That’s sounds reasonable, except that you are simply assuming that replacement with alternative fuels and/or conservation will be adequate to allow us to continue living the way we have been living, i.e., in a society and economy based on cheap and universal automotive transportation. It may not be so.
You apparently misunderstood my post. I was not myself claiming that we will be producing thirty billion barrels of oil a year in a thousand years. I was questioning Chief Pedant’s claim that we would be doing so.
He stated:“We are not going to run out of oil. Period. Oil is never going to zoom to some astronomically high price and stay there. Period.” and “But one thing that will NOT happen is that we’ll run out of oil or that oil will become too expensive to provide. Those economics are already settled in favor of indefinite long-term oil at well under $100 per barrel to produce.” These claims seem a little optimistic to me and I was thinking maybe Chief Pedant hadn’t really considered the implications of his claims.
On a broader note, you seem to believe I said we were going to run out of oil. I never said that. In fact, the first thing I said in this thread was “We’re obviously not going to run out of oil.” But I said that oil will become more expensive, which is a point you apparently agree with.
The problem I keep facing on this issue is that people agree on the facts but they can’t bear to look the implications in the eye. Sure, they’ll agree that there is a finite amount of oil in the world - but then they’ll say we’re never going to run out. Sure, they’ll agree that oil will become expensive - but then they’ll say that we won’t see anything increase in price as a result. Sure, they’ll agree that no comparible alternative to oil has been found yet - but then they guarantee that such an alternative exists and will be found as soon as we need it.
Sometimes, I feel like I’m arguing economics with underpants gnomes.
From The City in Mind, by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Atlanta, pp. 73-75:
(Emphasis added.) That book was published in 2001 and industrial civilization appears still to be ticking along just fine – but that does not make his predictions irrelevant. I think the exploitation of previously untapped oilfields in Iraq* might buy us some time, but only some.
*Untapped because of policies, dating from shortly after WWI, of the international oil companies and OPEC, as discussed in Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast; see this thread.
For crying out loud, of course oil prices will rise and of course we won’t live like we do now. We don’t live like we did 1,000, or 100, or even 20 years ago. We won’t find something comparable to oil, we’ll find a replacement. Replacement energy source already exist: coal, solar, hydro, biomass, nuclear, and tidal to name a few. Most of those are more expensive than oil right now, but not by an order of magnitude. We also don’t use energy efficiently. In Iceland, heat is so cheap from hydrothermal that they open the windows in winter to cool off the house. Likewise oil is currently cheap enough that we have one person in a car, have vehicles twice as big as we need, we do not combine our trips to the store, we live tens of miles away from work, etc. If we shipped more freight by train we’d save an enormous amount of oil.
In the short term the only crisis we have is political. A cartel of oil producers can set prices and can threaten to withhold oil like they did in the 70s. Investing in alternative energy sources is smart, but at some point it will happen by itself. And it is happening.
But even if none of the above were true, the peak oil model makes no sense. There will be no cliff. Prices will rise gradually and the market will adapt. Sure we will live differently, but isn’t that the same as it has always been?
Well, no. In the American experience up to now, “living differently” has meant only going wider still and wider, adapting to new technologies and new potientials and new powers and their effects on our economy and society. We’ve never experienced a real setback (the 1970s oil shocks were just a hiccup) requiring us to adapt to limitations or scale down our expectations or make sacrifices or change our lifestyle to something less mobile.
IMO the big possible problem are these two things.
The alternatives to cheap oil may or may not happen. Just because every peak other stuff crisis in the past was no big deal because something saved the day does not automatically mean the day will be saved yet again.
Many folks IMO don’t realize how important CHEAP(and technologically “easy”) oil/energy is to ours and for that matter the world economy/way of living. It just doesnt allow Yuppies to drive gas guzzlers. It also allows poor people to not starve to death. And everything in between.
There is IMO the possibilty that oil getting expensive too fast will retard world wide economic improvement or even cause a long term or worse yet permanent depression/decline.
But wait you say, that new wonder technology will save the day!
The kicker here is that the new wonder technology MAY cost a fortune to develop/use/implement and by the time we try to start going that route civilization is so far behind the economic curve that its too little/too late even if that magic solution arrives.
