihood as well as the ocean where he made his living....Marc and Frank Kruse said their brother would still be alive today if he had believed he was making an impact against the oil that was threatening the waters he loved.
Instead, he told them, cleanup boats were placed close to shore, just so onlookers would think work was being done.
"Madness. It's just a dog and pony show," Marc Kruse said. "Send them out. Ride around. Let everybody see them. Bring them back in."
Gulf Coast Governors Leaving National Guard Idle
(CBS) All along the Gulf coast, local officials have been demanding more help from the federal government to fight the spill, yet the Gulf states have deployed just a fraction of the National Guard troops the Pentagon has made available, CBS News Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian reports.
Who would have thought the Gulf oil spill would make a 90-year-old law newsworthy? The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, was meant to save the merchant marine industry by requiring ships that plied American waters be built in the United States and manned by American crews. After the oil started gushing, lawmakers started demanding that the government waive the law to speed international assistance for the cleanup. What the White House can't waive, however, is the ongoing damage caused by the Jones Act. The policies it embodies are a remnant of a worldview that contributed to economic collapse and the Great Depression.
Oil Spill Diplomacy: The Response from the Americas
The BP oil spill also has spurred an unexpected round of talks between the United States and Cuba. U.S. State Department officials have contacted Cuban officials to share information that would help Havana better prepare for the oil slick reaching its coast. Although not acknowledged as official diplomatic relations, cooperation between the United States and Cuba is common on environmental issues such as hurricanes and earthquakes, as outlined by the 1983 UN Cartagena Convention. The inability to predict the spill’s size or direction has meant ongoing contact between officials of both countries.
Take a closer look at the cleanup site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill using the interactive 3-D rendering below.
Gulf Spill Could Produce Wealth of Scientific Knowledge
WASHINGTON 2010 (IPS) - Eventually, the oil spewing from the ruptured well of BP's Deepwater Horizon offshore rig will stop. And some time after that the bulk of the mess will be cleaned up. By then, though, the amount of damage done to the Gulf of Mexico may be catastrophic - but will we know just how catastrophic?
Golden parachute unlikely if Hayward leaves BP
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If embattled BP chief executive Tony Hayward leaves the company, he is not likely to walk with a massive windfall, compensation experts said.
India 10-Year Bonds Drop Most in a Month on Fuel Price Increase
(Bloomberg) -- India’s 10-year bonds fell the most in a month as an increase in petroleum product prices fueled concern that it will stoke inflation and prompt the central bank to raise interest rates.
How A Regime Change In Iran Would Transform The World: A freer Iraq, a stable Middle East and cheaper oil
Imagine how regime change in Iran would utterly transform the world. So many knotty, insuperable obstacles all overcome in one stroke. Let us consider the benefits. They are so glaring that you can be sure President Obama and his advisors have chewed on them at some length.
Pakistan: A relationship undefined
Is America our friend, our ally, our partner, our temporary lifeline, what? We have a superpower billeted in our backyard, it’s underwriting our economy and keeping the peace between our boys in uniform and the civilians.
A Weed that Could Bring Cuba Power
I finally identified a specialist on renewable energy, a sector in which this country is a leader. In a single conversation, this individual changed my opinion completely about the marabu, that thorny bush that is devouring Cuban agricultural fields.He explained to me that in Spain they look at Cuba with envy given the island’s abundant marabu “plantations.” With these, islanders could generate electric power by building biomass plants and even take advantage of the generating capacities of sugar mills.
Solving the Water-Energy Crisis
The world is running out of water. By 2030, the UN projects that 60 percent of the global population will face water shortages, increasing social unrest and creating additional risk for companies.As demand for water increases, so too will demand on the energy system. Technologies like desalination require enormous amounts of fossil energies to process water. But burning more fossil resources exacerbates climate change, thus making water shortages more severe. And more severe water shortages mean that we'll need yet more fossil energies to process water.
Introducing the "Post Carbon Reader"
In 2009, Post Carbon Institute recruited 29 of the world's leading sustainability thinkers to answer one fundamental question: How do we manage the transition to a more resilient, sustainable, and equitable world?
BP spill an argument against nuclear power
Extracting fossil fuels from ever-more-difficult environments is a dangerous business, a truth underlined spectacularly by the explosion at the Massey mine in April that killed 29 miners or the Deepwater Horizon spill that has left the Louisiana coast a blackened brackish mess.Not in decades has the nuclear option looked more attractive. Earlier this year, the government extended funding to build two new reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia, likely the first reactors to go online since 1996, and a lot more may be in the works. Oil and coal disasters like Massey and Deepwater Horizon may be some of the best arguments for nuclear power.
They may also be some of the best arguments against it. Disasters like Deepwater Horizon highlight troubling truths about natural resources. But they also point to some equally troubling truths about accidents and worst-case scenarios.
Will Obama continue this relatively tough line as he pushes for energy and climate legislation in Congress? He clearly understands the big-picture reasons the United States needs a green energy revolution. Politically, to rely on foreign oil leaves us hostage to events outside our borders, including the desire of some oil-rich states to smite the Great Satan by closing off supply. Geologically, experts say peak oil is either imminent or has already arrived. The easy-to-access petroleum on this planet has been exhausted, which is a big part of the reason BP was drilling so deep—nearly four miles beneath the earth's surface. Economically, clean energy is a key to prosperity and competitiveness in the twenty-first century, as China and Germany clearly recognize.
Lukoil Allocates $5 Billion to Finance Iraq West Qurna-2 Field Development
OAO Lukoil, Russia’s largest non- state oil producer, allocated $5 billion to finance the West Qurna-2 project in Iraq as the company seeks to boost output through foreign projects.The funds were provided as a loan to its Lukoil Mid-East Ltd. unit exclusively for the Iraq project, spokesman Dmitry Dolgov said today by telephone in Moscow. The loan matures at the end of 2030, the company said in a regulatory filing today.
Ambani brothers sign revised gas deal
MUMBAI (AFP) – India's billionaire Ambani brothers have agreed a deal sharing the family's natural gas wealth following a vitriolic court battle, a company announcement said Friday.
Renaissance Capital Forms Unit for Oil and Natural Gas Acquisitions
Renaissance Capital, the Russian investment firm that has arranged the most stock offerings in that country this year, set up an oil and natural gas merger and acquisition company to advise clients from Hong Kong to Morocco.
Bourbon to Almost Double Oil Fleet by 2015, Sells Bulk Vessels to Genco
Bourbon SA, owner of the second- biggest fleet of supply and crew ships for the oil industry, plans to spend $2 billion to nearly double its fleet through 2015, partly financed by the sale of bulk carriers to Genco Shipping and Trading Ltd..
Advances in Oil Spill Cleanup Lag Since Valdez
Two decades after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, cleanup technology has progressed so little that the biggest advancement in the Gulf of Mexico disaster — at least in the public’s mind — is an oil-water separator based on a 17-year-old patent and promoted by the movie star Kevin Costner.
Order and Chaos in a Bustling Cleanup
On one hand, an impressive rhythm had been established, with each day beginning with an 8 a.m. meeting in the trailer version of a conference room. There, a dozen people each give a synopsis of the situation within their purview, leading off with a weather report. The crisp condensation of information on operations, logistics, medical matters and the day’s goals takes about 20 minutes.On the other, for all of the declarations that the Coast Guard is in charge and that BP and federal officials want to be transparent with the news media, there are signs that the spill response command is not a clear top-down hierarchy. When you add in the other players like the contractors, things work or they don’t, reminding one of those old strings of Christmas-tree lights: one recalcitrant bulb can make the whole apparatus go dark.
Deep Water Oil The Final Frontier
BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to accusation by Obama himself of corporate recklessness, and to huge numbers of lawsuits for damages and loss of earnings, is also capable of leaving very long-term ecological damage. This disaster however underlines the basic problem facing all the major Western oil corporations, and most national oil companies - outside the OPEC states, Russia and a few other oil producer countries with large or relatively low cost, onshore and shallow offshore oil reserves and an export surplus.
Indians, Envious of U.S. Spill Response, Seethe Over Bhopal
In 1984, a leak of toxic gas at an American company’s Indian subsidiary killed thousands, injured tens of thousands more and left a major city with a toxic waste dump at its heart. The company walked away after paying a $470 million settlement. The company’s American chief executive, arrested while in India, skipped bail, never to return. This month eight former senior officials from the company, including one who has since died, were convicted of negligence, but the sentence — two years in jail — seems paltry to many here compared to the impact of their crime.No matter how halting the Obama administration’s response to the gushing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico might look to Americans, Indians cannot help but marvel — and envy — the alacrity with which the United States government has acted.
We all live in an oil slick now
Has our crude awakening begun, at last? It's not just the pelicans of Louisiana that are flapping and flailing in an oil slick – it's all of us. We live permanently doused in petrol. Every time we move further than our feet can carry us, or eat food we didn't grow, or go shopping, we burn more barrels. Petrol pours off each of us like an invisible sweat. The 20th century was propelled into the stratosphere on a great gushing geyser of oil, and nobody wanted to ask where it was coming from, or what it would cost us in the end.But in this decade, the true costs of oil – steadily accumulating since 1901 – have begun to finally distract our gaze from the speed-dial. They now silently dominate almost every long-term question we face.
Interview with Franny Armstrong
Independent film maker and climate activist Franny Armstrong, whose most recent documentary is called The Age of Stupid, about climate change, is also at the head of a campaign she launched called ’10:10’, to get individuals and companies in the UK to cut their carbon emissions by ten percent this year.
Study Says Natural Gas Use Likely to Double
WASHINGTON — Natural gas will provide an increasing share of America’s energy needs over the next several decades, doubling its share of the energy market to 40 percent, from 20 percent, according to a report to be released Friday by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The increase, the report concluded, will come largely at the expense of coal and will be driven both by abundant supplies of natural gas — made more available by shale drilling — and by measures to restrict the carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to climate change.
In the long term, however, the future may be dimmer for natural gas if stricter regulations are put in place to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 — a goal set by President Obama. Although lower in carbon than coal, natural gas is still too carbon-intensive to be used under such a target absent some method of carbon capture, the authors of the report concluded.
FACTBOX - Key U.S. shale natural gas and oil deals since 2009
REUTERS – Companies eager to capitalize on the U.S. shale gas revolution are buying up firms which have deeds to land with access to reserves.Despite rumblings of environmental concerns, cheap and plentiful gas from shale is increasingly becoming a larger part of U.S. domestic energy production.
Crude Oil Trades Below $77 on Renewed Concern Europe Debt Crisis to Spread
Crude oil headed for its first weekly decline in three weeks, as retreating equity markets and growing supplies sowed doubts about the economic recovery.
Analysts Split on Outlook for Oil Price on Economy, Supplies, Survey Shows
Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News were split over whether crude oil prices will rise or fall next week amid mixed economic reports and ample stockpiles.Sixteen of 47 analysts, or 34 percent, forecast crude will advance through July 2. Sixteen more respondents predicted that futures will decline. Fifteen said there will be little change. Last week, 52 percent of analysts expected an increase.
Brent Oil May Reach $90 a Barrel on Rising `Channel': Technical Analysis
Brent crude oil may climb toward $90 a barrel after it re-entered a rising “channel” that will draw prices higher, according to a technical analysis by Standard Chartered Plc.
In the past few years, petrol price increases have so angered consumers, such as truckers and fishermen, that they blockaded petroleum refineries — in Britain and France, for instance.Within days, food distributors and other essential services had run out of fuel. Whole industries were hit, and the economic losses were calculated in the billions.
Our economies rely on cheap oil. When its cost goes up, we lose stability. One of the things that is expected to happen if future oil production falls is that we will pay more to supply ourselves.
Addicted to oil … and to economic growth
For the last two centuries, Western economic theory has been based on the untenable proposition and requirement that economies must (and can) grow at substantial rates, indefinitely.Especially for the last hundred years or so, abundant and inexpensive fossil fuels have allowed an unprecedented rate of economic growth that has brought Americans and much of the rest of the developed world a previously unimaginable, but unfortunately unsustainable materialistically-based standard of living.
By its very nature, an economic system based on constant and inexorable dynamic growth contains the seeds of its own demise. Indeed, capitalism as it is practiced today in America and Europe has become the proverbial anchor that will send us all to the bottom if we can’t find the thoughtfulness and courage to devise a new path forward.
We Cannot Afford To Live The Lifestyle We Are Used To
Senator Alexander's remarks contain numerous fallacies about our current energy supply and its future.First, he assumes we can keep on relying on petroleum, when the truth is that we on the brink of seeing our petroleum supply diminish rapidly. One of the unmentioned truths about deep water oil drilling is that we are only doing it because all the easy oil is gone. We are at the point of peak oil. Supply is remaining constant while demand, especially from India and China, is increasing. Senator Alexander refuses to face the fact that we are running out of oil.
In his talk, Moore looks at the projections of both Cambridge Energy Research Associates, led by Daniel Yergin, author of acclaimed book, 'The Prize,' and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, ASPO for short. He examines the question of how much oil America produces and why the fields out in the Gulf of Mexico are so important and, in the long view, so futile.Taking his cue from T.E. Lawrence, he proposes seven pillars of energy cooperation and then examines the feasibility of someday powering most of the cars in America with solar power; ending with this final thought: "We will either fight over the last drop of oil, or we will celebrate it -- the choice is ours to make."
Investing For A Peak-Oil Future
We can say that a period of relative calm in the world’s oil economy is coming to an end and what lies ahead could be a wild ride. In my previous life as an airline pilot, preparing passengers for the disaster we hoped would never happen was routine. Long-term investors would do well to fasten their financial seatbelts now, just in case.
Apple sells personal and computer electronics to a fraction of the world while Exxon is a Global 130 year old oil company. That’s mind blowing. Everything Apple, builds, ships and sells is made possible by oil.What does this say about the potential for Apple, what does this say about the future of oil?
Is Peak oil in process cutting into Exxon’s long-term value?
Caribbean Storms Strengthen, May Head for Oil Spill
The first tropical storm of the Atlantic hurricane season has a 60 percent chance of forming this weekend, with one computer model indicating it could head into the Gulf of Mexico where BP Plc has a flotilla of vessels trying to clean up an oil spill.
BP market losses hit $100 billion on spill cost fears
LONDON/VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) – BP Plc stock hit a 14-year low on Friday and its credit weakened sharply on talk it needs extra cash to fund the clean-up and compensation bill for the worst oil spill in U.S. history.Total share losses for the embattled oil major since the ecological disaster began on April 20 stand at around $100 billion, more than halving its pre-spill market value, and analysts at Nomura said it needed to assure the market of its liquidity.
BP reattaches cap, but oil closes Florida beaches
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) – BP resumed full siphoning operations from the ruptured Gulf of Mexico oil well , but Florida was forced to close down popular tourist beaches at the height of the summer season as more crude washed ashore.The vast slick has already soiled the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, but could spell disaster for Florida, one of the world's top tourist destinations with more than 80 million visitors a year.
Liability Questions Loom for BP and Ex-Partners
For now, BP appears to be the deep-pocketed party footing many of the bills, including setting up a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the spill. But the legal endgame of sorting out the final tab among the companies that owned the well and worked on the Deepwater Horizon rig has also begun.
Drilling firms set stage for a long liability battle
As BP opens its checkbook to pay damages related to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it is beginning to do battle over a high-stakes question: Who else bears liability?Some of the companies involved in the drilling operation are laying the groundwork to argue: not us.
Halt to Dredging Pits Louisiana Against U.S.
A standoff between Louisiana and two federal agencies, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers, has halted the operation to dredge sand for protective berms to protect the state’s coastline from encroaching oil. At issue is where a federal permit allows dredging.
Oil spill takes toll on tourism on Gulf Coast
Vacationers are starting to steer clear of the Gulf Coast. The worst oil spill in U.S. history, which has endangered wildlife and stymied the fishing and oil trades so vital to the region's economy, now is threatening the multibillion-dollar tourism industry as wary visitors cancel trips or plan vacations to places where they don't have to worry about oil coming ashore.
