[Viper]

So I really should have known better, and after spending a few years watching Peak Oil, now I think I do. I've heard a lot of people compare the Peak Oil issue to Y2K and point out that Y2K was a non-event so Peak Oil will be a non-event. I've also heard the refrain from the Peak Oilists defending their position by mentioning that Y2K was a technical problem and Peak Oil is a geological problem. Having spent the later part of the 90's working on Y2K bugs and communicating with other developers who were also fixing Y2K issues, I can tell you it was anything BUT a non-event. It also was not a technical problem. It was an economic problem. In short, the world spent $1 trillion to fix the Y2K issue, and if they had not done so, the TS would have HTF on a truly grand scale. Had the world not caught on to the problem when they did (a little late in the game which is part of the reason that it cost so much) Jan 1 of the year 2000 would have looked very different than it did. However, humanity fixed the problem and disaster was averted. (To such an extent that most of the world thinks nothing happened.)

Why do I bring this up? Because we're doing it again. Peak Oil is an economic problem in much the same way that Y2K was, and just like with Y2K, there are solutions that might be a little late in coming so there will almost certainly be some pain, but humanity is most definitely smarter than yeast. Is liquid fuel important? Of course it is. It allows us to move 2 tons of steal with us any time we want to get around. Do we need to push that much steel around? No, but it's a neat trick that impresses the neighbors and as long as the stuff is so cheap that we think the best way to fly around is to jettison it out the back of an airplane, we'll keep burning it just to show we can. Is the supply of sweet crude going down? For the moment it seems to be, and even if we find some more, long term it's going away eventually unless we find another planet with life on it. Either way, we're going to need to get used to getting the majority of our energy from the sun sooner or later.

Yes, I understand that everyone would feel better if the US had started addressing this issue 20 years ago, but a lot of progress has been made in the past 20 years, and the US is going to wait until the last possible moment in part to make sure that they pick the best possible option before replacing their entire infrastructure. We don't want to have to replace all of that stuff twice, right? Coincidentaly, if you've been reading some of the reports, apparently it's all reaching its expiration date at just the right time, so we have to pay for replacements anyway.

I do think that the horse is out of the barn on sea level change, so we kinda messed up on that one. So, the next 40 years? We're going to be relocating a lot of construction and associated infrastructure to slightly higher ground (only a little higher, because it seems most people would risk almost anything to get to live next to water.) That means that we're going to have a building and recycling boom that will continue into the indefinite future. Stock market will bounce up and down as the world is constantly trying to figure out which markets deserve our reduced levels of energy and which ones are complete wastes. Over time I expect we'll change our minds quite a bit, so it means that people will have lots of interesting investment opportunities. Me personally? I'm betting on blimps for transport and travel and robotics for labor and security. It will always take less energy to have a robot doing work than to keep a human alive 24 hours a day to do 8 hours of the same work. It's not that I think the population needs to fall, I just think that business will become more robot centric and less people centric. People will probably find they have a lot more value in the creative fields since for the moment that's one of the few human computing problems we haven’t solved.

To summarize,

Less energy
Not the end of the world as we know it
More technology
Most of your children will wonder what the big deal was
More leisure for human beings

Eventually Dyson Sphere (Sun is our best power source, might as well collect all of it, no?)

Thoughts? Am I wrong? Why?

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', ' ') It will always take less energy to have a robot doing work than to keep a human alive 24 hours a day to do 8 hours of the same work.

[Cashmere]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')o summarize,

Less energy
Not the end of the world as we know it
More technology
Most of your children will wonder what the big deal was
More leisure for human beings

[Viper]

@MonteQuest:

Assume for some reason we need to break a rock. Which of the following requires more resources (read energy) to operate and maintain for an equal amount of rock breakage?

1 man with a jack hammer?
1 artificially intelligent jack hammer?
Some number of men (maybe 5?) with an equal number of sledge hammers required to break the same amount of rock?

I do realize that every time technology allows us to go past another overshoot milestone, we have further to fall if we screw it up. I also think that we'll never run out of sun. So we'll burn up everything we can on this planet until the only thing left is sunlight and then we'll collect all of that. (hence the Dyson Sphere...)


@pstarr:

I can just as easily get to my job with 50 pounds of steel and maybe a few pounds of plastic as I can with my 2 tons of steel. We can also move large quantities of stuff much more efficiently with electric rail and blimps than we can with 18 wheelers. Is there going to be an adjustment period? Sure there will. And if you're smart and able, then you make sure that you're in the blimp building industry during the transition, but it's a far stretch from some powering down to calling for the end of the world. It might be annoying to have only 12 hours of electricity for a while (whether it's due to a coal shortage or a money shortage) but that's not the end of civilization. And eventually, enough stuff will have been replaced and enough solar power stations will have been built that you'll be back to forgetting to turn off the lights when you leave the room. Heck, if you've got 12 hours with no TV and no internet, what are you going to do besides donating your time to infrastructure reconstruction. What is your city going to spend its money on that year? Repaving the roads or buying more local solar capacity?

