While the economics prize is _technically_ not a Nobel Prize, everyone calls Paul Krugman the 'Nobel Prize Winner' (Google Nobel Paul Krugman) - including, I might add, the New York Times.
If someone were to endow the money to define a Computer Science prize, and the Nobel Committee were the ones to award it, I would wager $1000 that it would fairly quickly ( 10 years) be attributed just like the others.
IT continues to optimize mid-tier jobs, allowing one good worker to do the work of several poor ones. This trend will continue, as computers get more powerful, and software gets more sophisticated.
AI research continues, and makes small, incremental improvements in language processing, comprehension, etc. Fairly soon, Watson-style computers will do a bad job of service desk support for products, services, etc. Eventually, they will do a pretty good job.
Robotics research continues to make robots more adaptable, more sophisticated and more aware of their environment. We are already in the process of automating jobs that would otherwise go to China and Mexico. Over time, more of those factories will come back to the US, and be staffed with robots. This will have incredibly dire consequences for China. Eventually, there will be no humans on assembly lines.
As others in these comments have said, the last human job on earth will be programming the robots and computers that are automating all the other jobs. Because it takes a certain type of mind to understand the ramifications of decisions in software, a mind that very few people possess. These people won't be called programmers anymore, they'll be called CEOs of companies with no human workers, and lots of robots and computers.
In a world where we are steadily eroding away the need for no-skill labor and minimal-skill middle management, what happens? Several predictions:
1) Things made by software and robots (hereafter referred to simply as 'robots') will get cheaper. This is a long-term historical trend. It may not sit well with your ideology, but it's a fact.
2) The cost of starting a new business will drop (unless we have politically-motivated additional structural costs) - people will come up with exotic and bewildering ways to create things to make money. And they will depend on robots and software to help them scale.
3) People with little ambition, little creativity and little brainpower are well and truly fucked. I'm sorry, it's just a fact. The set of people included in this category will increase over time. These people will be the unfortunate equivalent of the deeply mentally challenged - unable to find meaningful work. They will be obliged to live off of the welfare of others. Luckily food is cheap, internet is cheap, computers are cheap - they will have lots of amusements.
4) Software and engineering jobs will rise in status over time - because thats where the money is. Alas, people who are not good programmers will flock to the discipline, but they will not succeed at it. It will be very messy.
5) Art will proliferate, because it's one area where people can beat robots for a long time. But, of course, there's only so much demand for art, so each artist will earn a pittance. Luckily, said pittance will be enough to live modestly
6) There will still be jobs in mining and other forms of resource extraction (including farming, mining resources from landfills, etc). This will be an interesting growth area for a while.
7) People at the top will get taxed more. There's simply no way around it. It will not be pretty, but it will happen.
8) You'll see some point of semi-equilibrium, where the companies that extract resources will sell things to companies that create robots to do things, which sell those robots to other companies that extract resources. One of those resources, BTW, is 'sunlight'. These companies will be heavily taxed, and that money will be given to the people who fit into item 3 above. The B2C economy will have two parts - the people who still work, and the people who don't. The people who work will get lots of custom service, lots of human service, while the people who don't work will get lots of generic, automated service.
9) As AI slowly but inexorably improves, it will be pushed higher and higher in the management and political decision-making process. Over time, politically, we'll have a human leader who is advised by
it is quite possible that the singularity will arrive in your lifetime, but it is also possible that it won't. You should save for retirement as the contingency case. Also, there's a strong argument that in a rapidly advancing future, people with any capital at all will be in a much better position than people with no capital.
There are a lot of jobs (and I mean a _lot_) that do not require lots of brainpower, but, because of guilds/cartels/monopolies/licensing/etc, are priced as if they did. For example, researching a patent for novelty is a much more brain-intensive task than reading documents, looking for keywords. But lawyers gamed the system, and made it appear that both activities were equally time-consuming and difficult. (patent research must be difficult, because they get it so horribly wrong)
Do not weep for the destruction of false barriers to entry.