Democrats Fail to Reach Agreement in Talks on Energy Bill, Reid Says
Senate Democrats, meeting for the second time in a week for talks on a planned energy bill, still haven’t agreed which “clean energy” programs are justified after the BP Plc oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Nearly 1 in 5 older women are going childless
More women today are childless: Nearly one in five end their childbearing years without having a baby, compared with one in 10 just 30 years ago. That's true for all racial and ethnic groups and for most education levels, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data for women ages 40 to 44.But a very small group — the most highly educated — is bucking that trend.
Monbiot: Sunday Times admits 'Amazongate' story was rubbish. But who's to blame?
Like the hundreds of others who fell head first into this trap, he should have been more cautious. Richard North is our old friend Christopher Booker's long-term collaborator, and between them they are responsible for more misinformation than any other living journalists. You could write a book about the stories they have concocted, almost all of which fall apart on the briefest examination.This one was no exception. I decided to check North's claim that the WWF report (pdf) said nothing about 40% of the Amazon's forests reacting badly to a reduction in rainfall. I used a cunning and recondite technique known only to experienced sleuths: typing "40%" in the search bar at the top of the page.
Forget Peak Oil, Peak Lumber Is Coming
British Columbia is currently experiencing a Mountain Pine Beetle outbreak beyond any bark beetle epidemic recorded in North American history. This eco-system altering epidemic is causing widespread mortality of the lodgepole pine forests, the province’s most abundant commercial tree species. At the current rate of spread, 50% of the mature pine will be dead by 2008 and 80% by 2013. The consequences of the epidemic will be felt for decades in British Columbia.
Northern Wisconsin region suffering long dry spell
Parts of this state's North Woods and the adjacent Upper Peninsula of Michigan are the only areas in the continental USA experiencing "extreme" drought. It's the region's most severe drought since the 1930s and its longest dry period since the 1950s, says Roy Eckberg, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Green Bay, Wis.It will take 30-50 inches of precipitation to make up the deficit, probably over two or more years, he says. The drought is caused by "natural variability in weather patterns, and I'm sure there is some global (climate) change aspect," Eckberg says. "How much, that's really hard to say."
Drought adds to Syrian woes of poverty and unemployment
SYRIA IS sweltering in an unseasonable heatwave which Damascenes are blaming on climate change. “We have to fight global warming now, as well as so many other battles,” asserted Zuhair, an academic.Battle was joined in 2007 when the rains failed and 40,000 farm families in the country’s northeastern breadbasket began to migrate to Aleppo and Damascus, the country’s main cities, to take up low-paying, unskilled jobs.
Arctic Ice Forecasters Split on Summer Retreat
Despite what has appeared to be a big early dip in the extent of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean this spring, a suite of forecasts issued today by the leading teams studying shifting conditions around the North Pole mostly do not (quite) see a repeat of the extraordinary ice pullback in 2007. The graph below shows the range of the forecasts for early September, the point when the sea ice typically reaches its minimum extent, compared to recent years and the average over the period of precise satellite measurement.
Climate change debate to get radical overhaul
World leaders will give final approval on a plan to radically overhaul the global climate change debate at summit meetings in Toronto this weekend in the hope of breaking the deadlock in talks for an international emissions-reduction deal, the Toronto Star has learned.
UN talks chief 'appalled' over climate change response
HONG KONG (AFP) – Outgoing UN climate chief Yvo de Boer said Thursday he was "appalled" at the international community's response to climate change, after the failure of last year's Copenhagen summit on global warming."The one thing that has appalled me most is to witness the degree to which the international community is cutting off its nose to spite its face," he told a Hong Kong business conference sponsored by The Economist magazine.
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Hello,
I've uploaded a new version of my free Peak Oil software to my website.
Changes:
* New Hubbert Curves for Brazil, Kuwait and Ecuador added
* Fixed a small drawing bug for Europe_Euroasia and Iraq in the Hubbert Linearization panel.
You can download it here: http://sokath.sourceforge.net/
Any chance you can do one for natural gas and coal?
Yes, there will be analyses for NG and coal as well. I can't say when I'm going to work on them though.
Hubbert Linearization (HL) is one of those heuristics that has always bothered me. This post I wrote last week essentially shows that HL only works for a very, very narrow range of behaviors.
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/06/hubbert-peak-in-five-easy-piece...
To use HL and be able to defend it, you should understand how it is derived. Once you understand how limited it is, you realize that maybe you need to try something else. But if you don't have anything else, what do you do?
Interesting that this paper (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.157.6951) by a peak oil skeptic claims that 5/6 of the early oil production data was not used to fit the logistic because it doesn't work well
I always wondered this myself because all the tabulated oil production data seems to only start around 1960. If have seen USA data that goes back much further, actually to pre-1900, so am curious why we don't see anything for global production that goes back this far.
Web, the data from the early history of the oil production from any country is always used. It is always part of the cumulative production and is never discarded. If it is discarded then the chart is useless at worst and gives an inaccurate plot at best.
True, the first point on the chart often represents a year's production many years after the first oil was drawn from the ground in that country. It makes no difference however because that first dot on the chart is plotted as a percentage of total cumulative production up to that date. Total cumulative production must be known before the chart gives anything close to an accurate prediction.
Because the first years of production is often erratic it makes no sense to plot them on the chart. The very first year's production would have to be plotted as 100 percent of cumulative production. The next year's data would be around 50 percent, giving a line hitting zero in only a couple of years. There needs to be many years of past cumulative production before the chart gives any sort of trend. This is well understood.
While we don't know, to the very barrel, how much global oil has been produced since production started over 100 years ago we have a pretty good estimate and that estimate is used when the very first point on the chart is plotted. It makes no difference if that first dot is the production for 1930 or 1955, the end result will be the same.
The very best description of the Hummbrt method is Chapter 3 of Deffeye's "Beyond Oil", titled "The Hubbert Method". It explains very clearly the Hubbert method and why it works.
The Hubbert Method has many drawbacks and is not always accurate. What makes it so valuable is that it is far more accurate than any other method we have. That is, it is far from perfect but we have nothing better.
Ron P.
Ron:
There are many assumptions in any method; Hubbert's method just has better input and fewer bad assumptions.
Those who denigrate Hubbert's predictions point to productions levels continuing on past 2000 and increasing. IMO, this flaw in Hubbert's method is that it does not give adequate credit to enhanced techniques, both to increase total yield and level of production. Consequently, a second flaw will perhaps (but not of a certainty) manifest in much higher depletion rates in the future as those techniques are no longer able to keep the flow rates up... witness Ghawar, and closer to home, Pemex.
If oil was not so important to so many industries and applications, it would be merely 'interesting' to see things unfold. Since I expect oil triage to become a reality, and the source of great anguish and perhaps conflict, my description would tend to add, "grimly."
Craig
When a given method can return any answer you wish, based on whichever information you choose to feed it at any particular time, it is difficult, if not impossible, to characterize it as "accurate". Hubbert modeled a very specific combination of economic factors which just happened to include oil production and the regulatory scheme in place during a time of stable real prices. While interesting, the methods absolute self destruction when multi peak profiles become involved (including in Hubberts own examples of dead and gone areas like Ohio) let alone the random nature of the methods relationship to URR (Cavallo, A.J., "Hubberts Petroleum Production Model:An Evaluation and Implications for World Oil Prodution Forecasts", Natural Resources Research, Dec. 2004, p.211-221) pretty much relegate it to "if this is accurate, please for the love of God don't show me inacurate".
Reserve Growth, the production data is supplied by the EIA, the IEA, BP and a few others. And all of these agencies agree to within a given error margin, the same data. But the point is this is hard data. It cannot be changed. It cannot be manipulated.
It is an absolute insult to all who follow the peak oil debate to say that we simply "choose" the data we use to obtain the results we desire. We use the only data we have and this hard data is never altered to give the results we wish. Hard data cannot be manipulated.
Hubbert was very accurate in his prediction of the US peak. True he was a little early concerning the world peak. The problems with OPEC in the 70s and particularly the 80s have delayed the world peak by from 10 to 15 years. Had there been no Iranian Revolution, no Iran-Iraq war, we would already been way past world peak. But the situation being what it is, we can only say we are there right now, and have been since about the middle of 2004.
Ron P.
While I am certainly not above insulting everyone I can find who associates themselves with some of the ridiculous mythology which has grown up in the peaker movement, in this case there is no need. My statement is just historical fact. Please show me a discovery graph which shows the appropriate level of discovery for 1935. This is important, because without the flowing oil of the Orinoco, it is difficult for any peaker to say with a straight face that they use the same data as, say, those of us who consider all oil, versus just the kind we happen to feel like counting any particular afternoon. Without the correct global discovery graph, it is easy to make bell shaped curve looking things of the discovery profile, as evidenced by a graphic in this very thread. Using all the data leads to a completely different profile and suddenly, the bell shaped curvy looking things aren't bell shaped anymore, and it becomes much, much more difficult to convince the average joe on the street that there isn't much oil left in the world.
And therefore it doesn't matter when we discuss the sheer size and number of area's in which his method DOESN'T work?
When exceptions are required at nearly every turn to explain why his method doesn't work, I have news for you, it says something about the quality of the method...like....it itself working correctly is the exception. Not the rule.
Orinoco 'oil' ? Rulz, what are you smoking ?
Well, when those long chain hydrocarbons flow to a wellbore, thats what us petroleum engineers call it. Of course, if you would feel more comfortable with a second opinion from geologists, that wouldn't be unreasonable.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3028/
Who ever said there isn’t much oil in the world? Do you really feel that your argument is so weak that you must misrepresent peak oil theory and trot out examples of the lunatic fringe from our movement? People hoping for a die off? (see below) I’m sure there are some weird ones out there, but I myself would rather retire comfortably on my pension and spend the last of my days fiddling with my garden. Your posts drip with vitriol.
You will have to be more specific. In order for peak oil theory to properly frighten a noob, one of the core angles is to take some generally agreed upon amount of oil, like 2 trillion barrels, show that we have used half of that, and then present a single peaked Hubbert curve.
Campbell was relatively clear about the "used one trillion, maybe a trillion to go" angle. And he isn't an ex-cop, violin player, or accountant.
http://dieoff.org/page140.htm
Have I misunderstood what the grandfather of the modern peaker movement was representing?
Certainly that is not my intention, would additional :>) clear up the matter?
:>)....?
So what are Campbell's biggest specific misrepresentations in that above article and why? Where and how did he specifically get it wrong. Cites other than complete manuals and textbooks would be appreciated.
Recovery factors do change as economics and technology are applied.
Before someone declares the end of cheap oil, it would behoove them to check first. Cheap oil ended in about 1969 or so when real oil prices ended a period of real price stability spanning some 4 decades.
"FLOW OF OIL starts to fall from any large region when about half the crude is gone." is not an accurate declarative statement. The multi peak profile was already easily discernable in some of Hubberts own examples by 1985, let alone 1998.
Same basic problem with this statement.
"The flow of oil from several other regions, such as the former Soviet Union and the collection of all oil producers outside the Middle East, also follows
Hubbert curves quite faithfully."
Ignore the multi peak debunking of Hubberts method at your own risk.
The figure on Page 80 of the PDF provided is flat out wrong. I don't know why, Colin correctly attributes the profile to fields in his book which I believe predates the Scientific America article. Bad proofreading perhaps, but such is how peaker myths are made I suppose. Wiki still carries this nonsense on its peak oil page as well.
No reserve growth is accounted for, instead we are fed the standard "lets backdate everything to hide the volumes which technology brings" routine. I would recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Undiscovered-Petroleum-Mineral-Resources-Controver...
for why Hubbert thought reserve growth needed to be accounted for, and what he would do if he thought it was improperly accounted for.
And finally, the basis for Campbells estimates are completely missing. No transparency, no basis for their use, just "its a trillion and take my word for it" appears to cover it. Campbell does provide more information elsewhere, but not in this article.
Perhaps because it was designed for a non technical audience he thought he would cut a few corners, load up on the pablum?
I can get into greater detail on anything of interest of course.
We really do need another peak timing thread or something around here, the threads have been moving backwards pretty fast because of all the newbies flowing in to see what they can see about the leaking well in the GOM.
I agree that the backdating process is the most subtly challenging aspect for prediction purposes.
So as discoveries first get reported, you have no idea of what backdating gets applied later. But in retrospect it is always easy to do the backdating and account for what transpired. The key is to have a valid reserve growth model. This is why I am so hard on the USGS reports on reserve growth. If we had excellent models for reserve growth that worked in a global aggregate context we would have better confidence in our predictions.
As it stands, dispersive discovery includes the uncertainty in these estimates, and it can generate the fat-tails associated with reserve growth. The logistic could never do this.
So now I’m supposed to buy this $118.00 book, in which the only review at Amazon is a copied review posted by someone who probably did not even read the book, and a book that is probably not even at the large university libraries nearby I have access to? Huh. Over the years I’ve read many criticisms of the USGS report, including this one: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2544 If I’m not mistaken doesn’t the USGS fall short of its predictions and always needs revision, the same criticism you level at Campbell?
Why am I always being steered at sources which are either unavailable or difficult (expensive) to acquire?
You may do as you wish. The book has an example of what Hubbert relayed to the author about his thoughts on field growth, and how he felt about including it in his calculations. Or the lengths to which he would go if he had forgotten to.
Everything needs revision in the context of better information coming along, improved methods, newer research. Have you actually read through the USGS study, or do you just take someone's word for it? Are you aware of the geologic manpower which went into there numbers, versus Campbells "lets fit a few lines to my favorite data and proclaim a deterministic answer"?
Your reference doesn't appear to have much more than general gripes about the USGS study, and they don't appear to even understand why they can't simply take the "potential additions to reserves" and simply divide those numbers up to calculate future discoveries. If I recall correctly, the USGS study even warns people against this within the study. Even when calculated in this incorrect way, the authors admit that one of the fractiles of chance for discovery was being met. Which means, the outcome was completely within their expected answer, and the time period has not expired yet. Sounds like a backhanded compliment to their work if you ask me...certainly Campbell provides no probabilistic answer to his estimates and by the very data in your reference his estimates for future undiscovered have already been overrun. Are you aware of Campbell then changing his estimates for reflect a new, higher volume of discoveries to acknowledge this?
I apologize for my reference, certainly it is difficult to track through the appropriate research without a decent library, but research is not restricted to only the easy to access or cheap information.
Yes I have. The problem is as a lay man in this field it is difficult to determine where the faults of the study are without the aid of expert opinion. It would be like me asking your opinion in my field, lets say the decision Roe v. Wade, without you having the education and experience in reading all the pertinent case law and law review articles to understand the logic behind the decision - which is a very long one. Real easy for me to just state that you don’t know what your talking about because you can’t get by the legal jargon, nor that you haven‘t read all the material. This is largely what is going on here. You’re asking me to accept your version of events versus someone else’s with no real evidence presented in a straight forward manner that non-experts can understand. This is where your opposition is doing a much better job, and they are not insulting our intelligence.
The first sentence is a fallacy - appeal to authority. Throwing people at a problem doesn't guarantee a good result, especially if there is an established mindset. I've read enough studies in other fields that were completely erroneous despite lots of money thrown at the problem. The second one is a nice cheap shot. Do you really know what kind of analysis went into Campbell’s calculations? I doubt it, but it doesn’t stop you from slamming him because his results don’t jive with your beliefs.
So I'm just supposed to take your word for it?
Perhaps I should explain then. The USGS methodology starts with the geologic basis for oil and gas being present because of basic principles, source rock and maturation, traps and seals, the timing of these geologic events. They do this work at some basic unit level, basin, play, assessment unit. When the very essence of recoverable oil and gas is dependent upon these items, it makes sense to start there, using the appropriate experts, such as geologists. To do the entire world, it takes many geologists. I am not appealing to authority as much as I am noting that this particular study is accepted by many as definitive not because of its size, but because of the basis for its construction. Geology. While curve fitting the entire planet as though all parts of it are the same fits with Hubberts macro-scale concept, it has nothing to do with solving the problem from the actual things which create recoverable oil and gas.
I did not appeal to authority as much as I noted (admittedly for those who are perhaps familiar with these distinctions) that Colin does not have the resources in his lifetime to generate the type of ground truth based geology required by the USGS method. Its the difference between estimating the number of people in an American city using only an overhead satellite picture or voter turnout information, or going out and counting them all.
