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Fossil Fuels Could Be Phased Out Worldwide In a Decade, Says Study (phys.org)
James Hakner, writing for Phys.org: The worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade, according to an article published by a major energy think tank in the UK. Professor Benjamin Sovacool, Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex, believes that the next great energy revolution could take place in a fraction of the time of major changes in the past. But it would take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-scalar effort to get there, he warns. And that effort must learn from the trials and tribulations from previous energy systems and technology transitions. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture. Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use. But this time the future could be different, he says -- the scarcity of resources, the threat of climate change and vastly improved technological learning and innovation could greatly accelerate a global shift to a cleaner energy future.There's no doubt that we will soon reach a point wherein solar and wind will be readily available and feasible to the vast majority but, the decade timeframe feels like a stretch. We must acknowledge the financial and political challenges that we face today. Private and government-backed companies have invested billions of dollars into plants that turn fossil fuels into electricity. Ditching these plants means losing a lot of capital and owing investors with plenty of explanations. There are several forces at play here.
not if China has anything to say about it
The rush to wind and solar does not work in a great deal of circumstances. To force it on people is wrong. The green weenies have turned this crusade into a religion. The amount of people who will be out of work is staggering. There is no sense in rushing this until the technologies to replace it are not anywhere near beta. So often, the green weenies like to roll out stuff like this before it's fully ready. This is akin to putting the wings on the plane as it's taking off.
Until the replacement technologies have years of study and years of proven reliability they should not be deployed.
If renewables are cheaper, they're going to get built. Wind is already cheaper than natural gas in some cases. If you're betting against solar, you're betting that a bunch of electrical engineers can't get costs down on a silicon based system. Eastman Kodak made that bet once, last time I looked the world wasn't exactly lining up to buy Kodachrome anymore.
Actually, no, fossil fuels couldn't be "phased out" in a decade, and strangely enough the entire article is written as if it's a fait accompli. As for "the threat of climate change" - oh, you mean 'catastrophic man-made global warming'? Why didn't you say so? Because you're LIARS, that's why, on the 'climate change' gravy train.
www.climatedepot.com
www.wattsupwiththat.com
Things are unstable enough as it is in that territory. Matters could get a lot worse if they lose their only major source of income.
Pile on a few more conditions and you realize this is just wishful thinking. Some "think tank". Alternative energy is growing. And this is a good thing. But oil was still viable at $150/bbl. Don't think that at $40/bbl people are going to drop it. I think we're currently at or just past peak oil. Peak oil is not where oil is scarce - peak oil is where there is so much oil available that we are literally drowning in oil. Which is why we're hearing about oil gluts, and seeing plummeting oil prices.
Yes, economic slowdown in the US and China has something to do with that too. But currently we are running flat out pumping up oil from tar sands, from the bottom of the oceans at scary depths, and even shale oil from coal and barely treading water, barely producing oversupply. Once the economic slowdown reverses and demand picks up again, these gluts are going to disappear, but production will not pick up as quickly. It can't. All the "easy" oil has already been drilled. Fossil fuels will be not be phased out, there just won't be anymore. But it's going to take a lot more than a decade.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I haven't even read the study and can tell you the title conclusion is completely ridiculous, bordering on bad click-bait.There exists over 1 Billion cars in the world. Unless the governments of all countries in the world both fully subsidize AND legally mandate people to switch to electric cars AND build global infrastructure to support 1 Billion electrical cars, then it ain't gonna happen. Simple as that, end of story.
No trees were killed in the making of this post; however, many trillions of electrons were horribly inconvenienced.
Too many political obstacles.
The transition will probably be faster than the previous ones but ten years is a pipe dream.
It simply won't happen until there is a compelling financial reason to do so.
Market forces always, eventually, win.
-Styopa
https://xkcd.com/678/
Fossil fuels will be here for the foreseeable future and then some.
that same money that wont be there to finance terrorism abroad.
I often keep my cars for over ten years. When there is a compelling reason to replace, often operation costs, sometimes another driver is an idiot, I replace it with a car that I expect to last for over ten years.
So for those of us that don't have an electric car (or tractor) and need more than a few hours of continuous operation, I say "phooey."
If the Aussie brown coal industry shut down tonight, the natural fires that they have prevented would destroy centuries worth of fuel coal by the next of the next fire season.
If coal isn't a useful resource, it isn't in anyone with money's interest to keep it from burning so natural fires will start and it will burn sometime in the future. That issue must be addressed.
I have a Time magazine from 1948 and the cover article said the same thing.
Yeah... not happening.
The three main fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. Coal is already being phased out except in China and India, and Coal power plants will probably be almost gone in under thirty years worldwide. Oil is used mostly in transportation (cars etc.). Most action in this area has been to reduce oil consumption rates by using more efficient drivetrains (including hybrids), but that transition won't approach oil-free. In the longer term, plug-ins will, but that seems to have barely started and given the lifespan of a car, it will probably take at least twenty more years. Natural gas on the other hand is mostly not decreasing. It used in dispatchable power plant to cover both demand variation and supply variation. Batteries could do this, but they are currently far from cost-effiective for this use. So maybe thirty years for that, too.
It simply won't happen until there is a compelling financial reason to do so.
Market forces always, eventually, win.
I'm pretty sure that if your hose is burning you won't bide your time and wait until there is a bear market in the fire extinguisher business so you can secure a fire extinguisher at the lowest possible price, you'll pay any price asked for a fire extinguisher so you can keep your house from burning down.... but then again boil a frog slowly, yada, yada, yada... (it doesn't work on frogs but apparently it will work on some free market fundamentalists).
Britain ended slavery throughout it's empire* in 1833. The government paid off the slave owners.
The author of the paper, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, is Director of the Sussex Energy Group at the University of Sussex. Confusingly, the University also describes him as "Professor of Energy Policy (SPRU - Science Policy Research Unit)". A brief search of the University of Sussex, University of Aarhus, and Wikipedia Web sites reveals that he has published a vast number of papers, given many, many talks and seminars, published books, received grants, and has a PhD in 'science and technology studies from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he won the “Outstanding Dissertation of the Year” award from the College of Social Sciences and Humanities'.
Nowhere, however, can I find any information about Professor Sovacool's undergraduate degree discipline. From his published biographical details, he seems to have popped into existence at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University where he received his PhD - awarded, be it noted, by "the College of Social Sciences and Humanities".