Normal people don't reject MMOs because of stuttering and warping (neither of which happens in DDO, btw).
Normal people reject MMOs because they aren't fun. DDO has had problems getting content out the door on a timely basis, and in some of the bells-and-whistles of housing and customization. That is where it has struggled.
Because of its instanced nature, DDO is not as vulnerable to griefing as other games that are open-world.
It's just one of the things that I prefer about DDO, compared to other MMOs.
I disagree. I suspect that even in a time of mass famine, you'll find emaciated corpses lying face-down in the dirt with "Bushitler" signs still clutched in their clawlike, skeletal hands.
And, similarly, others who die slumped over their keyboards, their most recent anti-Obama screed sitting in front of them in their blog editor, as it waits patiently for the 'submit' button-press that will never come.
I'm a long-time DDO player. The combat is so much more exciting than every other MMO that it's not funny (like Quake 3 vs. Duck Hunter).
This is an interesting move by Turbine - I think it says that they do believe in DDO, and still want to attract new players to it. The early game stuff is definitely frustrating when you don't know how to group (it takes about 3 weeks to get the hang of grouping, IMO).
sacrilegious - grossly irreverent toward what is held to be sacred; "blasphemous rites of a witches' Sabbath"; "profane utterances against the Church"; "it is sacrilegious to enter with shoes on"
It doesn't have to be sacrilegious to my personal beliefs - it just has to be sacrilege to someone.
But in any case, yes, I was trying to be amusingly sarcastic.
And when there's significant profits at stake, a corporation will damn-fire-certainly use whatever means they can use to maximize those profits, regardless of whether it might be "ethical."
Here, let me fix that for you:
When there's significant profits at stake, individual humans will damn-fire-certainly use whatever means they can use to maximize those profits, regardless of whether it might be "ethical".
I disagree about DDO. DDO is by far the best MMO I've played. The combat is more intense, the spell system is far more interesting, and the use of instanced dungeons for parties of 1-6 players means that they can call far more CPU power to bear on your combat experience.
Instead of clicking on a monster, and then cycling between hotbar items, you can dodge, attack multiple opponents at once, spin, draw aggro, etc. It's far more exciting than CoV, WoW or LoTRO.
(I also posted a variation of this, inadvertently as an Anonymous Coward, so this might be a repeat)
There is no grinding like these other games - no standing in a field waiting for monsters to spawn so you can kill them. No digging for ore, or searching for flowers. It's all adventure and action, and for anyone who likes Quake or Half Life, it's far more action-oriented than the other MMOs.
Is it perfect? No, of course not. It's just better than all the others.
This is another example of "Creating a problem that only Big Government can solve."
You know what's going to solve the problem of "not enough science?" A challenge. Some other country (India, for example) mounting a meaningfully interesting scientific expedition - for example a permanent base on Mars. Americans are a very competitive bunch (no, really?) and nothing motivates us like someone trying to out "gee-whiz" us. Look at Sputnik. An entire generation of engineers and scientists created from one stupid metal ball in the sky.
Will many of the people who work on our research be foreign-born? Yes. That's one of the things that makes the Anglo countries, and the US in particular so vibrant and powerful - we can actually work with people from other cultures and help them reach their potential in whatever field they choose. China's stifling of free expression essentially ensures that they will never be able to compete with us technically; certainly not in any sustainable way.
The only country that I see having a chance of competing with the US in R&D and innovation is India, and I think that's probably 30+ years out. Which is unfortunate - I think having a large democratic rival to compete with is a wonderful thing for the US, and for the world in general.
For what it's worth, I would support taxing fossil fuels to fund renewable energy research. Increasing the cost-to-use will encourage the market to develop alternatives (faster than they would otherwise; I agree with you that there is an incentive anyway, but I worry that the magnitude of the incentive may not be great enough). Taxation for research can be justified any number of ways, but one of my favourites is as national security. How much is it worth to the DoD for the country not to rely on foreign energy sources?