For example, lets say the only solution worth a hoot is nuclear power. You are not all of a sudden going to have nuclear reactors being built worldwide faster than Walmarts and Starbucks. It takes some serious infrastructure, investment, ramp up time, and know how to build and run those things.
Personally I dont think the Peak (cheap and easy)Oil thing is certain doom or even highly likely. On the other hand I don’t think its SO unlikely or risk free that to not even give it a second thought is a wise thing to do.
Would this happen rapidly? As i recall, my Grandfather lived in a suburb-only he commuted vis bus, streetcar, then another bus. Some evenings, it would take him 1-2 hours to get home.
Other than that, he seemed to have an OK lifestyle.
As I said, I wonder if such a return to a prewar lifestyle migh be the thing to save the cities…it certainly would force the middle class back to places that they had abandoned (since the rise of the suburbs).
It was called bio-diesel.
As I’ve said, I’m not predicting the end of civilization. But we live in a substantially different world than your grandfather did. The people who are claiming that cheap oil might run out but we will still live the way we do now may be wrong. Especially when they can’t support their beliefs except to say “we’ll figure something out”.
We might go back to living the way your grandfather did. Not completely - we’ll still have things like television and the internet, so we’ll have better communications than your grandfather did. But we again might become a society where most people never travel more than a hundred miles from their hometown or eat food that wasn’t grown in their locality. You’ll have children that will never fly in an airplane or eat an orange. Or walk on the moon.
An analogy I’ve made before is winning the lottery. A person wins the lottery and their lifestyle is going to change. They can suddenly can afford things they never could before. But the fact that they have a lot of money now doesn’t mean that they have all the money they’ll ever need forever. If they won five million dollars and spend $250,000 a year, they’re going to run out in about twenty years. But somebody tells them “You only have so much money. You should be making plans now for what you’re going to do when it starts to run out.” and they say “Money’s not a problem. I have lots of money. And if I ever do run out of the money I have now, I’ll just figure out some other way to get $250,000 a year to spend.”
Couple of links regarding the advancement of algae bio-fuels
I was at a recent engineering forum where AlgaeOil was the featured topic. Rapid advancement is being made.
I think higher oil prices could be nothing but good for the world. Reduce consumption of hydrocarbons while making other forms of energy more palatable.
I loved hearing Obama talk about Nuclear power.
The higher the prices of oil the more profitable things like shale oil and depolymerization become. And stuff like solar becomes cheaper by comparison.
If these other things arent cheaper than oil hows that a good thing? Besides possible ecological benifit?
I’ve got an idea. Lets make houses expensive as hell. Then I can live in a tent and think “man, this tent is da bomb”.
This is basically my stance as well. While everyone above is perfectly correct in stating that the market will adjust when supply starts to drop off, I think it is the most optimistic position to suggest we’ll be able to live as before on energy alternatives. (The people who suggest oil will never peak or decline aren’t optimistic; they’re deluded). The real question is what sort of time scale will the oil supply drop over, allowing us to adjust? I’m of the opinion that it will occur faster rather than slower thanks to nations continuing to build up industry and continuing to want more oil, not less. Plus there’s also the export land model, which dictates that the decline in oil exports accelerate even faster than the decline in supply.
I’m also of the opinion that we have not spent anywhere near what would be needed to fully switch our society to an alternative to oil even in a limited area like passenger cars, let alone planes, plastics, etc… And I don’t see anything being done about this on the scale needed until prices get really bad. By then, I don’t think it would be out of the question to see widespread economic collapse, government instability, and even military campaigns to obtain what’s left of cheap resources. How it ends is anybody’s guess.
Anyways, feel free to call me out on exaggerating points of my analysis. I enjoy being pessimistic about society so I am certainly biased, but mostly I think I’m being fairly reasonable here.
You keep saying WWII wasn’t that bad. I think you need to recalibrate your Bad-O-Meter. It was the most terrible time in world history.
A worst-case scenario would be a food war. We often think primarily about oil’s use in transportation but oil is also heavily used in food production. Suppose we lose that food production capacity? We might end up with seven billion people and only enough food for two billion of them. That’s not going to play out well.
