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Yes. OPEC will decrease production soon. They will do this to keep prices high. They will also do this because they have no choice.

In other words, if Saudi Arabia increases production in 'sweet oil' they risk slitting their own throats by destroying their production capacity. Oil extraction works that way.

Yes, OPEC will certainly decrease production. All the more reason to abandon oil-based systems, the sooner the better. It's a pity this will result in billions of human deaths.

And how much petroleum energy input in the form of fertilizers, pesticides, the energy needed to drive irrigation systems, and the like is needed to even allow the 30% of the supposed arable land in the United States to have the level of productivity it has? It's not like a significant percentage of it uses organic farming techniques that don't require those kinds of external energy inputs ultimately derived from petroleum. Last time I checked, nearly all of it does, and even if it did, you'd run into other problems as well. Remember that it's not just land you need, but also water. One reason why the other 70% of possible farmland isn't used as such is that there isn't enough water to do it. Fully 85% of all the US freshwater resources are already used for agriculture and as it is these are already being depleted at unsustainable rates. Increasing land use as you suggest would hasten the looming water crisis.

No, I'm afraid that we'll need to accept the fact that it will be necessary to abandon the personal automobile, easy air travel, and the many other perks that we all have gotten used to that depend on cheap oil.

What do you call a bus full of lawyers careening off a cliff?
A Good Start.

RS

if you read the chart on page 81 of this 1998 edition of Sci Am. you will see the World Total line hits its maxima around 2004. Only Bush administration hacks and kids who have read nothing but comic books for the last 8 years would be unaware of these facts. By the time a former executive of a failed oil company tells the nation "we are addicted to oil" we have already run out of veins to stick the needle in.

I suppose I shouldn't gripe at what a bunch of retards my courtymen have been on energy conservation issues...it could be worse: yet another article on oil depletion could have been ignored. The matter could have been framed as if it were some kind of questionable theory, similar to the treatment bushco wanted to give evolution. Really, I ought to be glad that everybody finally gets it. I'm sure Hummer sales will go to zero day after tomorrow.

Yeah, right.

[We are so screwed. any of you know how to saddle a horse?]

Too bad it will be the future generations who'll end up paying for our spending.

Future generations? If you expect to be living around 2020 (according to the oil industry) or 2010-2013 (according to others), we'll be paying ourselves.

Uh, the glaciers on Antarctica are continuously moving, and rebuilding. Snow falls year after year, after year, and the glaciers keep moving, and rebuilding.

They are continuously moving, but the sea ice shelf is holding back the glaciers from moving a lot faster, which has allowed so much ice to form on Antarctica. If the sea ice melts, all the glaciers would be able to "dump" their ice (which is currently over land) into the oceans, which would raise the water levels. It is not necesarrily the melting of the ice over Antarctica itself that will cause the sea levels to rise.

And, yes, the glaciers are moving faster. And, yes, this could - eventually - effect water levels. And, no, there is no possible way that this would happen within 10 years time. There is a mere outside chance that it may happen over the next 200 (two hundred) years.

Its not that it will occur in 10 years, but if we don't change the way that we currently use fossil fuels etc... it will be very hard to stop Antarctica melting within that 200 year timeframe, due to positive feedback in out atmosphere. (look to Venus for how positive feedback can occur, and how its atmosphere ended up as a 400 deg C maelstrom, as opposed to Earth, an essentially similar planet)

What we don't know is how much we can effect this change - in either direction.

What we do know is that CO2 levels are the highes they have been since known atmospheric history (420,000 years) and that CO2 levels have had a close correlation to temperature over that period. (Although we dont know that they are causally linked.)

Whilst we don't know how much we can affect this change, we do know that if we carry on as we are, things will certainly not get better, and warmer weather is not necessarily better, ~14,000 excess deaths occurred from heat related problems in France during Summer 2003, which is a lot more than the ~3,000 who died in 9/11. (Although 9/11 showed how bad the USA's homeland security was at the time - all the flights took off from US airports on internal flights.)

>I mean, even parasites usually try

>to not kill the host.

Yeah, well it's the same old

Tragedy of the Commons

Metawire.org, my precious server, slashdotted!

I guess we can consider the fact that it's still up a testament to OpenBSD :)

In all seriousness, though, OpenBSD has been a blessing for running Metawire. I joined the admin team a few months ago, after having been a lowly user and an active member of the community since last year, and have found (as Danny put so well in his article) that the biggest challenges in terms of maintaining a secure and stable server with thousands of users are well met by a system with a philosophy like OpenBSD's.

