No, I wish it were. Someone was selling these contraptions to the gullible.
I hate being reminded how easy it would be to get rich if I weren’t afflicted with a functioning conscience. :mad:
Not exactly “end,” and not when we hit the all-time peak of global oil production, but you might want to read The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler.
Another difference is there’s no way for the saved/threat-aware to escape going through the crisis themselves by being “raptured” before it starts.
Of course, just because we can extract, refine and burn every drop of fossil hydrocarbons in the Earth’s crust doesn’t mean we should. There’s still the anthropogenic climate change thing, y’know? And please don’t try to tell us that’s not real!
It won’t collapse, it will just become nonsustainable in its current built form.
Only one I can think of: Don’t live any place where you need to drive a car to get to work, school, shopping and any kind of recreation or social activity.
That’s a very, very big “at least.” Skepticism about the assumption that inventors and engineers will always be able to come up with technological solutions to new problems, including those caused by technology itself, is a very healthy and rational habit of mind.
The thing I see is that a lot of people are assuming that the free market will solve any problem - and that the solution will always be beneficial to society.
We now live in a society that relies on global transportation. For all practical purposes, our transportation system relies on petroleum as a fuel. Most rational people agree that at some point in the foreseeable future we will no longer have sufficient petroleum to run our transportation system as it now exists.
Some people say there’s no cause for alarm. They expect that at some point due to the decreasing amount of petroleum and its subsequent increasing price, a petroleum substitute - let’s call it x-fuel - will be developed and will function pretty much the same way as petroleum does. We will continue to go along the same way we’re doing now, with no significant changes in our economic system or society except that we will not use x-fuel instead of petroleum to run the transportation system we rely upon. Now this is possible - but I’d feel a lot better about this plan if people could make a more reliable estimate about what x-fuel will be and how soon it will be produced in usable amounts.
Because there’s another possibility. When we run low on petroleum, we may stop having a transportation system like we’re used to. Cars will still exist but they’ll exist in the same way they currently exist in third world countries - as an expensive toy not a means of transporting people or goods. The same for planes, trains, and ships. They’ll still be around for a few people but the rest of us will have to rely on the types of transportation that existed before petroleum - steam engines for mass quantity production and maybe muscle power (human or livestock) for local travel. As recently as fifty years ago, most people in the world expected to spend their entire lives within a hundred miles of where they were born and consume only goods produced within a hundred miles of where they lived. Even in the United States, which was remarkable for its traveling citizenry, there was little casual traveling. People might head out to new frontiers but they didn’t go visiting. If you lived in New York and your brother moved to Illinois you pretty much accepted that you might never see him again.
So do I think humanity will die off? No. Do I think society will collapse? No. But do I think it’s possible that we will return to a 19th century economy? Maybe. And the best way to avoid that possibility is to acknowledge that possibility is real and start working on avoiding it.
Well, yeah, but a healthy skepticism towards doomcriers is well justified, too. Remember what a bust the Y2K bug was?
Well, one thing we could have been doing for the past thirty five years was developing nuclear energy like the rest of the industrialized world has. And it wasn’t the Republicans who kept us from doing that; it was the technophobic left.
As I see it, the problem is not that oil will suddenly run out… it’s that we as a society may not be able to adapt fast enough to increasingly-expensive oil. There are alternatives out there for some uses, even though those alternatives are often more expensiove or carry less energy per unit of volume or cost.
And in many sectors, it’s possible to become dramatically-more efficient at using what we do have. For instance, it’s quite possible to build a house that remains at a decent room temperature in a northern mid-continental climate (cold (-35C) winters, hot (+35C) summers) without the use of a furnace or air-conditioning. My friends live in one.
The house may not look like the houses of yore, but that’s because it’s designed to fulfill the function of moderating its indoor climate as intensely as a Ferrari is designed to go fast. People tell me that it wouldn’t be popular because it doesn’t look like what they’re used to. I reply, are you willing to go broke for style and tradition? It seems that some people are.