Prof. Greg Mankiw at Harvard is the founder of the "Pigovian Club", a group of people who feel the same way, that a tax on gasoline has various positive side effects, including increasing the incentives to develop alternatives. He has a blog, you would probably like it.
I'm not sure where I lean on that topic, Dr. Mankiw paints a fairly persuasive case, but others (who I also respect) say that these taxes are just a form of "big government statist meddling."
I also agree with you that not having to be dependent on foreign oil is a good thing with regard to defense.
Have a great day!
You do realise, I hope, that preparing for peak oil consists of making sure that those two things happen rather than crossing your fingers and hoping.
You do realize, I hope, that rising oil prices will incent people to see that those things happen, regardless of your desire to "make them happen."
Which side were you arguing on again?
The one that says that if you use government's statist power to "force" a fix to peak oil, you're more likely to end up in a catastrophe than if you just leave it alone and let the market work.
Actually, you're apparently just not strong enough in the logical argument department to understand what I'm saying. I'll try to spell it out for you in small words:
Low supply = Big prices. Big prices = less demand. Less demand, us in happy place!
The burden of proof is on you to explain why this would not apply.
Now, lets spell out all the predictable counter arguments. Higher prices != lower demand. Again, the burden of proof is on you as to why oil would be different from any other economic good Technology doesn't let us switch away. We know that the oil tar sands exist, and can be converted to oil if the price is high enough. So whether technology lets us switch away or not is not an issue, at least for the next 50+ years. Oil sand use is expensive and wasteful That's why I said it would only happen if the price of regular oil was high enough. And besides, that's a matter of personal taste, not an argument. Oil sand use causes too many negative externalities Again, a matter of personal taste, not really an argument. There are some applications that require oil Really? There used to be all sorts of applications that required whale blubber, and well before that, virtually every tool was made out of flint. Are we running low on flint? You don't know we'll find alternatives. Eventually we might run outIf we never find enough mass-market alternatives to oil uses, and if governments enact price caps preventing oil sands, oil shale, oil tar, etc from being profitable, then it is possible that catastrophic failure might occur.
Note that in the last scenario,the cause of the failure will be government ineptitude, not a lack of oil. There will still be 3 trillion barrels of oil or more sitting in the ground at that point.
You would do well to educate yourself on the science of economics. It is an amazingly sophisticated and powerful system. And it boils down, IMO, to two key points:
First, inflation only happens because the money supply increases, that is to say, the government prints more money. There are other ways to reduce costs, and some businesses will be clever enough to do that.
Second, in 0.5 seconds I came up with alternative, non-oil using ways to handle every single one of your objections. It isn't that hard, you just have to turn off the catastrophe switch. Yeah, it may not be feasible to swich them out next year, but we have at least a decade or two.
Third, we don't have to switch to non-oil ways to handle those things. We have to switch to less-oil ways to handle those things. Big difference. Pre-consumer recycled paper products, for example - same number of trees, more paper. Voila!
Actually, no. That's not the way markets works. Although statistically the mean price over the past N days/weeks/months might increase steadily, the market also becomes more volatile as supplies run out and supplier delivery becomes more unreliable. It's very hard to run an economy on supplies that one can't rely on.
You can't turn off the panic button, can you? I direct you to the futures market, which helps stabilize and smooth out prices over time, giving potential oil investors a clear signal about what price oil will be in the future. This helps incentivize them to begin drilling/digging/what-have-you now, so they can be ready to deliver oil in the future.
I also ask you to consider that we are not talking about oil vanishing tomorrow. We are talking about a predictably gradual decline in the production from the worlds' wells. That is not a recipe for disaster. How could it be?
Hmm. You are underinformed. Oil has value to invidividuals, who make decisions about how much they are willing to pay for it, irrespective of its value "as a unit of energy".
