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Comprehensive Projection of World Oil Exports
Prof. Goose writes, "This article is a comprehensive assessment of world oil exports, defined has the total amount of liquid hydrocarbons that are surpluses in producing countries. This assessment is made by projecting into the future fixed change rates that reflect current trends in liquids production and consumption in all countries where presently the difference between the two factors is positive. The outcome of this assessment is rather worrisome." Here is the money graph through 2020.
The only worrisome thing I see about this projection is that it's based on extending current trends into the future.
Probably because it's easier than predicting how technological innovation and the ebb and flow of the global economy will totally change the entire equation long before these simplistic predictions ever come due.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
The makers of that "money graph" don't seem to know how to do any extrapolation. Canada shows a decline in exports for the next 15 years which is absurd. As the Alberta Tar Sands become more and more viable Canada's exports will increase substantially. Shell is already heavily invested out there and so are numerous other oil companies. If anyone is interested they can check some of the statistics.
Would people vote for a presidential candidate if he said something to the effect "I promise to increase taxes for the sole purpose of implementing whatever technology is prudent to quickly wean ourselves from foreign oil." My guess is no so we will just have to wait until the price of oil goes through the roof, crippling the economy before anything significant happens.
Well, you really don't want to factor future technological developments into the predictions, because that encourages people to just keep doing what they're doing, and might cause the technological developments that you were counting on, to never be introduced.
... and the crisis ends up being worse.
The point of these predictions, IMO, is to show us what will happen if we just keep bumbling along, doing what we're currently doing.
If you assume that we'll start using more efficient cars in the future, and take that into consideration when making your graph/paper/prediction/whatever, then it might make the looming crisis look less severe, meaning that people won't actually start using more efficient cars
It's a self-defeating prophesy: if you make it look like we're going to do better than we're currently on target to do, taking no corrective action, then you encourage us to not take any.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well, good old progress has allowed us to produce a lot more food than we could back in the 70s, when people were fond of predicting we'd all be dead of starvation by now, on account of there being too many of us to ever possibly feed.
As it turns out, the population has grown as predicted, but progress managed to keep up.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
There is also an energy consideration when discussing extracting oil that is not currently profitable. If it takes more than one barrle of oil energy equivalent to extract one barrel of oil, then it can never be done economically, even at $300/barrel.
I love, really love, all the stats that show that We Are At Peak Oil Right Freaking Now (And Then We Will Plummet Like Mad). This to me is like saying The World Will End On October 18, 2006, So Repent Now Or Perish.
If maybe these studies showed We Hit Peak Oil Three Years Ago And Now We See A Definite Downward Trend, or even We Will Hit Peak Oil In About Ten Years, Give Or Take, then there may be something to it, but this Hey, Peak Oil Is Right Now, We Swear stuff just sets off my We Really Don't Know When The Fuck Peak Oil Will Be alarm.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
And how do we produce all that food? With petroleum-based fertilizers. We're using a finite resources that's getting harder and harder to come by to feed an exponentially growing number of people.
This topic always has people saying, "There's always been a fix for this kind of problem. We'll find the next one when we need it." OK, probably we will next time. And the next time. But if we keep pushing our luck, we're going to come up dry one of these days.
Now, I'm willing to do that feed people. But to indulge people's SUV habit? Uh uh.
You say that if we keep pushing our luck, sooner or later it's going to run out.
I say that if our luck consistently doesn't run out, after a while it's not really luck anymore, is it?
We don't say the cheetah is "lucky" because it's able to run so fast. We don't say the albatross is "lucky" because it's able to fly so far. Why should we say that it's "luck" that humans are naturally adaptive to changing conditions?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Dude, cheetahs will go extinct in our lifetime. They were doing fine as long as there were plenty of gazelles to eat. But soon, no more gazelles. And no more oil.
It seems that politics have invaded the issue. To propose stewardship of available resources or suggest conservation causes many to assume you are liberal.
It's a dangerous connection, I fear that the consequence of this becomming a political point of contention is that nothing will happen until the damage is done. Then both sides will likely blame each other.