Until I learn to the contrary, therefore, I am assuming that Professor Sovacool is essentially a social science specialist who has ventured - very boldly indeed - into the topical, not to say fashionable, world of climate change, global warming, and general greenness. TFA tells us that, "In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy Research & Social Science, Professor Sovacool analyses energy transitions throughout history and argues that only looking towards the past can often paint an overly bleak and unnecessary picture".
"Energy Research & Social Science". Hmmmmmmm. Professor Sovacool advances undeniably compelling (if not very scientific) arguments, such as this:
"Moving from wood to coal in Europe, for example, took between 96 and 160 years, whereas electricity took 47 to 69 years to enter into mainstream use... Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; a major household energy programme in Indonesia took just three years to move two-thirds of the population from kerosene stoves to LPG stoves; and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982".
Well, there you have it. Clearly that evidence leaves no possible doubt that "[t]he worldwide reliance on burning fossil fuels to create energy could be phased out in a decade". To the satisfaction of any social science professor, anyway.
http://phys.org/news/2016-04-f...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
You might argue that it would solve their problems.
If there was no demand for their product, the major world powers wouldn't quit injecting themselves into their affairs. With no income, they couldn't buy weapons. Without weapons, their ability to wage large-scale wars would drop off.
The whole place might not be nice, but it would probably settle back to a patchwork of tribal areas generally stable because there was no means of consolidating power or enforcing minority governance.
That is the only issue. Everything else is trivial by comparison.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Does this fantasy in the article include transportation as well? Who's going to subsidize everyone to all buy electric cars and trucks (which aren't even on the market yet) and convert all of the cross-country trains to electric and build all electric airplanes?
The wars will be pretty small if they can no longer afford to buy the mass weaponry they are importing.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
For example, Ontario completed a shift away from coal between 2003 and 2014; ... and France's nuclear power programme saw supply rocket from four per cent of the electricity supply market in 1970 to 40 per cent in 1982.
So with a little political will, large changes can be made to our electricity generation system rather quickly. It would mean embracing nuclear, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For example, take electric cars. The switch cannot be done in one decade, because we have already working on that technology for 70 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle
But, yes, we're closing in on mass deployment. That simple step can be completed, but only after the technology is sufficiently advanced.
If "feasible" means "economical", there is definitely doubt - each bit of government subsidy & market distortion is concrete proof of that.
But it would take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-scalar effort to get there, he warns.
Uhh, that isn't a minor speed bump, that is Olympus Mons on Mars sized speed bump...
To actually do it would require that we actually buy up and destroy most of the gas powered cars on the roads, since more than half of them are used longer than 10 years.
We'd have to shut down and destroy trillions of dollars worth of industry around the world, from oil refineries to coking coal plants that make steel, to natural gas powered appliances, etc. (in my home along, my water is heated, my food is cooked, and my home is heated with natural gas, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace all that with electric).
We would somehow have to get all the nations of the world on the same page. You know, the same ones that are at war right now, declared and undeclared, the ones that fly jets 30 feet over our warships, the ones wanting to expand ISIS, and the ones building islands in the South China sea.
If you wanted to avoid nuclear, you'd also somehow have to build an international power grid and allow nations to become dependent on other counties for power. That may work for Denmark and Sweden, but do you really think South and North Korea are going to get along? How about the US and Mexico? Israel and everyone else...
---
The "think tank" either just wants money to write more pointless "reports", or they are smoking crack... Both are sad...
All of the fast changes of electrical supply cited in the article were moves from one baseload source to another. But if you want to move from baseload to renewables (other than the lone baseload renewable, hydro) we will need a new grid. The envisioned upgrade, "Smart Grid" would be able to match fluctuating supplies with continually monitored and controlled loads. Yes, you will have to give your utility power to continually monitor your electrical demand and be able to switch your major appliances on and off to match the changing supply of sun and wind. Changing over to this grid will cost a few teradollars.
The very first small step in upgrading to Smart Grid is Smart Meter, the first generation of which continually monitors load for each user, but does not have the control component. In my town the hippie moms have already protested away Smart Meter on grounds that they "emit radiation" by which they mean use cellular data chips to send their readings to the utility. So around here anyway, the flat-earth lobby has already eaten its own proposed solution.
As of 2015, 33% of the United States' electricity was produced from coal.
Coal might not be used as much as it once was, but it's still among the dominant energy sources in the US and many other nations.
In many regions we didn't really see a shift away from coal. Instead of the coal being directly used on-premise to heat buildings, it was centralized at large coal burning plants. The plants would then provide the coal-derived energy to power the electrical heating of these buildings.
This is what we're seeing with electrically powered vehicles, too. The end user only thinks they're using electricity, often not realizing that this energy came from burning coal. They think they're being "green" when they're indirectly powering their vehicles using coal!
I so saw this coming. Started saving my pile of banana peels in my kitchen corner so I can stuff them in my "Mr. Fusion" powered flying car we'll all have when this comes to be... right? DERP.
I suppose so. I mean, space aliens could land in my back yard tomorrow, and that's even less likely.
I comment occasionally so that I can mod others -1 overrated or -1 offtopic.
Quite a bit of large machinery is diesel electric. If someone came up with a way to replace those engines, they would jump on it. Even at today's relatively cheap prices, fuel is still a huge cost. If the tech existed where those diesel engines and generators could be replaced by solar cells or something, the rail road industry would on it in a heartbeat. It's not just fuel costs it's also maintenance costs too.
The same goes for those earth moving equipment.
My point is that changing over isn't as a big a deal as everyone thinks.
Things are unstable enough as it is in that territory. Matters could get a lot worse if they lose their only major source of income.
The Middle East is unstable because of the oil wealth. Most terrorism comes from the wealthiest ME countries, not the poorest. If a government gets most of its wealth from oil, it has little need to be concerned about the welfare or aspirations of the people, other than to just keep them under control. So you get a corrupt and repressive elite, and seething resentment from the population. Saudi Arabia is the worst case, and has bred the most terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, and 15/19 of the 911 hijackers.
Here's the article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...
