That oil is a commodity like any others. The cartel can manipulate production (ramping it up or spinning it down), but it doesn’t otherwise set the price. Anyone who thinks that the price is driven solely by the cartel and ‘government dealings’ and not related to market forces is simply wrong.
-XT
So after asking you point blank 3 times, you finally tell another poster what you want to debate.
Is this what you want to debate? If so can you tell us what your position is on this topic?
Or is this going to be yet another of your typical threads, where you make coy allusions to conspiracies and all sorts of other nonsense, post links and make oblique references to them as “intriguing” or asking “what do you think of this?” and never once say what you actually believe?
Because so far this thread has been the latter, and oh so typical of your GD performance.
If you can’t tell me what you actually want to debate and what your position in in your next post, I am going to chalk this up as another of your non-debates.
I never realized that economics were a subjective field. 
Note the beginning of my third sentence. I said, “For me …” I never asked anyone to support that view. I read this thread to learn.
Is there manipulation of energy prices? The Bush Administration attempted to artificially raise electricity prices of the Bonneville Power Administration. The profit was allegedly to pay down the debt. No matter that the price increase would have killed the Northwest economy. Politics was more important that market forces, nor the government policies not to create a profit.
Travel up the Columbia Gorge sometime and check out the wind turbines. A considerable percentage are shut down because of over-capacity. Getting an online cite to verify that is hard because the people you talk to won’t go on the record. (Yeah, I know that’s not good enough for debates here.) Yet, given a choice between reading some of the comments in the energy debates here, and seeing with my own eyes and hearing it with my own ears, I tend to support the latter in this specific instance.
I’m sorry, Blake. I can be a terrible 'doper sometimes. Let me try to answer you more specifically.
You are the first person to mention ‘conspiracies’. What do I believe? I don’t think any of the sources cited in my OP are reliable. It is ridiculous that they would claim peak oil happened at less than current production- that is how the information seemed presented to me in the article. I find discussions on the topic, whether in the media, on boards, or from corporate sources, to be misleading generally. Which makes me suspicious- I suppose you could say it is intriguing. But that isn’t the end of it. Sheesh, at least give me a friggin’ day to get back to you.
So I don’t believe Exxon either. Hubbert projections predict a peak in global oil production right about now. I had another thread that looked at the data on this, in which actual production seems to peak at ~86 million bbd. We may or may not have passed peak, but I do think we’re close enough that it won’t go to 100 million bbd as Exxon claims. I don’t believe them- I think they must be including LNG or natural gas liquids, natural gas itself, I don’t know maybe something else… ISTM they are being misleading with this claim. With production declining all over the world, how is offshore drilling going to make up for the difference plus another 14 million bbd? We might debate that.
We could debate if new drilling technology changes Hubbert’s predictions.
Sorry. If you want to accuse me of something in my history, maybe that is for another thread. I admit I am liable to bring my dumber ideas here. I don’t seek out advice on subjects I think I have figured out. Who would?
Try to simmer down there. I can’t be on here all day, but I generally come through when I say I have a cite in mind.
As for ‘changing the arithmetic’ and what is my cite that rising fuel prices=inflation, well I suppose I am taking that for granted. Food needs to be transported. It requires fuel to produce. Rising fuel prices= rising food prices, that’s pretty much it. The effects are unrest in places like Mexico. Tunisia. Egypt. Anywhere really poor people are seriously affected by rising food prices. As time goes on, well, I don’t know what to predict other than rising demand. It is debatable that events like this could become more common. Maybe combined they might become the kind of threat to stability that a war would be. Or gee I dunno, maybe it won’t be so bad, and a smart investor would grow his money investing in the solutions. What do you think those will be? If your answer is, like xtisme, basically “I don’t know”- if that turns out to be the consensus, well under the circumstances isn’t that itself meaningful?
Quibble point: the trend has always been generally upwards.
Thanks for the analysis, Blake.
The only problem I have is that BURNING these complex petrochemicals seems to be a really short-sighted use for them. No doubt after new energy technology is developed, our ancestors will laugh at our primitive usage of such a resource.