People buy things for all sorts of reasons. "One units worth of energy" is an amorphism, because oil is not fungible with other sources of energy.
For example, let's say that everyone on the earth, other than one hospital, has converted to nuclear power. That one hospital uses gasoline, and your premature infant is in neonatal intensive care there. The amount you would pay for a gallon of gasoline for that hospital is dramatically different than its value as a "a unit of energy" to someone else.
Otherwise, no one would ever use candles, especially fancy scented ones which cost far more per unit of energy than they are worth.
a) That is only true if you use oil to run the pumps. Wind, Solar, Geothermal, Hydro, Nuclear power are all viable options. Or even, *gasp*, coal and natural gas!
b) People are tricksy things - some of them will find ways to clear the oil of the wells more efficiently.
I know that many of you out there are young, and you probably find the prospect of the mundane existence that we all share to be terrifyingly bland. Many of you are hoping, in your secret hearts, that *something* changes and the world becomes a much different place, where a 9 to 5 existence in a cube farm is no longer a possibility. So you latch on to disaster scenarios, like Catastrophic Global Warming and Peak Oil, because they offer the kind of dramatic "world-changing" catastrophe you hope to bear witness to - to be one of the survivors, one of the pioneers of the new, simpler Earth.
(and for those of you who read this and say "That's not me", that's fine. I'm not talking to you)
But Peak Oil is not the catastrophe you might hope it will be. It will result, at worst, in a gradual increase in oil prices, causing people and countries to shift slowly away from oil-consuming technologies. It might be messy, and there might be shortages (although virtually all shortages will be caused by government price caps), but the fundamentals of the market have not changed just because Peak Oil is capitalized.
Many people criticize CERA, and claim they are industry shills. Fair enough, I make no claim as to their veracity and ethical fiber. However, don't forget that the Peak Oil advocates are also receiving money and attention for their claims, and the more catastrophic a picture they paint, the more money and attention they receive. For a professor or a scholar, notoriety is as valuable as cash in terms of book deals, speaking engagements, etc.
Let's review:
Demand for a good causes the price to rise.
The rising price gives businesses the incentives to supply that good to the market.
As the supply increases to meet the demand, the price levels off, reducing the incentives for new entrants.
Changes in supply may cause existing suppliers to fall short.
This causes other businesses to enter the market, and provide supply, possibly in a variety of new ways. Many of the world's paradigm shifts happen because a businessman discovers a novel and unusual way to solve a problem.
This causes the supply to increase, or causes the demand to fall.
There is nothing about the oil industry that does not fit this model. We know that we don't capture all the oil from the existing wells. We know there are lots of alternatives, both in terms of oil-like solutions and solutions that are completely unrelated to oil (solar, nuclear, telecommuting). We know that as the price rises, people will drive their cars less (we saw that after Katrina, for example) *You* know that if the price of gas was $10 a gallon, you would find ways to reduce the number of trips you took, take public transportation, carpool or walk, or find other ways to reduce your personal gas costs.
Well, everyone else can take those options as well.
There is no catastrophe here. It is not going to happen. If you want to fret about a catastrophe, contemplate supervolcanos and asteroid strikes, and how much the survival of every living thing on earth depends on humanity's ability to advance technologically as rapidly as possible.
Oh, there's no doubt that the world is getting warmer. And I don't have any doubt that CO2 emmissions from human effort are part of the reason.
I don't, however, feel that the data to this point justifies the panic that seems to be sweeping the planet. Why?
a) The warming is significantly slower than the "Catastrophists" would have us believe.
b) The modellers, by their own admission, do not really know what's going to happen with cloud cover, and it makes all their predictions suspect.
c) The rising price of oil will cause humanity to look for other sources of energy
d) Ongoing technological advance is revealing new sources of energy, new ways to burn fuel more cleanly, more ways to avoid using fuel in general, more ways to scrub CO2 from the air, more ways to deflect/reduce sunlight, etc.
