Edufer said:
That was Louis XIV philosophy: “Aprés moi, le deluge”. Yes, it is an egotistic attitude, but it is human nature. Human nature includes people like Hitler and Stalin, Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer, Al Gore and Margaret Thatcher, Alexander Fleming and Jesus Christ – and all the gray tones in between.
And it is in the nature of societies to embrace practices which are cohesive for their well-being and to minimize practices that threaten to unravel them.
For instance, you don't see to many societies that advocate intentional wasting of resources (burning entire forests for the hell of it) or murder, do you?
No, you don't. And there's a good reason for that. Societies with those kinds of self-destructive values wouldn't last very long.
On the other hand, Rev. Martin Luther King was an exceptional man, but he didn’t go into history as a scientist, but as a politician – a good one. He was partly right, though, when said “the modern plague of overpopulation<b> is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we posses.</b>” He hit the bull’s eye when acknowledged that we have the means for giving a solution to possible problems –but he was wrong when categorized world population of those days as “overpopulation”.
When most people think of overpopulation they only look at 1 resource: land surface area. If you take into account the full equation, that is population growth and resources that enable and support said population/growth, then the picture becomes much more different.
Your graphs look impressive, quite neat. It’s a pity, though, but they are simple statistics, based on dubious data, and on an inexistent consensus. It is an ironclad rule in computing called <b>GIGO</b>, that is, “garbage in, garbage out”. If you have four variables you can get any result from any statistic. And as late mathematician Von Neuman said about statistical graphs, <b>“if you give me four variables, I can draw an elephant. And with five, I can make him wiggle his tail.”</b> And of course, there is the old famous and quite repeated saying: <b>“There are lies, damn lies, and statistics – in that order.”</b>
So we can throw all estimates of anything anywhere at anytime out the window as total nonsense, right?
There was a geologist back in the 1950's by the name of Dr. M. King Hubbert. he compiled petroleum data and found that the production of oil follows a bell curve and peaks around the 50% mark. Based on his model, he said that the United States production of petroleum in the lower 48 would peak in 1970. nobody believed him. And the things his critics said with glee in 1970 was "Remember that old guy Dr. M. King hubbert who said we were going to begin to run out of oil? Well the U.S. has never produced more oil than this year!", which was the year we peaked.
And since then several nations have come across their peaks and gone down the arc of terminal decline and oil production in teh U.S. has been downhill all the way for over 30 consecutive years now.
This is what we call a "historical precedent". Hubbert warned us, we didn't listen, and now here we are stuck with the consequences of being oil dependent on nations that don't like us very much and could pull the plug on our economy overnight if they wished. Hubbart showed that if you take all the peaks of individual wells and states, you could compile that into one bell curve and show the depletion of the whole country. The United States is proof of concept right there. He was dead-on about the oil in the U.S. and every one of his critics that were saying similar things back then as you are now were wrong.
Now if you take the production cirves of all the oil producing countries in the world and compile them into one big curve, you get a ballpark figure for when the world's petroleum supply will peak, also known as "peak oil". It's coming up any year now. All we're seeing is a repeat of what happened here in the United States, except this time on a global level. We have a world economy that is addicted to oil, requires more of it each year, and cannot run without it, and the peak and decline means less oil every year, lesser quality oil, and more expensive oil.
Something has got to give here, and it isn't going to be the geology.
We have seen the President of the United States sending his Secretary of Energy on bended knee to plead with OPEC leaders to increase petroleum production so as to keep our gasoline prices from rising. For a country that boasts that it is the world’s only superpower, this is profoundly humiliating.
Gasoline prices are rising. Natural gas prices are rising rapidly, which poses real economic hardship for millions of American home owners who depend on natural gas to heat their homes in the winter.
The only energy proposals we see are for short-term fixes, sometimes spread over a few years, that seem to ignore the important real-world realities of resource availability and consumer costs.
For years, scientists have warned that fossil fuels resources are finite and that long-range plans should be made. These plans must recognize that growing rates of consumption of fossil fuels will lead, predictably, to serious shortages that are now starting to appear.
For years we have heard learned opinions from non-scientists that resources are effectively infinite; that the more of a resource that we consume the greater are the reserves of that resource; and that the human intellect is our greatest resource because the human mind can harness science and technology to solve all of our resource shortages.
