Peak oil inbound
Until 2008, world energy forecasters had always assumed global oil production would keep up with economic growth. According to classic economic theory, as world economies grew they would demand more oil, and oil companies would respond by investing in more exploration and development. “Peak Oil” was considered decades away.
Beginning around 2005, however, world oil production began to hit a brick wall, and by 2008 global oil demand actually exceeded supply. With only a 2 percent shortfall of supply compared to demand, oil spiked to $147/barrel, and U.S. gasoline prices soared to over $4/gallon.
That same year, the International Energy Agency for the first time published a “bottom-up” oil analysis, evaluating each of the world’s major oil fields to see if production actually could continue to increase.
After looking at the oil field data, the IEA revised its forecasts of future oil production downward, yet still took a very optimistic official view, by using rosy projections of as-yet-undiscovered oil fields.
Independent researchers, however, using IEA’s same “bottom-up” data, have now stated the IEA was wildly optimistic. The Global Energy Systems Group has concluded the world actually reached Peak Oil in 2008, and global oil production will now begin to decline. Investment alone cannot fix the problem as the decline rates of existing fields are accelerating.
Michaael Anderson:
My personal (intuitive) projection was that we would slide off Peak this year. However, 2008 might be a realistic date, considering that the global economic collapse started then, and, related to that, we know that those who are in a position to know don’t necessarily reveal their hands to all when things happen.
29 May 2010, 4:11 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
But to the author of the piece… you had me with the exception of that “depends who we elect” crap. It should be manifestly clear that the Presidency could be given to Angela Davis, we would still get substantially the same policies.
29 May 2010, 10:32 pmStan:
^^This is wisdom.^^
30 May 2010, 1:18 pmStan:
The first thing any person who takes office is required to do is swear in. What they swear to? That they will uphold the law.
30 May 2010, 1:19 pmRolf:
“It’s the end of the world (as we know it) — and I feel fine.”
There really is something senile about the infantilism and narcissism of Americans.
30 May 2010, 2:58 pmJon:
Re: This is wisdom.
Cynicism is not wisdom. There is no easier way of seeming to be intelligent. Besides, the author clearly says “may be determined.” Unless Ms. Smith possesses unerring clairvoyance, the future and its possibilities remains essentially unknown.
30 May 2010, 3:09 pmHenry:
Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Oil Rush to Hell
It took President Obama 24 days to finally get publicly angry and “rip” into BP and its partners for the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. What was he waiting for? The pattern has been obvious enough: however bad you thought it was, or anyone said it was at any given moment, it’s worse (and will get worse yet). Just take the numbers…
…
Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age of Tough Oil, a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone. And brace yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.
More:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175249/
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-05-18-a-new-oil-rush-endangers-the-gulf-of-mexico-and-the-planet/
30 May 2010, 3:38 pmStan:
Recognition of a con is not cynicism. Elections are corporately funded personality contests to fill jobs that don’t change. Follow the career so far of Obama, our rescuer from those war-happy Republicans.
Haitians have a saying: The child of a tiger is a tiger.
There may be ways we can force this tiger to do certain things (usually involving massive disobedience of the law or refusal to work); but its still a tiger, and it will act like one.
Marcilla’s observation is wisdom because it is clarity in the face of and in spite of the ceaseless mystifications of this system. One doesn’t need a crystal ball to predict that an imperial capitalist government will act like an imperial capitalist government, any more than looking both ways to cross the road qualifies as paranoia.
30 May 2010, 5:32 pmDave:
Arab saying:
“When you see the lion’s teeth, don’t think the lion is smiling.”
31 May 2010, 2:36 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
Jon, if you honestly felt I was claiming some supernatural-level ability to state the events of the future in absolute terms, then I apologize for not being more clear in my statement. Please believe that I was making an honest attempt to do so when I used “could” “would” and “substantially”. I was not attempting to claim prophecy, merely forecasting a “most likely scenario” based upon a preponderance of evidence. As I tell people, if the election of a black community organizer with roots in ACORN and a liberation theology church gets us a continuation and expansion, even, of the worst of the Bush policies, how is it reasonable to continue to insist that the election of someone with “more progressive values” is what is needed to change the direction of US national policy?