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
We could debate if new drilling technology changes Hubbert’s predictions.
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just new drilling technologies though. The thing is, as the price of oil rises then reserves that were previously not economical to tap or exploit will become economical to tap or exploit. Stuff like the vast reserves of tar sands in Canada and Venezuela, for instance, or the staggering amount of shale oils in the US. And these are just a few of the reserves out there that would become viable if the price of oil goes up.
Which is why the folks who predict the end of the world is coming due to Peak Oil™ are wrong. Oil isn’t going to suddenly run out, leaving us scrounging for snacks and rediscovering the joys of hunting and gathering. Instead, it will be a progression just like all the other progressions of commodities or resources that become scarce…a progression where eventually the price will exceed some limit on what people are willing to spend, or will cross over to the point where one or more alternatives becomes viable and begins to be adopted. I think that this is already starting to happen, and in the end we’ll find that we have a lot of oil laying around unexploited because basically no one wants it anymore. We will have moved on to something else. Just like there are still whales swimming about in the ocean with previously valuable whale oil in them that is left unexploited because no one really needs or wants whale oil anymore.
[QUOTE=FuzzyOgre]
Quibble point: the trend has always been generally upwards.
[/QUOTE]
Sure, with periods where it flattens out, as well as spikes in various directions. Overall the trend has certainly been up though…didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
[QUOTE=Gagundathar]
The only problem I have is that BURNING these complex petrochemicals seems to be a really short-sighted use for them. No doubt after new energy technology is developed, our ancestors will laugh at our primitive usage of such a resource.
[/QUOTE]
I doubt they will laugh, considering the fact that burning hydrocarbons has pretty much made all of our current civilization possible, and there really weren’t any alternatives to burning the stuff until recently (in fact, there STILL isn’t a better alternative today at the current production and cost rates). It would be like laughing at our ancestors because they didn’t use blast furnaces and large scale production to make steel swords and instead hand smelted and forged the stuff by beating the crap out of it repeatedly and putting in straw for carbon in order to get a relatively small amount of steel.
Definitely agree with this. I also thank Blake for his input into threads like this.
-XT
I don’t think that’s true, if you adjust for inflation. The trend of the red line on this graph is down, it appears to me.
Here is the price of crude adjusted in dollars. It’s generally up, with long flat periods and lots of spikes.
ETA: My guess is that the cost of refining has dropped as it moved to more large scale production, and the spikes are due to refinery issues that periodically happen. That’s just a WAG though so grain of salt time.
-XT
I was reading in my Science News magazine that China’s current investment in renewable energy technologies is double the United States Investment on a yearly basis. This alone, regardless of the actual year that peak oil occurs (which all experts I have read agree it will happen between 2000 and 2050), is in my mind reason enough to to try to develop alternative technologies. We just don’t have enough oil reserves here to power our economy in the long term and we will most likely see world energy demand growth in perpituity. Why not invest now and become one of the market leaders instead of letting China, Germany, and Saudi Arabia (a very large investor in solar power research) develop the market and make all the profit? It would help if we did not subsidize the oil companies, then the market might actually itself spur investment…
Quibble point: We don’t produce oil, we extract it.
[QUOTE=L. G. Butts, Ph.D.]
I was reading in my Science News magazine that China’s current investment in renewable energy technologies is double the United States Investment on a yearly basis.
[/QUOTE]
I’d have to see the cite, but my guess is that this is sort of playing with numbers. China is currently investing more (as a percentage of their economy) than nearly every other country on earth in ALL forms of energy (renewable and otherwise, especially coal powered) because they are starting from such a low level of power infrastructure. Also, something like the 3 Gorges Dam cost a huge amount of money (and is ‘renewable energy’ and ‘green’, since it’s hydroelectric) that it’s probably skewing the data for the period it was being constructed.
The last time I looked, regardless of what anyone was spending in either absolute or as a percentage of GDP, the US had the most renewable energy systems actually in production.
-XT
It also begs the question as to how you’re supposed to ‘invest’ in alternative energy and expect anything other than the results we already have.
