Let's Face It. The World As We Have Known It Is Coming To An End.

Great Debates
101

  1. There is no such thing as post oil". There will always be oil. All that varies is the supply.

  2. If you mean that the sooner we start perfecting alternatives to oil powered, the easier it will be if we need to make a transition to poil powered vehicles, well, damn, I bet others had wish they had come up with that wonderfully insight. :rolleyes:

WTF have *reserves *got to do with the timing of peak oil? If Bartlett actually said this then he is an ignorant fool.

If he said this is is provably an ignoramous. A simple Google search will return numerous graphs like this which show that world oil consumption hasn’t seen anything like an exponential increase for at least 30 years.

Given that yourself and Bartlett are apparently totally ignorant of this subject, I don’t think too many people hereabouts will lose too much sleep over you Chicken Little fantasies. This doomsayer nonsense that the oil is about to run out has been around for at least 80 years now. It’s always 20 years away form a catastrophic failure, and we always need to repent right away.

I suppose if the Chicken Little keep declaring that the sky is falling for another century, eventually they might be right.

102

I admit I have ignored the possibilities offered by energy alternatives, bio-fuels of various kinds and nukes, for example.

There is progress being made in increasing the benefits/cost ratio of bio-fuel production although there is some debate as to whether bio-fuels can do more than slightly reduce our need for oil in the face of ever increasing per capita oil consumption, here and around the world. There are also hotly debated downsides to large-scale bio-fuel production outlined here. Issues relating to biofuels - Wikipedia . Any one of these issues could be a subject of a GD thread in itself. I’m not up to it.

Nukes, most agree offer a clean and relatively inexpensive alternative to coal-fired power plants. Safety and spent fuel disposal issues present formidable political obstacles, however, and the proposed construction of new plants, in this country, anyway, meets less than public acceptance. Not in my backyard is the cry. Again, nukes are a large enough issue to provide gist for a number of separate debates here and beyond the scope of my intended OP.

$20 Per Gallon - How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives by Christopher Steiner is a good read, review here. http://ezinearticles.com/?$20-Per-Gallon---How-the-Inevitable-Rise-in-the-Price-of-Gasoline-Will-Change-Our-Lives&id=3987083. The author takes a more sanguine view of our prospects than I do, but that’s just me.

103

Oh, I think progress is underway. Just for a start, Denmark is in the process of setting up a network of battery-swap stations for electric vehicles. Battery recharging will be powered by wind farms, since Denmark currently exports around 20% of its wind power capacity. Since current EVs only have a range of about 100 km this is not a panacea, but it seems to me better than living in a hole in the ground.

And about that hole in the ground…not to piss on the barbecue or anything, but viable agricultural land is already owned by other people. Unless you’re prepared to stump up for it, the farmers of my acquaintance will find you on the wrong end of their weaponry. Mean bastards, farmers.

104

My ten year old is watching James Burke’s connections. Era’s end. All the time. But that just means we figure out a different way to do it and a new era kicks in. Sometimes its a very painful journey - the Black Death was no walk in the park. But for those who saw the other side, the Renaissance was - historically speaking - right around the corner.

105

I’m back (without sound), and hearsay suggests that the dude in the video might not be a complete loon, though if he believes that oil use will inevitably continue to increase, even in the face of dwindling supplies and escalating prices, then his analysis may have missed a few things. (Or maybe not - as noted, I haven’t watched the thing.)

The OP asserts a pretty much complete collapse of society, which indeed is not particularly sanguine. Of course, for such a collapse to occur, you would require a perfect storm of failure of all alternative sources of energy and materials and distribution systems. People are pretty resourceful, after all, and given any workable alternative they will stave off the apocalypse.

Given that many workable alternative solutions to oil already exist and are proven techologies, the OP’s doomsaying is headscratch-inducing. It goes beyond pessimism, to be sure.

Though contrastingly, the OP is strangely optomistic in assuming that if 0.1% of people have self-sufficient communes, and 99.9% of people are starving, that the masses won’t sweep down on the communes like a swarm of locusts. It’s as though he has this image in his head that he wants to happen, and will ignore or dismiss anything that would prevent it. He requires societal collapse to get his communes, so he handwaves existing and promising technologies that would prevent such a collapse. And then the entire rest of humanity would doom his communes, so suddenly they don’t exist either. A consistent approach, but it makes for plot holes when the fiction is related back to reality.

106

begbert2, allow me to expound slightly. No, Bartlett isn’t a loon. He’s a legit (emeritus) math professor. It’s a fairly limited lecture, in that it’s mostly about the potential scariness of exponential expansions. Which most of us know, but don’t think about often. Bottom line, I found it interesting enough to watch (having given it the usual “you’ve got five minutes to prove this is worth my time”) but not important enough to forward to family and friends. Your (and others) mileage may vary.

107

Wait wait wait - the lecture is on the theoretical effect of oil need making the axiomatic presumption that it’s an exponentional increase? Along the lines of that Cecil article about how by smashing 52 flies as a child, a person single-handedly saved the cosmos?

108

We come up with a room temperature superconductor, the energy picture will look somewhat different.

109

There is no chance that gasoline will ever get to be $20/gallon. None. Long before that alternatives that already exist (but which you ignore) will become economically viable and begin to compete for market share with the existing system.

-XT

110

As Yoda said, that is why you fail.

You keep conflating “oil” with “energy”. Every time. You don’t seem to understand that peak oil means only that OIL production will decline. OIL. It says OIL right there in peak oil, so I don’t understand why it should be so difficult. Coal is not oil. Nuclear is not oil. Hydro is not oil.

We aren’t facing any sort of shortage of coal. We aren’t facing any sort of shortage of uranium. We aren’t facing a shortage of hydro, although we’re pretty much maxed out on hydro.