The challenges that OpenBSD and a proper user management system (which I have been an active developer on since I was made an admin) can not handle are those that plague any provider of a free service, namely the ages-old Tragedy of the Commons.

Garret Hardin's prophetic essay deals mainly with the human tendency for one to maximize the usage of any communal space for his own personal gain, and at the same time to shirk the responsibilities of its upkeep since it is not "his". As this applies to being a free shell provider on the Internet, you have to deal constantly with users who apply, abuse the service, are given the boot, and then show up again. As far as they are concerned it is a common space, freely available, for which they are not responsible. Since they do not take ownership in any sense, what responsibility to they have to keep things OK for others?

The "tragedy of the commons" manifests itself in the biggest administrative headaches the team has had to face so far. People signing up to use bandwidth-hogging psyBNCs/IRC proxies to get past bans on networks or keep nicknames alive, people using our service to mailbomb, people using it to host illegal materials... Had they been using a paid shell (which are widely available) for which they had some degree of "ownership" and at least an implied responsibility to follow the rules, their behavior might be less destructive, but because they are using a free resource, they feel unburdened by any responsibility towards other users and the administrative staff.

I could let these failings of human nature get me down, but thankfully there is another tool which can fill in where OpenBSD fails. Perhaps even the vagaries of man can be overcome...

by Perl :P

Well, many times, people who think they're just looking out for themselves actually are being selfish and greedy. It's actually very, very difficult to not be. Care must be taken to always think about how your actions affect other people, both in the short term and the long term. Most of us think about only about the short term and consider ourselves good people, but a lot of the time, it's the long term effects that matter most. Here's an example:

The Tragedy of the Commons

Our planet now supports 6.3 billion people. To feed them, we industrially generate as much nitrogen (in the form of chemical fertilizers produced from natural gas) as the biosphere produces naturally. Essentially, we use our unrenewable fossil fuel "capital" to make the planet produce approximately twice as much food as it could using the renewable "income" of solar radiation and natural nutrient cycles.

According to a study by David Pimentel and Mario Giampietro found that 10 kcal of exosomatic (non-muscle-power) energy are required to produce 1 kcal of food delivered to the consumer in the U.S. food system. This includes packaging and all delivery expenses, but excludes household cooking). We spend 10 times the fossil-fuel energy that we get back in food energy.

What happens when that fossil fuel "capital" is used up? Suddenly we can't support 6 billion people. Estimates of population size supportable under normal solar input range between 2 and 3 billion.

Further, an increasing number of people believe that we are much further down the slope of oil depletion than is generally acknowledged by goverments and oil companies. Many believe that we have already reached peak supply, while demand continues to soar. For example, it has been over 20 years since more oil was discovered in a year than was consumed that year. In that environment, energy intensive practices (including energy driven food production) will become economically unfeasible. I expect to see the effects of this becoming significant in the next 10 years.

So if one were to check up on these assertions (as I have tried to do) and conclude them credible (as I have), there is a frightening conclusion to be drawn. As the oil runs out over the coming decades, somehow at least 50% of the human population will need to be eliminated.

How this happens is up to us. We can go for a "last man standing" strategy (as I think the Bush Admin necons are trying today) where force is used to ensure that we maintain our industrial power and luxury lifestyle up to the very end, by condemning weaker nations to war and famine. Or we could try to ratchet things down more methodically and fairly and possibly achive a soft landing worldwide. This would mean changes to every aspect of human affairs, to seek solutions that allow us to continue human society using a fraction of the energy we use today, and with every effort made toward humanely lowering birthrates below replacement levels.

I frankly think that the latter option is the least likely of all, given the way things work in our world.

Still, it changes the entire framework of the argument when these assertions are considered--it is not so much about whether one particular option is more economically advantageous in today's market than it is a question of what can we do to preserve any kind of desirable human society as our current system becomes impossible to sustain over the next 10-40 years.

See the article Eating Fossil Fuels for a detailed treatment of this topic, or the book The Party's Over by Richard Heinberg for a more comprehensive analysis.

Due to the fact that we are going to start on the downslope of Hubbert's peak very soon, transportation requiring petrolium based fuels will not be an option. I say that we are on the down slope due to this data stating that peak oil extraction was in 2003.