The people predicting that we’ll transition to a world where no one execept the hyperrich will be able to afford a car or to fly in an airplane aren’t able to look out their own window and see the alternatives that exist today.
You can buy–not in the future, not “next year”, but today–an electric car. How much does that electric car cost? It costs a lot more than an IC car. How much more? 100 times more? 1000 times more? So much more that only the hyperrich could afford an electric car? No, it costs twice as much, more or less.
So we’re looking at a future where transportation costs are double what they are now. That’s the ceiling. So a world where people can’t afford food unless it was grown within walking distance is nonsense.
I think some people have the notion that a doubling of transportation costs will mean a doubling in all costs, or even more as doubling transport costs means doubling everything including transportation costs again. Except that would only be the case if transportation accounted for 100% of the cost of a product. But that’s clearly not true.
And a doubling of transportation costs only means a lowering of our standard of living if economic growth doesn’t keep pace with the increase in transportation costs. If average GDP increases faster than transportation costs then we’ll be richer in the future despite high transportation costs. And that plane flight to Paris might cost $2000 instead of $1000, but that doesn’t mean only the hyper-rich will get to fly to Paris.
The energy-intensity of our economy has been decreasing over time. We use less energy per dollar of GDP than we did decades ago, and the trend is increasing. We’ll continue to use energy more efficiently in the future. If the price of heating oil increases you can insulate your home and buy less oil. We waste a lot less energy than we used to. So our economy can grow despite using less energy.
Bottom line, oil is a small part of our energy budget, that is devoted overwhelmingly to transportation. Oil prices are going to increase over the next decade, perhaps sharply. And we’re all going to have to get used to the idea. But it’s not like there’s no alternative, and it’s not like we have to imagine mystical future technological innovations for those alternatives. We have those alternatives today. They already exist.
And for 80 to 90 percent of the worlds population its about as afforable a ticket to space.
And if the ENERGY to power it is expensive as hell thats really not gonna help much for the people who can afford it but its still a non trivial purchase.
And all those poor people who CANT afford this expensive transportation will still suffer serious trickle down cost for everything they buy that involves energy usage or transportation.
Most of the world is still damn poor. We need another couple generations of economic growth and good luck to remedy that IMO. If we run out of cheap and easy oil before that, there is a small chance IMO that at best things will get ugly and at worst it will devolve into a downward spiral that brings down most everyone eventually.
I am not sure I understand why you would ask such a question. The price of something is fluid. If the price of oil goes up, the cost of extraction goes down relative to the price of oil. What’s so difficult to understand about this?
? What is your point here? Do you have a problem with the law of supply and demand or what?
Well gee, it’s no secret that people in India and Africa and China are a lot poorer than people in America and Europe and Japan.
Yes, there will be a trickle down effect. It’s not as though more expensive alternatives to cheap oil aren’t more expensive, they are. So a portion of future economic growth is going to be eaten up by more expensive transportation costs. Cheap is cheaper than expensive.
But you all are acting as if they whole history of the 20th century is a history of turning oil into money, and once the oil runs out we’ll be back to stone knives and bearskins.
As I said before, the trend for the last few decades is use less energy per unit of GDP. GDP can increase even though energy consumption decreases. Maybe people in China and India will never be able to afford an electric SUV, but they can’t afford an IC SUV today either.
But they can avoid investing in infrastructure that presumes low cost IC transportation. Like, you know, trains.
Good grief. How in world does MORE expensive oil make my life or anyone elses better? That makes no sense whatsoever. The cost of extraction is irrelevant. If it becomes profitable to put sea monkeys in a blender to make oil once it reaches a thousand dollars a barrel the fact it came from sea monkeys aint helping. Its still costing me a thousand dollars a barrel. I guess I can sleep somewhat easier that sea monkeys are a renewable resource and my great great great to the nth grandchildren can ALSO enjoy thousand dollar a barrel sea monkey oil.
As for your second complaint. Again, IMO you are the one making no sense. When shit becomes expensive and we all have to cut back or do without and the poor people are really screwed I don’t see how this is any sort of improvement, other than the fact its better than dieing.