There seem to be two cultures; science and non-science. Each has its own Ph.D. "experts" and "think tanks." Each has its own lobbyists who argue vigorously that their path is the proper path to achieve a sustainable society. So let’s compare the two recommended paths.
The centerpiece of the scientific path is conservation; hence it is appropriate to call this path the "Conservative Path." On this path the federal government is called on to provide leadership plus strong and reliable long-term support toward the achievement of the following goals. The U.S. should:
- Have an energy planning horizon that addresses the problems of sustainability through many future decades.
- Have programs for the continual and dramatic improvement of the efficiency with which we use energy in all parts of our society. Improved energy efficiency is the lowest cost energy resource we have.
- Move toward the rapid development and deployment of all manner of renewable energies throughout our entire society.
- Embark on a program of continual reduction of the annual total consumption of non-renewable energy in the U.S.
- Recognize that moving quickly to consume the remaining U.S. fossil fuel resources will only speed and enlarge our present serious U.S. dependence on the fossil fuel resources of other nations. This will leave us critically vulnerable to supply disruptions that we won’t be able to control.
- Finally, and most important, we must recognize that population growth in the U.S. is a major factor in driving up demand for energy. This calls for recognizing the conclusion of President Nixon’s Rockefeller Commission Report (Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, 1972).
The Commission concluded that it could find no benefit to the U.S. from further U.S. population growth.
In contrast, the non-scientific path suggests that resources are effectively infinite, so we can be as liberal as we please in their use and consumption. Hence this path is properly called the "Liberal Path." The proponents of the Liberal Path recommend that the U.S. should:
- Make plans only to meet immediate crises, because all crises are temporary;
- Not have government promote improvements in energy efficiency because the marketplace will provide the needed improvements.
- Not have government programs to develop renewable energies because, again, the marketplace can be counted on to take care of all of our needs.
- Let fossil fuel rates continue to increase because to do otherwise might hurt the economy.
- Dig and drill. Consume our remaining fossil fuels as fast as possible because we "need them". Don’t worry about our children. They can count on having the advanced technologies they will need to solve the problems that we are creating for them.
- Claim that population growth is a benefit rather than a problem, because more people equals more brains.
We should not be confused by the conflicting expertise that supports each of
these two paths because there is a very fundamental truth:
For every Ph.D. there’s an equal and opposite Ph.D.
For our U.S. energy policy, we must choose between the Conservative and the Liberal Paths. The paths are the exact opposites of each other. Each is advocated by academically credentialed experts. On what basis can we make an intelligent choice?
There is a rational way to choose. If the path we choose turns out to be the correct path, then there’s no problem. The problems arise in case the path we choose turns out to be the wrong path. It follows then that we must choose the path that leaves us in the less precarious position in case the path we choose turns out to be the wrong one.
So there are two possible wrong choices that we must compare.
If we choose the Conservative Path that assumes finite resources, and we later find that resources are really infinite, then no great long-term harm has been done.
If we choose the Liberal Path that assumes infinite resources, and our children later find that resources are really finite, then we'll be in deep trouble.
There can be no question. The Conservative Path is the prudent path to follow.
However, it is the Liberal Path that we are so eagerly taking today.
If resources turn out to be infinite, then we will be OK on the Liberal Path. But if resources turn out to be finite, then today’s choice of the Liberal Path will create enormous and critical problems for us.
Furthermore, you of course know, there is no consensus in science, <b>and there will never be</b>.
There is a concensus in geology about the URR of oil, and that is 2 trillion barrels. Oil discovery has peaked and shows no signs of reversing, so this estimate has just been becoming more and more probable every passing year.
Also consider that oil companies use their largest most profitable fields first and save the much smaller ones for later when the price of oil gets so ridiculously high it becomes economically feasible to drill for those paltry sums compared to the megaprojects the worldis running on today. That just corroborates the concensus figure even further.
The concensus figure shows very little sign of being very inaccurate.
The yellow curve shows exploration drilling.
Note that the level of activity barely affects the discovery trend. It destroys the flat-earth heresy that discovery is driven by market forces
Go back in history and you will find that there was “consensus” in that the oil was going to be depleted in 30-50 year time. (Paul Ehrlich, Lester Brown, Alexander King, etc). That 50-year prediction still stands, even 50 years have elapsed and oil reserves have increased three fold.