Climate change is a worthy problem to look at, but it is not the only problem to solve. Poverty, viable space colonies, longevity and disease elimination are all very important problems. If the "slow warming" people are correct (and they seem to be), these other problems are far more pressing.
And last, but not least, anytime someone tries to use fear and intimidation to silence dissent, you need to get out there and speak up. You all don't tolerate it when the Bush administration tries to bully and cow you into blind obedience. Why would you let climate scientists do that?
Oh, and to the other two posters about Scenario B vs Scenario A. You guys are correct. My mistake.
Except that of Hansen's 3 scenarios, Scenario C is the one that said "we stop putting any extra CO2 in the atmosphere by 2000" and Scenario A was "We keep on doing what we're doing now (dumping huge amounts of carbon in the atmosphere)."
For the world we live in, Scenario A is the appropriate one to compare to the actual data.
And thus, demonstrate the error in Hansen's predictions, just as the author said.
This is another example of how people assert their personal opinions as hard-and-fast truths -
"People aren't really free, unless they are free to live their lives the way I think they should be able to live them."
"Such-and-such isn't fair, because it doesn't do X, which it must do in order to fit my definition of fair."
"There can be no justice without XYZ."
"Because ABC does QPR, they are fascists"
"Because ABC won't do JKL, they are fascists"
Here's another one for you:
"People who assert their own biased opinion as a redefinition of a commonly used term are, in my opinon, idiots, and I refuse to read the opinions of people I think are idiots."
Slashdot Mirror
If someone were to endow the money to define a Computer Science prize, and the Nobel Committee were the ones to award it, I would wager $1000 that it would fairly quickly ( 10 years) be attributed just like the others.
Ahem. the meme that will not go gentle into that good night: http://pesn.com/2011/04/07/9501805_Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Validated_by_Swedish_Skeptics_Society/
AI research continues, and makes small, incremental improvements in language processing, comprehension, etc. Fairly soon, Watson-style computers will do a bad job of service desk support for products, services, etc. Eventually, they will do a pretty good job.
Robotics research continues to make robots more adaptable, more sophisticated and more aware of their environment. We are already in the process of automating jobs that would otherwise go to China and Mexico. Over time, more of those factories will come back to the US, and be staffed with robots. This will have incredibly dire consequences for China. Eventually, there will be no humans on assembly lines.
As others in these comments have said, the last human job on earth will be programming the robots and computers that are automating all the other jobs. Because it takes a certain type of mind to understand the ramifications of decisions in software, a mind that very few people possess. These people won't be called programmers anymore, they'll be called CEOs of companies with no human workers, and lots of robots and computers.
In a world where we are steadily eroding away the need for no-skill labor and minimal-skill middle management, what happens? Several predictions:
1) Things made by software and robots (hereafter referred to simply as 'robots') will get cheaper. This is a long-term historical trend. It may not sit well with your ideology, but it's a fact.
2) The cost of starting a new business will drop (unless we have politically-motivated additional structural costs) - people will come up with exotic and bewildering ways to create things to make money. And they will depend on robots and software to help them scale.
3) People with little ambition, little creativity and little brainpower are well and truly fucked. I'm sorry, it's just a fact. The set of people included in this category will increase over time. These people will be the unfortunate equivalent of the deeply mentally challenged - unable to find meaningful work. They will be obliged to live off of the welfare of others. Luckily food is cheap, internet is cheap, computers are cheap - they will have lots of amusements.
4) Software and engineering jobs will rise in status over time - because thats where the money is. Alas, people who are not good programmers will flock to the discipline, but they will not succeed at it. It will be very messy.
5) Art will proliferate, because it's one area where people can beat robots for a long time. But, of course, there's only so much demand for art, so each artist will earn a pittance. Luckily, said pittance will be enough to live modestly
6) There will still be jobs in mining and other forms of resource extraction (including farming, mining resources from landfills, etc). This will be an interesting growth area for a while.
7) People at the top will get taxed more. There's simply no way around it. It will not be pretty, but it will happen.