Neither estimate will be right. But one has a much better basis for its estimate, and a corresponding chance of being closer to the truth.
My response is that I saw no analysis. I saw speculation, a typo, 2 independent references, neither of which provided the basis for filtering or censoring any data based on conjecture or oil gravity and no basis for the curve fitting demonstrated, any scientific basis related to the predictive ability of Hubberts method in general, and a conclusion resulting in an answer which was absolutely certain and because of it, almost certainly wrong.
This is America and you are free to do as you wish. I provide references on particular points for a reason, so that others may check my sources and decide for themselves the validity of either the information or conclusions provided. To be honest, I simply don't care if you believe me. Popularity should never be a factor of informed opinion or scientifically based conclusions, IMHO.
There are other resources.
I've uploaded Richard Nehring's presentation from the ASPO 2007 (Houston) conference. He has done significant work on the extent of reserve growth we might be able to expect and distinguishes how near-peakists and late-peakists view reserve growth. (He calls it 'recovery growth' in his presentation.)
His view is that for the near peakists recovery growth doesn't have time to make a material difference while for the late peakists recovery growth is what allows for there to be a late peak.
Note that he further points out that reserve growth has "Only a modest effect on the maximum level of world oil production" but "A significant effect on how long high levels of world oil production can last." This is just a product of the math but it's worth pointing out.
In other words, he is saying that we can stay on a plateau for much longer — if the recovery growth can match the decline rate.
http://files.me.com/aangel/pblt94
I concluded when I was studying this part of the picture that recovery rates weren't currently increasing in the manner needed to extend the plateau. Further, I concluded that they were unlikely to suddenly rise to the occasion considering how expensive EOR is and how long it takes to institute the various extended recovery techniques. Nehring's rebuttal to that is the familiar "high prices will solve that." (Slide 22)
Now that we have a history of high prices, it would be interesting to see if there are in reality more/larger fields doing EOR. The megaprojects databases tell us whether more fields are being put into production (and it appears the high-price hasn't done much/anything for that).
That is a very good analysis.
Reserve growth is a fat-tail phenomenon while demand production is thin-tail. In the end, fat-tails cannot keep up with the demand requested of thin-tails.
Fat-tails mean that there is a significant delay before something becomes available.
Thin-tails imply a constant demand proportional to how much is currently available.
where X is the convolution operator
thin-tail X thin-tail => thin-tail
thin-tail X fat-tail => fat-tail
fat-tail X fat-tail => fat-tail
He has. I find his unconventional estimates interesting, his medium case has already been overrun by recent recoverable estimates of the Orinoco alone. Perhaps Richard is being a wee bit conservative?
You concluded? Would you care to share any pertinent training, experience or expertise related to the calculation of recovery rates, past, present or future, or their change with respect to time? Or did you rely on the work of some credible source or another (I use this to discount accounts, violin players, ex-cops, etc. etc., but few others)? Surely you must have had some information to directly contradict Richard estimates to which these recovery factors are to be applied? His information gathering and processing ability stretches back into the 70's, and includes working with Hubbert? When Richard counts unconventionals in his estimates, and others do not, Richard is not usually the one with explaining to do.
Certainly, in either case, you should be prepared to reference why the common examples in the San Joaquin basin can't be used to demonstrate exactly this type of increasing recovery factors through time effect.
This is so true. The reality of the situation is that multiple processes are at work, spread out in time and in rate. The ultimate naivete of Hubbert's original work was that he assumed depletion somehow marched in lockstep at a given rate. This is a so-called deterministic model which doesn't work for most real processes, but people can't seem to think in any other way.
One of the most damning indictments of the Hubbert Logistic is that you cannot use it for both the discovery curve and the production curve, which is what many people try to do. If production is a mathematical transformation on discovery, then you will never get another Logistic unless the transformation happens to be the identity function. And we know that can't happen because the production curve is usually shifted by 10's of years from the discovery curve.
That Cavallo paper does illustrate how if you use too much of the old data, the model will show a peak way too early. I remember giving Staniford a hard time about his use of the Logistic several years ago, and sure enough he eventually realized that the USA production profile didn't fit the Logistic at all.
The entire argument around the original Logistic derivation would be as if the AGW scientists were using some heuristic based on "ether" to explain climate change. They justified this "ether model" based on the fact that it "seemed" to fit the data. But then it blows up in their face when some longer time scale is involved or some other evidence pops in. But then they have no way to defend their argument because their original argument was built on an invalid premise. That is the case of the logistic model as understood because it never had any broad generality. Yet climate scientists are much more in tune and they understand stochastic concepts like probability convolution and fat-tail statistics. Not a chance that any of the oil depletion realists have this deeper understanding, because they choose to use heuristics based on flaky premises.
Hubbert himself had the right intuition but failed as a mathematician. I shouldn't knock him too much because the widespread application of stochastic methods only started to reach applied science in the 1950's and 1960's when many of the classic texts by Feller and Cox came out. I checked and David Cox apparently is still alive, which shows how recent this field is. If somebody had gotten on this early we would have had a strong analytical framework built on from years of improvement -- as it is we have this brain-dead and evolutionary dead-end Hubbert Linearization.
WHT:
I know there is a many-year shift of production from discovery. Do you know, has the time for the correlation remained static through the years? It seems to me that the delay might be lessened in times of high price, and extended when prices are lower. If so, during the mid-80s to mid 'aughts' I would expect it to lengthen... thus prolonging upward bounds of the curve.
Of course, if the delay during the cheap oil era happened, we would expect that the curves would be drawing closer together now, with oil prices in the $75 to $85 range. Since this is a time-related phenomena, I would expect that evidence would be scant today, and would grow over time.
Craig
Good question, and that is an example of why the Hubbert logistic will never explain the reality of the situation. Indeed, the extraction rate will modulate over the years, and that is what gives rise to a lot of the interesting detail in the production profile.
In general, the delay gets longer the lower the extraction rate, and shorter the higher the extraction rate. If you had a situation such as the "easy-pickings" gold prospecting in the wild west, the discovery and production almost coincided and there was no real delay between the two. As soon as some prospector found some gold, they collected it and thus it was produced.
On the other hand, oil has these built-in delays having to do with bureaucratic regulations, the construction processes, the reserve growth issue, and the extraction process. We are seeing this play out in the Gulf as it takes time to put the relief wells in. This is the premise behind the Oil Shock Model, which is the realistic version of the Logistics model.
In contrast, the Logistic curve will assume everything is pre-ordained, including the backside!
And, to extend the model just a bit, as oil prices rise, it is easier to find capital to drill, extract and process. Thus, production goes up as prices rise, and that depletes the fields faster.
Do you suppose we will see the finale as an orgy of "Drill, baby, drill," as prices skyrocket and the two curves meet and, basically, explode in a downward rush?
Craig
That will never happen I suspect because oil discovery and production is very dispersed and all the effects have a fat-tail characteristic.
The only way to get close to having the discovery and production curves to meet is to not have regulations, build the rigs instantaneously, have incredible knowledge of where the oil is and how much there is (i.e. no reserve growth in the equation), and get extraction rates to 100% per year. I have shown Oil Shock model production profiles where I start to increase the extraction rate to prolong a plateau but notice that some physical constraint will prevent the two from meeting.
It is one of those cases where the fat-tail of uncertainty and randomness actually helps us. If it wasn't for dispersion, for instance if everyone was like a USA, I suspect we would have burned well past peak already. Another reason that the Hubbert Logistic doesn't work.
I doubt Hubbert's method can give any answer you wish. The general point, more than specific curves or datelines, is that oil production (or, production per dollar it costs) is slowing or curving down while demand keeps going up as more and more want to drive in India and China, etc. This is the truth and it transcends the detail questions of just how much the discrepancy is and when "technically" it will be a peak and not just a deepening mismatch, etc. All else is vanity.
Then I suggest you review Cavallo's paper in Natural Resources Research.
like creative hype/type analysis for example ?
Like I said, if you want to be able to defend it, you should understand how the Hubbert logistic is derived. That is the standard acid test for any model. The problem then is that the logistic model as typically derived uses arguments from biology and the notion of carrying capacity. The problem is that oil is not a living entity and it can't reproduce so the notion of carrying capacity has to go out the window.
Doing it the correct way and accounting for stochastic processes instead of using a deterministic equation swiped from a predator-prey model works much better. I still think that oil depletion skeptics attack of the naive mathematics and statistics that most depletion realists use is something that we must address.
Web, the Hubbert Linearization method has nothing to do with biology. There is not a mouse or guinea pig or even a petri dish anywhere to be found in the process. It is a mathematical formula, nothing more and nothing less. From Wikipedia:
That alone, plotted on a yearly basis, will give you the Hubbert Linearization plot.
But... having said that I would love to see your stochastic chart that gives a more accurate plot than Hubbert's. Well, that is if you can express it without half a page of formulas that no one but Web understands. We are all very impressed with your mathematical skills but they add very little to this debate when only you have any understand as to what they mean.
Ron P.
I understand all of Web's math, but I'm not impressed by it. There is nothing you need beyond seventh grade arithmetic skills to read graphs, tables of numbers, or the math that, for example, westexas uses in ELM2. Thus I see the fancy math as interesting in its own right but essentially irrelevant to the questions we discuss on TOD, questions that can be answered quantitatively even without using simple algebra.
Good. I am glad that you understand it. If you found something wrong with it, then I would worry and have to reconsider the approach.
I'm going to jump in here and disagree. The million dollar questions are: 1) when is peak and 2) what will be the decline rate. They were 5 years ago when I started reading this site and they still are today. We have some really big decisions to make, as individuals and as a society. Knowing how much time we have to prepare and what it is we are preparing for are extremely important. Should we be electrifying rail or learning to garden, building windmills or establishing local currencies ... it kind of depends on the decline rate (and yes ELM gets factored in).
Furthermore, people I talk to about peak oil all have an intuitive understanding that its a finite resource. However, getting them to believe that its a problem of immediate concern is much more challenging. Most of these people are in science fields and empirical data go a long way. But a logically consistent model based on first principles which can explain and potentially predict depletion would be extremely valuable.
I get tired of hearing people respond 'they have been saying we are going to run out of oil since the 70's' and my best response is 'yeah, but one day it has to be true'.
That is my interpretation as well. We have dug ourselves a small hole by incorrectly predicting the peak in the past -- the old boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. So I wondered how this can happen and is it possible to do any better.
Just yesterday, I posted a figure I constructed based on possible peak dates based on random discovery dates, but all leading to a fixed URR.
Depending on how far we are along the time-frame, we can have peak dates that occur sooner or later than the mean date. As far as policy, where do we start screaming about the problem? The arrow above points to a 3.5% probability of hitting a peak date by the end of the 1980's is essentially the date that Jimmy Carter warned us about. But was he (a) jumping the gun, (b) being conservative, or (c) just relying on intuition?
My whole approach is based on removing intuition from the equation and giving a risk-based approach for policy decisions. If we can generate good models that help with policy decisions, it will help. You can say that perhaps none of these people such as Carter or Colin Campbell jumped the gun on predicting peak, they just selected the wrong "alternative universe" that we ended up eventually inhabiting.
This is no different in principle than the excellent risk-based relief well analysis that Joules Burn put together last week. At some point, quantitative analysis will prove useful.
Web,
I think it is impossible to do a valid risk analysis with regard to the question of how much reserves the world has at, say, $75 per barrel. Instead, I think such analyses have to come to grips with uncertainty, where quantitative methods must be used with extreme care so as not to hide assumptions. In particular, we at TOD are uncertain of true Saudi reserves of oil and uncertain of KSA's true production capacity. They may have a lot of excess capacity--as they claim loudly--or they may have very little excess capacity. Really, that is as precise as we can get, though we can judge the plausibility of various estimates of excess capacity and reserves for Saudi Arabia and for other countries. We have no reliable data on global excess reserves, only SWAGS. Similarly, estimates of reserves available at $75 a barrel depend a lot on serious differences of opinion as to the effectiveness of various technologies--both the proven ones and those in various stages of development.
You mention uncertainty, yet my analysis is based completely on a probability model with the maximum level of uncertainty (maximum entropy in fact).
But above you say that "I understand all of Web's math, but I'm not impressed by it."
Do you want to see a probability-based model or not? I am getting mixed messages.
I follow Frank Knight and other economists in making a sharp distinction between risk and uncertainty. Risk can be insured against using solid actuarial techniques. Uncertainty is uninsurable, because it cannot be converted to risk, and hence actuarial techniques don't work at all. This distinction between risk and uncertainty is fundamental to questions of when oil production will peak, how much excess capacity exists in the world, and how fast oil production will decline in the future.
When dealing with uncertainty, no probability model is an appropriate tool to use in making decisions.
I've studied decision theory under risk and also decision-making under uncertainty; the two distinct conditions result in radically different rational decision rules. For three years in the Graduate School of Business Administration I specialized in doing research in decision making under uncertainty, and was surprised to see how closely actual rules in the real business world approximated techniques of decision making under conditions under uncertainty. For example, real world business firms almost invariably use a payback hurdle before they even do a present value analysis. Finance books unanimously and vehemently argue against the payback hurdle in making investment decisions, but the real world firms know more about dealing with actual uncertainty than do the finance professors--who, to a man, love their complex mathematical models and eschew rules of thumb.
We are uncertain how long a new product will last.
We do some testing of that product.
We get an average time-to-fail.
We realize that not every product fails at the same average time.
We generate an exponentially damped probability density function to describe time-to-fail characteristics.
We make a business decision to release the product based on how much money we will make versus how often it breaks.
So I say to your statement: Huh????
Earlier this month I wrote specifically about this topic:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2010/06/predictably-unreliable.html
Uncertainty in the sense in question seems to be the stuff you can't measure and get an average time-to-fail or anything else. Wasn't it Taleb who pointed out that fewer things have measurable/computable probability models than most people tend to assume? How could one possibly compute or measure a probability distribution - other than pulling it out of thin air - for, say, how long the "six month" Gulf moratorium might last, or on many other political uncertainties?
That is a very good and topical example of uncertainty that cannot be reduced to risk.
Afraid not. Since he brought up Taleb, just remember that Taleb makes no distinction between different kinds of uncertainty. Not much in real life matches the laboratory environment of rolling a dice. So you might as well take your best shot at discovering the odds either through an educated guess or via experiment/experience.
Well then you use Bayes, pick a probability and update it when better information comes along, since you can treat probabilities as a belief if you want to. Or you can choose a probability distribution without a second moment or even without a mean. The best fit to the oil reservoir size distribution does not converge to a finite mean reservoir size. That is fat-tail just like Taleb seems to like.
One aspect of Taleb's writing that I found wanting is that he actually discourages the idea that we should or could actually reason about these systems.
Web,
IMO you are still confusing risk with uncertainty. The example you give is clearly one of risk, one that is amenable to actuarial methods. I agree with the comment which probably appears just above this one in reply to the same comment of yours that I'm replying to now.
In other words, I do not think that your mathematical model can handle uncertainty at all. Risk, yes, but not uncertainty--where by definition no risk can be quantified.
No, you are confusing uncertainty with "unknown uncertainty".
Taleb lays it out:
So you can go ahead and try to make these distinctions but it really makes no difference.
I think its pretty funny.
Would you feel any better knowing that its been going on since 1886? 1917? 1943?
When Web mentions the boy who cries wolf routine, it is completely applicable to what the "running out" gang have done with this particular issue.
At least the running out gang has learned I suppose....after a century of running out claims, with no running out in sight, now they say its the peak which matters which allows them to effectively cut everything in half because the silly numbers just..won't...stop....growing.
'rulz2, I already said: the numbers (oil output, and has to be divided into various forms anyway) may not be going down yet, but the growth is slowing (and is it really growing when you look at types, like true liquid crude?) and demand is rising faster. That is bad enough. It means a big drag on the world economy. Maybe the term "peak oil" was a poor choice - maybe it should have been called an old fashioned rolling "oil shortage" or somesuch. Wells are not putting out as much and new ones are harder to find. There's "plenty" of oil at low EROEI, that's not going to help us much. (And there's still climate change risk anyway - right?) But if we're lucky and your optimistic view is valid, then we can at least transition to renewables and not have a disastrous long emergency. I'm sure you meant that, not the idiocy of BAU; right?