As for cynicism, I’m not entirely sure what you meant. Perhaps it was too harsh to use phrasing like “that crap” when talking about someone’s writing. So with regard to my cynicism toward the author, let me say that I would gladly read another piece and have not just decided to “write this person off” (pun unintended, but still appreciated). But I think it’s more likely that you meant cynicism toward the system, which I don’t feel is evident in what I’ve written. I’m simply describing the system as-is, with no attempt to attach normative values. I don’t like the system, I confess, but I understand that some people do receive a relative benefit from it.
The “Great Man Theory of History” was one of the first ideas to be de-bunked in my POS2001 “Introduction to Political Science” class, and Florida State was no stronghold of New Left ideology!
And as for “seeming to be intelligent,” you say that like it’s something to strive for!?!?!
31 May 2010, 8:58 amTess:
“Recognition of a con is not cynicism.” This is true as far as it goes. What I think is the true cynicism in all of the “peak oil” hoopla is the failure to appreciate human creativity. The failure to really appreciate that “necessity is the mother of invention”: categorically and without hesitation. I might also add, a failure to see that there are and have been only 2 responses to any challenging situation: to become overwhelmed with the problem, to see it as hopeless, beyond our capabilities to change it, to succumb to pessimism and cynicism, to be defeated: or to perceive the problem as a remarkable opportunity, a challenge to create, to see within that problem its own resolution.
We humans, almost without fail, are incredibly myopic. We tend to exaggerate our little slice of history in one of 2 ways: either we make of our times as the worst, we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket, we’re all toast; or, the flip side of that; prior times and people were neanderthal, without merit, flat earth with all its silly notions; and we have arrived.
Historically, “these are the best of times, and the worst of times”: that’s always been true, without fail.
1 June 2010, 10:27 amCurt:
Tess,
Thank you for reminding us, me especially, of that.
An important thing that separates humans from many other animals is our ability to plan farther ahead. I posted on another thread a question as to how humans, Americans in particular, could make a transition to a post fossil fuel world with out using all the fossil fuels that we can peacefully get our hands on.
No one answered.
When I went to school and the teacher asked a question and no one answered I always felt pity for the teacher. I thought, why is everyone pretending that they do not know or are not listening. I can only guess that perhaps “THE PLAN” is to important to discuss where anyone can read it. What does it include, the culling of the population over 65 years old? Perhaps no one wants to admit that we are going to have to drill off shore. Perhaps no one wants to admit that in order not to need to drill off shore some one is going to be sacrificed. Not in an explicit manner like culling all those over 65 but in an implicit manner like saying OK
thousands or tens of thousands of people died in food riots but it is the price that we had to pay to avoid off shore drilling and avoid stealing the oil from Venezuela and killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Has there been silence, or have I just been left out because the answers are too important to be widely shared?
The link that Karl gave some days ago shows some directions. Traditional cities, eating much less meat and switching from beef to rabbits and swans, using more labor intensive farming rater than petroleum intensive farming which would use techniques more akin to native American methods appropriate for free people rather than the European system that was based on serfs and slaves. I wrote Nathan, the author of Karl’s link the other day that Traditional cities could come about by scrapping some types of zoning laws. Yet new houses would need to be built for all the people that want to move back in to very densely populated Urban areas. Also if we have 10% chronic unemployment but also figure that everyone would be better off if 10% of the people were involved with growing the bulk of our food rather than the 2% that it is now how are those chronically unemployed people going to be coaxed in to wanting to farm and retrained to be able to farm, and be relocated, and on to whose farmland?
1 June 2010, 5:27 pmNeed I ask for more?
DeAnander:
… the children of tigers …
Tom Engelhardt, addressing this year’s crop of university graduates
1 June 2010, 6:59 pmGaianne:
DeAanander–
Thank you for this quote, which spells it out in clear, clean language for those who didn’t get the short version.
It is now a matter for historians: Peak production of light, sweet crude–till then, the standard of oil production–occurred in 2005, and the peak of all petroleum liquids mostly likely occurred in 2008 (though the numbers are dodgy and 2006 is still a possibility). As we now enter the cliff of production decline, these facts will cease to matter and will be buried in the endless clamor of denial of reality. What will matter is shortages, and how they will be explained, or explained away.
What will matter even more, is the degree to which we decide to go clean and sober, small as this likelihood currently seems to be.
–Gaianne
2 June 2010, 10:29 pmStan:
Human creativity cannot overcome the second law of thermodynamics. There is no substitute in nature for oil. None.
