Without that it will take a lot more resources to be viable. Again, please show your math that cities use more resources than the same number of people living in small towns scattered around the countryside.
We are building that replacement now.
GDP has been decoupling from energy inputs for decades.
Yes, our economy requires oil inputs to function. But each year, the economy as a whole becomes less reliant on oil. There’s no particular reason to think that trend won’t continue. Energy production and use technologies keep getting better!
A (trite) but on the money blurb about this: The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stone, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil.
Yes, there is a finite amount of oil out there, but there’s every indication that it’s not going to run out while we still depend on it.
Very well said. Far too many people have this mentality that technology and ‘innovation’ is going to save us, and allow us to keep living the same we do now. This is a type of ‘magical’ thinking on par with the cargo cults of the south pacific.
The future is very loudly telling us that we need to downscale just about everything we do. From our living arrangements, to government, to education, to food production.
Wow, you are even tying your hatred of college education into this?
Where is the future telling us this, loudly? Does the future have a podcast or something?
The only information we have about what’s going to happen in the future is pricing information. Prices communicate scarcity. Nothing indicates there’s a coming scarcity of commodities on the horizon.
Now - if you want to argue that externalities such as climate change are not currently priced into goods and services, I would emphatically agree and this is why I would support a carbon tax. But that’s a different conversation than “everything has to get smaller because this can’t continue forever”.
Why do you put innovation in quotation marks? Everything we have is due to innovation. Technology and innovation have accomplished quite a lot.
Resource depletion and pollution are serious issues. But people don’t realize how much fat we can cut from civilization and still function, or how much human capital and financial capital we could devote to these issues if we had to. There is a huge gap between pre industrial civilization and everyone owning a mcmansion.
One person driving a car that gets 25mpg uses eight times more oil than a carpool of four people in a car getting 50mpg. Transporting cargo by barges uses less fossil fuels than via train. Trains use less than semis. It may take longer to ship things but we will still be able to. Carpooling and not getting everything shipped from Amazon in 2 days sucks a bit but it’s survivable.
If peak oil happens you will see more investment in public transit, carpool and alternative energy. People may telecommute more. The trillions and trillions in global gdp and millions of highly educated people will look for solutions.
Also this universe is full of natural resources. We just have to learn to mine asteroids and other planets.
I understand your position I just don’t think it’s correct.
Yes we can and should invest more heavily in sustainable living. But we have time to figure it out. As we hit shortages we will find alternatives. They may cost more but we will survive.
Resources are unlimited. There’s a whole universe of resources. We can start mining asteroids, for example.
I wouldn’t disagree that real innovation has yielded quite a few dividends.
However I am sympathetic to the point of view that people are addicted to the idea that innovation is so common nowadays that certainly it will solve our problems for us.
Technology can solve many of our problems, but phone apps aren’t going to accidentally solve climate change by the miracle of the invisible hand. Someone’s got to decide what the problems are and start allocating resources to them. If there’s no obvious profit behind it, then government has to do it.
Well yes it is and no it is not. A shock disruption can cause short term pain, however we have been adjusting nicely to not be so dependant on oil. We have found more sources of it, at various price points, then one can shake a stick at, and have moved towards alternate and more abundant fuels such as natural gas by a order of magnitude. The big thing oil has for it is it’s wonderful useful hydrocarbons which are hard to make by other means, not that orange flame that comes from burning it. So short of a sudden stop, all is well in this respect as we have fuel, and oil will not run out though it may be outpriced for fuel.
It seems otherwise. Cities seem the most efficient per person in terms of energy usage and IMHO the most likely to receive assistance in times of emergency while others are left to rot.
I fully agree, and the market has a large number of failures in it that you need the state to adjust for, including funding R&D for more sustainable economic systems.
But solar panels have declined in price by around 90-95% in the last few decades, and so have wind turbine generated energy. We need more, but the trendline is already there.
I believe we need to spend closer to 2% of GDP for 30 years to develop a carbon neutral economy. Right now in the US we’re spending closer to 0.3% of GDP a year. Not nearly enough.
I just don’t agree with the idea that society will collapse or the decline will be irreversible. Our lifestyles may temporarily be cut back while we allocate resources, but civilization is very sturdy. It survives plagues, famines, wars, dictatorships, etc. Seeing some aspects of our lifestyle curtailed temporarily will not be the end for us, it’ll just incentivize us to find a solution.
