by Twilight » Tue 03 Apr 2007, 13:23:14
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'O')kay, let's assume that's 100% accurate. What does a gradual decline to 55 mb/d in 2020 mean for us? Can that be dealt with, sort of? Can we maintain civilization-as-we-know-it, but without the brain-dead wastefulness we now indulge ourselves in, at a rate of decline like that?
Would that head off the Mad Max scenario? Is that a gradual-enough decline to avoid total worldwide chaos? At first glance, I think maybe it is. That would seem to be something we could more or less work with, if we made the commitment to actually do the right things.
From 85 mb/d in 2007 to 55 mb/d in 2020, that's roughly a 35% drop in 13 years at the 3.25% depletion rate Campbell suggested back in 1996, assuming the current plateau ends with 2008 as he also suggested at the time.
First observation, the spreadsheet existed and the world just pissed away a decade.
Second observation, that's pretty steep. I'll whip up a graph and upload in a few minutes.
I don't see us mitigating that kind of decline at all. The world might just about mitigate long-term static supply in the face of current demand growth, but losing a third of its liquid fuel supply in 13 years is terminal. It's a big drop and it's not a very long time at all. It's barely enough time to get a new technology to market, it's barely 2-3 infrastructure project cycles. The average consumer can daydream away several years without even noticing.
That magnifies other problem. I doubt we're going to see the onset of terminal decline next year. I think we'll bump along until the end of the decade before the effects are severe enough for the threat to be recognised, and Bakhtiari
has been saying that the initial decline rate will be low. So we are going to have breathing room for years of denial and then we could see a steeper drop, 3.5%+ to the level he states. In that scenario, you can postpone the commencement of any mitigation by several more years, with a corresponding reduction in its effectiveness.