This is straight from ExxonMobil, not some wacko site. I think that they would know what they are talking about when they state that conventional oil extraction peaked in the year 2003. Also, Hydrogen is not the awnser to the earth's petrolium problems, most hydrogen produced today is extracted from petrolium based substances.

Due to the fact that we are going to start on the downslope of Hubbert's peak very soon, transportation requiring petrolium based fuels will not be an option. I say that we are on the down slope due to this data stating that peak oil extraction was in 2003.

This is straight from ExxonMobil, not some wacko site. I think that they would know what they are talking about when they state that conventional oil extraction peaked in the year 2003. Also, Hydrogen is not the awnser to the earth's petrolium problems, most hydrogen produced today is extracted from petrolium based substances.

It's the tragedy of the commons, dude. Try not to get your knickers all in a knot.

but I must express my doubts that LA will have maglev monorails and all cars will be fuel cell powered by then.

This is nothing new. See the Tragedy of the Commons. It all comes back to abuse of abundant resources held in common. Everyone suffers eventually. As much as people fear regulation of abundant resources, government-imposed limitations are sometimes the only way to prevent abuse.

It should also be mentioned that no resource is unlimited. Take spam for instance. There's a certain signal-to-noise ratio that needs to be maintained for email to be useful. Spam abuses the system in such a way that that ratio is thrown askew. There is a narrow, limited amount of noise that can enter the system before the system is crippled. Spam has passed that threshhold, and is now almost purely noise.

Many other problems of abundance stem from the fact that the prices we pay do not reflect the true cost. While you eat a cheeseburger for $0.99, hundreds of people that had a hand in that hamburger's production, from farmers to meatpackers to fast food workers all suffer to give you the cheapest possible meal. There's not an over-abundance of food...there's just an out-of-control industry that has reduced the forward-facing price so drastically that food seems limitless.

Abundance is a mirage. You can't make something from nothing.

Here's another point to muse: think of The Tragedy of the Commons, and how infinitely copiable information changes that situation.

Admittedly, the media by which the information is sent and received is still a commons in the old sense of the word, but the information itself represents a limitless resource. In the not-too-distant future, even the transmission medium could become essentially limitless. The mind truly boggles.

The information economy is dead. Long live the information economy!

Not much more than speculation here. Here's some more for ya. Looks like a fellow doomsayer is still talking about oil being harvest in at least 42 countries until 2080

http://dieoff.com/42Countries/42Countries.htm

Remember these curves will do nothing but adjust up as:

- demand grows
- technology improves (more efficient harvesting)
- new sources are found (improved GIS and research)

You care to back up your statement, or?? Civil war? It's always a mess, but the big money will always find a way to get at the black gold...

Don't nuclear power plants extract one heckuva lot more energy per unit of fuel than oil?

Per unit mass of fuel yes. But that is not the appropriate measure of their usefulness. For a start uranium is relatively rare and a huge expansion in the use of nuclear power would soon run into problems with fuel shortages. Also the net energy return from nuclear, while postive, isn't vast. Large amounts of energy must be invested to mine and enrich the fuel and to build and operate the reactors. This all cuts into the net energy you get out in the end.

We have 50 years to come up with alternatives to oil

Do you now where that 50 years number comes from? They take known reserves of oil and divide it by present consumption to get years left. However consumption rises at an exponential rate and so would be much higher in the future, shortening the time to exhaustion. Secondly the physics of oil extraction is ignored. You cannot pump oil out of the ground at any rate you like. At first it is easy but as the well empties it be comes increasingly difficult to extract the remaining oil. After half the oil is gone production will fall year on year, whatever you do.

This physical effect for a single oil well is mirrored in the overall oil production figures. It was predicted by M. King Hubbert in the 1950's that US oil production would peak around 1970 and then start to steadily fall. This is what happened and we are fast approaching the peak predicted for global oil production, likely within the next decade. It will be possible to produce oil well past the end of the 21st century but it will be in smaller and smaller quantities. What matters is when oil production peaks and the shortages begin, not when the very last barrel is pumped.

Also as I said before a barrel of oil is not a barrel of oil. The oil that is left in the ground is has less net energy in it than the oil that has already been used because it takes so much more energy to get it out of the ground. The Energy Return On Investment (EROI) of oil has been steadily falling and when it gets near unity, oil is no longer an energy source, no matter how much is left in the ground. Other fossil fuels are affected in a similar way. The EROI of coal has been falling steadily as it becomes necessary to dig deeper to find it.

See these links: 1 2 3 for more info.

