Peak Oil is You
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Page added on August 1, 2013
What is “Business as Usual” in terms of now to 2030 ? 2050 ?
One of the pessimistic blogs is collapse of industrial civilization which has a sample article that proposes that a collapse will be well underway by 2047 (collapse of agriculture, collapse of economies and global trade, limited nuclear exchanges from Pakistan bombs getting into the hands of extremists) and virtually complete collapse by 2087 (only pockets of survival at the poles, the rest of the world uninhabitable because of the runaway heating). Collapse of Industrial Civilization looks silly in its doomer extremism. There are affordable technological options such as stratoshield that can be used in the event of climate change becoming a lot more serious. There are many other affordable and simple options to mitigate and reduce temperature changes (white roofs, dealing with soot).
Our Finite World is written by Gail Tverberg who one the main people at the Oildrum.com
Gail’s view. Widespread deflation and then Discontinuity
The traditional “peak oil” response to this question has been that oil prices will tend to rise over time. There will not be enough oil available, so demand will outstrip supply. As a result, prices will rise both for oil and for food which depends on oil.
I [Gail] see things differently. I think the issue ahead is deflation for commodities as well as for other types of assets. At some point, deflation may “morph” into discontinuity. It is the fact that price falls too low that will ultimately cut off oil production, not the lack of oil in the ground.
Even with little oil, there will still be some goods and services produced. These goods and services will not necessarily be available to holders of assets of the kind we have today. Instead, they will tend to go to those who produced them, and to those who win them by fighting over them.
* no more cheap resources
* people’s wages stagnate and go down and in particular what they can buy decreases
* A period of longer and more frequent recessions. Commodity prices go down during the recessions
* recessions tend to be global because of networked economy
* government cannot pay for social security, national medical, unemployment insurance, federal deposit insurance, education etc…
* businesses cannot pay pensions
* eventually a lot of people get pissed off leading to riots, civil wars and wars
Automatic Earth and Receding Horizons
Here is the nutshell of the Automatic Earth position
EROEI effectively determines what is and is not an energy source for a given society (ie to maintain a given level of socioeconomic complexity). Unconventional fossil fuels are caught in a paradox – that their EROEI is too low for them to sustain a society complex enough to produced them.
They can only be produced for the relatively short period of time that the complex society built on conventional sources continues to maintain its current capacities, but as the conventional sources disappear, and that society can no longer support itself, the ability to undertake all the activities required for unconventional production will be lost.
Post Carbon has a 178 page report (Feb, 2013) that talks about the US crude oil resurgence peaking at 7.5 million bpd in 2019 and then sharply declining. US crude oil production is already at 7.55 million bpd in July, 2013. Pessimists proven wrong within 5 months of some “detailed analysis” that took 178 pages.
Nextbigfuture Position
Gail is wrong about how much oil, gas and coal that can be obtained and the price of it.
The amount of resources will still go up for several decades.
There are other sources of energy that are being developed now which can be scaled up (biofuels, uranium from phosphate, laser enrichment deeper burn fission (breeders are being built in China, Russia, India etc… and new annular nuclear fuel is being developed. Those are over twice as efficient at using the uranium)
There is continued progress toward several new oilsand and tight oil production techniques which would reduce the cost and increase the EROEI of unconventional oil.
The EROEI of fracked gas is estimated to 50-85. The amount of energy returned is 85 times the cost of energy extraction.
There are many places in the US and Europe where pensions were not properly funded and where those over promises will have to be adjusted. This is the case in Detroit, Greece, Spain and their will be more adjustments.
Oil prices are up from the 1980s and 1990s. Part of the issue is that the US dollar has devalued against many commodities and currencies.
Many of the world economies (Europe, China, India, United States, Japan) are far too fragile and need to make adjustments. Debt levels, unemployment, financial systems need to be fixed.
The world should aggressively control soot. It has about 70% of the climate effect of the the carbon dioxide now and would cost over ten times less to reduce and it would save over one million lives per year as well. This could be mostly done in 10-20 years.
The world should shift to a lot more usage of nuclear energy. There is also benefit to using more wind and solar.
Actually dealing with soot and shifting to non-carbon based energy would be changes from the current Business as Usual.
8 Comments on "What is “Business as Usual” in terms of now to 2030 ? 2050 ?"
rollin on Thu, 1st Aug 2013 10:33 pm
They all read like sci-fi novels. If one goes from history, we generally muddle along and things are nasty for the individual but society and civilization in general seem to continue. We have been living through major societal changes since the 1500’s, and many more in the last two centuries.
Where are the European kings? Gone, but the countries are still there. British, German and French empires, gone. USA split in two then reformed after a very bloody war. Russia turned to USSR, a super power, now Russia again but different. Two major world wars where countries were sundered and millions died. China raped by Japan and now a rising power. Japan destroyed by the allies, to become a great industrial/economic power. The US, backbone of heavy industry, now still powerful but heavy industry elsewhere. Germany brought to it’s knees twice and horribly wrecked the second time, now a great example of European power and sustainable energy. India, a broken colony of Britain, now free and becoming an economic power.