We know how that works. Back then, someone made a calculation about how long oil was going to last. The calculation was wrong, and therefore
all calculations are wrong.
Back then what they were doing is taking the amount of oil they knew existed, dividing it by what was then the current rate and growth of consumption, and they came up with 50 years. Now with this model you have to recalculate the figure evry time you make a new discovery. We should realize that there is a better model.
We turn to the work of the late Dr. M. King Hubbert and he came up with a model, which so far has been amazingly accurate, that calculates the date of petroleum peak by totalling the discovered and undiscovered petroleum. We're now talking about
all of the oil.
So we turn to the geology literature and we see that the consensus figure is 2 trillion barrels and that figure just gets more certain with every passing year.
So now we are right at the peak of world oil. This means that we've used half of the oil that was ever in the Earth to use and we're now on the second half. No big deal since the tank is still half full, right? Wrong. What happens after you hit the 50% mark is that the production of the resource declines. No matter how hard you pump or work those fields, every year after the peak you get less and less oil up out of the ground. It's also heavy in sulfur and of a much lower quality. Everyone wants premium light surface crude that is cheap and easy to extract/refine, but once you hit peak the cheap stuff is pretty much all gone. We also can't extract 100% of the oil that is there. In 150 years of geology we haven't been able to do it. As energy advisor to teh President Matthew Simmons pointed out, the old methods are still the best ones for extraction, and this trend is unlikely to change anytime soon.
By the time that thing happens, mankind will have other ways of getting energy and different fuels for transportation, and other techniques replacing the petrochemical industry.
The crisis could be hitting as early as the
4th quarter of this year. Somehow I doubt we're going to have a solution to 150 years of oil-dependent infrastructure problems in the next 4 months.
Perhaps, when we run out of oil, "tree huggers" will become a valuable resource as fuel for heating hospitals and schools. They have a lot of condensed energy inside and will burn merrily giving warmth and happiness to sick people, children and elderly people. That way they will be really serving mankind.
I think it's much more likely we'll be using thermal depolymerization to turn the fat "waste-as-a-virtue" advocates into limited quantities of oil enough to heat a few small villages by thermal depolymerizing them because the "tree huggers" as they were called push for aggressive alternative research practically from the beginning but others just wouldn't have any of it. The problem is that we didn't listen to them, because if we did then people might not be paying $100 to fill up the SUV war wagon at the pump like they are now.
My opinion is that you, tree huggers, want mankind to disappear so all those beautiful creatures in the wild will be free to chase them down and eat each other at will.
And you all-consuming Juggernauts are giving it to them by depleting the resources at an alarming rate and orders of magnitude faster than we're developing anything to mitigate the problem, much less allow for a seamless transition.
The only way we're be knocked back to the dark ages is if we keep on our current course of action. Alternative energy science being a small, niche little trick pony that comes out the closet once a year during auto shows and goes right back only to come out again the next year.
We need something much larger than a Manhattan project to mitigate the coming energy crisis and we need it yesterday. But thanks to short-sightedness, political hubris, and the general "what me worry" attitude of the idiots that have the power to change, things don't happen until they already become a problem, at which point it is too late to preempt them.
We need to follow the Conservative Path, and right now the path we're going on is Liberal beyond imagination.
population has nearly doubled in the last century, we are presently producing more than double the amount of food in about a third of the land used in 1900, and at cheaper prices.
All thanks to the
Green Revolution which used oil and natural gas to explode the amount of food we could produce.
Our population would have never gotten this large if not for the green revolution. A population can't exceed it's ability to fee itself for obvious reasons. But oil and natural gas are finite resources. They are transient. As they go, so does the Green Revolution and the increased food capacity along with it. Then you end up with Easter Island redux.
We are
eating fossil fuels. As they go, the food goes with it. And unless we find some way to quickly replace agriculture with the decline of petroleum (Which Dick Cheney, Vice President and senior oil official puts conservatively at around 5% but could be much steeper) then there's going to be a gap between the amount of food people are demanding, and what the supply is.
In economics when there is more demand than supply, the prices go up and a thing called "demand destruction" is achieved. At a certaing price, people will either be unable or unwilling to pay for the commodity.
In the case of food, the implications of "demand destruction" due to scarcity are pretty evident.