I'm planning on purchasing a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth" and hiding it away for awhile. Either way, it will be interesting to see it again when the kids are older.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
The stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age wont end because we ran out of oil
Your implication is that the stone age ended because we found something better than stones to switch to. Perhaps so, but it raises the question, what is there that is 'better than oil' (read: cheaper, more convenient, less polluting) that we will switch to this time? Other than a breakthrough in nuclear fusion, I don't see another energy source that can easily scale to fill oil's shoes yet... which suggests that this time we may be switching to something else not because something else has been discovered that makes oil not worth harvesting, but rather because there's no longer enough oil available to meet our needs.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
And it will undoubtedly happen again. Yet here we are, a mere millenium and a half after the Roman collapse, bigger and better than ever before.
Right, and in between we had the Dark Ages. If you had told the Romans that their civilization was about to collapse, but not to worry because after a thousand years of wretched barbary and ignorance that a new enlightened civilization would arise, do you think they wouldn't have worried?
If this kind of adaptability and survivability showed up once or twice, I'd call it luck, and wish for more. But when it turns out to be the normal thing, repeated constantly throughout all of human history, it stops being luck and starts being the fundamental nature of the human species.
Adaptability is without a doubt an aspect of the human species, and it isn't "luck" any more than a cheetah running fast is luck. However depending on adaptability to bring us through any particular calamity, particularly when we cannot name what form that adapatability would have to take, is indeed luck. Just like being able to run fast doesn't guarantee a cheetah's survival -- being able to sprint won't produce game for them to hunt. Being able to understand and utilize new sources of energy won't cause one to appear.
I've read before that it is believed that mankind barely survived the last major ice age, with the worldwide population dropping to under a hundred individuals. However you slice it, that was a lucky break. For whatever reason that those hundred survived, it was clearly not an attribute common to humans in general, who for all their adaptability were unable to survive the harsh conditions. While those few may have had a (lucky) genetic advantage, I suspect it was more the praticulars of their environment. Which could have easily been different, and a hundred humans easily could have easily been wiped away by a thousand things that no amount of 'adaptability' would overcome.
We adapt. We endure. We survive. We build and grow and prosper. We respond to setbacks not by going extinct, but by overcoming them and growing beyond them. This isn't wishing. This is a reasonable interpretation of the historical record.
You can only say that we have failed to go extinct for the period that our species has existed, perhaps 100,000 years, which would hardly impress many other species. The dinosaurs had a reign of tens of millions of years before being wiped out. If you had gone off of historical trends during the late Cretaceous, you would have determined that while some specias may die out and others arise, the dinosaurs were there to stay forever as the dominant animals.
The only reasonable interpretation of the historical record is that we haven't gone extinct yet, and are not so ill-adapted that it seems likely we will soon.
But that notwithstanding, if your overal point is that humanity will probably not go extinct as a result of our failure to develop a new source of energy, then I remain thoroughly unimpressed. I personally would like to do better than that.
The enemies of Democracy are
Okay, will do. From the site:
Yeah, 'cuz you're soooo open-minded and against spouting off, Mr. Comment #3.
Perhaps, if your argument didn't convince us, the problem isn't that we were unable to "come to grips with it". Maybe the problem is that your argument isn't all that convincing to someone who isn't already a believer, and that it's a whole lot harder to convince normal people than to preach to the choir.
But with paragons of rationality and open-mindedness like you guys, ready with such well-thought-out and informative responses to doubts and misgivings, I guess it's just plain ignorant (not to mention unscientific) of us to question you. Bad skeptic, no biscuit!
Your "insightful" comment betrays a lack of economic understanding. There will be no discontinuity, no moment in the future when we run out of oil and everything grinds to a halt.
We will never run out of oil.
As supply decreases, the price will increase, and at some point something else will reach the cost/benefit ratio of oil. Rising prices will speed that along.
But even giving you the benefit of "as supply decreases" is not borne out by history. Enviro-types have been telling us for decades that supply is dwindling, yet it increases every year.