Is there a large ‘green’ research project that we believe would return new results, which currently isn’t being funded? I’d like to hear specifics. If so, we can argue the merits of the government becoming involved to provide funding.
But if there isn’t, just what is the proposal? When you hear politicians talk, they seem to believe that all you need to do is pass an appropriations bill and hey presto, alternative energy! It’s just a matter of ‘investing’ enough.
In the real world, government ‘investment’ often turns into pork for the politically connected, and is often used to squash the non-connected and can actually hurt innovation.
One of my first jobs out of college was as a scientific programmer for a small chemical manufacturer. The company was run by a brilliant Ph.D. in chemistry and had about ten employees making specialized intermediate chemicals. We did a lot of original research, including the work I was doing. But our biggest competitive problem was that a couple of large, well-connected chemical manufacturers were constantly getting government research grants, which they were then using to displace their own funding for research, and using the savings to undercut their competitors on the price of chemicals.
Eventually, most of the small players left the market. And of course, the big companies and the government portrayed this as an actual success - look at the market share growing for the companies that are being ‘helped’! Look at their government-funded research programs! We’re awesome! In fact, these companies did about as much research as they would have done without the government funding, and we lost the research that the smaller companies would also have been doing had they managed to stay alive.
There’s no miracle ‘investment’ that will magically make a viable alternative energy source appear. And there’s a good chance that ‘investment’ without direction will lead to distortions and misdirection of effort and actually hurt. France’s Minitel ‘investment’ caused them to lag the rest of Europe in internet adoption. The U.S.'s ‘investment’ in corn ethanol has been a disaster that has caused an over-building of ethanol distribution, an increase in the energy requirement in the transportation sector, and an increase in food prices.
The fact is, everyone knows there is huge money to be made in cheap energy. Billions are already being invested in research by private firms all over the world. Any remotely viable idea for reducing the cost of energy is already being pursued. There’s no evidence that throwing more money at the problem will speed up adoption of alternative energy.
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
The fact is, everyone knows there is huge money to be made in cheap energy. Billions are already being invested in research by private firms all over the world. Any remotely viable idea for reducing the cost of energy is already being pursued. There’s no evidence that throwing more money at the problem will speed up adoption of alternative energy.
[/QUOTE]
Exactly.
-XT
Yeah, what you said. It’s like saying that diamond prices are controlled by DeBeers, just stupid. The market always rules!!!
I don’t know if you were talking tongue in cheek there or not, but I’d say that in DeBeer’s case, they DO somewhat control the price of diamonds due to their near monopoly on the commodity and their ability to almost totally control distribution. They are a one stop shop, mining the diamonds, cutting and polishing, selling to other distributors (or NOT selling and keeping large reserves, doling out diamonds just enough to keep the prices high) and being an end point distributor as well, and they control a huge percentage of the industry. The oil cartel only wishes they had that level of control of every aspect of the oil industry, but really they are much more loosely knit and in the end they mostly are able to have only a tenuous control over production (and even then they aren’t always able to control the amounts of production for the countries involved).
-XT
No, I’m not. Duckster thinks there is a conspiracy that keeps either prices high or supply low (not clear which).
So you started the debate by quoting sources that you didn’t believe were accurate without noting that you knew they were inaccurate. That seems disingenuous at best
Certainly some people mislead, by quoting information that they know is inaccurate for example.
You managed to respond to four posts, including notifying another poster about what you wished to debate, before you answered my simple questions concerning what you wished to debate.
In fact you still haven;t told me what it is you wish to debate or what your stance is on the issue.
So it isn’t a case of giving you time to respond. It is the fact that you refuse to respond when clearly you did have time. You are pointedly ignoring the very basic question: what do you wish to debate and what is your stance on that issue.
Do they really?
Can we have a reputable reference for this claim? And by reputable I mean university, government agency or peer reviewed journal. Not some Chicken Little website or elementary school essay.
So all the premier reseach bodies in the fiueld and all the peer reviewed science is wrong? The USGS is wrong, the EIA is wrong, the WEO is wrong? Why do you believe all these bodies, all these eminent geologists and geophysicists and economists are wrong? What is the basis for this skepticism?