The recent price crash of oil was caused by a supply glut of 2 million barrels per day. According the the studies referenced here, if electric vehicle growth continues at the rate we have seen in recent years, electric vehicles will in and of themselves create their own oil demand glut of 2 million barrels by 2023. I wouldn't want to own oil stocks when that happens.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
With no income ...
what little economies they do have will collapse and that huge population of unemployed young people will go somewhere, bringing their Wahhabism with them.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
When I went to school back in 2000 I was taught the world would be out of oil by 2016. So when I hear scientist complain about resources drying up I don't believe them. That is what happens when you make predictions you don't know are true.
Scientific pseudoskepticism coupled with conspiracy theories. David Icke met Roy Spencer, and you're the product of that unholy union,.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
At a level of global cooperation never before achieved by the human race, on a project vastly more expensive than any project previously undertaken by any nation state (or supranational governing body) humanity could achieve X in Y years for Z dollars—where the precise value of X is pretty much irrelevant, since it surely won't happen in less than Y*3 years and Z*10 dollars, in the unlikely event it happens at all.
What Coke promised: "I'd like to teach the world to sing".
What Coke delivered: global BMI inflation & Texas-sized land yachts.
Over the last 5-10 years you have had a large number of power plants re-powered from oil to natural gas and from once-through cooling to cooling tower operation. I could be way off on my numbers, but I believe the cost is around $1MM/MWh typically, and generally amortized as a 30 year investment. So, in order to pay off those expenses, you are looking at whatever the existing (wholesale) cost of electricity is, and adding the cost of new renewable sources to it (roughly triple the wholesale cost amortized out). In addition, you need to add effective peaking capacity back in, which right now is sodium batteries.
The wholesale energy cost today is $0.03, give or take, so you would see energy costs go up by about $0.20/kWh to make it happen. In California this would be a retail cost of around $0.30/kWh compared to a blended $0.15 today.
Which seems kind of manageable. It would really suck for people with McMansions in Texas that currently have $3-400/summer month electricity bills seeing it go up to $6-800 per month... but market factors should push a solution.
The problem, which the electrical utilities are all painfully aware of, is that at such a point, what is their value-add? Would you see a mass exodus from the grid? (If so, would people just run a crappy little genset on days without adequate sun, making matters worse?) Whomever is left on the grid at that point is going to see costs closer to $1/kWh which is not viable in terms of investments that go out 30 years.
So, the alternative becomes letting the generators go bankrupt and/or bailing them out in order to get the costs off the books quickly. Then you need to bail out the consumers who made poor decisions relative to the previous utility assumptions. Oh, then you need to bail out cities, since they won't have enough land area for renewable resources to make them self-sufficient... so they are disproportionately impacted.
I think it can and should be done, but the horizon is likely closer to 20 years, and we need to get new nuclear plants permitted now and completed within 10 years. It is likely the only thing that would make financial sense. Less developed nations could be able to do it in an economically viable manner faster with the right technologies.
The government paid off the slave owners.
There's a smidge more ICE vehicles than there were slaves.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Enter the carbon tax. Price emissions for their actual costs they incur. You know, the free market solution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It simply won't happen until there is a compelling financial reason to do so.
You're right. If the US government stopped it's massive oil and gas subsidies, the economy would swing toward renewables quickly.
I don't respond to AC's.
>They think they're being "green" when they're indirectly powering their vehicles using coal!
burning coal in an plant, and using its electricity in a battery-operated vehicle is more environmentally friendly than using petrol, and it does allow using solar or wind or other future power to drive the vehicles.
I can't even post a reply, such navel-contemplating are the comments here. It's not even redneck level -- more like Mr. Burns doing an AMA.
Let's talk about steam engines, shall we? Reminds me of that Monty Python sketch: "Come back here! I'll bite you to death!"
An EV powered by coal emits less pollution than an oil powered car. Plus, as more renewables come online, the EV becomes more efficient.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
BIGGGG emphasis on "Could be"..!!
If you want to know how that works, look back at California's electric market deregulation in 2000/2001. Real time pricing is unfortunately very easy to game.
And what if your house *isn't* burning? Do you still by a $40k fire extinguisher to put it out?
Rolling Stone, of all places, had an excellent analysis of the rather simple and brutal math behind such a transition. Simply put, there are about thirty trillion (ie, 10^12) US Dollars worth of hydrocarbons in the ground. Those hydrocarbons count as assets on the balance sheets of the richest companies on earth. Avoiding a 2-degree C global average temperature increase requires leaving about $20T of those reserves in the ground, forever. That is, you would have to get the richest companies in the world, all together, to write off a loss five times the size of the one that triggered the subprime mortgage implosion in 2008.
The scary thing is, in the long run, that's the cheaper alternative.
It's not like we want to avoid it, peak nuclear production is expected around 2030 to 2040. Not much energy left in there, especially considering that nuclear energy usage worldwide doesn't reach 15% of total output, where two thirds are oil and gas.
It's not like we want to avoid it, peak nuclear production is expected around 2030 to 2040.
Don't be silly, that is just counting existing refined stockpiles.
Between actually bothering to mine for more uranium and using breeder reactors to make plutonium, we could make 100% of our power from nuclear for a long time if we wanted to.
We simply don't want to.
This demonstrates a POSSIBLE answer. Right now we don't think the situation is anywhere near bad enough to warrant the major problems caused by the proposed solution.
Far more likely is the complete removal of all coal plants, replaced by green technology. Combine that with a cessation of building fossil fuel burning cars, and you have a major shift.
While not as good as the possible solution from the actual post, this is a far more likely one, and would still surprise most people. The benefits would take a while to appear, but they would be real.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The coal industry is crashing. Peabody coal, the largest coal company in the US just went bankrupt. The reason: competition from renewables and cheaper LNG, and dropping Chinese demand. China has a huge air pollution problem caused primarily by coal generation. They are moving to renewables in a big way.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Who cares? The point about TFA is all fossil fuels would be gone in a decade. Which I believe is just a load of bullshit. It is not going to happen within a decade for sure.
Achille Talon
Hop!
If the 120 or so wealthy men with governments in their pockets who mostly rule commerce on this world agree, and they can be on board to receive the profits, then this would happen.
We may be about to find out to what degree the oil and coal industries own governments. You can bet that big oil and big coal will play every evil card on the bottom of the deck to maintain their grip on your wallet. Then again with an out of control world population problem exploding in our faces we may be using human bodies as fuel to run power plants.
But it would take a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multi-scalar effort to get there, he warns.
Uhh, that isn't a minor speed bump, that is Olympus Mons on Mars sized speed bump...
