Someone referred to this issue in one of the other threads -- maybe the what do I hate thread. It's something that I've just recently been researching.

What do you think about Peak Oil?

If you think it's real, what are you doing about it? If you think it's a hoax, why? And why do you think it's being perpetuated?

Something like that isn't really a hoax, as the perpetrator knows at best only a little more than the victim. Really, do you know somebody who can gauge the socio-military-economical geographical effects of an oil shortage and project those changes 20 years to the future? At best you get reasonable approximations or guesses, which that page essentially is.

That said, I could see it happening. Much depends on the actions of various political bodies around the globe; I find it unlikely that India or China would take steps to develop alternatives, but some western societies might. Which will mean that they'll share those solutions with the USA when the time comes, because otherwise the US military comes aknocking with force. Hopefully the solutions are portable and scalable, otherwise we'll get to live in some interesting times.

As for me personally - don't really care. I've not been vested with political power, so I have no opportunity to help people about this thing. The best I can do is what I do anyway: live nice and prosper. If societal breakdown reaches here, I'll be one fuckin' survivalist bunny you soft city people wouldn't believe. More likely Finland will just scale heavy industry back for a couple of decades, go through a massive rearrangement of agroindustry, and continue on it's merry way. We don't even have oil, so no reason to come kill us.

So my attitude is wait and see - and educate myself in case I some day end up in position of responsibility and have to do something about these matters.

I'm with Eero on this one (except for the fact that I think we already live in interesting times). Wait and see. I started digging through the links on that site and found all sorts of suspect leaps in logic inorder to make facts bend to a certain point of view. That immediately raises red flags to me.

Personally I see it as a real issue that will have to be dealt with in the near-term. However, I don't fell the need to panic.

Keith

I'm nearly as skeptical about the pessimism as I am about the optimism. My guess is that times will get hard, the massive megalopoli will fall on terrifying economic hard times as the price of gasoline spikes, but there won't be an end of civilization, just a move away from the modern, suburban style of life. I think we may look back on right now as a "golden age of energy" but not that the entireity of the world society is going to collapse.

But

My father is an energy researcher (hydrogen fuel cells) and pretty well connected in the field. HE is enormously pessimistic about the energy future of the US. Like, way more than most people. Probably way more than that site. And he knows more about the issue than I do. Probably than all of us on this forum combined, unless there is another person who has devoted his or her life to the study of energy resources engineering around.

People have been talking about running out of oil for 30+ years.

Fact is far from running out we have more today than we did in the 70s with more being found all the time.

Technology improves and we can now extract more oil from wells that used to be considered dry. We can take oil out of places that we couldn't ever even reach before. While its true that no new Oil Refineries have been built in the US since 1976, the efficiency improvements that have gone into place means that those same refineries are able to produce much more useable product from a barrel of crude. So not only has the number of barrels of crude increased, the amount of energy we can extract per barrel has increased.

When you look at the VAST reserves still in places like Iraq and Russia and realize those places are still using 1970s era technology...and then extrapolate how large their reserves might actually be if they were exploring, and drilling using modern techniques...and refining using modern techniques...

No friends. We will not see an "Oil Shortage" of civilization threatening proportion in our life times, or our childrens (for those that have 'em). Life will go on...big business will continue to use oil as long as its cost effective to do so. They will bring online alternative energy sources at the rate required (after some lag) to offset any unbearable price increase.

Oil shortage is hooey...

Yeah, I saw that interview on the Daily Show, too: Basically every time a shortage in "usable" oil is spotted, technology improves to the point where a huge source of oil, previously untappable, becomes tappable and refinable. The next oil on the horizon is called, IIRC, "sand oil", which apparently there is a HUGE supply of in N America. They can't refine it yet, but they're working on it...

That was an interesting point of view. Dunno if it'll hold, but again: Interesting times.

Plus, I've got fingerless leather gloves and mismatched football pads in my closed anyway- If the oil wars come and go, I'll be there alongside Mad Max.

-Andy

Ben Lehman wrote: I'm nearly as skeptical about the pessimism as I am about the optimism. My guess is that times will get hard, the massive megalopoli will fall on terrifying economic hard times as the price of gasoline spikes, but there won't be an end of civilization, just a move away from the modern, suburban style of life. I think we may look back on right now as a "golden age of energy" but not that the entireity of the world society is going to collapse.

Valamir wrote: As long as capital is free to flow to where its needed to finance that adaption life goes on.

Valamir wrote: Or could the development of new wireless technologies and ever increasing internet band width lead to a major trend towards telecommuting? Which could allow Americans to avoid the traffic and energy costs without having to move back to urban areas. Lots of possibilities.

Lifestyles change and adapt to conditions. As long as capital is free to flow to where its needed to finance that adaption life goes on.

There are a couple of folks on dailykos that have been giving very informed analysis of peak oil from a progressive viewpoint over the last few months:

http://www.dailykos.com/user/Stirling%20Newberry
http://www.dailykos.com/user/Jerome%20a%20Paris

I think that it is pretty clear that oil supplies will not be able to keep up with rapidly accellerating demand in the near future, even factoring in attempts to utilize difficult to extract reserves (some of which, like shale and sand bound oil take more energy to extract than they produce). The oil companies know this today as do many officials of various governments (definitely including the U.S. White House). While Ralph points toward the improvements that have been made in the recent past, investment by oil companies in new technology and exploration has actually been rapidly grinding to a halt. They know that it won't be profitable and they are maximizing their profit potential accordingly.