8) You'll see some point of semi-equilibrium, where the companies that extract resources will sell things to companies that create robots to do things, which sell those robots to other companies that extract resources. One of those resources, BTW, is 'sunlight'. These companies will be heavily taxed, and that money will be given to the people who fit into item 3 above. The B2C economy will have two parts - the people who still work, and the people who don't. The people who work will get lots of custom service, lots of human service, while the people who don't work will get lots of generic, automated service.
9) As AI slowly but inexorably improves, it will be pushed higher and higher in the management and political decision-making process. Over time, politically, we'll have a human leader who is advised by
it is quite possible that the singularity will arrive in your lifetime, but it is also possible that it won't. You should save for retirement as the contingency case. Also, there's a strong argument that in a rapidly advancing future, people with any capital at all will be in a much better position than people with no capital.
There are a lot of jobs (and I mean a _lot_) that do not require lots of brainpower, but, because of guilds/cartels/monopolies/licensing/etc, are priced as if they did. For example, researching a patent for novelty is a much more brain-intensive task than reading documents, looking for keywords. But lawyers gamed the system, and made it appear that both activities were equally time-consuming and difficult. (patent research must be difficult, because they get it so horribly wrong) Do not weep for the destruction of false barriers to entry.
Normal people don't reject MMOs because of stuttering and warping (neither of which happens in DDO, btw).
Normal people reject MMOs because they aren't fun. DDO has had problems getting content out the door on a timely basis, and in some of the bells-and-whistles of housing and customization. That is where it has struggled.
This is what they're doing - subscribers get free access to all new content. F2P players either have to earn points or pay for new content modules.
Because of its instanced nature, DDO is not as vulnerable to griefing as other games that are open-world.
It's just one of the things that I prefer about DDO, compared to other MMOs.
And, similarly, others who die slumped over their keyboards, their most recent anti-Obama screed sitting in front of them in their blog editor, as it waits patiently for the 'submit' button-press that will never come.
This is an interesting move by Turbine - I think it says that they do believe in DDO, and still want to attract new players to it. The early game stuff is definitely frustrating when you don't know how to group (it takes about 3 weeks to get the hang of grouping, IMO).
It doesn't have to be sacrilegious to my personal beliefs - it just has to be sacrilege to someone.
But in any case, yes, I was trying to be amusingly sarcastic.
I say 'Gosh Darn It!' Wouldn't want to be sacrilegious.
When there's significant profits at stake, individual humans will damn-fire-certainly use whatever means they can use to maximize those profits, regardless of whether it might be "ethical".
I disagree about DDO. DDO is by far the best MMO I've played. The combat is more intense, the spell system is far more interesting, and the use of instanced dungeons for parties of 1-6 players means that they can call far more CPU power to bear on your combat experience. Instead of clicking on a monster, and then cycling between hotbar items, you can dodge, attack multiple opponents at once, spin, draw aggro, etc. It's far more exciting than CoV, WoW or LoTRO. (I also posted a variation of this, inadvertently as an Anonymous Coward, so this might be a repeat) There is no grinding like these other games - no standing in a field waiting for monsters to spawn so you can kill them. No digging for ore, or searching for flowers. It's all adventure and action, and for anyone who likes Quake or Half Life, it's far more action-oriented than the other MMOs. Is it perfect? No, of course not. It's just better than all the others.
This is another example of "Creating a problem that only Big Government can solve."
You know what's going to solve the problem of "not enough science?" A challenge. Some other country (India, for example) mounting a meaningfully interesting scientific expedition - for example a permanent base on Mars. Americans are a very competitive bunch (no, really?) and nothing motivates us like someone trying to out "gee-whiz" us. Look at Sputnik. An entire generation of engineers and scientists created from one stupid metal ball in the sky.