The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" [snip technical stuff] [T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

There's an olde English tale to sum up scarcity called The Tragedy Of The Commons. In a nutshell, at just the point when economic scarcity bites, our instinct tells us to maximise personal gain. By maximising personal gain, we accelerate and prolong the scarcity of resources. Look hard enough and you can see this model *everywhere* (just like the tiny voices).

It's a layman's Socioeconomic Theory of Everything!

If the acks are sped up, this interferes with TCP keeping track of the statistical average Round Trip Time.

So if the network is congested and an ACK SHOULD time out but doesn't, TCP will keep on flooding the network, ruining the pool for everyone.(see: Tragedy of the commons)

Yes, I agree that this is a big-O style worse case scenario, but its something to consider.

just thought i'd mention this site: dieoff.com basically world population is going off the scale, and fossil fuels will be gone by 2030, so yes we'd best have some alternative energy sources by then. i think the probability of a large die off is as inevitable as the growth, but i also think other technologies will kick in by then and the rich will continue to be rich and lit up. one issue currently is that china's fossil fuel needs are increasing, making US control of what's left pretty critical. hence the war etc. also read on the site criticisms of fuel cells and nuclear power.

New discoveries are made, as are new, cheaper methods to extract oil that was previously thought to be uneconomical.

And you expect this trend to continue forever? Unless you think there is a cornucopia down there somewhere continuously pouring out hydrocarbons, you must realize the supply of fossil fuels is finite. Maybe you believe the hypernova will arrive before the supply runs out. I believe it makes a lot of sense to look for alternatives.

The most sober meditation I've seen on this was a Scientific American article archived at dieoff.com called The End of Cheap Oil. It doesn't attempt to forecast the day the wells run dry, just the year when gas prices finally rise to the point where the society that depends on them begins to break down.

It's an exercise in frog boiling. I think Iceland's leadership is wise to begin looking for ways out of the pot now.

I can think of many reasons why it will

Humor me for a second while we're on the subject of "Big Oil". For the moment, accept the following, or peruse the following links until satisfied:

1. Industrialized society is absolutely dependent on oil.
2. There are no conventional rewewable energy sources that can replace oil.
3. World peak production of oil will occur in the next 10 years.

Industrialized society will collapse and billions will starve trapped inside a system that cannot support them. The horrifying truth is that this future is more acceptable to the powers that be than the alternative. Like people trapped in a gas chamber (industrial world) the oxygen (oil) is running out and the strong (rich) are on the top getting the last few gasps crushing the people below them. The few would rather have billions die than risk losing control. For most educated people presented with these ideas the situation would appear hopeless. Here we are at the beginning of the 21st century addicted to a drug that is both destroying our environment and enslaving us, yet absolutely essential for continued survival. And the supply is running out never to be replaced. Perhaps the end of civilization will mirror the collapse of a star, burning progressively heavier nuclei in a futile attempt to stave off gravitational collapse. Indeed this outcome would be easier to accept than alternative. The "alternative" requires you to accept a new and shocking paradigm summed up in the following statement:

* Closed systems do not exist.

Everything in the universe is freely exchanging energy at all times. The challenge is to figure out how to channel and direct this energy. This problem was solved by Nicola Tesla (and many others) but supressed or simply ignored by the mainstream. The Western mind only sees what it EXPECTS to see, not what is actually there. As proof that closed systems are an illusion and a crutch, consider the common refrigerator magnet stuck to a refrigerator. This closed system will remain static for an indefinite period of time with no energy input. This should already be setting off alarm bells. How can a magnet constantly attract and defy gravity in its attempts to pull it to the floor??? If the magnet was glued to the refrigerator it would be easier to accept as a physical bond would exist to support the magnet. No such bond exists besides the field of the magnet. A field that is governed by the same laws of thermodynamics that insure that entropy in a closed system will increase over time. This is not the case and the system will remain in equilibrium for many years with no apparent outside influence. This is a baffling mystery that has yet to be solved by mainstream physics. So how does the magnet stay put?

Since closed systems do not exist, clearly energy is coming from somewhere to replenish the field. But this isn't normal energy. The energy coming into replenish the field actually REDUCES entropy. How would this be detectable? Conventional electricity flowing through a conductor will lose some of its energy in the form of heat. Any time there is a flow there will be some resistive loss (thermodynamics again). Some materials when cooled sufficently loss their resistance to flow, and become superconductors and do not loss energy. Now, if this new type of energy were to flow through a conductor the most obvious side effect would be a DECREASE in temperature.