This is the kind of thing that will come up more and more often: alternatives to the way we’ve been doing things are available, but they are different from what we are used to. And some people just don’t want to move on to something new.
But I agree with the OP in that there is a contingent who latch emotionally onto the doomsday scenario. It seems to slot right into that unthinking emotional place that lets people feel smug and superior to others.
Has anyone pointed out that running out of fossil fuels addresses the global warming problem? 
Nothing happened at Y2K because they fixed the problem! The Y2K bug a) had a definite deadline, b) was small enough that its effects could be described precisely (and therefore could be diagnosed, and solutions tested), and 3) appeared separately, and could be fixed separately, in many different locations. All that was needed was a few tens of billions of dollars in repairs, according to methods already known, in many different places, a specialty whose details were largely hidden from the layperson. The average person didn’t need to change their lifestyle or reprogram anything.
The Y2K bug was easy compared to adapting to high-priced energy.
I disagree that such skepticism in this case is healthy. Oh, I’m not saying that one should automatically assume that technology WILL solve all our problems (or that the Market will solve them all either), but outright skepticism that technological solutions are possible? No, I’m not seeing that. To me, that is again faith based…a anti-technology neo-luddite skepticism about anything new or about technologies ability TO solve problems. Despite the demonstrable fact that it HAS solved a hell of a lot of them in the past few hundred years. Has it also caused problems? You betcha. I’m sure that going from stone tools to metal ones caused some uphevals as well…but the problems caused were far outweighed by the benifits.
There is a point where healthy skepticism over something crosses a border into a knee jerk reaction against it and a blinding of ones self to even the possibility that one could be and is wrong. And I think the folks described in the OP have certainly crossed that line…and to me, that is certainly not healthy.
You see anyone saying any of that here? I don’t. However, there are nutballs on any given issue…and any who thinks that the free market is even SUPPOSED to solve problems or is SUPPOSED to provide solutions beneficial to society is both a nutball and doesn’t really understand what the market really is.
Thats true…at some point in the future (decades? Centuries?) we WON’T have sufficient petroleum to run our transportation. However this isn’t going to happen overnight…it will be a gradual process of either replacement or change as the price of the fuel for that transport goes up. This is the concept that the Peak Oilers (and perhaps you) don’t seem to get…its not all going to happen in a few days, weeks or months…not even in a year or two. Its going to gradually happen as the price of oil goes from $70/barrel to $80/barrel, etc etc…until at some point it reaches a level where alternatives become viable and acceptable. At that point you will have several competing technologies or solutions attempting to win the battle for what is to become the next big thing.
Take your example of global transportation. I assume that you are mostly refering to trade between nations as the most critical aspect that would hurt civilization if the price of oil goes too high. So, I’ll use that example. IIRC the vast majority of trade between nations is done via the sea. True, the majority of ships currently run on fossil fuels. However, they don’t HAVE to run on fossil fuels. Perhaps as things tighten up, regulations will be relaxed and good old nuclear powered fission steam plants will be used instead…thats a technology that is decades old. Or, maybe some advanced version (pebble bed reactors for ships, say) of the concept.
The point is, that technologies ALREADY exist that could potentially take up the load…if they became either cost effective or acceptable to the public. You don’t need miricle pie in the sky solutions to these problems…most already exist. Those that don’t are already in development by one company or another and will vie with each other for dominance once the conditions are ripe…IOW once the price of oil reaches a certain level where they can compete.
Though you may be thinking that I’ve now contridicted myself from my earlier statement, I’m not saying the market will fix all problems or correct all of societies woes…in point of fact its not SUPPOSED to do either of those things. However, if the market is left to its own devices wrt THIS issue its tailor made to provide a viable solution…several of them in fact. This IS what the market does well. I’d have to say that, from my perspective it looks like this is already happening in fact, and its just a scramble to see which one wins out in the end.
-XT
Except this is exactly what is NOT going to happen. We aren’t going to develop an x-fuel as cheap as gasoline that does what gasoline does. Not gonna happen. Forget about it. There is NOT going to be a “new” technology that suddenly comes up to replace the gasoline burning internal combustion engine.