To actually do it would require that we actually buy up and destroy most of the gas powered cars on the roads, since more than half of them are used longer than 10 years.
Yep, my car is 10 years old and I fully intend to keep it for another 10. I see quite a number of cars on the road that are nearly 20 years, the mid 90's produced a lot of reliable cars.
We'd have to shut down and destroy trillions of dollars worth of industry around the world, from oil refineries to coking coal plants that make steel, to natural gas powered appliances, etc. (in my home along, my water is heated, my food is cooked, and my home is heated with natural gas, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to replace all that with electric).
My house would not only need a vastly larger electrical feed and new appliances but the power lines at the street would need to be upgraded as well. My old roof is not likely going to be able to support the load of PV panels nor do I have a large southern facing section of roof and I'd have to cut down all of the trees that provide me shade for much of the year, which would just drive up my A/C usage.
[coal] is still the dominant energy source in the US
Natural gas surpasses coal for electricity generation, July 2015
Now just for a month, but coal has been declining in it's percentage.
in 2010 coal was 50%. Dropping to 30% in just 5 years? that's not a 'dominant' player, that's a dead albatross on it's way down.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
The reason: competition from renewables and cheaper LNG, and dropping Chinese demand.
Let me fix that;
forced market purchase of heavily subsidized renewables and cheaper LNG, and dropping Chinese demand.
cheap LNG being by far the biggest factor.
I don't think you understand how this works. They won't go somewhere. They will die.
I question that thesis.
These countries have by and large been economic backwaters forever and its required basically a state of war and anarchy in Syria for several years to kick off a major wave of migration. End the fighting and you end most of the migration. The oil economies of most of these countries don't do a lot to help the man in the street anyway, they largely depend on general internal economic activity for subsistence.
Plus you have to figure that the Europeans won't tolerate much more migration as it stands. They already agreed to let Erdogan run a fascist dictatorship in exchange for letting them repatriate people who leave from there. A lot of central European countries have unilaterally closed their borders and fenced them off, any significant increase in migration will result in political changes that endorse not just closed borders, but the use of deadly force to keep people out, forced repatriation and so on.
So within the next decade people going on long road trips are going to put up with traveling 80 miles at a time, parking for over an our to recharge in between ASSUMING there is a free power station as they arrive? I can't see it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You clearly don't know anything about subsidies. Look it up; they're not nearly as big and bad as you imagine.
They are a drop in the bucket compared to the economy, and aren't really big enough to affect prices the way you think.
I did not read the article - this is Slashdot after all.
But, start with in the US alone there are about 275 million cars and trucks on the road in the US alone. That means replacing over 27 million of them each year. That means everyone driving a car can afford to replace it.
Net step is replacement of the infrastructure to deliver fuel conveniently to 275 million vehicles.
Next step replacing the OTR trucking industry with something powered some other way.
Next step, replacing 39% of our (US) power generation using coal. The past 10 years we have replaced 10%
Replacing super tankers drive systems and super tankers. And remember these tankers are expensive and the ROI is based on more than 10 years service, someone will take a heck of a beating.
Converting to a different energy source is what we need to do, and we need to start seriously NOW. But, to much money, to much infrastructure, and too much investment to replace in just 10 years.
Yes because its a new shiny and if I have a new one I impress my neighbors.
American buying public is already that fickle, so yes they absolutely will.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Enter the carbon tax. Price emissions for their actual costs they incur. You know, the free market solution.
A couple things.
First, government-imposed "social engineering" taxes such as a carbon tax are anything *but* "free market" and are nearly polar opposites.
Second, such a tax would impact lower-income people hugely more than wealthier people both directly and through increases in their cost of living. The "1-percenters" won't hardly notice, but lower income people will pay a much larger percentage of their income, drastically affecting their ability to house, clothe, feed, and prevent themselves from freezing to death in winter and dying from heat in summer.
Why do you hate lower-income people struggling to survive?
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I'm pretty sure that my house isn't burning, no matter what excuse those who love a powerful government want to deceive me into giving the government more power.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
manishs worries about the cost of dumping old infrastructure to investors. However, smart investors will take advantage of the opportunity. Stanford was out of coal stocks before they tanked, while Harvard's coal country president, Drew Faust, has cost Harvard big time with her dubious loyalties to fossil fuels. There is essentially no cost to investors that avoid buying buggy whip stock.
Peak Oil has nothing to do with drowning in oil; it has to do with the inevitable decline in supply of oil. For some reason, some know-nothing blogger out there started this notion that Peak Something means that the world is drowning in that Something. Well, it doesn't mean that; rather, it means that the world has reached the maximum at which it can supply said Something, and the ability to maintain that supply will surely and only decline thereafter.
Yes, you will have to give your utility power to continually monitor your electrical demand and be able to switch your major appliances on and off to match the changing supply of sun and wind.
No, just no...
Come over to my house and speak with my wife, tell her that she no longer will get to decide when she can and cannot use her appliances. See how far you get.
If you told her the choice was a 4 degree rise in global temps, or limit her appliance use, she'll take the appliance use, and she isn't alone.
These countries have by and large been economic backwaters forever and its required basically a state of war and anarchy in Syria for several years to kick off a major wave of migration.
Syria isn't Saudi Arabia, which has a huge population of educated, unemployed young people who are used to the good life and don't revolt only because they're being paid off.
No more payoffs means no more placidity, which means more radicalism.
A lot of central European countries have unilaterally closed their borders and fenced them off, any significant increase in migration will result in political changes that endorse not just closed borders, but the use of deadly force to keep people out, forced repatriation and so on.
But think of the children!!!!
Anyway, as long as it shuts them up about us being fascist pigs for trying to keep out illegal Mexicans, bully on them for trying to deal with their own illegal immigration problem.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Turns out the uranium would run out within a decade of the transition. https://slashdot.org/journal/2...
Average age of a vehicle on the road today is 11 years, and the trend has been lengthening. That fact alone suggests the average person would not be phasing out fossil fuels in less than 11-12 years. Given that is the mean age, many folks are out there with cars that are 15-20 years old.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
So... You should move to Somolia to obtain a piece of the heaven you speak of.
You have some kind of hair trigger response to anything perceived as libertarian/anarchist. The problem is with you and not us.
totally dooable.
Yes, the truly controversial feature of Smart Meter is the going to be the upgraded version that controls your appliances. Though the version now being installed just monitors your usage, it has to transmit that information to the utility using (cue the spooky organ music) deadly radio waves!