@Cashmere:

Please let's leave Iran in Geopolitics where it belongs.

I am not a cornucopian, I'm a technologist. I do believe that oil is running out, and I do believe that it's going to hurt as it goes away. Probably more than that trillion $'s we lost on Y2K. I also know however, that we've solved the fusion question. Yes, we can have fusion... all you need is a sun, and it works like magic. So... we're going to base our energy future on the sun. The theoretical full collection potential of our sun is 3.3x10^13 times our global 1998 total power consumption. Now, obviously we don't have a dyson sphere yet, but until we do, I predict we'll just keep building our way to one. It's the obvious direction to head in... why let all of that sunlight just escape into space?

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', ' ')I do realize that every time technology allows us to go past another overshoot milestone, we have further to fall if we screw it up.

[Viper]

@MonteQuest:

Are you suggesting you'd object to 6 trillion people on the inside of a Dyson Sphere because it could mean the deaths of 6 trillion people? 6 trillion people would not have any idea what to do with all the space and energy they would have available to them on a dyson sphere. Obviously there are a lot of population and technology stairs along the way from where we are today to that scenario, but what reason do we have to stop at any particular step and call that the highest one?

[energytech]

"To such an extent that most of the world thinks nothing happened."

Viper, that's the difference between Peak Oil and Y2K ~ the world will know something's happend. They already do recognize it's happening but just can't understand truly why.

You appear to have a Pollyana type of world view. Stop. Think. And then tell your childern everything's NOT going to be OK. Exponential growth is only good when you can stop it where you want it to stop. Unrestricted growth is a cancer on humankind and our use of the ancient solar resource will end with an abruptness that will shake even you out of your slumber and cause you to prepare for our bumby ride into the future.

My advice is for you to study the history of oil beginning with whaling in the early 1800s. It is rich with awakenings and prompts one to wonder what the world would have been like had we only treasured and placed higher value on our black gold inheritance instead of squandering it on frivolous "things" .... trinkets of plastic and artificial rubber. Future generations will ask us, "And you burned it?

James Hansen's recent charge of crimes against humanity for oil execs and government leaders is too easy for those responsible for this tragedy.

Y2K indeed!

[Gothor]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', '@')MonteQuest:

Assume for some reason we need to break a rock. Which of the following requires more resources (read energy) to operate and maintain for an equal amount of rock breakage?

1 man with a jack hammer?
1 artificially intelligent jack hammer?
Some number of men (maybe 5?) with an equal number of sledge hammers required to break the same amount of rock?

I do realize that every time technology allows us to go past another overshoot milestone, we have further to fall if we screw it up. I also think that we'll never run out of sun. So we'll burn up everything we can on this planet until the only thing left is sunlight and then we'll collect all of that. (hence the Dyson Sphere...)


@pstarr:

I can just as easily get to my job with 50 pounds of steel and maybe a few pounds of plastic as I can with my 2 tons of steel. We can also move large quantities of stuff much more efficiently with electric rail and blimps than we can with 18 wheelers. Is there going to be an adjustment period? Sure there will. And if you're smart and able, then you make sure that you're in the blimp building industry during the transition, but it's a far stretch from some powering down to calling for the end of the world. It might be annoying to have only 12 hours of electricity for a while (whether it's due to a coal shortage or a money shortage) but that's not the end of civilization. And eventually, enough stuff will have been replaced and enough solar power stations will have been built that you'll be back to forgetting to turn off the lights when you leave the room. Heck, if you've got 12 hours with no TV and no internet, what are you going to do besides donating your time to infrastructure reconstruction. What is your city going to spend its money on that year? Repaving the roads or buying more local solar capacity?

@Cashmere:

Please let's leave Iran in Geopolitics where it belongs.

I am not a cornucopian, I'm a technologist. I do believe that oil is running out, and I do believe that it's going to hurt as it goes away. Probably more than that trillion $'s we lost on Y2K. I also know however, that we've solved the fusion question. Yes, we can have fusion... all you need is a sun, and it works like magic. So... we're going to base our energy future on the sun. The theoretical full collection potential of our sun is 3.3x10^13 times our global 1998 total power consumption. Now, obviously we don't have a dyson sphere yet, but until we do, I predict we'll just keep building our way to one. It's the obvious direction to head in... why let all of that sunlight just escape into space?