The same concept was applied to natural gas in 2005 in the US, remember, back when the gas CLIFF was coming? Not only is low EROEI just fine and dandy when it comes to natural gas, those same wells completely reversed the US total natural gas production rate and created another peak some 40 years after the first one. Providing just that much more information that a single peak profile doesn't work, and that low EROEI is pretty irrelevant when it comes to production rate as well.
Do you have any specific reasons why low EROEI is a concept of any value whatsoever when certainly the concept appears thoroughly discredited with what has happened with natural gas production here in the US?
I'm not an optimist, I'm a scientist. My goal is always objectivity...how can it be any other way?
I am not a fan of what American BAU looks like any more than some others. But that distaste certainly doesn't influence my opinion on geoscience topics.
Rgr2, re natural gas: Look at the TOD thread below:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3673
with interesting title "North American Natural Gas Production and EROI Decline"
For example:
Energy Return on energy Invested (EROI) was explored as a method for choosing between the two forecasts. Examining a historical study of Louisiana natural gas production shows that EROI declined rapidly post peak production and that peak production occurred at about 70% of URR.
The EROI of Canadian natural gas production was found to be falling quickly. If current drilling rates are maintained, Canada could see energy break even occur as soon as 2014.
The EROI analysis was extended to the US by comparing data on Yield-per-foot drilled and Yield-per-well drilled between the two countries. It was found that the US is rapidly approaching the same low EROI as Canada.
Taken together this evidence supports Laherrere’s position that North America is past peak production and that as little as 30% of our natural gas endowment remains to be produced.
Jon doesn't have to be right but should be taken seriously. NG is not a panacea. And it means NG will be more expensive. In general, really: First the argument isn't a red herring over whether we've used half of "all there is" yet as you implied above. It isn't even a yes/no question anyway. The facts are, prices go up and down but oil and similar is getting more expensive to net produce. There's a lot of reserve out there, but it does not "rule" over that process. And whether there's less output tomorrow than today, there will surely be less than people want and they'll pay more for it. That behooves us to work on alternatives.
BTW do you think nuclear can tide us over? I worked as a Radcon on Navy ships. It's easy to just imagine taking those plants and churning out power for cities but I'm not sure.
I like Jon. I take Jon seriously. And the US did peak....in the early 70's. And then it reversed itself during the 80's and began a long climb back..and peaked again recently. Does Jon think we will have many more? :>)
As to Jons estimate of what remains in terms of endowment, well, thats another topic.
I like nukes. Wind. Hybrids. Mass transit. NG powered cars, or PHEV's and EV's. I am a big fan of everything which substitutes for wasting oil on silly soccer mom transport. 5000# of steel, glass and plastic so mom can haul a 40# soccer playing kid 10 miles across town is ridiculous waste of such a fine chemical feedstock.
1986 is "recent"? 24 years is 15.9% of this industry's life span, you know. If you're referring to peaks from, say, last September, we've never regained levels from 2003, never mind the halcyon days of US production, despite firm assurances from the EIA that Fed GOM would top 2 mb/d by now.
I was referring to how unconventionals allowed a repeak in US natural gas production, not oil.
No. Someone like Sam Foucher understands it perfectly. He like me has a strong background in statistical signal processing and was able to add some detail to it. If I never posted any of this to TOD, I never would have advanced this theory beyond what I had originally sketched out. I have to thank people that sent me comments to my blog and to my personal email that also had a hand in ironing out details.
The fact that someone doesn't understand something, doesn't mean that no one understands it. That is what is commonly referred to as projection.
Besides, a half-a-page of formulas ain't too bad.
In point of fact, Hubbert Linearization is defined by the Verhulst equation
dU(t)/dt = U(t)*(U0-U(t))
Verhulst derived this completely in the context of biolgical systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Fran%C3%A7ois_Verhulst
HL thus only has a tenuous connection to reality.
Robert Rapier is also not a fan of HL. He completely demolished it in a few posts he made to TOD a few years ago.
Look, we are only trying to make our arguments stronger. The challenge of continuing a discussion in a place like TOD, is that there are plenty of Luddites that have such an anti-technology bias that this bias extends to some of us trying to strengthen the analysis. I have long since realized that this problem goes with the territory, and I get enough positive feedback to make it worthwhile.
Robert took a producing region, Texas, which had a fairly noisy pre-peak HL plot and built his whole attack around analyzing that profile. I invited him to use the same analysis on the Lower 48, and he said he would do so. I am still waiting. Here is my Lower 48 analysis:
http://graphoilogy.blogspot.com/2007/06/in-defense-of-hubbert-linearizat...
My point about Texas was that we could take the total data set and come with a plausible estimate of when Texas peaked, as a percentage of Qt. We could then take that datum and apply it to the the Saudi HL plot, which had a far more stable HL plot through 2005. That was my premise for generating the following graph in early 2006 (Texas in black; Saudi Arabia in blue):
Link to Texas/Lower 48 paper:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/16459
Despite annual US oil price exceeding the $57 level that we saw in 2005 for four years and for 2010 to date, Saudi crude oil production has been below their annual 2005 crude production rate for four years and for 2010 to date.
If it does turn out that 2005 was the final Saudi crude oil peak, I have admitted that there was some luck involved in posting the Texas/Saudi graph in early 2006. However, I don't see how people can look at the 2002 to 2005 versus 2005 to 2008 Saudi net export data versus price and not admit that there was a large amount of involuntary reductions in production in the post-2005 time frame.
Why not ask for the entire world?
Not how lousy the Logistic fits world production.
Lower-48 USA below. Logistic would be a straight line and not curved. No use even trying HL because it won't be a straight line.
Both of these were posted from TOD.
That's what I was saying, how horrible HL works for early production data.
Production is a series of convolutions off of discovery, and what you will see when you do a series of convolution is the Central Limit Theorem start to take hold and the shape of the curve will turn more into a Gaussian (if thin tails) or a power law Cauchy (if fat tails), which is what these curves demonstrate.
Yeah, well, it doesn't work for late production data either if anyone is still drilling wells into the field.
Works okay on dead fields though. I wonder why its advocates never mention that little detail?
Based on the HL plot, the North Sea peaked in 1999 (at about six mbpd), when it was about 50% depleted. Sam Foucher studied the North Sea oil fields whose first full year of production was 1999, or later, and these new fields had a production peak of one mbpd in 2005. But the new fields only served to slow the overall rate of decline in production, which has been about 4.5%/year since 1999.
Of course, you only get a reasonable projection when the plot shows fairly linear progression with a P/Q intercept generally in the 5% to 10% range.
And using the HL method, Deffeyes predicted* a global crude peak between 2004 and 2008, most likely in 2005 (based on modeling conventional production). As you know, the annual rate of change in total crude production, inclusive of non-conventional, has been zero or negative since 2005 relative to the 2005 production rate.
*Deffeyes made an erroneous observation that we probably peaked in 2000, but he never backed away from what his model showed.
But that just goes to show you that it has nothing to do with a Logistic.
I wrote about this in 2005:
http://mobjectivist.blogspot.com/2005/12/hubbert-linearization.html
My proof says that when you get near the peak, you are measuring an upside-down parabola if expanded in a Taylor's series, and you will find the peak no matter what curve you use. So in the general case it really has nothing to do with the Logistic.
Since we are discussing HL plots, why not show the HL plots?
Here are the Lower 48 (C + C) and global (C + C + NGL) HL plots that Sam did:
Note that the black points weren't used in the fit. Only the green points were used and those can be fit with an upside-down parabola. So the Logistic nature of the curves was irrelevant.
That is correct. The basis of the method is that one extrapolates the projection to get a Qt estimate when the data plot shows a fairly linear progression, with a reasonable P/Q intercept.
Mathematics + common sense = ?
Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens
- Jimi Hendrix
They do attack it but except for a few people, who authentically cares? For a certain segment of the population the math must be all lined up. However, for the vast majority of people I think it makes no difference. Listening to the math geeks duke it out is close to a root canal for them.
The most simple way to express the oil situation is the graph below, which holds for individual oil regions and the whole world. Everything else is just trying to add accuracy to the basic concept:
>
Most people can understand that we are living off of our oil discovery inheritance. Subsequent to that they then have to grapple with, "Yes, but what about electric cars, and solar power, etc.?" But it all starts with grasping "You have to find it first before you can produce it."
Aangel, good to hear from you. I see several overbearing problems today. First of all is that people might hear it, but they tune it out. With full credit to Terry Goodkind:
http://members.tripod.com/~Dark_Prophet_9/wizardrule1.html
Second, we are hearing a growing crescendo of claims that oil discovery is higher than production. By 10BBPY. If true, that would be nice. If not, well... not so much. I don't know where these figures derive from. I suspect that they are talking about the total size of reserves quoted by OPEC, EIA and IEA. Figures that are suspect to begin with, and that I do not recall showing what is claimed.
So. Third problem, even people who are relatively well informed have knowledge gaps.
TOD, in my opinion, should serve the purpose of filling in the gaps, verifying or refuting statistics being used, and educating people about the reality and the potention impact of Peak Oil.
Thanks for your many posts advancing all of the above.
Craig
You're welcome, Craig. TOD is excellent for exactly what you say. I suspect the recent discovery numbers are people lumping everything into one bucket and calling it oil, with no distinction on how quickly it can be produced.
Freddy Hutter, for instance, doesn't recognize the backdating that Colin Campbell started doing way back when. And that Professor (Boyce?) discussed here earlier this week doesn't either. And if one doesn't backdate the "new" discoveries everything looks fine.
Notice that one of the first things Colin does when discussing oil is distinguish what we're most interested in. Colin starts speaking at 9:46:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2010/06/june-18-2010.html
Everyone must realize that back-dating has nothing to do with Hubbert Linearization. That is another problem with HL and the Logistic, as it is in no way a comprehensive theory of what's happening.
By your own measure, no one should care about back-dating because HL tells us everything we need to know.
Yet, in fact, those are the kind of logical inconsistencies that Michael Lynch and company will throw back in your face. That is the way that the skeptics work, and you can only effectively counteract them by providing a bullet-proof comprehensive model of the oil production life-cycle.
And of course, that may not be enough, if you watch how the AGW debate has played out. But you can rest assured that if the scientists had gaping flaws in their analysis, similar to the flaws of HL, we would be in even worse shape. It is possible that we can assume that Peak Oil is much more "obvious" than AGW, but I never assume anything if I can derive it from first principles.
I don't think PO is all that obvious. It is too nuanced, and depends too much on forces not measured correctly in the computer programs spitting out those nice bell curves. For instance, given the huge volume of available oil, if sufficient capital came along with the dedicated purpose of puming out as much oil as they possibly could in as short a time as is possible, it is not impossible to see the old 'peak' doubled. For a very short time. And, that doubling would be pointed to as 'proof' that Peak Oil is a strange, doomer cult.
Of course, the aftermath would be disasterous. It could happen, though.
Craig
This makes no sense, because it is only possible in theory.
Bell curves, symmetrical or not, are for conventional oil and that is what counts.
Never saw Hubbert make that distinction. Or anyone else. Reference please.
Actually, I don't use HL at all...those curves are just pretty but have no math beyond what my drawing program needs to get its job done.
I concur that there are some types who want the comprehensive answer and I'm sorry if I've come off as poo-pooing your work. I realize looking back that you could have read that tone from my comments and I hope you accept my apology. Please continue to find that comprehensive theory because we need all the ammunition we can get.
But my point stands for the general population and even for some of the people who might be inclined to want to see the math. In the 2 1/2 years I've been speaking publicly about peak oil, not once has someone come up to me afterward (or during) a talk and said, "Your model doesn't hold water."
There is a veritable thicket of objections that people must get through before they accept the future we discuss here and possibly the most difficult objections to overcome are purely psychological. (My current favorite: "Well, they'll think of something. That's what we're paying them for!")
Besides, as you point out, when someone has made up their mind and, further, made up their mind that they don't want to change their mind, whether it is for climate change or peak oil, no amount of evidence will make a whit of difference.
And that is, in my experience, the primary block to people accepting the decline of oil. The ramifications are simply too confronting and the mind first rebels then gropes around for the easiest excuse laying around to mount a defense. It's the same thing with climate change.
You are right that these heavy math arguments may not work as well for the general population but they are a more effective tactic against Michael Lynch and his cohorts that spend all their time criticizing the models.
So people absolutely do not care how the "tail" of oil depletion plays out?
So people are naive enough to think that policy wonks don't base some of their suggestions on who has the strongest analyses?
So people don't worry that we go through this same back-and-forth the next time we find a new non-renewable resource? Hubbert Linearization or ELM or any of these heuristics won't even begin to "work" until you get close to the half-way point (whatever the half-way point even means, see the "tail").
I strongly believe there is room for pragmatic reasoning about what is going on.
Web, if you're talking about my statements, its not true that I don't care about how the tail plays out. Let me make myself clearer here. It is an important issue, but not if it dominates the agenda. Our future is not going to be dominated by fossil fuels, and the future is coming rather quickly at this point, with the GOM blowout illustrating just how far out we've walked along the net energy cliff. I am frustrated and feeling a sense of urgency, having long ago moved past the issue of when and how much for oil. There is a spectrum of PO believers here, some of whom are farther along in embracing the descent, as Andre? said so nicely. And now there is also a whole host of newbies panicked by the sudden appearance of insecurity and rapid massive civilization change. So while education regarding PO, which is science of 50 years ago, needs to be ongoing, issues of the future and descent need to be addressed if we are to have any hopes of a viable future. I'm just frustrated.
Not you specifically, but to the comment I responded to. It may not be at the top of the agenda, but everyone has a role in this discussion, and it remains at the top of my agenda because that is how I think I can best make a contribution.
I realize that I won't come up with any organic farming breakthroughs, for example, so I tend not to discuss that.
I think at this point that anyone can contribute dialogue/ideas about adaptation will be making a contribution to the possibility of a viable future. I don't see a mission stated for TOD beyond "discussions about energy and our future." Perhaps the two discussions attract different people and are inherently at odds, since the first discussion, energy, has the goal of education, and the second discussion, our future, is complex, wholistic, and is about adaptation. The energy discussion attracts engineers focused on technology, and the future discussion attracts a ragtag mix of systems generalists, and the two don't blend well. And while one discussion hopefully leads to the other, many don't make the leap. Or, perhaps the second conversation on descent simply cannot be carried out online or at a global level, because the nature of the discussion is local and affective? Who knows.
The energy discussion attracts engineers focused on technology, and the future discussion attracts a ragtag mix of systems generalists, and the two don't blend well. And while one discussion hopefully leads to the other, many don't make the leap. Or, perhaps the second conversation on descent simply cannot be carried out online or at a global level, because the nature of the discussion is local and affective? Who knows.
I know. You could think of the rest of us a comic relief.
The audience here is much larger, and the spinoff contacts among posters much more fruitful, than you seem to be able to imagine. I think globally and act locally.
I cannot contribute to the technical discussion, but I can follow much of it and that is why I came here. As just one of millions watching the TV reports on the GOM I had questions not being answered by the media. WOW!! It was like having Dad back again. This site helps me to access the world (not just the GOM disaster but the varieties of expertise and the social spheres represented by each person who posts) and to assess my role in it, for example, the future of our oldest son, who is weighing architectural against ecological studies in university but who is, at 34, already self-educated in both areas. Will he complete those studies in the US and go on to a conventional career or will he be forced by economic factors back to our patch of Canadian land (which so far seems to be very advantageously positioned ecologically) and to subsistence farming, building, and communal living? See? From your erudition to my disposition. Helpful.
The issues being debated here by experts are being watched by the rag-tag of little folk who are not so stupid as some people assume. We have developed our mental resources in different, not lesser, ways. I don't have to "mix" with with you, although as a sort of "systems generalist" on the human brain I begin to think I have a contribution to make to some of the technologists who seem flummoxed by the status quo. To those unable to imagine positive outcomes to the transitional energy phase but that I have been adapting to for 28 years I have some encouraging things to say. I appreciate the fact that others in this forum offer wisdom on the minutae of transition as well as technical knowledge.