But this doesn’t mean a shutdown of the transportation system. It doesn’t mean we forget about traveling except by bicycle. Because we don’t need NEW technologies to replace gasoline burning internal combustion single passenger vehicles. We already have replacements.
Y’know. Trains. Buses. Vans. Teh internets. And freaking electric cars, biodiesel (vegetable oil) cars, ethanol cars, natural gas cars, hydrogen cars, coal burning cars.
What happens when the cost of commuting to work every day doubles in cost? Some people just suck it up. In the short term people have to suck it up. But you CAN rearrange your freaking lifestyle to avoid a 100 mile round trip daily commute in a single occupancy 5 mpg Humvee. It IS possible. In fact, MOST people don’t have such commutes. And if such commutes become two or three times as expensive ten years, well, sucks to be them. In a ten year time frame we can build light rail, we can buy buses, people can move closer to work, then can arrange to telecommute one day a week, they can join a vanpool. It IS possible.
We aren’t going to solve the problem with some flashy high tech pie in the sky technology, we’re going to solve the problem by adopting already existing off the shelf technology that people today COULD be using, except they rationally prefer their cheap gasoline cars. But when the alternative is expensive gasoline cars, well, people will mostly pick the alternatives. Simple.
Coincidentally mentioned earlier in the thread as belonging to the camp of people described in the article… Does that mean, with this approving quote, that you are also, BrainGlutton?
I don’t quite see the major difference, especially since I can’t see how the transition could be anything but catastrophic.
I do, at least, think this passage from The City in Mind is very well-thought-out:
That was published in 2002, and we are now “experiencing the initial effects” in the form of much higher prices at the pump – higher prices which ar not only charged now to the motorist but which, sooner or later, are going to be passed along to the consumer in the form of higher prices for anything that has to be transported by vehicles burning gasoline or diesel fuel – and what do we buy that doesn’t?
Frankly (and I apologize if I misinterpret or overreach), but I think I’ll have to take that as a ‘yes’ answer to my question. I mean, if you believe in that passage (which you’ve quoted quite a bit in similar debates), I don’t see how you CAN’T believe that the worst case scenarios (especially that of millions of dead and compete economic shutdown) will come to pass.
Interesting. So how has this belief affected what you’re doing with your life, especially in the medium term (the next decade or so)? Or is this too much of ahijack of my own thread? 
And nothing has changed since then BG? We still buy the same number (or more) of gas guzzlers? There aren’t more hybrids on the road than ever? Companies aren’t unilaterally and on their own going green? There isn’t more and more of a push on to develop alternative fuels and alternative methods? To develop resources that previously went untapped?
You see, the flaw in your wonderful cite is…things don’t stay static in a free market system. People don’t continue to blithely bump along until they run over the cliff, completely oblivious of whats happening…and more importantly on how it effects their pocket book. We are only ‘experieencing the initial effects’ you say…and yet in those 4 years a lot has changed. With a price rise in gas of (guessing) less than $2/gallon here in the states. More hybrids on the road…not because the government has mandated them but because of a huge demand for the things. Hell, MY next vehicle is going to be a hybrid…probably sometime early next year, my finances permitting. And as you’ve probably realized, I’m not exactly a tree hugging hippy here (I’m also not the slash and burn capitalist you probably THINK I ame either, but thats another story :)).
-XT
No . . . Even Kunstler’s scenario isn’t “worst case.” It allows for the possibility that all existing cultures and civilizations will survive and gradually adapt – to a world were rapid personal transportation just isn’t quite as easy as it is now. I hope it’s gonna be that easy.
No, I’m not making any changes in my personal life, as yet . . . but I’m seriously considering, when I have the opportunity (and I really hope we’re dealing with a timescale based on decades, here), relocating to someplace away from the seacoasts and higher in altitude. (Where I live now, the sea level rises one foot and I’m wading.) Also, to some town or city that was mainly built pre-WWII, or better still pre-WWI, and built on a more walking-distance scale, and not built around the assumption of unlimited personal automotive transportation for all.