I don't think you understand how this works. They won't go somewhere. They will die.
Tell that to the millions of people fleeing Syria...
Yes, but before you go down the big hill in the rollercoaster, you have to be at the top.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm pretty sure that if your hose is burning...
...you need antibiotics?
Why did people move from wood to coal? Candles and gas lamps to electric lights? Was there a shortage of wood available? This was quite likely in some cases.
While I admit to not having done a rigorous analysis of this topic I do recall from history class in college that electric lights were cheaper, safer, and easier to manage. Coal is energy dense and it doesn't take from the wood supply used for construction.
People moved to these new energy sources because they were better than what they had. Much like how the stone age didn't end for lack of stones.
If we want to see a shift away from fossil fuels then we need to have something that is cheaper, safer, and plentiful. This must also take into account the cost of changing the infrastructure. Some transitions are easier than others. Gas pipes in homes became conduit for electric wires, making that transition something that could be done without tearing walls open. Moving from wood to coal likely meant they could use the same boilers, just shovel in coal instead.
What won't be as easy is shifting gasoline and diesel fueled vehicles to whatever this professor thinks can replace them. We can replace coal with nuclear, that's not a big shift in infrastructure. Shifting away from natural gas for heating would take some time since people aren't going to throw away a working furnace on a whim. I presume this would be replaced with electricity, which likely means a greater electric load. Cars and trucks on the other hand cannot be just replaced with electric. Ethanol might be considered but only as long as it takes someone to do the math on how much crop land it would take to produce enough ethanol for every car to run from it.
One way out of this is to synthesize hydrocarbons using nuclear power. This would close the carbon loop since the carbon released in burning is recycled from the air to produce more hydrocarbons. The US Navy has been experimenting with this for a few years now. The change in infrastructure would be minimal but it would mean replacing every oil well and refinery with enough nuclear power plants and fuel synthesis plants. Unless the US Department of Energy starts handing out nuclear power operation licenses like never before then it cannot happen. I've done the math before and we'd need something like one new nuclear power plant coming online every month, perhaps more.
The bottleneck on this is regulation. I believe that it always was. The USA and many other nations could have built nuclear power plants like France did and free themselves from coal a long time ago. The costs to build a nuclear power plant today largely rides on appeasing the regulators, not in building a safe power plant. We know how to build a safe nuclear reactor, and we've known how to do that for decades.
I believe that humanity will reach a nuclear powered world, it's just a matter of when. It might happen in ten years because government policy makers listen to people like this professor. It might take one thousand years because we've run out of coal to burn. If we don't move to nuclear power then civilization will die. Energy is life. We can't live without it. If we don't move to nuclear power then we die. Well, not all of us will die. Those that remain will be hunter gatherers in tropical rain forests.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I would agree but it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle, which means if that region falls into a oil-demand depression then the entire world will become a less safer place.
You would know about STDs after all the assraping of farm animals you've been doing.
When some one says A could happen, there is some chance it is going to happen. But it could also mean "it is not impossible, and under the following circumstances, however unlikely and improbable the circumstances are, A could happen". So in that sense the paper could be correct.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That investors went long when they should have went short.
In 2026 I'll be looking to buy a 2016-2019 model year car. And it will probably burn fossil fuels.
If they convert those older cars to non - fossil, then I'm in the market for a more affordable option. Like an older car...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I would agree but it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle, which means if that region falls into a oil-demand depression then the entire world will become a less safer place.
It takes resources to be a threat. There are plenty of extremists in dirt poor places like Somalia and northeast Nigeria, but they pose little threat outside their home regions ... and even there, the extremism is promoted by funding from Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia.
There were 135 or 136 space shuttle missions.
There were two accidents.
Odds were estimated at 1:100
Two in 135 is right in the ballpark.
So no, your point does not stand.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Explains a lot about 'Murica
The analysis is flat-out wrong. Those reserves will still be used; even if we completely stopped burning them for fuel this year, we would still need them. Right now, over half of each barrel of oil goes for about 6,000 non-fuel products:
Here's a partial reference
So -- at most, assuming no new uses are discovered for it, which is an extremely poor assumption --, those stocks would take twice as long to use up.
So, no. No one will be leaving those in the ground, abandoning the value they represent. Not going to happen.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ok, sure. I will tell it to them. Syrians, know this: like all other mortals, you will die.
You underestimate how liberal the Euros are.
I think it will take many more immigrants before the majority accepts that muslim culture does not simply fit into western culture as simply as say french and german culture can accept each other.
I agree it takes resources. Saudi Arabia has most of our modern weapons system and $750 billion in US treasuries alone. I think those are enough resources.
That doesn't imply you're drowning in oil. What don't you get about that?
You are confusing the rate in a small sample with the probability of an event.
One in 100 chance does not mean there will be exactly one accident in 100 events. There might be zero; there might be ten. Might happen on launch one; might happen on launch 100; might not happen at all; might happen on launches 40 through 60 (though I agree this would be disturbing... ;)
What it actually means is that over a long series of events taken in groups of 100, the average rate of problems is expected to work out to one in 100. A sample of 135 with two events in no way contradicts the expectation.
For instance, I can tell you, and you are probably aware, that a fair coin flip has a 50% probability of heads.
However, it would not be in the least bit (hah!) unusual to see heads, heads, tails, heads in the first four flips. Approaching it the way you do, though, you'd be saying that such a result shows a 75% probability that the operation results in heads. Which is wrong. The observed rate for a sample of four was h-h-t-h. The probability remains at 1:2 and is in no way contradicted by the h-h-t-h result. Or a t-t-h-t result, or an h-t-h-h result. Etc.
1:2 does NOT means that one of two or two of four will be heads. It just means that in a long sequence, it's predicted (correctly, as it happens, if the circumstances are otherwise unbiased) settle out to that.
Which is not to say that those generally ignorant of how probability actually works won't set their expectations incorrectly; of course they will. That's why we have lotteries, McDonald's "Monopoly", and a good deal of the businesses in Las Vegas.
But I assure you, when the probability of a shuttle accident was assessed at 1:100, the people doing so did understand what they were doing, and what that prediction means. It is hardly their fault, or NASA's, when an individual doesn't understand what they've been told. That's more down to a failure to learn on the part of the individual. Also, I absolutely guarantee you that each and every astronaut and passenger that went up in the shuttle knew these facts perfectly well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This grid will be very expensive and very vulnerable.