[Hermes]

Yes, your statements are wrong.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', 'P')eak Oil is an economic problem in much the same way that Y2K was...

[energytech]

Well put Hermes. You covered all the important points.

I like it.

[Cashmere]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') am not a cornucopian,

[Cashmere]

And I second it.

Hermes - fine post. I like it too, including the bonfire metaphor.

[Buggy]

In the words of the human torch from the Fantastic Four, "flame on!"

I am a conservative republican and oh by the way, we are screwed. Robots? Blimps? Your're killing me!!!!

[Viper]

@Gothor:

I wasn't saying man plus robot uses less energy than a man without a robot. I was saying that for most applications I can get more done with a machine per unit of energy than I can get done by using a human who would need food, clothing, and shelter. That makes the robot the better choice for an expensive energy world, no? Even if you're going to go out on a limb and argue that there are some physical applications where the human body is somehow optimal for the task, I would argue that you would still be better off using an android (human body / machine brain) since it wouldn't want a TV and a house of its own.


@energytech:

We're human. That means we're always exponentially growing. What does that mean? It means that no matter how much food and how many resources you have on this planet, you will always have some % more people than you could possibly support, and it means that there always have been and always will be people who are starving to death on the planet. Even during the height of per capita energy extraction there were starving babies on the TV and we were being asked to keep a child alive for a day by donating one dollar. Having people starve on this planet doesn't mean that everything is not going to be OK. In the non-starving part of the world, we have sooooo much energy waste we could cut away its insane... and we will cut it away to the point where we can power whatever devices we feel are critical to our enjoyment of life.


@Hermes:

As I said above, we've always been and always will be hitting our limits of growth. Its what we do. However, if we felt that an oil shortage was going to cancel the Super Bowl this year, we could cut our oil consumption in this country by 50% overnight. All of the energy saving behaviors that get mentioned on every one of these peak oil sites are just waiting to be executed at the very first hint that this thing might actually interfere with our lives. As oil becomes more expensive you're going to see neighbors combining trips to the store. You're going to see people car pooling en masse with people they met through a car pooling web site. Public transportation will get used to the max, and everyone who can will start bicycling to work. The main feature of the people who spent 1999 claiming that the world was going to end at any moment was that they assumed that while they were smart enough to see all of the problems, the problems were big enough that only mass action would fix them and then they assumed that society at large was too dumb to see the problems / solutions. The reality is that SARS did not go unchecked because everyone was perfectly willing to get their temperature scanned in order to fly. And people did not riot when asked to enter quarantine. Society at large doesn't spend their day trying to understand the intricacies of peak oil, not because they're too dumb to see it. The just know that when it becomes important enough, they'll drop everything else and work on it. If the only way to get enough power to keep the lights on becomes instituting a "nothing else gets built" solar collector construction effort, then that's what will get done because none of us feel like going back to the dark ages.

Listen, even if all I'm doing is raising puppies so that you can club them, as long as you're willing to give me some food, we have an economy. I understand that fiat currencies have some people feeling a little less secure in their bank accounts, but the magic of money is that is does NOT have intrinsic value. The whole point of money is for it to flow. As long as the stuff is flowing we're doing things for each other, and by tying its value to flow, we try to make sure that the least number of people are sitting on their butts not doing anything. Every once in a while the flow of money is slowed down by raising interest rates to give people a short break, but then its back to the dance. High energy economy or low energy economy, we still trade work.

As for energy available on this planet. We are awash in solar energy (I understand that it's not liquid you can burn in a car, but if you're willing to waste energy you can use it to convert hydrogen and CO2 into methane.) These days solar thermal plants are coming up all over the world, and if we get really creative, we'll plant a giant deep water heat exchangers in the middle of the ocean and use the electricity to charge fuel cells.

Regardless of whether or not there’s enough electricity to keep the whole world in its current state powered up as the fuel dwindles, if the city that I live in has been able to replace most of its needs with solar, then I can continue producing and manufacturing things for other areas that need my help... So, even if we slip up and drop a state or two on their heads, eventually we recover probably with half the energy but and order of magnitude more efficient, which means that as far as we can tell prosperity has gone up...

Then we worry about those poor starving souls on the TV.

[Viper]

@Cashmere:

I look in front of me and it's pretty obvious that the computer I'm interacting with requires less energy to manufacture and operate than I do. What that means is that if I can get this thing to be smarter than I am, then I can solve more problems faster with machines than with people. And after all, what is life if not solving problems?


@Buggy:

yes, blimps.

You can weightlessly haul huge amounts of stuff from place to place with blimps using A LOT less fuel than by using planes and/or trucks. Also, as a military platform, you can load them up with missiles, surveillance electronics, laser point defenses, and then part them at 80,000 feet where nothing from the ground can reach them. They use almost no fuel, and can carry much longer range missiles and radar. The UK has been working on a variant that can withstand being shredded by anti-air cannons with out falling out of the sky.