The purpose of TOD is to approach problems optimistically, if I have read the directions correctly. We are looking for solutions here. I have solved a major social problem: I can define, neurologically, what causes so-called mental illness and what determines much, if not most, of human behaviour. The explanation for behaviour, including extreme behaviour, resides primarily in the physiology of the right ear and its effect on the brain, hence on the entire body and what that body can achieve. I arrived at that understanding because when faced with an environment peopled with individuals displaying a range of behaviour problems I (much of the time) remained hopeful and determined to understand and remediate those problems. Most people would have walked away; because I didn't others can benefit from what I learned by hanging in.
The technological discussion here frequently ends on notes of hopelessness. Perhaps that is where I can build bridges, not of steel, but of the mind. Knowledge alone does not generate hope. Hope generates new knowledge. I do not mean to rebuke those who express every flavour of discouragement from pale green cynicism to the deep jade of despair. Those thoughts arise in the right brains of all of us and thank you for crystallizing our angst.
But to those who can use their hemispheres integratively, know that the expectation of change causes change—and you can draw its shape and colour it before it comes into being. The effort of imagining positive outcomes opens the intellect to the formulation of those outcomes. That is one of the enormous potentials of TOD.
The more thoroughly informed the logical system of the left brain, the more it tends to chase itself in circles; whereas it needs to integrate the broader perceptions and hidden memories of the right brain in order to maximize its potential for problem-solving. That is why people so often come to the solution of a puzzle in dreams or as they awaken from sleep; the right brain (subconscious) has been more fully accessed by the left brain during that interval of left-brain rest. Some people have that access easily, but they tend also to be the people with less well-developed left dominance. Picture the problem solved and try to work back from there to the present reality. What if? What if the onset of change that most seem to anticipate as impending disaster instead produced marvellous positive outcomes? That is not pie-in-the-sky escapism; it is the means of arriving at novel solutions whatever one's area of expertise.
So think of the rag-tag of systems generalists as your right brain trying to help your left brain to come up with some practical answers.
I get qualitative brainstorms during exercise such as biking, running, or skiing, but my quantitative analytical work comes during these weird interludes where I can barely stay awake and drift in and out of consciousness. Of course that doesn't work very well at work when you have management keeping track of your activities.
Interesting. For me its different....after a solid hour of beating my head against an intracable problem during the day, I give up. Go home, go to sleep. The next morning after a good nights sleep, in the shower, is when the answer arrives. My subconscious is smarter than my conscious!
Wonder if I can use this as an excuse to nap at the office during the day?
Maybe "you" are not who "you" think you are?
You're not weird.
I do the same thing.
Except I do it consciously. I consciously think of problems for my brain to work on overnight when I sleep. And when I wake up, sometimes the answer seems to "pop" into my consciousness. But of course I know it didn't happen by magic. I had retrained my brain to operate that way. If you don't train yourself, then you will have just random dreams. But if you learn to focus your cognitive centers (there are many of them) on specific questions, they may surprise you by messaging those answers to the part of your brain that thinks it is the "you".
That said, good ideas and insight don't always come from within. Sometimes they come from stuff said here on TOD.
Depends on your particular peak agenda doesn't it? If Peak causes the hoped for die-off, who cares about the tail?
For example, Lunberg claimed that walmart trucks would stop running within days of peak oil.
http://www.bluegreenearth.us/archive/article/2005/culture-change/lundber...
Of what point is worrying about the tail if your entire fantasy is designed around the peak itself?
And when we find a 1.3 trillion in place barrels in 1935, why do we use graphics which hide it? The graphic in question doesn't even mention the things excluded from it, unlike at least some of the others referenced from the majors or even ASPO. Accident?
This type of selective editing of information, perhaps helpful during the "lets scare the pants off the noobs" phase of peak introduction, certainly does not help out during any honest discussion on the topic.
Of course, there are more insidious examples out there, but I'm sure everyone is aware of them, so there is no need to elaborate.
My sense is that you are on a tear right now and not really looking to collaborate, as though you have a point to prove so that you can be right about something.
Nonetheless, here is my response to your comment.
I start from the simplest principle I can find then I elaborate...but only as far as is needed to make my point.
That graph comes immediately before the discovery/production graph from ASPO in my video:
http://www.postpeakliving.com/preparing-post-peak-life
I don't mention EROEI at all though I'm well acquainted with it because I don't think it's needed to make the case. I do mention the ELM because it's intellectually accessible to more people and is material. In Part 2 I include rebuttals to what I presented in Part 1.
Also notice in the video that I include multiple other peak production dates and do my best to explain why the very latest ones aren't tenable. I fit in as much as I can and still keep the overall presentation to ~45 minutes.
If you are relating to me as someone who is trying to hide the bad so that I can have an overwhelmingly lopsided presentation, I think you are mistaken. My goal is to give people the full story and then let them decide. The video is Version 2.0 and in a few months I will begin work on Version 3.0 to refine it further.
I made it to 10 minutes before I had to stop. I shall simply mention that your discovery profile cartoon is incorrect and does not include recent information as to the size of oil discoveries in the year 1935.
The size of the discovery:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3028/pdf/FS09-3028.pdf
and its discovery well and geology:
http://cohesion.rice.edu/naturalsciences/earthscience/research.cfm?doc_i...
"Standard Oil made the first discovery in the Heavy Oil Belt in 1935 when the La Canada-1 well tested at 40 barrels/day of 7 deg API gravity oil."
A change in verbiage would suffice to clear up the problem and reflect that it is not the discovery profile of ALL oil you are referring to, but only the oil counted as "conventional". The ASPO titled graphic does this, your cartoon does not. The word "conventional" is the standard clue provided by ASPO so that they can create a discovery graph using only what they wish to call "conventional". The ASPO definition of conventional is not geologic in nature, and is the mechanism used to discount as much volume as possible.
Certainly oil and gas references have recognized the size of the Orinoco, ranking it above Ghawar in both inplace estimates and recoverable volumes more than a quarter century ago.
(Oil and Gas Journal, Feb 24, 1986, Field Size Tables, p.93-100)
When you have the time to continue, I'd appreciate it if you viewed the whole presentation. I promise I will treat your comments with respect.
In the meantime, I've done the work to satisfy myself that conventional oil — as defined by ASPO — is indeed the best indicator of our future. The text in the overview at Rice, plus the nationalization occurring at this moment in Venezuela, simply convince me further that this oil will not ramp up in time:
We don't know when that was written but it's likely sometime in the 2000's.
Unless the U.S. invades Venezuela (not out of the question, it seems to be doing a lot of that lately), I think we will mostly watch wistfully at all that oil not being used. You may think that Orinoco oil should be included in our consideration. I do not.
I'm heading out for Friday beer...if you have any other points you'd like me to consider, I'll respond either tonight or tomorrow.
Cheers,
André
Edit: Thanks for the comment on the language, I'll tighten that up in the next revision. Plus added "included in our consideration."
Are you sure?
I am a geoscientist. When I am asked about oil on this planet, professional training requires I do not make up my own definitions for what oil is, or is not. The economics of its recovery is uncertain. Its existence is not.
ASPO is free to do whatever they wish, to call it whatever they wish, to count whatever they wish. I can do the same, I imagine I could design a discovery curve which resembles the outline of a rabbit rather than a nice bell shaped curve thingie. And my discovery graph design of "oil" would then be as useful as theirs.
Of course it's all oil and no one is saying it isn't. What we are asserting is that the oil we oil we are most interested in is what we've been calling here conventional oil.
If you don't see why that distinction is important, there is probably not much I can say to sway you at this point.
Cheers,
André
Really? This oil I count. This oil I don't count. You've just said its all oil. Then I make a cool graph and claim its a nice bell shaped curve...knowing the entire time its only a bell shaped curve because I excluded the single largest oil accumulation on the planet. Perhaps you prefer "selective data manipulation to make a point"? The result being the same of course.
Thank you for adding some simplicity and common sense to this increasingly dull, academic discussion!
How straight or wiggly the lines are, whether peak is accurate within a couple of years--does that matter?
Hubbert himself--on VIDEO!--addresses some of the objections above:
1. That the model is overly "deterministic": Relevant quote: "That assumes an orderly evolution." Yes, he knew his model couldn't take into account the vicissitudes of the economy.
2. That the "peak" in the mid-90s didn't happen: Hubbert anticipated this. Relevant quote: "OPEC is tampering with this curve...it's conceivable that the peak might be shifted over to the back side a bit...that would extent this middle 80% by about ten years." I. e. until about 2005.
3. If all the math geeks in the world approved of the perfection of a WHT model that challenges Hubbert's model, what effect would this have on government, business, and the lay community? Probably nothing.
4. No matter whose model is "really right," it will only be confirmed in retrospect; that is, like Hubbert's model, the vast majority will not know--nor care--about the peak until after it's happened--until it's too late.
Hubbert's method contains uncertainties. Welcome to reality.
Robert Rapier worries about this--we can't afford to be wrong, he says. But how would we know we were right? When the crisis happens.
History teaches us--we're rarely right.
Well, at least its more interesting than the discussion about mythical spook scribblings elsewhere on this thread.
WHT--you've got to ask yourself: Why do "mystical spook scribblings" get more traction--everywhere!--than such discussions as this one?
Overtly technical science fails to capture the public mind.
And that is not only sad, but that mindset is not conducive to the long-term viability of 'modern' humanity.
BTW, you were spot-on using the turn-of-phrase 'capture the mind' wrt religion.
My super-Baptist SIL was in town a few weeks ago and when we were driving towards a huge local mega-church and she asked "Is that a prison?"...I bit my tongue to keep from saying 'Yes, of the mind."
Science doesn't 'capture the mind'...the mind uses science to deduce and evaluate theories about how things work...evaluate ideas in terms of how well they explain empirical observations, and how well experiments test and support the ideas.
All knowledge is provisional. Science never stops...it is never 'done'. It is not absolute.
Many people prefer a good yarn that has a definitive start inside the front cover and a definitive end inside the back cover...
That's a mind blowing observation. You can talk about that stuff on only about a million different discussion groups.
It seems these folks have access to cheap natural gas. I see an opportunity here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwogQWLEqW8&feature=related
http://seekingalpha.com/article/209805-shale-gas-revolution-could-turn-o...
Shale Gas 'Revolution' Could Turn Out to Be Mammoth Spin Job
Bill Francis’ articles (Part One & Two):
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/378002-bill-francis/71643-groppe-s-arg...
http://seekingalpha.com/instablog/378002-bill-francis/73812-groppes-argu...
Jeffrey, I wanted to thank you for prepping me for the interview with Michael Lynch last week. I unfortunately didn't get to use what you taught me in this instance, though! The format was set up to give Lynch the final word and I didn't get to rebut what he said.
I'm probably not the only one to use your expertise to sound good during an interview and wanted to publicly acknowledge how much I've learned from you. Thanks to you (and Samuel) for your tireless efforts, especially on the Export Land Model!
Michael C. Lynch is certainly an interesting person. In our 2006 debate, when I confronted him with the Texas decline, he went into denial mode. He said that Texas, which basically regulated global oil prices from the Thirties to the early Seventies, was not a place where he would choose to drill. In other words, he basically discounts any region that shows a decline as an anomaly not worthy of discussion. I was going to bring up the North Sea decline when the moderator moved on to a different topic.
In any case, in Michael C. Lynch you basically have a walking, talking personification of the cognitive dissonance that is the conventional wisdom regarding energy supplies for the vast majority of the population. As in the movie "The Sixth Sense," for most of us our auto centric suburban way of life is dead, but most of us don't know it yet, and we only see what we want to see.
Agreed. But until I see evidence otherwise, I'm inclined to believe that he authentically thinks we have no trouble in store. It's an increasingly untenable position but I think he'll hold it all the way to the end — and possibly longer.
I agree Aangel. Michael Lynch, and indeed the vast majority of cornucopians, are true believers. Lynch truly believes there is no peak in sight. Every success, every new discovery found is evidence that the peak oilers are wrong and every setback can be explained by the evil plotting of the peak oil gang.
Ron P.
Study Says Natural Gas Use Likely to Double:
IMO nonsense, current storage build has been less than last year each week for the past 8 weeks.
As a percent of total energy it may increase but only because Oil production will decrease.
NG production may increase over the short term, 2-3 years but then US production will be hard pressed to reach 60 billion CF/D versus about 50 today.
Greenhouse gas emissions will be less than 80% of 1990 levels by 2050 with out any legislation, due to the loss of oil and gas production.
Oil and gas affect the production of other fuels as well, partly by affecting the financial system (credit contraction means less demand for all fuel), and because of direct linkages.
Given our built infrastructure, it takes oil to move coal from one place to another. I expect oil is used in the extraction of uranium. Even natural gas has some oil linkages--some of the drilling rigs are diesel operated and; workers use gasoline to drive from gas well to gas well, and to commute to work.
So I expect different fuels will tend to decline together, regardless of what Hubbert's curve may say. It this is true, greenhouse gasses will decline quite quickly.
I think that oil production will fall much faster than the rate of decline in the quantity of liquid fuel used in the extraction of fossil fuels. In other words, I think that producing fuel (and building coal to liquids facilities) will not be hindered much if at all by an increasing scarcity of oil over the next ten to fifteen years. I further expect that the U.S. will be importing oil from Iraq and from Venezuela in substantial quantities fifteen to twenty years from now--enough to fuel further extraction of coal and yet more coal to liquids plants.
Hence, I disagree with your conclusion that different fuels will decline together. Coal, which was once king will be king once more, and therefore greenhouse gas emissions will probably increase rather than decrease from current levels.
There is a company called "Peak Oil and Gas". I had no idea.
Peak Oil and GAs plans $55m IPO
All these years I have been googling peak oil and this is the first time they ever popped up. Well, this is the first time I ever spotted them anyway.
Ron P.
There is a Peak Oil company in the UK. They distribute heating oil to remote houses in a part of England known as the Peak District. They probably have one road tanker...
http://www.peakoil.co.uk/
[edit]
I am sure they are fully aware of peak oil the concept, how can they not be given their company name by now? However, I am equally sure they consider it a deeply annoying fringe cult and just hope it will go away and stop confusing their customers.
I've known about them for years. Sometimes people wander into PeakOil.com and think it's the company.
Back when this site first started, Peak Oil the company was a lot easier to find. Now they've been totally swamped (in the Google results) by peak oil the concept.
I hope they have no plans to sue the site.
By the way, I noticed that you have included some fairly articulate items that have a deeper analysis than what is generally seen in the MSM--I'm thinking of the "Addicted to oil--and to economic growth" piece and the one about unaffordable lifestyles.
I'm curious: As someone who regularly scans the news, are you seeing a significant increase in these types of deeper and more accurate analyses (by my lights, anyway) out there?
Not really. They've always been out there. Sometimes in the darnedest places. They just go unnoticed among the more mainstream stuff.
Thanks. You know we all think you're the best.
By the way, did you know that your name (well, spelled with two n's, anyway) means 'sweetheart' in Irish (thought the other meaning is less flattering--"chronic irritating affliction"--perhaps what you are to TPTB??)
http://mankatofreepress.com/local/x383283010/Report-Cuts-inevitable-for-...
When even the cornucopians see the next 5 years as steadily declining revenues and increasing expenses + increasing demands you best figure on some major problems/changes.
While I was thinking that with 5-8 billion budget shortfall in the next 2 year budget in Minnesota would cause this result, it is kind of scary to see the dreamers and schemers coming to this conclusion!
It is should be interesting to see the various strategies used by "small town" America to deal with the ongoing financial collapse.
Reality is just starting to creep into the minds of local leaders in my locale (from the Mayor down the chain to local business leaders).
The demise of the Happy Shiny People is an ugly thing to watch.
John,
Minnesota will feel financial and economic pain--but nothing compared to what the cities in California and New York and some other states will feel. Our long-term budget deficit outlook is serious but tractable. Minnesota voters vote more often and are more knowledgeable and perhaps more intelligent than are voters in most other states. I'm glad that I'll be living in St. Paul, starting 15 August in a walkable neighborhood--Highland Park.