To make renewable energy sources competitive requires a very large and expensive electric grid so that when the wind blows over the plains in Oklahoma it can keep the lights on in St. Louis. It also means that the setting sun on the west coast is keeping lights on where it's already dark on the east coast. If there happens to be a tornado in Kansas then this delicate balance is gone, those downed power lines mean even if the sun is shining and the wind blowing the power can't get to where it's needed.
If we build redundancies for such issues then costs go up. If we bury lines to keep the weather from damaging lines then costs go up. If the costs go up too much then wind and solar don't look so competitive.
Turning off residential air conditioning and such can manage the load but only to a point. Running enough power lines to make renewable energy work is certainly possible in theory for large land masses like the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and maybe smaller ones like Australia and Greenland. For islands, geographical or political, renewable energy will not work.
What does work is nuclear power. We have small modular nuclear power designs that are safe, inexpensive, and reliable. How do I know this? Because the US Navy figured this out decades ago, and the US Air Force came up with some better ideas not much later.
If we want to keep electricity cheap and reliable then we don't need massive "smart" grids, we need small "stupid" ones.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Automobiles stay in the collective fleet for 15 to 20 years. You are not phasing out fossil fuels till the current cars run on something else.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The point about TFA is all fossil fuels would be gone in a decade.
I think the point of TFA is that it would be possible to phase out fossil fuels in a decade with enough effort, not that we would do it. To me a decade is extremely optimistic but I could see them mostly phased out in 20 years and gone except for specialized applications in 30 years.
No. They don't. To recap:
Tossing a coin 4x and getting heads-heads-tails-heads does NOT show other than 2:1
AND:
Launching the shuttle 135 times and getting two fails does NOT show other than 1:100
Same EXACT issue: Nowhere near enough sample runs to demonstrate empirically that the calculated odds for one sample are wrong.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Saudi Arabian Wahabis don't resent the house of Saud, they resent the western world for it's intellectual and military superiority.
Although Europe is clearly inferior in its sense of self preservation for the moment.
Terrorism comes from poor countries... like Africa, Pakistan, Palestine and India.
The problem isn't MONEY, is that the filthy child raping Muhammad cock sucking Muslims are to busy committing terrorist acts.. well, when they are not raping little boys, sheep or goats.
Going nuclear would enable us to keep our current grid. It still needs upgrades, for such considerations as security and EMP resistance. But it wouldn't need a total redesign and we wouldn't have to allow utilities to control our appliances.
As for cars, I think that once you hit 60% or so, it will only take another 2-3 years after that for them to basically disappear. Do you *like* yourself and your children being exposed to exhaust fumes? I bet not. Will you accept it as a "necessary evil" as long as you are driving a gas car yourself? Probably. But once the problem is your *neighbor* being the hold-out and poisoning you and yours while you have gone electric, you will have no problem voting to "get rid of the stinkers on the road"! Once that translates into a political majority, it will go very fast. It will happen by zone first (school zones, inner cities, ...rural last?), and by category (busses, taxis, personal cars, ...construction vehicles last?).
But we ARE drowning in oil. When they're talking about renting oil tankers just to store the stuff, there's a lot of unused oil. Therefore production currently far exceeds demand - but not because production has or can increase - because demand has slacked off. Slightly. China by 1%. The US by 2%. Every country in the world that HAS oil is trying to produce that oil. Refineries around the world are working at full capacity. Saudi Arabia has not slacked off production and is almost at full capacity. Never has oil been sucked out of the ground at a higher rate than today. And it's barely enough. Even if oil demand doesn't grow in the next year or so through industrial demand, it will grow through population increase.
China alone adds the population of Australia to the world every single year. All of them will need food, heat, light, transport, etc - even when the economy is in the tank. And when you talk about the Chinese economy being in the tank, it's still growing at 6% per year. That means the Chinese economy doubles in size in 12 years. It is currently tied with the US for the largest. In 12 years it will be twice the size of the US. Imagine every chinaman wanting and more importantly being able to afford a new car. How much oil are they going to want? US currently guzzles 20 million barrels a day. What happens when China ALSO wants 20 million barrels a day? They currently consume 11 and are growing at 4.3% per year. In 16 years, China will want 22 million bbl a day. Do you see world production of oil DOUBLING in 16 years? I don't. Peak oil is right now.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Unless exxon mobil can secure pretty much a monopoly on the next source of power.
Summary says
Private and government-backed companies have invested billions of dollars into plants that turn fossil fuels into electricity. Ditching these plants means losing a lot of capital and owing investors with plenty of explanations.
We all invested even more billions of dollars into assets that require a sustainable ecosystem. Ditching it means losing even more capital.
This is why border control must include strong walls and live ammunition.
In news today: Academic X states that outcome Y is possible after Z years and A substantial (not to say outstanding and superlative) effort.
Outcome: Outcome Y takes much longer or perhaps never happens at all. Academic X retorts that "the required effort was never made!"
This is the problem with predicting the future. In order to be credible you must do better than stating what could happen. Anything could happen. You must forecast what is likely to happen. And even then your predictions are going to miss a lot.
Poke a stick labeled Renewables or Climate Change in it, and legions of assholes come streaming out calling everyone ignorant and haters.
Fucking children calling each other names pretending to be smart.
Pedantic assholes, the lot of you.
These countries have by and large been economic backwaters forever and its required basically a state of war and anarchy in Syria for several years to kick off a major wave of migration.
The Fertile Crescent was one of the cradles of civilization, a rich conquest for the Hotties, for Egypt, for the Persians of various stripes, for Alexander, for the Romans, for the Arabs, the Turks, and the Mongols.
They'll be fine.
If you phase out fossil fuels, how are they going to get all the low-income people to upgrade or convert their cars? I can suggest a possible answer, but many of you aren't going to like it-- we either need to upgrade low-income people so there aren't any, or at least much fewer of them, and/or subsidize the upgrade of their cars-- and who is going to pay for it?
Second only to Ft. Lauderdale during Spring Break.
Back home in Maine there's a house that was on the property when I bought it. I had a new house built further up the side of the mountain. I was going to tear that old one down but it kind of grew on me so I had it rehabbed. In the basement, there's a giant (probably about six feet across) round boiler that burns wood or coal. I'm not there to look but I think it's called a Homart.