Will many of the people who work on our research be foreign-born? Yes. That's one of the things that makes the Anglo countries, and the US in particular so vibrant and powerful - we can actually work with people from other cultures and help them reach their potential in whatever field they choose. China's stifling of free expression essentially ensures that they will never be able to compete with us technically; certainly not in any sustainable way.
The only country that I see having a chance of competing with the US in R&D and innovation is India, and I think that's probably 30+ years out. Which is unfortunate - I think having a large democratic rival to compete with is a wonderful thing for the US, and for the world in general.
Low supply = Big prices. Big prices = less demand. Less demand, us in happy place!
The burden of proof is on you to explain why this would not apply.
Now, lets spell out all the predictable counter arguments.
Higher prices != lower demand. Again, the burden of proof is on you as to why oil would be different from any other economic good
Technology doesn't let us switch away. We know that the oil tar sands exist, and can be converted to oil if the price is high enough. So whether technology lets us switch away or not is not an issue, at least for the next 50+ years.
Oil sand use is expensive and wasteful That's why I said it would only happen if the price of regular oil was high enough. And besides, that's a matter of personal taste, not an argument.
Oil sand use causes too many negative externalities Again, a matter of personal taste, not really an argument.
There are some applications that require oil Really? There used to be all sorts of applications that required whale blubber, and well before that, virtually every tool was made out of flint. Are we running low on flint?
You don't know we'll find alternatives. Eventually we might run out If we never find enough mass-market alternatives to oil uses, and if governments enact price caps preventing oil sands, oil shale, oil tar, etc from being profitable, then it is possible that catastrophic failure might occur.
Note that in the last scenario,the cause of the failure will be government ineptitude, not a lack of oil. There will still be 3 trillion barrels of oil or more sitting in the ground at that point.
You would do well to educate yourself on the science of economics. It is an amazingly sophisticated and powerful system. And it boils down, IMO, to two key points:
Second, in 0.5 seconds I came up with alternative, non-oil using ways to handle every single one of your objections. It isn't that hard, you just have to turn off the catastrophe switch. Yeah, it may not be feasible to swich them out next year, but we have at least a decade or two.
Third, we don't have to switch to non-oil ways to handle those things. We have to switch to less-oil ways to handle those things. Big difference. Pre-consumer recycled paper products, for example - same number of trees, more paper. Voila!
You can't turn off the panic button, can you? I direct you to the futures market, which helps stabilize and smooth out prices over time, giving potential oil investors a clear signal about what price oil will be in the future. This helps incentivize them to begin drilling/digging/what-have-you now, so they can be ready to deliver oil in the future.
I also ask you to consider that we are not talking about oil vanishing tomorrow. We are talking about a predictably gradual decline in the production from the worlds' wells. That is not a recipe for disaster. How could it be?
People buy things for all sorts of reasons. "One units worth of energy" is an amorphism, because oil is not fungible with other sources of energy.
For example, let's say that everyone on the earth, other than one hospital, has converted to nuclear power. That one hospital uses gasoline, and your premature infant is in neonatal intensive care there. The amount you would pay for a gallon of gasoline for that hospital is dramatically different than its value as a "a unit of energy" to someone else.
Otherwise, no one would ever use candles, especially fancy scented ones which cost far more per unit of energy than they are worth.
But hey, thanks for playing!
b) People are tricksy things - some of them will find ways to clear the oil of the wells more efficiently.
I know that many of you out there are young, and you probably find the prospect of the mundane existence that we all share to be terrifyingly bland. Many of you are hoping, in your secret hearts, that *something* changes and the world becomes a much different place, where a 9 to 5 existence in a cube farm is no longer a possibility. So you latch on to disaster scenarios, like Catastrophic Global Warming and Peak Oil, because they offer the kind of dramatic "world-changing" catastrophe you hope to bear witness to - to be one of the survivors, one of the pioneers of the new, simpler Earth.