Welcome to Lake Wobegon... ???
Just the other day I was reading a different blog, and a poster there was telling everyone how their happyshinyville (Boulder, CO) had been immune to the Great Depression, and how they would be Immune Again This Time.
Boulder, Colorado - 20 square miles surrounded by reality.
People here really, honestly think they are in little bubble that is immune from the reality of the harsh world outside. It is a combination of new age philosophies fueled by trust fund wealth. Boulder *will be* more immune than most of the rest of the US, just because such a large proportion of the economy here is based on assets rather than production. Your assets may shrink, but half of ten million is still five million, so let's have another glass of wine and stare at the sun glowing on the Flatirons. Maybe we won't go to Tibet like we planned, but we can certainly do the Napa thing, can't we? Can't we?
Boulder is a major employment center and that is the main reason that the traffic is so bad. They restricted the population and drove up housing prices but did not cut off employment and commuters.
Not that I doubt you because I don't have the number. But do you have numbers which show that the main source of income is trust funds?
It is true that many people in Boulder are in a bubble but then I find that most of the people the United States are in a bubble, even if only a slightly different kind of bubble. The rich, of course, have a special kind of bubble which can make them especially annoying if they are spouting environmental awareness but spend most of their time jetting around about the world.
Anyway, reality bites.
Are you saying Dr Bartlett is lying?! >:^)
"more knowledgeable and perhaps more intelligent". Why thank you! However having lived here all my life I'm not sure I can really back you up on this one. I'd say we're just average people. by the way I'm about a 1 - 1.5 miles north of como park.
I live right across the Mississippi. The people are no smarter then anywhere else, just maybe more determined... Only good things? We are close to the oil in Canada and also the natural gas/coal out west of here... We have no resources of our own (wood/cold wx), but do have plenty of water. Our girls may be bigger and whiter, but they like to roll around the hay.
I think if you look at student performance in public schools you'll find that our students are high ranking compared to most students in most other states. Furthermore, Minnesota has--arguably--the cleanest politics of any state. And there is no doubt but that our voter turnout in Presidential elections is the highest among the fifty states. That last statistic speaks volumes.
Why did you smart cookies elect Michele Bachmann?
She has a district with a lot of conservative Republicans in it. St. Paul and Minneapolis are DFL territory most of the time. She is an idiot and IMO unworthy to represent Minnesota in DC.
I used to live in the Como Park neighborhood and each day would do laps around Como Lake on my bike, unless the trail was covered with ice or snow.
We'll have to get together after I move to Highland Park on 15 August. Feel free to e-mail me.
I have to point out that there are a slew of Twin Citians on TOD. Aside from posters above, Dohboi, Jon Friese, Gary Hoover (aka beggar), and myself all live in Mpls. Go Twin Cities!
We should all get together at a Minneapolis or St. Paul coffee house--maybe a Starbucks inside a Barnes & Noble store. Care to nominate a time and a place?
DEATH BY LEISURE: A CAUTIONARY TALE by Chris Ayres is a book that I just read and now recommend to all readers of TOD. It is a Peak Oil and climate change aware memoir, in which the author goes from driving a Range Rover for three years to riding a Vespa scooter. The book is entertaining and exceptionally well written: It tells how one man changed profoundly.
TNX Don for the book reference. Sounds like a good read. I will get my copy Tuesday and pass it around after reading. Again TNX.
Lynford,
If you do enjoy the book, please post your reaction to it on a future drumbeat. I picked it out by chance from the library's new-book shelf. Then I was surprised by
1. how enjoyable it was to read and
2. how relevant it is to concerns about AGW and Peak Oil.
Ayres went from a life of conspicuous consumption to one of relative frugality (except for a big house he got mainly (I think) to please his wife.
You mention an old problem. How much of what man does that is extravagant is done to please his woman/women? Or, if women decided that they didn't want all those trinkets (particularly the green paper kind), would men stop attempting to acquire them? Or, are all who strive for the American Way of Life infected with Afluenza, be they male of female?
E. Swanson
I think that most men are programmed to try to please women (or at least one woman) to get more sex. Yes, I believe it is just that simple. So if dear wifey wants a big house, fancy furniture, and a Chevvy Suburban, the man will try to provide all these things. And if he cannot or does not furnish the symbols of conspicuous consumption, the woman may very well leave him for a man who she thinks will support her in a style to which she would like to become accustomed to. I know that happened to end my own marriage of eighteen years.
I recall reading a story about some fellow who was making megabucks who then fell on hard times, only to have his wife up and leave him. She was quoted as telling him something like: "Of course, it was all about the money".
Or, as Tina Turner pointed out:
E. Swanson
I remember reading a good link posted on the drumbeat sometime last year. It looked at gender roles and pointed out that for any couple to retreat from materialism and return to some kind of farming lifestyle requires genuine trust and commitment from both partners. Supposedly the divorce and the breaking up of families was much less common way back when because it meant great economic
distress.
If you think there is a good likelihood that your husband will trade you in for a younger wife you will be unlikely to want to quit your job and use your retirement fund to buy a piece of land with the guy. If you are sure that your spouse will stick with you through thick and thin, devoting all your waking hours to building a farm with him might seem less risky.
Also a lot of modern conveniences like frozen broccoli and automatic washing machines and gas/electric stoves help out with what is often "women's work". If my partner was the sort of guy who thought unloading the dishwasher once a week and occasionally doing his own laundry qualified as a fair share of household chores I would absolutely not want to put myself into a kitchen with a wood stove a hand pump and 200 lbs of tomatoes to be canned if you want eat any this winter.
I don't doubt that there are lots of women that would throw a fit at giving up their personal car, wednesday night yoga class and designer shoes, but I think that a lack of long term commitment, trust and fairness from both sexes might also have something to do with it.
I don't doubt it either...
Debt slave and prisoner of others expectations...
Reminds me of a joke I once heard:
"Why do men tend to die several years before women?"
"Because we want to"
Over at PeakOil.com, you hear from a lot of women who are trying to convince their husbands to go along with peak oil preps. I think it's really a chicken or egg thing, which gender is "to blame" for our affluenza.
In baseball, there's a saying: "Chicks dig the long ball." Meaning that power hitters who can hit lots of home runs get the girls. But someone actually did a study on that, and found that chicks do not dig the long ball. What impresses a woman is a man who is admired by other men. So if women fall for home run hitters, it's because men look up to such men.
In the end, it's all about status - for both genders. And it might be argued that it's men who made up the rules of the game.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that my situation is everyone's situation...
I have insufficient data, Captain!
My personal life experiences would lead me to think that few people I have interacted with personally or professionally seem to think that BAU/resource depletion/pollution is anything to worry about.
I think they meant another "millstone" around the neck of the Obama presidency. More half-measures and stalling by FrankenDodd, more pretending to do something by Bush (ah, I mean Obama).
From Rational Optimism: Hope and Foreboding
At least someone is listening. At least someone cares.
And, yet, isn’t that article a “doomer” rant? Consider the following from “The doomer's curse.”
It would serve us all well to keep that in mind. I have seen some of the doomer’s curse on TOD, and in myself from time to time.
Best hopes in phychoanalysis.
Craig
Ray Grigg, the author of that "Rational Optimism" article, does get it. He has written about peak oil often for his paper, the Courier-Islander.
I think Guy McPherson might be the Poster Child of the "Doomer" in that particular article.
I begin to lose track of who thinks what, but if I am not mistaken, Guy actively promotes the decay and collapse of industrial civilization.
(edited for better quote and link for an example)
The Degrowth conference this past week in Spain made a Degrowth Declaration that gets right to it, Aardvark, promoting the descent. I'm not going to call it decay and collapse if I'm thinking positively and actively trying to change things. The group called for local currencies, promotion of various relocalization agendas, abandoning large-scale infrastructure, limitation of advertising, support of women's reproduction rights,and conscious procreations, and decommercialization of politics. The link to the working groups is below:
http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/index.php?id=9
This was a broad-based group of both scientists and civil-society participants from around the world. As usual, the Europeans are way ahead of us Americans, who still view the future as BAU, and view efforts to change things as doomer paranoia. The peer review process at TOD is sometimes unfortunate in preventing ideas and the paradigm presented here from progressing farther than the majority or poster-leaders. Additionally, TOD's cadre of specialists focused on technology limits big picture thinking on the future. I know Campfire was supposed to change all of that, and perhaps we are all victims of lack of vision beyond BAU, and its all hopeless. But I will try. Editors, are you listening? With improved visibility, you have the potential here to make a difference in education and perhaps even more.
I would suggest that the new influx of people to the site who do not understand peak oil will be a problem for this site for those reasons, magnifying underlying problems. Discussion of GOM issues such as safe migrations and how to improve mitigation which are surely coming could actually make a difference but are not being discussed, and PO aware posters are hunkered down in corners like this or have fled the site completely. Or perhaps those people were never here, and need to be attracted. I'm still waiting for TOD to move beyond its what looks like infinite supply of oil supply curves.
I think you should count and categorize all the articles for 12 months and see if your intuition is correct. I think you would be surprised at how many non-technical/non-oil articles are posted here.
You're one of the minority, Andre. Your posts and your website are great examples of a possible future, and kudos to you for putting the ball in play.
You could be right that my perspective is skewed by spending two days reading the ongoing circus called, "Deepwater Oil Spill," which, by the way, is named inappropriately, since this is the much more catastrophic situation, a Blowout.
I tend toward just looking at the key post and maybe browsing the thread, looking at some posters, or not, depending on time.
But I think we here at TOD has a varied degree of future predictions, some good some bad, most of us acknowledge that we can't predict the future from past results. There has been a few new folks that have added a positive shape to discussions of late. Alan Drake has been steadfast in pushing toward a possible good future as well, even though he is in the thick of things in the Gulf.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs from Arkansas,
Do you suppose they are abiotic?
Craig
Craig, by jove, I think you're on to something. Abiotic oil curves; an endless supply of engineer-in-denial happy and sad faces :-))))][(((((((
I think this stuff is in some ways as bad as the cornucopian "the singularity is near!" nonsense.
I'm all for thinking seriously about how to change our systems to be more robust, less dependent on impossible kinds of constant growth, less Ponzi-scheme-like, and more efficient. But if the goal is to gently ease back into pre-industrial ways of doing things then count me out. I'm most certainly not a believer in whitewashed nostalgia about how great it was back in the "good old days." In the good old days life was nasty, brutish, and short for 99% of humanity. I don't care how far back you go. I just don't see the evidence for primitive utopias outside of a few very small scale outlier cases. The last hundred years and especially the last 50 have been a very special time for more people than ever, and we should not simply throw that away if we have any choice at all in the matter.
You might call that "trying to continue BAU", but it depends on how you define BAU. There's lots of stuff about BAU that I think is amazingly stupid and would not mind at all to see gone, but there's quite a bit worth keeping as well.
So I suppose I sort of agree with some of the American right-wingers here. (That's a rare thing.) Boo on all the elitists trying to sell the middle class on poverty. I'd like to see some of these globetrotting "thought leader" narcissists who attend these things try to actually live like they claim we should be living. But fat chance of that... that's for the "little people" whom they hope will go back to tending feudal farms and living to a ripe old age of 35. There's a lot of thinly veiled "have to get the peasants off the King's lands" elitism in some of this stuff. If we let this sort of thinking win, then for 99% of us it's back to tending the lord's lands and sending our daughters up to the castle to be raped.
Of course nature may not give us a choice. Maybe "nasty, brutish, and short" is part of what one doomer that I once read called "nature's eternal fascism." Maybe the universe just isn't a very nice place. But we should try.
We should bend every resource and every ounce of intellect we have toward transitioning to a sustainable technological civilization. What's the worst that can happen? Poverty and misery and death? If we don't even try, we know that's what awaits us. Hey, at least old history buffs could tell their children that once upon a time men tried to escape the hell of peasant existence.
Until we embrace decline, we'll make all the wrong choices.
(I don't want it to be collapse, however. I'd rather a more gentle slope!)
By the Oil Gods, aangel, I think you are right. And, like you, I'd rather a more gentle slope. I am just afraid that we are already heading down that slope, and the severity is what it is. And, we cannot go back to the top, so... maybe we can move sidewise to some relatively gentle downturn. I just don't know how to do it.
Ideas, anyone?
Craig
Like this...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMhBbmE92v8&feature=related
Link up top: Caribbean Storms Strengthen, May Head for Oil Spill
This has now been upgraded from a 60 percent chance to an 80 percent chance of developing into a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours.
NOAA National Hurricane Center
This thing is so close that if it does develop into a hurricane the rigs may not have enough time to evacuate. There is some talk of evacuating now. Oil is already up about $2.25 on the news.
Ron P.
Those of us who believe the world is on the wrong path—those the poster called "doomers"—would be overjoyed were a kind of metamorphosis occur—a boodless coup, as it were—that would steer us in a different direction—but events overtake us. The world is so in love with the idea of ever more, more, more—a belief, by the way, which cannot hold—we despair of anything short of a cataclysm to bring it to it's senses.
And now, do we not have a cataclysm on our hands? What if BP simply cannot stop the leak? What happens then? Although they've given us assurances there's a "95% chance of success" that relief wells will quench this—what if this, too, proves to be just one more rosy BP assurance that didn't turn out to be true?
And then of course there's this:
"The second angel sounded his trumpet, and SOMETHING LIKE A MOUNTAIN, ALL ABLAZE, WAS THROWN INTO THE SEA. A third of the sea turned into blood, and a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed."
--Revelation 8:8
Speaking of bogus, the whole Book of Revelation is bogus. IMHO John wrote it while under the influence of spoiled rye; it produces a chemical identical to or nearly identical to LSD. In other words, the whole Book of Revelation is nothing more and nothing less than a bad acid trip. I've talked to a number of Lutheran pastors about the Book of Revelation, and they agree on one thing: They do not preach on the Book of Revelation, pretty much for the reason I've given.
If you think every word in the King James Bible is the literal Word of God, I think you are sadly mistaken.
Revalation ws written by John of Ephesus (not the same guy who wrote the Gospel) on the Island of Patmos. Patmos was famous as the place where the old folks from the Helenistic Mediterranian were sent... there, they ate / drank henbane (http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/h/henban23.html), and hallucinated their lives away.
Revelation was added late to the cannonical Bible. The first time was in 367
The canonical Christian Bible was formally established by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem in 350 (although it had been generally accepted by the church previously), confirmed by the Council of Laodicea in 363 (both lacked the book of Revelation), and later established by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 (with Revelation added),...
One source claims Erasmus wrote the ending himself.
In any case it is a strange book. http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/revelation.html
I understand that Martin Luther considered removing it from the Protestant Bible, but saddly he did not.
Craig
Erasmus!? Surely you mean Athanasius of Alexandria and not Erasmus.
Did I mention my undergrad deg. was from a bible college? Not that it matters that much to facts or theories, but in the interest of full disclosure. BA, Major Philosophy, minor History.
http://bible.org/article/textual-problem-1-john-57-8
Other sources are more emphatic...
http://members.cox.net/deleyd/religion/revelation.html
Like I said, it is interesting.
Craig
And let's not forget--and this is something I emphasize for my lit. students--John of Patmos was writing for his time, not ours. All the New Testament writers believed the End would come in their times.
The Beast was the ROMAN empire, also called BABYLON in coded language. The Whore of Babylon was the CITY OF ROME.
Someone quotes the mountain thrown into the sea motif: JOP stole that from "Daniel" (who wasn't really Daniel).
The Book of Revelation is perfectly irrelevant to contemporary events.
I very seldom reply to religious posts because I think they have nothing to do with the peak oil debate. However since the subject is already on the table...
If you think any word of the King James Bible, or any other so-called holy book is the literal word of God, I think you are sadly mistaken. The Book of Revelation has just as much a claim to divine inspiration as any other book in the Bible, absolutely none.
Ron P.
The only sure thing in the Bible is "Book of Job". It's a literal master piece. Go read it :-) .......... or rather :-(
I'll take the Ecclesiastes section, please, if you're done with it..