Lemme Google...
Yeah, the logo looks right but Google Image Search doesn't appear to have one. Maybe I'll take some pictures of it and upload them somewhere for posterity. I doubt there are many left. It's from the late 1800s and can be used to heat water as well as using ducts to pipe heat all over the house. It's really quite remarkable.
At any rate, I don't use the house myself but it does get used at times. I don't like the phrase, it seems a bit like putting on airs, but it's really just a guesthouse. There's a ready supply of coal and firewood down there in the basement. The Farmer's Union still sells coal and, for a few extra bucks, they'll even deliver it to you. It comes in plastic bags - thick plastic and I've got a half-dozen tons worth of it, or about that much, stocked away in the basement.
When I have friends stop by and stay for a while, we often get the coal fire going and it's a nice, thorough heat. When I had the house rehabbed, I had them restore it but much of the restoration is cosmetic. The walls are now full of real insulation and the windows only appear to be old. They're actually triple pane and the house is rather tight. A coal fire, with surprisingly little coal now, will keep you roasty toasty for a long time - on the order of feeding it just twice a day.
There are enough people buying coal to heat their homes that the Farmer's Union not only carries it but they run out of it during the winter months - on a regular basis. Coal is not dead and gone, it's still actively being used by more people than you might think - and in the residential areas as well as the commercial areas. I don't go through a lot of it - I put 10 tons in there to begin with. I imagine there's about a half-dozen ton left. It's not like it goes bad or anything.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And to weaken the United States shale oil production. Isn't it funny how they waited until so much money was invested before undercutting shale oil to less than the cost of production. Shale oil costs a LOT more to extract than the oil the Iranians are producing. The USA is getting hurt a lot more by this than Iran and Russia.
Even if thermal coal for electricity generation goes away the home market is still likely to get enough cheap coal for those boilers, stoves etc from lower grade metallurgical coal. As probably a lot of people here (but not all) would know, coal is used in steelmaking not just for the heat but for the chemical reaction with the iron ore. There is no easier or "greener" way to do it since using hydrogen or whatever to reduce the ore isn't going to add carbon to turn iron into steel. In Brazil a wood burning blast furnace ran for a while and consumed astonishing amounts of wood - not "green" at all. Most comparable metals require a lot more energy to produce than steel, so forget aluminium and titanium etc for general use.
The GP is suggesting following the demand instead of shaping demand to match supply. Everything else is your own baggage taken to a ridiculous extreme.
lots of people care, they are just stumped by the price of the still newish technology, but the price is dropping all the time and the market will widen out to more and more people as a result.
A test for you, drive your petrol/diesel vehicle in your garage, close the garage door, sit in the car with the windows open and turn on the engine and see how long it takes you to care. then do the same with an EV and see which is more pleasant an environment.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The very first small step in upgrading to Smart Grid is Smart Meter, the first generation of which continually monitors load for each user, but does not have the control component.
There is literally no need to monitor each user until you can control each user. Substation monitoring provides all the information the power company needs about residential customers, because they cannot switch power at a finer resolution anyway. Big industrial customers need to be connected more intimately to the system, because they are the ones which make large and unpredictable demands on the system. Residential demand is highly predictable.
In my town the hippie moms have already protested away Smart Meter on grounds that they "emit radiation" by which they mean use cellular data chips to send their readings to the utility.
Yeah, that's stupid, because they use radio chirps. They don't transmit constantly. That, however, just proves how useless they actually are. They don't do realtime reporting anyway! However, there are serious problems with so-called "smart" meters. The first and largest problem is that when they fail, which is regularly, they fail in favor of the power company and not you, the way the electromechanical meters do. The other problem, which is also significant, is that they occasionally explode, burst into flames, et cetera. You can look it up, if you care.
Smart meters are stupid shit that nobody needs on residential customers at this point. If they wanted to spend money on "smart" infrastructure then it should have been on more infrastructure. We call it a "power grid" but it is not. It is a network of barely interconnected trees. We should make it more like a grid, to reduce outages.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What makes the oil, gas, and coal industries possible is permitting them to ignore externalities. If you had to put the hill back to being nice after mining coal, and you had to fix all the CO2 emitted, and also somehow put all the radioactive isotopes back in the ground, and actually build refineries such that they don't occasionally^Wregularly emit deadly toxic clouds forcing evacuations (that is, build them to the same standard as chip fabs) and clean up 100% of the oil spilled and so on and so forth, none of those industries would even exist, at least not in their current forms. The oil industry would be focused on plastics, which would cost more. We'd use more composites as a result, with natural fibers perhaps. Coal just would be over. It wouldn't even be a thing. Natgas would exist, but we wouldn't be fracking, and they wouldn't be storing it in leaky underground caverns.
Permitting an industry to ignore externalities is a kind of subsidy being paid in natural capital which, in theory, belongs to all of us.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They are not fleeing from unemployment, you know.
Sure, there are plenty of economic migrants, but refusing those entry to your country is commonplace and generally not considered to be morally wrong. Yes, there is illegal immigration, but the scale and the ethics are very different from migration of people fleeing for their lives.
No. The point of the article is that the next energy transition could only take a decade. Not THE next decade. WHEN the next breakthrough happens, the transition won't be as long as previous transitions. It might not start for 20 years. But when some as yet unknown technology is created, the whole world will transition in 10 years hence.
FFS wind and solar are just too of over a dozen ways to harness renewable energy. And what on earth is 'will be' there for? Solar and wind are readily available now.
Other renewables types and ways to move over include:
Tidal lagoons, tidal streams, wave power, dams and pumped storage - several types including compressed air underground, underwater and dual reservoir. Solar panels, solar water heating, concentrated solar and this including molten salt storage etc. Geothermal power generation and geothermal home heating. Air-source and ground source heat pumps. Fusion and cold fusion*. Battery technology is going nuts right now, cheap battery tech that could store vast amounts of grid energy using some of the most common elements is currently being developed, for example Materials discovery for earth-abundant battery | UTokyo Research.
And then there's 'time-shifting' which would be a lot easier if all vehicles where electric or some electric some hydrogen etc. These vehicles could be charged when renewables output is high.
Energy ratings could be vastly improved, the creators of consoles and computers could be moved to improve standby energy use and have default energy profiles which save energy quicker.