And the past is rich with examples of die-off and civilizational collapse. “The bigger you are the harder you fall” is apropos here. Our collapse will be a doozy. Already is in many parts of the world… but the Nigeria-blindness allows us to think of these examples of the exterminist dynamic as somehow separate from the “main” reality, that is, our air-conditioned lives in the metropoles.
3 June 2010, 6:23 amm.c.:
RE: …the children of tigers…
A little backstory: in the 2000 presidential campaign, I remember it came out somewhere that after he graduated from Yale with mediocre grades was rejected by the Univ. Texas law school(Jim Baker, the family friend was a UT law alum) I guess family connections got him into HBS[later one of his profs there was interviewed and was suprised he got accepted] Obama at least on paper wins out on the IQ test. Its hard to make law review at Harvard & even harder to get elected its pres.
But the main levers of power haven’t changed very much.
~APATHY is a great word, not exactly Lack of Empathy. Lokk it up on Wikipedia, there’s a great chart at the top with Apathy being both low skill level & low challenge level.
3 June 2010, 11:54 amRichard:
How Oil Breaks Down in Water
Nature has its own chemical processes to minimize oil’s impact in seawater—can human dispersant efforts measure up?
Here’s what happens on a molecular level when oil hits ocean water.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/coal-oil-gas/oil-spill-water-chemistry
3 June 2010, 1:21 pmTess:
“Human creativity cannot overcome the second law of thermodynamics. There is no substitute in nature for oil. None.”
The real creative genius will bypass oil. The only limits to solutions reside within ourselves; especially pessimism, which is totally destructive of energetic, original response.
http://www.ted.com/talks/craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life.html
3 June 2010, 7:24 pmJon:
FDR and the New Deal Response to an Environmental Catastrophe
Thursday, 06/3/2010 – 12:58 pm by David Woolner | 2 Comments
Roosevelt historian David Woolner shines a light on today’s issues with lessons from the past. He co-edited the book “FDR and the Environment,” now out in paperback.
As President Obama heads to the Gulf of Mexico to inspect the miles of coastline ravaged by oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, he might wish to examine the federal government’s response to an earlier environmental catastrophe — the drought and dust storms of the 1930s that turned major regions of the United States into what is commonly referred to as the Dust Bowl…
Over the course of the next seven years, the U.S Forestry Service, working in conjunction with the CCC, the newly established Works Progress Administration (WPA), and local farmers, planted nearly 220 million trees, creating over 18,000 miles of windbreaks on some 30,000 farms. The scale of this effort boggles the imagination. It literally changed the face of America and most importantly — along with the introduction of new farming techniques also initiated by the New Deal — stopped the dust storms dead in their tracks….
Today, as we grapple with the ecological disaster plaguing the Gulf waters and region, we would do well to recall the New Deal efforts to not only bring immediate relief to those suffering in the wake of a natural disaster, but also to bring about a long term solution to the problem. Planting millions of trees provided work for thousands and helped restore a vast area of the country into productive farmland. The conditions we face today are not all that dissimilar from those we faced in the 1930s. But the solution — a massive effort to combine our need for jobs with the pursuit of alternatives to fossil fuels and a concomitant reduction in greenhouse gasses — has so far eluded us. Perhaps the President’s visit to oil-drenched wetlands of Louisiana will change this.
4 June 2010, 1:16 amDeAnander:
I think that — to name just a couple of people — Sharon Astyk, Richard Heinberg, Lester Brown all have many creative, energetic, and even optimistic suggestions as to how we can deal with the age of expensive and scarce oil. I’m not sure these are quite the kind of mystical/miracle, transcendent solutions that seem to be implied in Tess’ post though. They are commonsense solutions involving food autarky, relocalisation, and weaning ourselves off of the massive-energy-use-per-capita habit.
From what I’ve read, Venter’s achievement is interesting, but hardly epoch-making. It seems peculiarly industrial-human to be so excited about making a kind of limited pseudo-life that is entirely artificial, while being (more or less) blissfully unconcerned about the gradual degradation and exermination of most of the natural biotic systems that — er — keep us alive (aside from being elegant, diverse, beautiful and complex beyond our present ability to understand or describe).
4 June 2010, 1:38 amRhisiart Gwilym:
Evidently no use to present real-world evidence to Tess. She has faith! (Wonder if she’ll be able to eat it when the food’s running low; or burn it to keep warm in a hard winter?)