Do you personally have post-grad qualifications and decades of experience in geology, geophysics or economics? Do you have references from people who do that contradict all those other sources?
In short. why do you believe this claim when everybody who is credible and all logic and all common sense and all past experience says that you are wrong?
Did you bother to read my posts? I won;t ask if you read the actual articles that I linked to, since you clearly didn’t. But at least you could read my posts.
No, it doesn’t include natural gas. The increase oil production comes from “processing gains” and “natural gas liquids (NGLs) and unconventional oil”. It says so right there in my post.
Sheesh.
Ahh, no, production is *stable *all over the world.
Why do you think that production is declining? Can you provide a reference for this claim?
Who said that offshore drilling was going to make up the shortfall on its own?
Why debate a claim that nobody has ever made? Isn’t that a strawman?
We could.
Is this what you want to debate? If so what is your stance on the issue?
This is, what, the 6th time I have asked you to clearly state what you want to debate and what your stance is on the issue.
Firstly you are conflating two separate issues. “Changing the arithmetic” =/= inflation. “Changing the arithmetic” is a meaningless term used, in my experience, by those who refuse to be pinned down on what they believe or what they propose. The sorts of people who refuse to state what their position is or what they want to debate.
It is, in short, a classic example of the use of weasel words.
Secondly, you can’t take it for granted.
Well hemp is much more expensive now than it was in 1900, agreed?
And hemp is essential to sailing ships, agreed?
And sailing ships were essential to transporting food inn 1900, agreed?
So food must be much more expensive now than in 1900? Agreed?
Except that it’s not. Food is much cheaper now. So there must be a flaw in this logic. Can you see where it is?
This is what happens when you start “taking things for granted” rather than clearly stating what your position is and what your basis for that position is. It leads to making ridiculous, chicken little extrapolations that are inevitably wrong.
Or to put it another way, it is debatable that they will not. And there is no evidence presented for either position.
So once again, a classic use of weasel words.
And maybe they won’t. And there is no evidence presented for either position.
So once again, a classic use of weasel words. This is becoming tiresome.
Well the IEA and Exxon and the PRC all say that there is nothing that requires a solution for the next 30 years. We have plenty of oil for the foreseeable future. The problem of peak oil simply has no basis in reality.
You are once again begging the question. You are assuming that a problem exists and asking for solutions without ever showing any evidence that the problem is real.
The people promulgating this Chicken Little nonsense, the people you quoted in the OP,m the people that you knew were lying, those people have been forced to blatantly misquote the IEA by chopping the end off a sentence that says clearly that peak oil is a myth. They are forced to those sorts of measures to give the problem any semblance of credibility.
With level of credibility form the people presenting this problem, I want to see some damn strong, independent evidence that the problem you posit actually exists.
If you would tell us what it is that you are debating and what your position is and how you arrived at that position, then it might be.
At this point your position is that peak oil kinda, maybe exists even though you know the sources you learned it from are clearly lying. Your position is that this peak oil thingy might, debatably cause some vague problem with “changing arithmetic” and “altered paradigms”. And you reached the conclusion that peak oil causes such problems because you can take that for granted.
And then you ask what the solutions to these problems are!
With a position so vague, and sources so untrustworthy, and problems so ill defined and causes so baseless, what other response did you expect?
Of course we are gonna say "“I don’t know”. No other response is possible.
That’s not meaningful. It’s just the result of your refusal to even state what it is that you are debating, much less what your stance is or what your evidence is for that position.
Because I have yet to see them
I wasn’t talking about government investment. I was talking about the kinds of things I would invest in. To make a buck.
People sometimes dismiss this topic with the solution, “The market will solve the problem.” Ok, so if that is the case, what can I invest my money in to make a buck without, you know, loading my portfolio with Darth Vader Hitler Nazi Communist Dictator Corporation Incorporated? Seriously, it would be an odd ‘market solution’ in the absence of anything to trade. In a way that undermines the “the market will solve the problem” argument.
I dunno. Maybe its debatable.