Keeping people alive isn’t very hard, and our standard of living can be cut back quite a lot w/o it affecting human capital or survivalship.
Like with the concept of mass starvation, a lot has to go wrong for mass starvation to happen.
- Not all the land on earth is used for farmland that could be.
- The land used isn’t always used to western productivity levels (a lot of asian and african farms are poorly run)
- A lot of crops are not calorie dense (corn produces more calories per acre than lettuce, etc)
- A lot of staple crops aren’t even used for human food, they are used for animal feed or industrial purposes.
- People can survive, albeit uncomfortably, on 2000 calories per day.
- Vertical or urban farming can be explored to grow staple crops.
All of those things are factors in mass starvation. Theres a lot of ways to increase calorie production that have to be exhausted before mass starvation occurs.
Happily it’s not an either/or choice. Do I think we can transition, today, to all renewable energy? Nope. I don’t. But we don’t need to, either. There are plenty of alternatives. And progress marches on. In 20 years or so we might have battery storage systems available to make renewable energy more viable. Or we might have figured out how to politically sell nuclear, which absolutely could scale up, especially with renewable energy, to meet all our needs. Or we could, you know, use natural gas as we are to give us the baseline power we need.
Sorry, but your little blurb here doesn’t do much to help your non-case. There isn’t going to be a coming era of resource or capital scarcity. There isn’t going to be a huge Peak Oil™ crisis. What there will be, almost certainly, is an environmental backlash due to climate change, and this will certainly render some cities less viable, but we’ll get through that. This is even without any sort of magic tech like nano-scale materials or fusion or unicorn power…just on what we have today, that’s real. Factor in the stuff that we don’t have locked down today, or the potential for magic future tech, and the sky is the limit…literally. Because the whole resource scarcity thingy is as much an illusion as it’s ever been. There is a whole solar systems worth of resources out there, when/if we ever seriously start to have resource scarcity on the planet…which won’t be any time soon.
Uh… I feel perfectly comfortable surviving off 2000 calories a day.
Have I been on a starvation diet this whole time? 
We start running low on the stuff we make fertilizer out of?
This is ridiculous. Things will not be better without oil. In the short term things will be far worse and might cause millions of near term deaths. Agriculture on a scale to feed seven billion people needs oil to make sure that the food can be grown and harvested (fertilizer and farm equipment; trucks to get food to warehouses; electricity to process and freeze it; gasoline and diesel to get it to stores and back to our abodes. There is no current reliable replacement for petroleum should it magically disappear tomorrow. We dont have the energy or transportation stock to move all Americans (not to mention citizens of the world) if gasoline were to disappear tomorrow. Without gasoline many people who live in rural areas could not get needed medical help. And if oil were eliminated tomorrow, international business would come to a halt as goods, services and tech folks couldnt get where they need to get to in a reasonable time.
I was thinking more about nitrogen. We make nitrogen fertilizer out of natural gas. At current consumption levels, the world reserve of natural gas will be gone in ninety years.
I don’t really think there will ever be a shortage of nitrogen. I’m breathing a bunch of it right now.
If you want to be REALLY technical, the only resource we will ever run out of is fissionable material. For everything else, the atoms are still here on Earth, waiting for us to arrange them into useful configurations.
Large cities are only possible in the era of cheap and abundant energy. That era won’t last much longer (we’re probably closer to the end than we are to the middle). They need to have almost every single damn thing flown, shipped, or trucked in, often from faraway lands. They are extremely expensive to maintain. As we head toward a resource and capital scarce future, they will no longer be viable. For every person crammed into a megacity, that’s one more person not working the land. In the future, we will need a far, far higher portion of the population working the land. Probably the majority.
Rome, Paris, London, Baghdad, Istanbul, and Moscow would all like a word with you.
Large urban populations have been achieved in pre-industrial societies, however, the 1 million mark reached by the city of Rome and certain Chinese cities have proven to be highly unstable and often very temporary in a low energy society.
It has been more commonly demonstrated that a low energy city has its greatest stability with 10,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. Most Medieval cities in a variety of cultures tended towards the lower end of this scale.
Throwing 1 million+ unprepared modern people in an urban setting with no cultural economy or long term history is a recipe for disaster when the power goes out.