So on balance, I have no trouble with society using as much oil as it's worth for us to pay for.
It's a broad mixture of viewpoints. The wide consensus is that the peak will be somewhere from 2005-2025. We're really, really running in the blind here. I read "I hope to god that it's not this decade" several times a day.
Those who do follow daily developments in conventional oil tend to be more pessimistic - there was a month late last year that we still havn't surpassed in production. They generally wholly reject OPEC's paper recoverable reserves war of the '80's (wherein OPEC one by one doubled their estimated reserves, to protect themselves in the case of a rules change where national reserves would determine allowable experts), and tend to follow decline rates as much as they can - because oil companies making projections almost refuse to acknowledge them, and use advanced drilling techniques that greatly shorten the chronological life of the well, in order to keep yields up. The End Of Oil begins: with a particularly good passage. We have list of fields coming online, but delays are widespread, and depletion rates are even less predictable.
So there is a small, well educated movement that says the peak is now. Most people tell them 'The peak may well be now, but if you run with that, the first price downturn the public sees, they'll dismiss you, and the inevitable will come in 10 years without anyone paying attention because you cried wolf now.' The community will always be a balance of alarmism and counter-alarmism because of this. We saw that type of criticism come to fruition when the Jack II "data" (actually a single 6000 barrel per day well tested for a few hours, which was extrapolated to thousands of $100m wells accross an area the size of Alaska operating for decades to produce a theoretical 50% increase in US reserves) was released, and newspaper columns everywhere declared that that Peak Oil was a millenial cult, and we have infinite reserves. This came in the middle of a commodities market shift away from oil.
The concept of oil depletion itself is older than Malthus and Hubbert. And yes, it's been pushed as an imminent event several times since the 1860's. It may be an imminent event now. It may not be. That doesn't make it any less of a threat - there is a steady trend in reserve discovery, which peaked 42 years ago. We now consume four times as much oil as we discover every year. Production is gonna start declining at some point, and we're gonna see the effects in our lifetimes - hopefully, those effects won't shorten them.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Yeah... that was (unfortunately) bullshit. And to compound it, conveniantly timed bullshit.
People in Soviet Russia, however, appear to be afflicted with amusing juxtapositions of the aforementioned situation
Hint: Julian Simon shot down all the "shortage" chicken-littles in the '70's and '80's. But, like people who follow Sylvia Browne and John Edwards, there's always new "truths" to be found in "shortage woo-woo-ism".
Repeat it enough, you'll win the politics even if the theories, and the theories, implemented are demonstrated false again and again and again.
> It may be an imminent event now. It may not be. That doesn't make it any less of a threat
Far and away the most disasterous effect on humanity has been government intervention in economies. "Good intentions" do not make good outcomes. If you are looking for a threat that will degrade the quality of your life, look to the government intervening in the production of commodities, rather than "shortages" that a free market will deal with. Our "outrageuos" gas prices in the US, with war atop hurricanes, was still $1+ cheaper than Euro prices from several years ago.
It will not be an imminent event, now, or ever, as long as the economy is free to respond to things, and develope alternative sources, and alternative substitutes from fuel, to engine types, to full-blown transportation types, to things as yet unthought-of.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Would I be right in assuming that you are not actively and directly involved, on a daily basis, in waste management efforts relating to the concerns you have raised?
I don't mean "do you recycle?"; I mean, "do you commit a majority of your personal time, energy, and wealth resources every day to solving the problem you describe?"
See, my theory is that real problems get solved in short order. Unreal problems, on the other hand, get a lot of lip-service from a lot of people who aren't really serious about solving them, as evidenced by their large amount of talk, and small amount of action.
To the extent that waste management becomes a serious problem, it will get serious solutions. To the extent that it isn't a serious problem, it will get a lot of people on the internet, taking time out from their non-waste-management-problem-solving lifestyles, complaining about how serious a problem it is and how we all need to take it seriously.
So which is it? Have you dedicated your life to the salvation of humanity, or have you dedicated your life to the twin grails of getting while the getting is good and of telling everybody else to take the problem seriously?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.