Civilization has been tearing itself apart and reassembling itself for hundreds of years.
So suddenly, because we seem to face general predicaments, do people think that civilization will fall apart. It seems pretty resilient to me. Sure, it is going to be tough or deadly for individuals and certain regions, that has always been the case. But to say civilization will fall because we walked away from all those available sustainable energy sources by decision.
This baloney about we don’t have enough energy to build new energy sources is foolish. We have energy now, it is just how we deploy the energy. Later when sustainable sources are available they can be used to make more.
No one seems to remember history, when we had civilization but no phones, tv or radios. No computers either. Not very long ago. Still there were cities and ships, libraries, museums, playhouses, and so on. We had all that when agriculture was done by people, horses and oxen. We built canal networks with nothing but people, horses and mules. The romans built giant aqueducts, with no fossil fuels.
The only way civilization is going to disappear is if humans are extinct. Civilization will change, which can be a very good thing looking at the direction we are headed toward, but it will not end.
Civilization has expanded in improper directions and corrections are occurring. We have pushed technology beyond our ability to understand it’s effects and before we really understood our place in the natural scheme of things. Maybe a few hundred years to sit back and think about it are in order. Maybe we will be act better in the future.
BillT on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 12:31 am
This is another techie religious article. Dreamers that believe tech can cure all diseases and problems, if only…
“…Collapse of Industrial Civilization looks silly in its doomer extremism…”
Actually, I think the author’s time line is very optimistic. The collapse will be underway long before 2047 and will likely be complete long before that year. We are in the collapse already. Look around.
As for nuclear war, yes, we will have that and that is why I think the collapse will come far sooner. It will be a world wide nuclear war with little industry left at the end.
So, dream on but a few of us are getting ready.
“You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”
xraymike79 on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 1:00 am
Responses the this article were posted here:
http://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2013/07/31/nothing-hides-under-the-sun/comment-page-1/#comment-8378
GregT on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 5:19 am
* no more cheap resources
* people’s wages stagnate and go down and in particular what they can buy decreases
* A period of longer and more frequent recessions. Commodity prices go down during the recessions
* recessions tend to be global because of networked economy
* government cannot pay for social security, national medical, unemployment insurance, federal deposit insurance, education etc…
* businesses cannot pay pensions
* eventually a lot of people get pissed off leading to riots, civil wars and wars
I’m not sure what the author is trying to get at here. This appears to be more of a list of observations, rather than predictions?
mike on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 6:57 am
Many of the futurists grew up reading sci fi comics. Hence their outlook. They are deeply embeded within their religion of progress and nothing will convince them otherwise. Best to just leave them to it and concentrate on living life and learning skills you think will be more appropriate in a harsher future.
Arthur on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 7:43 am
rollin saved me a lot of typing. The future is not fixed, there are plenty of opportunities to act and I am growing very tired of the little rabbit attitude of staring paralysed into the poachers light. History is a succession of transformations in varying pace. The coming transformation is going to be a big one at a very high pace.
BillT on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 3:33 pm
Ah yes, it will be fast and down. There are no ‘ups’ possible at this point. The change will be to take the world back to the 18th century … if any of it survives the nuclear exchange that is sure to come. When? Maybe 2020 plus or minus a few years.
GregT on Fri, 2nd Aug 2013 6:46 pm
“This baloney about we don’t have enough energy to build new energy sources is foolish.”
It is indeed foolish, there is only one energy source for all life on Earth. The Sun, and we didn’t build it.
“We have energy now, it is just how we deploy the energy.”
We have a source of tens, of millions of years worth, of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels. We will have burned them all up, and released their sequestered CO2 back into the environment in a few hundred years, causing another global mass extinction event. We should have left them where nature stored them in it’s natural processes. The same natural processes that allowed for the evolution of species that we have so fortunately been a part of.
“Later when sustainable sources are available they can be used to make more.”
The only ‘sustainable’ energy source that we have is the Sun. It is already available, and it does not need us humans to utilize it, to make more Suns. One is enough. All other forms of manmade energy require fossil fuels to produce, and are damaging the environment in their utilization.
“No one seems to remember history, when we had civilization but no phones, tv or radios. No computers either.”
My great grandfather did, up until the day that he died 15 years ago. Like the vast majority, he did not enjoy libraries, museums or playhouses. He was too busy physically working the land to survive. He lived a very difficult, labor intensive, but satisfying life.
Civilization, in one form or another, might survive. Unless we become extinct. Which is now a very real probability. Modern industrial civilization, with all of it’s technologies, will not survive. It is starting to falter already and it’s collapse will happen soon enough.
Civilization is a human term, describing a human made environment. The natural environment is where we live, and civilization of the natural environment, is what is destroying where we live. Native cultures around the world are very aware of this fact. They learned how to live sustainably within the natural environment, only taking what they needed for survival. If we are able to make it through the next few decades without going extinct, we will be lucky if we can return back to tribal, sustainable ‘societies’.
The planet Earth is in a very serious state of decline, it’s human carrying capacity has already been greatly reduced from a century ago, and we are not done destroying it, quite yet.