Been meaning to read the Gnostic Gospel, but haven't gotten there yet.
Which one? There are several.
If you mean Thomas, it will take you about fifteen minutes. It's just a collection of sayings, most of which make no sense whatsoever.
The saga of the House of David in 1 and 2 Samuel is the high point of the whole canon if you ask me.
It's no wonder Faulkner loved it.
a friend took Revelations in seminary & the whole course culminated in a drama/play; which the prof believed was written for a specific venue: a drama written/inspired re the politics, power figures, & issues of the day.
I actually agree with Don Sailorman for once.
Martin Luther took Revelation out of his Bible along with the Apocrypha.
He also had harsh words for the book of Revelation, saying that he could "in no way detect that the Holy Spirit produced it."[6]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible
Still it is considered as infallible prophecy by most Evangelicals.
I learned more about religion in a college level history course then i did my entire life up to that point. I loved that class. The guy even had us read a paper on if our switch to farming was really worth it 10,000 years ago... This was 10 years ago (i'm getting too old) and looking back, i'm sure the professor was a doomer. Sometimes i see him at the grocery store.
Religion is just spooky. People will buy into some pretty crazy $hi7.
I watched some thing on how all religions come from the Egyptians ...with the seasons playing a huge role (it does make sense)... Who knows, who cares :)
Was it Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race?
The last few sentences of that particular essay:
So, quite recently we got smart enough (and/or uppity enough) to think we could adjust the environment, rather than having to adjust to it. The results so far have been a mixed bag, but I'm not as pessimistic about the experiment's outcome as Prof. Diamond is.
No, that's not what happened. Hunter-gatherers do understand farming, and often do modify the environment. They do things like scatter seeds of the plants they like, and may build walls that help with hunting. They're plenty smart and uppity enough.
They don't settle down and farm full-time, because it's too much work. Hunter-gatherers work only three hours a day to provide food, shelter, and clothing, and they live longer, healthier lives than farmers. Why would they want to farm if they don't have to?
The problem is that hunter-gatherers require a lot more land per person than farmers. If there's a conflict, the society with the higher population density wins. That is why hunter-gatherers have been driven to the least desirable land - the desert, the arctic, etc.
It is flat out false to say that all religions came from the Egyptians. How about Buddhism and Hinduism? Judaism probably existed in some form before the Jews became slaves in Egypt. Christianity grew directly from Judaism, with major contributions from the neo-Platonists and the stoics. Islam was a combination of Judaism (e.g. circumcision of males) and Christianity with the Trinity stripped away. Some of Islam directly reflects the beliefs of Mahomet--the prohibition on drinking of alcohol in particular. The origins of Judaism are described pretty well in the historical parts of the Old Testament. Probably the monotheism of Akhnaton had nothing to do with Jewish monotheism, though it is impossible to be certain on this point. From what it says in the Old Testament, Judaism was first a polytheistic religion: "For I am a JEALOUS God . . ." Yahweh was indeed jealous of the other gods and Jewish prophets blamed all the ills of the ancient Isralites on their worshiping false gods and idols.
Early in its history, however, Judaism did become emphatically monotheistic.
So if I read you right on your short historical synopsis, Judaism was the original American Idol? Yahweh won? Wonder if he sang Hava Nagila...
He sang Me Comma (,) Moe Cha ...
(sorry, I just got back from services. Crude translation from the Hebrew: Which God dude up there in the heights is as cool as you dude? (Answer: no other))
פברואר 10 ניו אורלינס פאנקשן 111
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbtJDfqOG04&feature=related
So you're saying the New Orleans Blues Band is more cool than He Who Sends Hurricanes at them?
Hmmm. That doesn't sound like a convincing new religion to take on.
And Thomas Jefferson called it the "ravings of a maniac," the bastard!
Sorry Don Sailorman, but you can't cherry pick. Mind you I can appreciate the Bible for it's literature and some aspects of its spirituality - I can even agree the example of Jesus is inspiring in ways that other myth stories aren't.
In the end, though, religion is just BS.
I don't need any priests to make it through life, peak oil, or death.
What makes you think I'm a Christian? In fact, I am not now and never have been a Christian.
As a recovering Christian, I am ambivelant about this. I agree that priests are not 'necessary'. And, I also can see where they are helpful to those who feel that they are necessary. When my son died, we had to locate a preacher to say a few words, for the benefit of some kinfolk who see things differently from me. Since my son was a Druid, and I don't have access to any of those folks (sorry, JMG. Notice was too short, and distance too great), we were given a list of 'generic' preachers. Picked one whose name sounded good. Those who like that sort of thing told us he was inspiring. Somehow I was not impressed, but I understand how those people might feel, and it would have been wrong to do otherwise.
So... priests. Not necessary, but not bad in some circumstances. Only, I don't give them any money... it just encourages them!
Craig
Dude. (Druid?)
Sorry, you got the whole thing upside down and wrong.
It's all about getting the herd together ...oops .. I mean getting the congregation together as a social bird chirping group ... so they can all resonate with the same feathered flock of birds song ... oops ... I mean praise Him who is Holy ... and the priests are necessary so they can synch up all the harmonies
But of course, we humans are not bird like creatures who flock together and tweet to each other, are we?
By the way: sincere condolences for your loss
I too recently lost my son
It's a hole in the heart that never gets filled
Even if I might poke fun at religion from time to time
In times of great sorrow, such as when you lose a close family member
It's something to cling onto
And having friends and family join you in your sorrow,
While not filling the hurtful and empty void left behind
Nonetheless is a kind of comfort
They're saying: I feel for you dude. I empathize.
Ditto here. I empathize with you over the loss of your son.
The Universe is not a fair and nice place
Why me? why us? Why my son at such a young age? He did not deserve it.
we did not deserve it.
Sh*t of the really bad kind happens all the time.
Be thankful for the few gentle moments in between.
Thank God.
And as ambivalent, opinionated, or open minded to discussing the vicissitudes and messy bits of the world's religions I keep one important thought in mind:
There are no atheists in fox holes.
There will come a time in everyone's life where you will be frightened or challenged beyond the ability of your mortal coil and you will reach out to something or someone. Perhaps my friends, that is the only important fact.
Not everyone. While I agree religion is an important means of social control and an essential part of the human condition, and will likely play a big role in how we adapt to peak oil, there are sometimes atheists in foxholes.
In particular, my family has been atheist for generations, including those of us who have been in foxholes.
Honestly, if you haven't been raised with religion, it really doesn't occur to you to pray or whatever. Foxholes or no.
When you pray in solitude, who the heck do you think is listening?
Hint: there ain't nobody here but you and the rest of your brain
I honestly haven't a clue. I don't pray, in solitude or elsewhere.
However, I do sometimes talk to myself. I like a little intelligent conversation once in awhile. ;-)
A deathbed is a kind of foxhole.
More of a foxhole than a real foxhole.
And yet one professional observes (link):
If you think any word in the King James Bible is the literal word of god I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ooops! posted before I seen Darwinian's post saying the same thing. Oh well.
In Ridley's words, "The generation that has experienced more peace, freedom, leisure time, education, medicine, travel, movies, mobile phones and messages than any generation in history is lapping up gloom at every opportunity."
Ridley is living in denial. This generation is the first one living a LOWER standard of living that their parents. Some obvious facts... It now takes 2 incomes to have the same average home than it did in the 70's. A dollar buys about 1/3 less than it did in the 70's. A year out of the recession and unemployment is as high or higher than it was at the peak of past recessions. The only thing this generation has MORE of is rampant in-your-face corruption at every level of politics and business. Only someone living in denial or profiteering would state otherwise.
Ridley was chairman of Northern Rock, the bank which had to be rescued with 27 billion pounds of UK taxpayer money. He was criticised by the treasury select committee for his reckless, high risk business plan which caused the first run on a UK bank since the nineteenth century. That's where his "rational optimism" leads. You would not think he would have the brass neck to write his latest book after his experience. Some people have no shame.
Ridley is a great biologist, one of the best. His degrees are in Zoology. I am one of his greatest fans. I have read three of his books, The Red Queen, Genome and my favorite, Nature Via Nurture. But they are all really great books. I loved them all.
Too damn bad he ventured into the field of economics, where he seems to be a total imbicle.
Ron P.
I was wondering if Ridley the biologist and Ridley the author under the discussion are the same-I agree with Darwinian, his previous literary work in biology is great.
Let's not be too quick to condemn this book without reading it, and keep in mind that most or all of it may have been written before the current crash.I expect that by generation he means "boomers children/grandchildren who have had the world handed to them on a silver platter".
Now I may get in over my head here,and I am going to use some colorful language to draw a fast picture. There is a school of thought in biology that contends that a lot of our autoimmune disease problems are the result of having hotshot high performance immune systems with not enough to do;we don't have the normal load of parasites anymore, for instance, and we don't eat many things capable of causing food poisoning.
So the immune system reacts to trivial problems like a gung ho young cop with no crimes to solve and no criminals to chase.He spends his days creating more problems than he solves because he writes nice people who never do anything wrong a ticket because they have a taillight bulb burned out;a wiser older cop just nicely tells the driver he needs to get the bulb replaced right away of course;the younger one creates unnecessary friction and hard feelings.
Another school of thought holds that we are "programmed" in effect to live and die in an environment where it is necessary to solve numerous serious or critical problems on a day to day basis, while in the process getting plenty of strress relieving exercise.We don't have to do that anymore, but we still have a brain, nervous system, and endocrine system optimized for that sort of environment.This means that we are like a big old energetic dog that NEEDS to run and chase rabbits ;he can never really be a happy dog cooped up in an apartment.
I myself have experienced the malaise Ridley seems to be describing-living in a nice apartment,getting my food from a supermarket, enjoying a fine city environment in a university district with lots of bars, restaurants, clubs,a well paid job doing meaningless work,the whole deal-including a foxy and intelligent woman who saw fit to live with me and then marry me.
There was no CHALLENGE.The thrills,the trials, the tribulations, and the triumphs, such as they were, simply did not satisfy my inner self, my soul, so to speak.
Now that I am back on the farm, I have real problems to solve, problems that REQUIRE the use of my body as well as my intellect.These problems come in a never ending stream, and they vary greatly from day to day and season to season though some of them are repetitious of course.
I actually have good use for my snake reflex-I often need to put my hands and feet in places they might be bitten by a startled copperhead or even a rattlesnake.I have use for my night vision, as I will be going out later to enjoy a walk thru the fields in the moonlight, checking for deer in the new corn and green beans.
I actually need to use my intellect in a direct and immediate way to stay alive.I cut down trees occasionally;I drive a tractor on rough ground, I climb ladders frequently,and do many other dangerous things;and necessity demands that I take some serious chances;no farmer would succeed on a two bit farm if he tried to operate according to the dogmas of safety as a religion as it is practiced in industry and preached by people who work in offices.Farmers generally live nearer the edge-by necessity-than cops or firemen or miners or just about anybody except soldiers at war although when a mining or industrial accident does occur it often takes a lot of lives at a swoop.
I know of four farmers personally from the immediate nieghborhood who died in on the job accidents.
But the rest by taking calculated risks have managed to survive.
I will be armed tonight, and I might even catch a thief in the act of hauling off a garden tiller or even a tractor;thieves are getting to be rather common around here lately.If so , I might hold him for the law, or I might just dust him and his vehicle with birdshot.
If I catch a deer in the beans , I will kill it ,place it in a barrel, cover it with plenty of ice, full of ice, and butcher it tomorrow.
I got plenty of stress relieving exercise building a burglar proof (I hope!) tool shed today.Between bouts of work I come in and play on the net and have a cold drink.
The problems bring on the stress and the flood of hormones needed to fight or fly.The exercise dissipates the stress.
When I need some intellectual stimilation, I often look for it here;or I go to the public library , which for a couple of bucks will get almost any book for me thru an interlibrary loan.
When I need company , I have the company of my extended family available, and that of the congegration of the church I attend occasionally, even though I am not a believer;Hillary Clinton's "village " is largely experienced as and thru the local church in the local culture.
So I seem to be living in an environment aligned fairly closely with the parameters my brain and endocrine system is optimized for as the result of tens of thousands of years of evolution working its blind magic.
As one of my new age befuddled friens puts it, I am not only channeling my distant ancestors-I am a passable reincarnation of them.
The average yuppy puppy is not so living, and therefore he or she cannot be fully and truly happy.
This is not to say that evolution has not created a sort of race or subspecieces, a CULTIVAR in farmerrs terms, of people who are fully self actualized and happy in the urban environment.we shouldn't be suprised, as evolution has also produced dogs that live happy lives in apartments.
I haven't read this last book by Ridley but I believe from reading a couple of reviews I am barking up the right tree here in respect to his basic message.
The message is that most or at least many people NEED scary things to worry about and tough problems to solve and a certain amount of physical stress and danger.
They aren't getting what they need from thier current overly organized,predictable ,bland environments.
But they are subconsciously looking for it, and the looking manifests as the embrace of doomer scenarios.
The urban street skateboarder, or the ones that go rock climbing in the mountains and caving. Lots of the urban folk do the dangerous stuff and can't explain why they like it so much.
That ties in with you you were talking about. The need for speed, thrills and possible death and injury.
Our AutoImmune problems could be the result of to many drugs and medicines that we have been taking and not enough, just eat the right foods and make them varied. Some drigs are okay, but pumping people full of them for a tiny cold, was going to result in things we couldn't forsee. Killing off of your internal biotic populations, or not letting them grow in the first place, has it's side effects which we might be seeing now.
If you live in a sterile world, when you get out in the real world, you might get sick, or you might just get sick because your body needs those gut fauna.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world,
Hugs from Arkansas
I don't have the numbers, but this house was built in the 60's and is under 900 square feet. In the 70's were they built the same size? What about in the 90's when houses seemed to get bigger, but families were the same size.
Almost every new house farm out there is over 1,000 square feet, Why?
So here you have a system wide, building of bigger houses, which of course cost more. If we built smaller houses, couldn't people afford them more?
So on the one hand the statement that houses cost more, is true, but is it the $ per Sq Foot, or the Sq feet that have changed.
In general I don't disagree with you. But I don't see a lot of smaller houses being built either, and that always bugged me. The Bigger is Better mindset has filled the air. I push the mindset that you can be happy with less, and a small house is cool. But as a kid I liked hiding in the closets and toyboxes (we have an old ammo crate that we have used as a toy box for a very long time, I don't remember when we got it, at one time I was small enough to hide in it.)
But then again I have designs for a large house but it's all under earth, or built into a mountain like hillside, man made or natural. So small is relative.
Charles,
BioWebScape designs for a better fed and housed world.
Hugs from Arkansas
I first read Revelation as a teenager. At the time I had similar thoughts - It reads like an elaborate drug-induced hallucination put to paper.
As an athiest, I'm not sorry that Revelation is in the Bible. Genesis at the beginning, so much in the middle . . . I can't imagine the Bible ending any other way. Anything else would be a bit of a letdown IMHO.
Even in Genesis, for the first 7 days, a half logical mind should boggle and start asking some critical think questions.
... so let me get this straight,
.
.
this God guy is so all powerful and all knowing etc. that he creates the whole universe, batta bing; batta bam in just 6 days right?
and then this unstoppable, all powerful God gets "tired"? and he needs a day of "rest"? Sorry, I don't get it. Isn't it self contradicting? Either you're all powerful or you're not. Which is it?
And then this same God who can create people out of a pile of mud anytime he wants (aside from creating universes in 6 days flat), he's gotta go seek out this Mary girl and impregnate her with his holy seed? He can't just smack some mud together to make a Jesus like that? what's up with that? did he forget how to make mud people?
Finally there's that Moses guy who has to go up the mountain. Couldn't God just ship him an advance copy of an Apple iPad by UPS? why does he have to do this whole inscribing in stone tablets shtick? A tablet computer would have been a way more impressive "miracle". Even the UPS guy showing up in his brown truck in the middle of the desert would have been a way more impressive "miracle".
Economic slaves and slaves to God do not need too much logic. They only need to work hard, sacrifice their wealth and accept their preordained rewards. Having been indoctrinated with immutable myths from those of authority, there is no reason to reason further.