Now this is preposterous, how can energy travel through a lossy conductor yet GAIN energy from its travel? No idea. It's weird stuff and there really aren't any textbooks on it. We do know that this energy will run electric motors and light bulbs just fine though. There appears to be an infinite amount of this energy available free for the taking. For a much more indepth explaination check out this and for a $75 demonstration of this "cold" current that you can build yourself check out this. Please don't be turned off by my meandering slightly schizo style. It's VERY difficult to talk about this stuff and not look like a crack pot. Kind of like talking about heavier than air flight before the Wright brothers. But things are beginning to fall apart and we need to begin the process of switching from under unity lossy systems to over unity energy systems. If this switch over is not successful, billions will die. I encourage you to educate yourself and become involved in the revolution. This is a unique time, the fate of civilization depends on what you do right now.

So don't fuck up, I kind of want to see the good side win for a change.

If we're ever going to escape this mudball, we don't have a lot of time to waste. Barring some technological miracle producing free energy, it will never again be this easy or this cheap to expand into space.

this would be a good example of a 'well-rounded education'...

www.educate-yourself.org

www.dieoff.com

-=-=-

"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - DraKKon to the majority of Slashdot(users).

have Larry and Oracle behind my National ID system, as opposed to Billy and Microsoft- though if it was Bills' backend atleast we would know it wasnt secure and everyone was nobody(or owned).

justincase... http://www.dieoff.com

-=-=-
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - DraKKon to the majority of Slashdot(users).
-=-=-

While I don't agree with aspects of this other study (pro-nuke), it suggests a 5-10 for 1 return on energy investment in PV. http://www.uic.com.au/nip57.htm Personally, I feel wind, PV, and increased energy efficiency can supply all our power needs. Remember, over 1% of the US land area is already taken up with space used for power production, between power line right of ways, mines, related roadways, and so forth.

The only energy crisis I see is one of ignorance, vested interests, and lack of imagination. Personally, I would rather see land based solutions than space onces because I would prefer the political implications of decentralized ground based power over centralized space based power. I think there are reasons to develop self-replicating space habitats (mostly just as fun places to live for trillions of people, and as refugia in case bad things happen on Earth for whatever reason), but beaming energy back to Earth is not a major one.

They are the question. The answer is no. Read this site's analysis of the solar cells and why they won't work. The basic gist of their argument is that right now, it takes more energy to make a solar cell, than the solar cell will ever produce in its useful life. It's an energy sink. A solar cell would have to more efficient, a lot more efficient just to reach the break even point on energy in/energy out.

I'm afraid our realistic options are what they've always been - petroleum and nuclear. Petroleum production will be peaking in a few years, which leaves nuclear power. But even nuclear fuel supplies are limited. The only real solution is nuclear fusion. I hope the Farnsworth Fusor is the answer, because we're going to need one sooner than you think.

• World pop in 1500 = .5 B
• 1800 = 1 B (doubling took 300 years)
• 1940 = 2 B (doubling took 140 years)
• 1960 = 3 B
• 2000 = 6 B (doubling took 40 years

Can we slow down on the rutting until we figure out this whole food, air deal? -- Bill Hicks

I'm glad that psilocybin mushrooms are illegal. Because when I took them, I laid in a field of green grass, thinking "I love everything!" I realized that our true nature is spirit, and that it is only illusion that we are apart from God, and that God loves us. So, can you imagine what would happen if everybody started experiencing Universal Love? I mean, how are we gonna keep building Nuclear Weapons when we realize that we are all one? It'd fuck up the economy! -- Bill Hicks

1. Coal is a fossil fuel (some has plant fossils).
2. Oil and gas are geological fuels, they're in places just being discovered now.
3. Club of Rome 1972: World reserves 455 billion barrels. "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," said President Jimmy Carter.
4. 600 billion barrels used between 1970 and 1990.
5. 1990: Oil reserves over 900 billion barrels.
6. 1999: World oil reserves: 1,000 billion barrels (5,000 of natural gas also).

Of course, we're ignoring fission plants. Not that it matters when nobody is building power plants. Well, we can all fire up our backyard generators and see what that does to air quality.

Another disadvantage is that the energy used to mine, process, assemble and otherwise create a solar panel is greater than what a solar panel will ever produce within its lifetime.

(See also The Energy Required to Manufacture Renewable Energy Technologies.)

So can we please put this bit of anti-photovoltatic FUD to rest?