How this will play out is much more tricky though, and here is where I think the Peak Oil predictions in those web pages are entirely speculative. The problem is that there are several other issues that could be coming up soon to dramatically change the playing field to the point of making predictions now highly suspect. The rise in assymetric warfare, the potential for a reinvigorated nuclear arms race (except now proliferating more quickly into a larger number of less stable nations), the dramatical accelleration of imbalance in wealth and ownership, global warming now beginning to show signs of practical and immediate impact on our lives, and the potential impending collapse of the U.S. dollar that holds up the world economy, are just a few examples. Then there are the very dramatic issues that could show up suddenly and almost without warning yet also have a huge impact, such as the unification of the Islamic world under a centralized political entity, a constitutional crisis and the collapse of democracy in the U.S. caused by either fraud in the electoral process or a hasty fear-filled reaction to another major terrorist attack, a dramatic realignment of the world order based on the shockingly rapid disintegration of the U.S.' status as benign post-WWII world hegemon, or the rapid emergence of a new and unexpected energy source like cold fusion.

All of these things and countless more have the potential to emerge as major issues in the near future, along with peak oil, and the interaction between these various forces are very volatile and unpredictable. Any one of them could rise to enough of a crisis level that something like peak oil would become totally eclipsed or at the very least play out from within a very different political/economic frame. Any one of them could also simply never really become a problem.

I'm of the opinion that the rising cost of oil will drive the development of replacements. Cleaning up coal and nuclear, renewables, etc.

Vaxalon wrote: I'm of the opinion that the rising cost of oil will drive the development of replacements. Cleaning up coal and nuclear, renewables, etc.

That's not to say that there won't be huge economic displacements while that happens.

I'm the one who mentioned the issue (on the Get It Out Of Your System thread). I expressed the worst-case scenario purely for amusement value. I believe that the problem is real but the predictions of its effects are exaggerated.

It's always easier to predict, and proclaim, "total collapse" than it is to think through the complexities of what is actually likely happen, taking into account that humans do stuff to adapt to changes. This is a failure of imagination. It reminds me of all those nuclear-holocaust stories that conveniently assumed an eventual 100% death rate, because even a 1% survival rate would leave an enormous number of people who would then, y'know, do stuff, and who knows what?

But, things are going to change. I can't walk through a suburb at nighttime and look at the decorative outdoor lighting illuminating trees and walkways without thinking, "Do these people have any ideea how hard you have to pedal a stationary bike to generate enough power to keep even one of those bulbs lit?"

The key to predicting the changes, I believe, is to examine current uses of energy in terms of labor actually saved.

the peak oil site wrote: A single gallon of gasoline contains the energy-equivalent of 500 hours of human labor... It only takes one gallon of gasoline to propel a three-ton SUV 10 miles in 10 minutes. How long would it take you to push the three ton SUV 10 miles?

Walt Freitag wrote: Alas, all that tech might not prevent hot baths and showers from becoming infrequent luxuries. Genetically engineered anti-BO body bacteria might be a good business opportunity for a biotech startup.

Actually that last ain't a risk, IMO. One of the best and most efficient solar 'power' apps being sold now is simply water heaters; the glorified version of a set of water pipes painted black to put on your roof. Saves heating that amount of water using gas or electric. I've considered it, seeing as I have this huge roof which all looks straight south... but insolation where I live sucks.

So of the things you're likely to have to trade off... hot water is low on the list. Depending on where you live, of course. But otherwise I think Walt's bang on the money; substitute some other luxury-use instead.

As a note, though, things like the fresh water requirements for making computers are not going to be able to go down very far. I work in a related industry, and it costs a huge amount of ultrapure water (DI water, so pure that drinking it could destroy your intestines by reverse osmosis), which is energy+water, to do semiconductor processing. There's not a lot of room for resource savings there, I'm afraid... you rapidly hit a tradeoff where less waste purifying the stuff means more waste as yields go down.

For my part, I've simply been making home improvements (when otherwise warranted) with the assumption that the price of oil will at least triple during the lifetime of the appliance. This seems to have worked well so far. It's a long shot from going off-grid, but if it has a hope of paying for itself in today's gas prices, I say it's actually a bargain.

- Eric

Ben Lehman wrote:

Vaxalon wrote: I'm of the opinion that the rising cost of oil will drive the development of replacements. Cleaning up coal and nuclear, renewables, etc.

BL> You are a man of great faith. I admire that even as I think it is wildly incorrect.

yrs--
--Ben

Valamir wrote:
Its not as if one day all of the wells in the world will stop pumping and the next day everyone will wonder what to do.

Ben Lehman wrote: Now, our energy sources are presently located entirely within the biosphere, a tiny shell around the earth, thinner than the skin on an apple. That's coal, natural gas, petroleum. Anything. So we've got a lot less time that 160 years.

Ralph, did you look at the link I started this with? I'd be interested to hear comments specifically on the economic parts since those are the most muddled to me. It's easier to be afraid of a global depression because of complexities of currency than the tech since I too think that if our infrastructure stays good and we make a concerted effort, we'll probably manage the change OK.