Another interesting technological fuel reduction effect is happening with the US moving to robotic fighter bombers. Since the air force uses up a lot of fuel on training flights and since robotic planes don’t require practice, the more robotic planes you use, the less fuel you need.

[MonteQuest]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', ' ') Obviously there are a lot of population and technology stairs along the way from where we are today to that scenario, but what reason do we have to stop at any particular step and call that the highest one?

[AgentR]

The thing about Y2K is that most programmers knew the problem would eventually arise, long before anyone gave a flip about it. I think some were a bit surprised that code they wrote in the 1980's was still being used; but the fact that it was, was easily provable, and the vulnerability was already known; just as the 2038 vulnerability is already known, and when (if the world still exists) we get near that date, any old code still using that date format will get some attention.

PO is different, in that the problem is not uniformly provable to everyone's satisfaction. The proposed solutions are uniformly draconian and have a good chance of not working anyway.

With y2k, the programmer would say, "see this old code, it accepted input as a 2 digit year, and stored it in a 2 character field to save space; we're gonna change it to a 4 digit input, and save it as a 32 bit integer / ieee 64 bit floating point." Tada, fixed.

There is no, "tada, fixed" with peakoil.

[allenwrench]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Viper', 'S')o I really should have known better, and after spending a few years watching Peak Oil, now I think I do. I've heard a lot of people compare the Peak Oil issue to Y2K and point out that Y2K was a non-event so Peak Oil will be a non-event. I've also heard the refrain from the Peak Oilists defending their position by mentioning that Y2K was a technical problem and Peak Oil is a geological problem. Having spent the later part of the 90's working on Y2K bugs and communicating with other developers who were also fixing Y2K issues, I can tell you it was anything BUT a non-event. It also was not a technical problem. It was an economic problem. In short, the world spent $1 trillion to fix the Y2K issue, and if they had not done so, the TS would have HTF on a truly grand scale. Had the world not caught on to the problem when they did (a little late in the game which is part of the reason that it cost so much) Jan 1 of the year 2000 would have looked very different than it did. However, humanity fixed the problem and disaster was averted. (To such an extent that most of the world thinks nothing happened.)

Why do I bring this up? Because we're doing it again. Peak Oil is an economic problem in much the same way that Y2K was, and just like with Y2K, there are solutions that might be a little late in coming so there will almost certainly be some pain, but humanity is most definitely smarter than yeast. Is liquid fuel important? Of course it is. It allows us to move 2 tons of steal with us any time we want to get around. Do we need to push that much steel around? No, but it's a neat trick that impresses the neighbors and as long as the stuff is so cheap that we think the best way to fly around is to jettison it out the back of an airplane, we'll keep burning it just to show we can. Is the supply of sweet crude going down? For the moment it seems to be, and even if we find some more, long term it's going away eventually unless we find another planet with life on it. Either way, we're going to need to get used to getting the majority of our energy from the sun sooner or later.

Yes, I understand that everyone would feel better if the US had started addressing this issue 20 years ago, but a lot of progress has been made in the past 20 years, and the US is going to wait until the last possible moment in part to make sure that they pick the best possible option before replacing their entire infrastructure. We don't want to have to replace all of that stuff twice, right? Coincidentaly, if you've been reading some of the reports, apparently it's all reaching its expiration date at just the right time, so we have to pay for replacements anyway.

I do think that the horse is out of the barn on sea level change, so we kinda messed up on that one. So, the next 40 years? We're going to be relocating a lot of construction and associated infrastructure to slightly higher ground (only a little higher, because it seems most people would risk almost anything to get to live next to water.) That means that we're going to have a building and recycling boom that will continue into the indefinite future. Stock market will bounce up and down as the world is constantly trying to figure out which markets deserve our reduced levels of energy and which ones are complete wastes. Over time I expect we'll change our minds quite a bit, so it means that people will have lots of interesting investment opportunities. Me personally? I'm betting on blimps for transport and travel and robotics for labor and security. It will always take less energy to have a robot doing work than to keep a human alive 24 hours a day to do 8 hours of the same work. It's not that I think the population needs to fall, I just think that business will become more robot centric and less people centric. People will probably find they have a lot more value in the creative fields since for the moment that's one of the few human computing problems we haven’t solved.

To summarize,

Less energy
Not the end of the world as we know it
More technology
Most of your children will wonder what the big deal was
More leisure for human beings

Eventually Dyson Sphere (Sun is our best power source, might as well collect all of it, no?)

Thoughts? Am I wrong? Why?