(and for those of you who read this and say "That's not me", that's fine. I'm not talking to you)
But Peak Oil is not the catastrophe you might hope it will be. It will result, at worst, in a gradual increase in oil prices, causing people and countries to shift slowly away from oil-consuming technologies. It might be messy, and there might be shortages (although virtually all shortages will be caused by government price caps), but the fundamentals of the market have not changed just because Peak Oil is capitalized.
Many people criticize CERA, and claim they are industry shills. Fair enough, I make no claim as to their veracity and ethical fiber. However, don't forget that the Peak Oil advocates are also receiving money and attention for their claims, and the more catastrophic a picture they paint, the more money and attention they receive. For a professor or a scholar, notoriety is as valuable as cash in terms of book deals, speaking engagements, etc.
Let's review:
- Demand for a good causes the price to rise.
- The rising price gives businesses the incentives to supply that good to the market.
- As the supply increases to meet the demand, the price levels off, reducing the incentives for new entrants.
- Changes in supply may cause existing suppliers to fall short.
- This causes other businesses to enter the market, and provide supply, possibly in a variety of new ways. Many of the world's paradigm shifts happen because a businessman discovers a novel and unusual way to solve a problem.
- This causes the supply to increase, or causes the demand to fall.
There is nothing about the oil industry that does not fit this model. We know that we don't capture all the oil from the existing wells. We know there are lots of alternatives, both in terms of oil-like solutions and solutions that are completely unrelated to oil (solar, nuclear, telecommuting). We know that as the price rises, people will drive their cars less (we saw that after Katrina, for example) *You* know that if the price of gas was $10 a gallon, you would find ways to reduce the number of trips you took, take public transportation, carpool or walk, or find other ways to reduce your personal gas costs.Well, everyone else can take those options as well.
There is no catastrophe here. It is not going to happen. If you want to fret about a catastrophe, contemplate supervolcanos and asteroid strikes, and how much the survival of every living thing on earth depends on humanity's ability to advance technologically as rapidly as possible.
Oh, there's no doubt that the world is getting warmer. And I don't have any doubt that CO2 emmissions from human effort are part of the reason. I don't, however, feel that the data to this point justifies the panic that seems to be sweeping the planet. Why? a) The warming is significantly slower than the "Catastrophists" would have us believe. b) The modellers, by their own admission, do not really know what's going to happen with cloud cover, and it makes all their predictions suspect. c) The rising price of oil will cause humanity to look for other sources of energy d) Ongoing technological advance is revealing new sources of energy, new ways to burn fuel more cleanly, more ways to avoid using fuel in general, more ways to scrub CO2 from the air, more ways to deflect/reduce sunlight, etc. Climate change is a worthy problem to look at, but it is not the only problem to solve. Poverty, viable space colonies, longevity and disease elimination are all very important problems. If the "slow warming" people are correct (and they seem to be), these other problems are far more pressing. And last, but not least, anytime someone tries to use fear and intimidation to silence dissent, you need to get out there and speak up. You all don't tolerate it when the Bush administration tries to bully and cow you into blind obedience. Why would you let climate scientists do that? Oh, and to the other two posters about Scenario B vs Scenario A. You guys are correct. My mistake.
Except that of Hansen's 3 scenarios, Scenario C is the one that said "we stop putting any extra CO2 in the atmosphere by 2000" and Scenario A was "We keep on doing what we're doing now (dumping huge amounts of carbon in the atmosphere)."
For the world we live in, Scenario A is the appropriate one to compare to the actual data.
And thus, demonstrate the error in Hansen's predictions, just as the author said.
- "People aren't really free, unless they are free to live their lives the way I think they should be able to live them."
- "Such-and-such isn't fair, because it doesn't do X, which it must do in order to fit my definition of fair."
- "There can be no justice without XYZ."
- "Because ABC does QPR, they are fascists"
- "Because ABC won't do JKL, they are fascists"
Here's another one for you: "People who assert their own biased opinion as a redefinition of a commonly used term are, in my opinon, idiots, and I refuse to read the opinions of people I think are idiots."