Home heating systems could be vastly improved, it could be mandated that all new radiators have indiviual temperature monitoring and remote setting capability, we've had the technology to be able to do this for decades already. Heating a whole house 24/7 when half the rooms aren't in use is very wasteful. Energy taxes should escalate with usage / waste, the 1st 10kwh / day tax free, the next 10kwh/day taxed higher etc or something along these lines.
Country of origin labelling should be mandatory, for example I bought an apple the other day which it turn out had come from the other $%^&ing side of the planet, I didn't know this because UK supermarkets don't have to say where food comes from.
Just saying we can't power the world with wind and solar shows a complete lack of understanding of renewables and ways to go 100% renewable.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
In other words, Saudi Arabia has a lot of people who have both the ability and the motivation to build a decent nation, once oil gets out of the way.
Radicalism has no "good life" to offer, and often no life at all. ISIS is offering a practical demonstration of just that in the area.
One might argue it's a case of old masters showing young wannabes how it's done.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Without oil, middle East will be irrelevant.
There will be no need for US military to provide security. Asturity, Immigration, or Travel to and fro will be near zero and heavily scrutinized to keep the Jihadis out.
These countries will collapse back to the 17th century and no one will give a shit anymore. They may even be forbidden to burn their own oil eventually.
No, just no...
Come over to my house and speak with my wife, tell her that she no longer will get to decide when she can and cannot use her appliances. See how far you get.
If you told her the choice was a 4 degree rise in global temps, or limit her appliance use, she'll take the appliance use, and she isn't alone.
I can pretty much guarantee your wife will not know that the refrigerator will be delaying its cycle an hour or more. You probably won't notice the HVAC doing a delay either. And quite possibly not your dishwasher, dryer, or other equipment.
There are quite possibly dozens of other devices in your house that could be cut off or set into a reduced power mode without noticing, but that may be a step further.
And as failure modes go, given that the choice now is likely a crash break for your whole house, having it be items that can go off without impacting you would be a much better step.
In other words, Saudi Arabia has a lot of people who have both the ability and the motivation to build a decent nation, once oil gets out of the way.
I have a significantly less-positive view of mankind than that.
Radicalism has no "good life" to offer, and often no life at all. ISIS is offering a practical demonstration of just that in the area.
Neither does Communism, but that doesn't stop True Believers from saying, "They just did it wrong. If they do it my way, everything will work out Just Fine."
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Tony Seba has an interesting talk about disruption. In 1900 there were no cars on the streets of New York
By 1913 there were no horses on the streets of New York
Not many people saw that coming!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's because of incredibly cheap natural gas flooding the market as a byproduct of the oil boom in North Dakota. Now that the oil industry in North Dakota is seriously hurting, I'd be curious to see how the price of natural gas is going to change.
Since 1971, OPEC is bullied/bribed to sell Crude Oil exclusively in US dollars resulting in friction between Islam and the West;
http://www.zerohedge.com/print/502779
Casteism
Whilst technical change may be possible quickly, the economic and social impacts of a rapid/accelerated shift could be enormous. Fossil oils would remain for manufacturing (presumably plastics) or lubricants, but oil based economies will be massively impacted. This could create a new "world order"; US reserve currency status and debt burden, entire Middle East, several other major countries ... Would make Arab Spring look minor in comparison. This could lead to a better world, but the road is paved with hazards. Humanity's ability to manage huge change has proven woefully inadequate in the past. Or am I being doomsayer or paranoid?
You might want to read some history, as you are sounding like an 8-year-old who knows just enough to make himself look ridiculous.
Did you honestly just say Africa was a country? No wonder you are so scared of Muslims - your education is clearly some sort of joke foisted upon the rest of the world.
One of the biggest consumers of fossil fuels is international shipping via container ships. They use massive amounts of crude diesel fuel and emit large amounts of untreated, highly polluting emissions, with very limited oversight while the ships are in international waters. When we consider how much of the world economy is dependent on it, it will take a massive overhaul of the worlds supply of goods and the related economic system to change the shipping industry. It will eventually happen but it's hard to imagine that we'll see it in the next decade.
The truth is... and people hate this conclusion... is that we really don't have a clue how much oil there is, and it's extremely egotistical to have declared in 1974 that we were at peak oil, and then defend that conclusion for the next 30 years as "scientific fact". Which is exactly what people have been doing.
That being said we should be working as hard as we can to find alternatives, and once again, the actual truth is that we are doing exactly that.
How do I know this? Because the guy who controls the new world's energy supply will be just a wealthy as the people that control today's energy supplies, and if you don't think that this is the most powerful incentive there is then you are either too inexperienced, or too clueless to understand the problem. My last comment is not directed at the poster, it's directed at anyone who happens to be reading this.
You misunderstand Hubbert's peak. Like Moore's Law, it's not a law of nature or universal truth; it's based on observation.
All Hubbert said is that production lags discovery by a certain period of time, and that the pattern of production overall follows the pattern for individual fields.
Since U.S. discoveries peaked in the 1930s and production followed that, it seemed reasonable to project that production would peak around 1970, and in fact it did.
Of course, there could be a boom in discoveries (not likely) or a boom in production based on new technology (likely). In fact, we have had that boom because fracking changed the game. That doesn't mean Hubbert was wrong; it just means his information was incomplete, and therefore his projections were too.
One thing left unmentioned is that the Sussex group is wholly dedicated to removing any fossil fuel from the equation. Trumpeting their 'report' would be equivalent to accepting anything from the fossil fuel industry at face value. Large grain of salt required from anything as one sided as the Sussex group.
LOL, in what universe does a government imposed carbon tax equate to the 'free market'? Are you too young to have missed all the market distortions that occur when the government tries to place it's heavy hand on economics?
Since you are arguing AGAINST supply meeting demand I think your idea of "basic economics" is most definitely something else, such as magic.
I teach classrooms here in the US more than half filled with Arabs from the oil states. They know that their future is uncertain, they are investing heavily in solar and wind tech, and in the engineers that will make it happen. The young people I am training are really polanning to be ready to dump their reliance on oil as fast as they can. Ask a Kuwaiti about oil pollution, they will tell you that their country stinks from the wells, the transport and the refineries that come with oil. And they really really hate it.
I am not so worried about them, I'm more worried about the Kochs and the Texans building their own armies to "protect their investment" in coal and oil. No, you haven't heard of it yet.....