Oil is not used to produce electricity. Say it with me. Oil is not used to produce electricity.

What do we use oil for? To power cars, busses, trucks, trains, and aircraft. Why do we use oil? Because diesel and gasoline and jet fuel are cheaper than any other alternatives. Why is oil so cheap? Because there’s so much of it. What happens when there’s not so much of it? Why, it’ll get more expensive. And if demand is inelastic, then it could get more expensive very quickly. And in the short term, we find that demand is pretty inelastic, which means price shocks.

However, in the long term we find that demand IS elastic.

$20/gallon is a good thought exercise. What happens when gas prices start increasing to such levels? Do people just pay? Or do they search for alternatives?

Thing is, we use gasoline very inefficiently, in terms of people-miles/gallon. Single drivers drive their SUVs 60 miles a day back and forth to work every day. That uses up lots of gas. But people don’t think of efficiency in terms of people-miles/gallon, they think of it in terms of people-dollars/mile. They don’t care how much gas they burn to get to work, or to get to the store, they care about how much it COSTS (costs in terms of dollars, time, hassle, etc, sometimes even externalities).

If you commute 60 miles a day in a 15mpg vehicle, you burn a certain amount of gas. But it’s possible to reduce that amount by lot. What if you moved closer to your work? If you lived 30 miles away, that’s a 50% savings. If you worked from home one day a week, that’s a 20% savings. If you carpool with a co-worker every day, that’s a 50% savings. If you bought a 30mpg vehicle, that’s a 50% savings. Add up all those savings, and you’re using 10% of the gas you used to use. So if you can afford to commute to work in the wasteful scenario when gas is $3/gallon, you could commute to work in the efficient scenario for the same cost, even if gas is $30/gallon.

And the thing is, when gas is $20/gallon (or $10/gallon), electric vehicles are much cheaper to operate than gas vehicles. And if everyone switches to electric vehicles, what does that do to demand for gas? And when demand for gas goes down, what does that do to the price of gas?

111

Can we at least watch the MST3K versions?

112

It’s possible that we’ll have $20 gas. It’s just that the only people buying it will be the ones who like to keep antique cars to drive on Sundays. The rest of us will be driving cars powered by Mr. Fusion. :slight_smile:

113

I think the rich folks who want to drive their antique hydrocarbon burners will be paying $10/gallon at most…though, perhaps you are right, on second thought. After all, rich people are willing to pay outrageous sums for bottle water, so why not specialty gas for their expensive cars??

-XT

114

I don’t think the OP is thinking fourth-dimensionally.

115

I think that vastly more expensive gasoline will lead to some big changes:
-the end of big V-8 engines (except for the rich)
-the end of 2 hour commutes from distant suburbs
-(possible) replacement of Chinese manufactured goods (by domestic made goods)
My question: how gentle a transistion will this be? Are we faced with a few decades of gradually rising prices, or just one big wham ($20/gallon gasoline) with eveybody riding mopeds?

116

You’re assuming that no suitable replacement emerges. If we can get biodeisel or whatever down to $4.50 (or $3.00, or $1.50) a gallon, and some kind of retrofit that makes existing cars use it, then after the transition period life would go on exactly as before.

Heck, with a sharp enough transition, nobody’ll even have mopeds.

117

Between the greenhouse effect and general ecological degradation, I wouldn’t pin my hopes on bio-anything as a replacement; we are more likely to be too worried about growing enough food and trying to keep the oceans from rising any higher to burn organics. Nuclear power is the best choice available.

118

Not if we want life would go on exactly as before, it isn’t - any electrical-based solution will require the total replacement of our entire transportation infrastructure. There’s nothing about this notion that necessarily makes it a bad thing, and there’s a chance that when the dust finally settles it’ll superficially resemble the current norm with people having private cars that have long range, just with a different power and feuling system, but it would still be a much larger upheaval than any solution that leaves us pumping liquid into fuel tanks.

Plus if the biosphere is so shot we can’t grow anything, won’t we all be dead anyway?

119

Well, we need to replace much of our infrastructure anyway. We’ve been letting our infrastructure in general go to hell, so if we finally get around to rebuilding it we might as well do a better job of it. And we’ll need to replace all cars eventually, anyway; they wear out. As I see it our biggest problem with replacing the infrastructure and our cars isn’t the job itself; it’s that we’ve been putting it off and putting it off until we risk having to do it all at once, rapidly; which is much harder to do. If we’d been keeping our infrastructure up properly and replacing older plants with nuclear ones for the last few decades, finishing the job wouldn’t be nearly as big a deal.

True, but I wasn’t thinking of anything that extreme. But if we are struggling to feed ourselves and the ecosystem is badly degraded then there’s not a lot of room to grow stuff just to burn it. And when it gets to the point where cities are being inundated I really doubt that any fuel that burns will be looked upon kindly.

120

Never mind the plants - if we replace them all with nuclear there’ll be little direct noticeable effect on most people’s lives. The infrastructure in question is transportation. You know, cars and gas pumps. If we go all-electric, at a minimum all the cars will have to be replaced and all those gas pumps are going to either vanish or start looking mighty funny (and we’ll be able to smoke around them again).

And given that we haven’t nailed down the design of the electric car or standardized fuel/power delivery system for it yet, we haven’t procrastinated on replacing its infrastructure a whit.

I’m still not convinced it’ll get anywhere near that bad - and even if it does, it’s still a calamaty unrelated to peak oil or the peak oil timeline. Oil’s going to be getting scarce in a few dozen years, right? I don’t think that that’s quite far enough out for the fields to be black and the oceans to have risen to WaterWorld levels.