A fair example of a widespread mind-set, particularly amongst the badly reality-disconnected populace of the US. People who think like this, in the face of growing mountains of evidence, aren’t coping very well with the appalling bleakness of what’s happening, and the growing understanding amongst many of us that there will be no happy ending, no last-minute reprieve from the catastrophe, and sure as hell no miraculous supertech fix appearing out of the blue on the back of some cartoon-style genius inventor.
This sort of obdurately irrational — and doomed — thinking seems to come in a wave when empires collapse. Lots of hitherto very comfortable and pampered people of the metropolis, and its privileged sidekick-states (widespread here in Britain too), simply can’t — or won’t — handle the basic fact that sometimes things just end, whatever we do to keep everything going, and end badly. Not a new attitude. The survivors dump it pretty soon though, when things start to get seriously hairy.
Give me — for example — Mike Ruppert’s approach at the new Collapsenet site which will launch shortly. There you get unremitting, honest facing of the worst that’s happening, plus practical ‘life-boat-making’ for those who are ready to see the realities, and to start to prepare soberly. ‘Feral Scholar’ makes out pretty well on that score too.
5 June 2010, 4:31 pmStan:
“Synthetic life.” A more lunatic project could scarcely be imagined. This playing at being God stuff has been tried before… oh yeah, that’s called “progress.”
I can hardly wait for the unintended consequences of this one.
5 June 2010, 6:15 pmDeAnander:
I like Sharon Astyk’s approach (in those of her books I’ve read so far, and they are eminently readable too). No-BS, neither overwrought Mad Maxian dramaqueenery nor la-di-da cornucopian cluelessness. She steers a sensible course between gibbering panic and foolish complacency, and imho hits many worthwhile nails quite squarely on the way
I am wondering about this “synthetic life” concept. Surely it isn’t “life” (as we know it) if it’s “synthetic”, since life-as-we-know-it is self-organising and spontaneous (isn’t that part of the definition)?
6 June 2010, 10:31 pmMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
“Synthetic Life” got me thinking about nanobots, brain-computer interfaces, and the technological singularity. The video was somehow less interesting and yet more anxiety-producing =-S
8 June 2010, 9:09 amStan:
DeLanda’s “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” pokes around in all this, from his DeLeuzean standpoint, going on about “machinic phylum” and whatnot. He doesn’tr conclude much, except that they haven’t made a machine that can actually think yet.
I don’t worry that they can do it. They can’t, imo, because what we are cannot be reduced, and what is between us cannot be replicated mechanically. Since what is between us is much of what we are… well. I won’t enter the fray with questions of “spirit.” (:
But what people do in the attempts to play at being deities does concern me (anxiety-producing, indeed), given our experiences with atom-smashing, internal comustion engines, “education,” etc.
Here’s my favorite quote from the book, Jurassic Park:
8 June 2010, 9:52 amMarcilla Elizabeth Smith:
I’m not sure how far I should stray from “Peak Oil”, and Elaina accuses me of feeding her “nightmare food” whenever I bring up techno-futurism, but if I may try to tackle the “will machines ever think?” question in a blog post (HA!)…
First, let us consider that there are two issues here with which most people are relatively familiar nowadays: hardware and software. The human brain is a marvel able to make like a trillion calculations a second or something absurd like that. It’s able to do this via a “brute force” approach whereby it has like 20,000 processors crammed in our noggins which run at an amazingly low temperature. Still, they are carbon-based and have theoretical limits orders of magnitude lower than semi-conductors and other high tech materials. No single computer has yet surpassed the number of calculations of a human, yet, but I believe the SETI@Home project surpassed this number over a distributed network just in the last few years. Moore’s Law on exponential computing growth has continued decades after “experts” predicted it would run its course.
The second issue (software) is a little more elusive. Human General Intelligence is broken into ~5 areas by folks who research this stuff. Things that we evolved to do a long time ago (like looking at the world around us and being able to move accordingly, all the while maintaining our balance) we do a LOT better than machines. Stuff that we have only learned to do recently (evolutionarily-speaking) like figuring out the cube root of 216 we usually get beat out by even simple machines (it’s 6, for the OCD out there). There are some amazing projects out there exploring things like computers making jokes, robots with empathetic changes to their facial expressions, and of course, there’s the turing test. There’s a big hold up in software and integration on the path to super-human Artificial General Intelligence, but software shows signs of developing at a rate that surpasses even the Moore exponential.
Of course, I’m writing as an Atheist who wants immortality, so YMMV
8 June 2010, 2:57 pm