But don’t you just love to drop a stone into those placid waters and watch the waves ripple through, creating great tension and apprehension and a twisted visage. But the nugget of reason sinks to the bottom, never again to be resurrected, and the calmness of belief once again prevails.
All is right with God's plan.
I think humans' pattern recognition circuitry is biased toward seeing dangers, and that it's probably a positive adaptive trait. If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead.
Personally I'd rather hear a lot of doomer-ism if it means that some people get up off their butts and figure out how to transition off fossil fuels before it's too late (and maybe make contingency plans in case we don't make it fast enough). So go ahead, be a doomer and scare everyone to death with as many scary "peak fossil fuel die off" graphs as you can make! It's probably adaptive for the species. The more utopian our views of the future are, the less utopian our future will probably be.
Also... the more experienced I've become as an engineer, the more hype-laden techno-utopian whizzy sci-fi irritates me. The authors of this stuff usually know nothing about the nitty gritty and have never actually done engineering themselves. Particularly irritating is whizzy junk about "nanotech" and other buzzwords and how they will yield magic pixie dust that will make us live forever or some such nonsense. In the same way that doomerism is probably adaptive, having a healthy respect for how difficult engineering can be is also a good thing. Otherwise, you tend to chase fluffy nonsense and give up on the hard stuff when the going gets tough.
There was an interesting study that came out recently. It found that there were two kinds of people: trusting, optimistic types who readily form bonds with others, and suspicious, pessimistic types who aren't as good at bonding (often because they prefer independence to relationships). People much prefer the former when it comes to relationships. But in bad times, it's the latter who survive, because they are always on the lookout for danger. They notice things the more optimistic types do not.
Watch the movie "The Road".
I don't want to create a spoiler, so I'll just say this topic is explored.
Hi Leanan,
Could you kindly provide a reference for that study? I definitely identify with the latter while my wife has never-ending grief that I'm not more like the former. Maybe if she were to perceive my general wariness and concern as valid (and perhaps "bundled" with relatively low sociability), life may get a little easier.
What can't one learn on TOD?
I posted the link in a DrumBeat not long ago. Can't find it at the moment. I'll look.
Here it is. I'm not sure it will help with regard to your wife, however...
Being Bad at Relationships Is Good for Survival
There are two kinds of people..
Those who believe there are two kinds of people, and those who don't.
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.
.
.
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those who count in binary and those who don't
Hey, I just realized this means I'm optimistic about doomerism. That's funny.
Personally I'd rather hear a lot of doomer-ism if it means that some people get up off their butts and figure out how to transition off fossil fuels before it's too late (and maybe make contingency plans in case we don't make it fast enough).
Or it does what happens to me most of the time, mental paralysis on doing whats right because of how big the problem is and just giving the fuck up. Sorry for the language I just believe that unless you have a vision of here to there then scaring the fuck out of people just makes them either roll their eyes or give up without trying. I've been working on actually trying, but if we are facing an extinction style event my dysthemic ass has no chance to survive and it makes it hard to even bother. Also I don't believe having a negative outlook on life will help, I've had it all my life which has led me to having neither a college education and being divorced by 26. Sorry to be downer, doomer :-).
UPDATE: "Gasland" - The Industry Strikes Back
Congress is still debating whether to continue exempting ‘fracking' from environmental regulations like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Meanwhile, the EPA is only beginning its study of the issue and will hold a series of public hearing starting next month.
http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticker/update-%22gasland%22---the-industry...
Until we embrace decline, we'll make all the wrong choices. --Aangel
Well, we've put paid to the sea water; now let's go to work on the fresh water. Our efforts smack of desperation. In the end, we're going to burn everything we can find, or foul it, because of that little overshoot problem we've got going (multi-variable model http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3550 ).
Costner cleanup device gets high marks from BP
"Doug Suttles was the first guy to step up in the oil industry," Costner said at the presser, "and I'm really happy to say when he ordered 32 machines, it's a signal to the world, to the industry, where we need to be."
Suttles said the additional machines will be used to build four new deep-water systems: on two barges and two 280-foot supply boats.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100625/ts_ynews/ynews_ts2851;_ylt=AsXcM4...
In follow-up to yesterday's Drumbeat discussion regarding Asian carp.
"Researchers at Kentucky State University are introducing Kentucky "tuna." Still in development stages, the tasty treat offers one useful benefit of an otherwise invasive fish, the Asian carp."
This video describes how to make carp cakes, or "fish balls", which apparently taste a lot like...fish.
Apparently, pressure-canning reduces the bones to be soft enough to eat. Rather like canned tuna or canned salmon.
http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to-make-kentucky-tuna-asian-carp-cakes-21...
This is good for pause and reflect:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3550#comment-305325
From http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=67: Sadad Al-Husseini, former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco is quoted from Oct 29, 2007 saying that
...oil production had reached a structural ceiling determined by geology rather than geopolitics, and that the technical floor for the oil price will rise by $12 annually for the next 4 to 5 years as new fields become increasingly costly to exploit.
If it is time to start thinking about ... Powering Down ,
55 mph would seem to be the easiest first step
I know the gearheads will say ...it didn't/won't work.
http://www.drive55.org/
Going down to 55mph would save oil but at what cost? Sitting in traffic is more time away from families, less exercise, etc. The costs are more than just annoyance. And imagine how ticket-happy the local govts will get, with that kind of new moral justification and freshly lowered limit. Our traffic laws are already being used to levy an unofficial yearly driving tax as it is. It's just collected more randomly, more heavily from minorities, and the lawyers get a larger cut than usual.
I'm not making a blanket statement that it's a terrible idea to lower the speed limit. But I'm saying it's not something to do lightly.
The current situation is also different from the mid-1970s in other ways. The highway system is already much more jammed up even at current speeds. (Let's face it, we're basically living in the "after" shot of the 1970s speed reduction already.)
The vehicle fleet all has overdrive gears & better aerodynamics to decrease the gains made from the speed reduction this time. The kinds of gains they got in the 1970s are more like what we would get today if the limit started at 105mph and then we moved it down to 75mph to save fuel.
Another move from 75mph to 55mph would save fuel for sure, but it would offer proportionally smaller gains and larger problems than it did last time.
Or as a guy I knew in graduate school used to say, well, if 55 is so great, why not 35, save even more gas and more lives. People would usually sputter "well, that's too slow to be practical." Then he'd observe that we had reached the point of negotiating the price rather than sticking up for the principle. Note that European countries reduced their speed limits very little or not at all in the 1970s; European visitors to the USA tended to think the idea was a huge joke in such a huge country. But the concept does appeal to fatuous American puritanism.
And IMO it's still primarily about puritanism. At the deep-doom end of the spectrum, we'll purify and simplify our wicked lives until we're back to being miserable 15th peasants, dying of wear and tear and disease by about age 35.
The U.S. had a nationwide speed limit of 35 m.p.h. during World War II, and trucks made deliveries just fine; those few who had the gasoline to commute by car took somewhat longer to get to and from work, but so what?
I advocate putting into the Constitution a permanent 35 m.p.h. limit, partly to save fuel but also to encourage transition back to trains and light rail and streetcars plus electric cars. Electric cars can go a lot farther at 35 m.p.h. than they can at 65 m.p.h. Bicycles are a viable means of transportation where cars and trucks and buses are limited to 35; they don't do well when sharing the road with cars going 70 or 80, since so many people go ten miles or more over the limit. Finally, and most important, an enforced 35 m.p.h. limit (and it was enforced during World War II) would do a great deal to discourage suburban and exurban sprawl that is, as Kuntsler suggests, (at least one of) the greatest misallocation of resources in history. In other words, low speed limits tend to force people to go back to the city--or to spend many hours in commuting.
The speed limit should be strictly enforced with large fines for speeding; the revenue from these fines could go to maintaining roads or spending more on policemen and police cars to enforce the limit.
You may think this proposal is impossible to implement for political reasons, but I think that once we have gasoline rationing (within 10 or at most 15 years) we're in a whole new political ballgame. The decline in production after Peak Oil will create fast and major changes in our economy, our politics, our culture and our society.
I muck around quite a bit with friends who keep old old trucks as a hobby, being an country boy gearhead farmer.The trucks of that era were not really capable of running much faster than thirty five and indeed very often could not even get up to forty or forty five mph if fully loaded, unless they were going down hill.
Hi Don.
A 35 MPH speed limit would allow designing vehicles to be maximally efficient at that speed.
To get maximum efficiency out of a vehicle, it has to have the engine sized to the predicted load and be geared to the predicted speed. Cruise economy would be emphasized over acceleration. Tires would be designed for fuel economy rather than cornering and initial grip. Stopping distances would be greater(the lower speeds would mitigate some of the issues; I would make a political change here, and have a contact patch per ton of vehicle weight formula to equalize breaking distances.)
North American cars have wildly variable loads and potential speed requirements, and culturally mandated requirements for acceleration, cornering ability and stopping distances (I say that stopping distances are culturally mandated and not solely a safety concern because large trucks have admirable safety records despite long stopping distances. Operator skill and attention is important. Perhaps a new cultural mandate for drivers capable of the best fuel economy and safest driving record...Un-American, I know.)
If we had a 35 mph speed limit, I suspect that much of the acceleration requirement would become moot; a vehicle that is incapable of reaching 60mph renders the low zero to 60 time a useless metric. A tall final drive ratio, and greater gearing flexibility in the mid-range (which a 5 speed limited to 35 mph would allow) would yield a vastly more efficient vehicle than current usage and cultural requirements allow.
The last barrier is the American driver's hankering for the all-thing-to-all-people vehicle. A primary cause of vehicle inefficiency is over-flexibility: the idea that you have to have a vehicle that will transport a hockey team and their gear across the tundra in February, as well as win a drag race, for your daily solo commute. Scarcity and/or rationing are the only things I can think of that will change this.
Lloyd
Can't speak to current vehicles since I'm driving a '90 Miata. However, it has overdrive gears, a real small cross-section to the wind, and a 1600cc 4-banger with the usual fuel injection and computer control. A couple of years ago after learning on RealAge that I'd add 2-3 years to my life expectancy by slowing down, I started driving the speed limit on the way to work (65). Yeah, I became one of those old guys poking along in the slow lane that you all curse.
First finding: the stress levels went WAY down. I was cranking up a lot of adrenaline to make sure I didn't make a mistake at 80 mph.
Second finding: gas mileage improved by about 10%, from 30 to 33 mpg, roughly.
I expect cars are like airplanes: there's a cruising speed with the most efficient use of fuel and both above it and below it the efficiency drops off. I'd love to see someone do some tests on this. What I read is that it's in the 45-55 mph range, but it doesn't seem to be based on rigorous testing.
I started doing that in Florida with the Tahoe. Used to be the guy blowing past at 90 mph in the Beemer convertible, livin' the good life, look at me I'm so important get out of my way cause I'm drivin' fast with a radar detector. Like you, the stress went wa-a-a-a-y down. Didn't mind stopping at Cracker Barrel for lunch or dinner because there was no time to be lost or make up.
Back in the '70's when the U.S. went to 55 and we were still 60ish in Canada it seemed ridiculous driving I-5. The Interstates were built for higher speeds and here you are clunk...clunk...clunk... as you go over the expansion joints in the concrete. And you're right, there was the righteous puritanism manifested by every state trooper looking for easy pickin's Canadians.
We all know the real answer to improved efficiency and reduction in consumption. The best way to improve your vehicle efficiency by 50% is to put another butt in the seat beside you. The one thing that does have to change though is transport truck logistics shipping. They are driving the truckers, and as a result the speed, to the limits. The number of times I saw semis go past me on I-95 like they were driving a sports car was scary. This once again proves that the notion of unregulated capitalism is really a race to the bottom.
http://www.drive55.org/downloads/tdiclubchart.gif
Miatas are very fun cars but the gearing is WAY too low and even with a five speed the engine is way over revved at highway speeds.If I can find a proper set of differential gearsreasonably priced I think the gas mileage will improve from around thirty to thirty five or so on one that I am fixing up for a relative.Such gears are not available from wrecks so they must all be geared the same way.
I haven't driven a car geared so low since my drag racing days!
After spending some extra hours here and there on trips in different cars finding out about optimum speeds for the best fuel economy, my opinion is the slower the better so long as it's a stick shift and fuel injected.There will probably be only a negligible gain below about thirty to thirty five , or even a loss, because most cars with small engines and five speeds can't really be driven properly below this speed in fifth gear.Going to fourth increases engine revolutions quite a bit.
With an automatic you must go at least fast enough to keep it in top gear-usually an overdrive automatic will not consistently stay in top gear below thirty to forty mph.
Older cars with carburetors and lacking an engine computer often get better mileage at around forty to fifty five than any other speed.
These experiments have been rather limited, such as making only a couple of trips of a hundred miles or so at a given lower speed and measuring the mileage by simply filling carefully to the cap before and after.
But they were fun and profitable for a gearhead such as myself-I have made made a couple of very profitable bets as to how far I could go in a given car on a couple of gallons.The prospects of the bets were the reasons for the experiments.
The savings in gasoline are dwarfed by the expense in time at very low speeds and even though I have very little money I usually drive at about sixty on the interstate if traffic is light;otherwise I go with the flow up to seventy or so as that seems to be the safest policy.
If gas goes to ten bucks I will cruise at thirty five and eat the time to save the money.
OFM --
When gas hit $4.00 I started looking at ways to boost the mileage and found out there's an RX-7 differential that drops into the Miata rear end and gives it about a 10% taller gearing. In my younger days I might have pulled it apart and done it, but my days of crawling under a car are pretty much over. Plus, it would take me at least a week to find all my wrenches. :-(
Once sufficiently 'powered-down,' one can always use what was previously a means of transport as a 'vehicle' of great social value in the creation of a 'new' music, as per this video extravaganza:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFybwg4wadI&feature=channel
Here is my revelation for today: Seemingly, many, perhaps most, folks in LA (and probably in MS and AL, maybe in FL) want to keep on trucking with deep water oil drilling and are unwilling to even take a measly 6 month TV time-out to let the 50 pound heads do some root cause analysis and try to devise better equipment and procedures and oversight to continue on hopefully somewhat more safely in the future...
http://motherjones.com/environment/2010/06/oil-rigs-moratorium-louisiana...
All this angst for putting a 6-month moratorium on less than one percent of all the drilling rigs in the GOM, and even after BP said that it would set up a $100M fund to tide over affected oil industry workers.
And I am tired of the comparison to not shutting down the airline industry after one airliner crash...this is a completely off-the mark comparison...airliner crashes do not adversely affect entire ecosystems for years...
And the judge down in NO disallowed the moratorium anyway..."Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez"
Edit:
Well then, this may help explain the judge's mindset:
http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/06/25/4564162-moratorium-judg...
But hey, the SCOTUS ruled that corporations are people and can give as much money as they want to politicians...why not just adjudicate that corporations can legally bribe anyone they want?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26sat1.html?hp
The worst is yet to come?
Does oily horror await birds flying south?
From a wildlife perspective, Canada and the Gulf are linked, which makes the spill of vital concern to conservationists and scientists.
See: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/does-oily-horror-await-birds-f...
Cheers,
Paul
A nightmare scenario! All the birds land in oil-filled waters and start dying.....
So I read some good news, by the way! The Indian govt is going to stop price controls on diesel and gasoline and let the prices paid by the public go up to market levels! Yay! That should help put a dent in the consumption and slow down the economy some more. Hopefully at some point it will be too slow to bring us all the oil we have been using. I know that is farther off, of course, but I`m sure the birds must be looking forward to that day.
With all due respect I think the idea of a 35mph speed limit is totally unrealistic. I imagine it could work in a country that was set up for that level but we currently are not. Given our modern technical abilites I find it a waste to keep things that slow. We all know about the problems of speed but there are also benefits to going faster.
Lower autobile speed limits, greater restrictions on mileage or horsepower . . . we will do everything under the sun besides paying a little more for gasoline. I find it absurd. We could be paying $50,000 for entry level new cars and it would still bother us less than paying $5/gallon for gas.
We're like Pavlov's trained dogs. No matter what everything else in our lives costs, we still think our economic prosperity can be measured by how cheap the gasoline is.