If you read only one more thing today…
…read this:
Peak Oil: Beyond Optimism and Pessimism by Jim Bliss
Statistically speaking, I am due to live another 40 years. During that time, I will witness the complete collapse of free-market capitalism. The project of globalisation will fail, and the consumer culture within which recent generations have been raised will end. A massive reduction in living standards, unlike any other readjustment in history, will be experienced by 99% of us living in the industrialised world. A hundred thousand things that we all take for granted today will have ceased to exist by the time I reach my allotted lifespan. This will happen. And it is perhaps unsurprising that this pronouncement was not joyously embraced by the people I informed of it.
I’m a late convert to the Peak Oil issue, thanks almost entirely to Jim. I’ve now read enough of, and around, his excellent writing on the matter to be cast-iron in my certainty that this is going to happen.
I’ve been looking for some time now of a way of explaining what’s about to happen to us to family and friends without it sounding like a conspiracy theory or something so far off as to be dismissed. Jim’s piece does it eloquently, admirably. Read it and then go to Google and read some more. If like me, you’ve got kids (and if you haven’t for that matter), it should give you a chill like you’ve never felt before.
(Long past) Time to get the message out there.
(File under: Peak Oil)
Posted on June 15th, 2005 at 5:05 pm
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Cheer up, you bugger. Look, no Global Warming.
This really is scary stuff - I read something in a Michael Moore book once where he touched on this issue.
It took the form of a grandfather telling his grandchildren about the olden days where they used oil to make bottles for drink etc… and the kids didn’t believe him.
You can’t believe everything you read on the Interweb.
Andrew, you’ll have to do better than that!
Of course, I’m not worried, because our clever young inventors are going to bail us out - and the quicker we burn the stuff, the sooner they’ll get round to inventing the, er, thing they’re going to invent!
No, really, it’s true:
http://tamponteabag.blogspot.com/2005/06/really-big-issue.html
I mean, isn’t it obvious that the only reason no-one’s come up with a perpetual motion machine yet is because oil is so cheap that there’s no real motivation to do so?
Sorry, I forgot to add that it’s not going to run out anyway.
But even so, our best chance of getting an alternative is to use as much oil as possible as quickly as possible, because this will encourage the clever inventors to invent alternative energy sources instead of working in the oil industry.
Or something.
I think one of the main reasons this hasn’t taken off is the general public’s very low level of scientific literacy. One person I spoke to thought that they would probably work out a way to make cars run on water. From my A-level science, I would say there is zero chance of this. The hydrogen is ionically bonded to the oxygen, and there is no chemical way of releasing energy from this by combining it with air. It’s not just that it hasn’t been invented, it’s impossible without a nuclear reaction.
The fact that anyone is putting the ‘hydrogen economy’ forward as a serious proposition just goes to show how poor the science is behind political ideas.
Likewise biofuels etc sound great until you look at how much energy is required to produce them, and therefore how much land would be required etc. Recycling agricultural and domestic waste into fuel is an easy energy win, but growing it specially gives precious little energy profit - eg half your total fuel production might be consumed in the fuel production process. Can you imagine a biofuel industry so big that it burns as much oil substitute as the rest of the country put together? There are some rays of hope in the form of oil-rich algae etc, but even if these are practical, ramping up the production fast enough will be extremely difficult.
I’m not convinced by the apocalypse scenario, but the idea of a steady economic depression for decades is very feasible, if not somewhere near the middle of the probability spectrum. Energy use and GDP are very closely linked - and one thing we can be sure of is that energy will get a lot more expensive.
‘n.i.b.’ is having a sly dig at me, and why not? However, for those of you desperately trying to save energy and thus refusing to follow his link, here is what I wrote:
“My advice is don’t read it. Dear old Jim has been parading up and down with his “End of the World is Nigh” banner for years and has thoroughly depressed himself. No need for the rest of us to follow suit. I think ‘matt daws’ (above) has it, inadvertantly, *roughly* right. What Jim keeps forgetting is that society does not evolve in a linear way, it is dynamic. In other words, extrapolating oil consumption figures into the future and then bursting into tears, is not the way to work. Human behaviour changes with circumstances, so as the oil becomes more expensive, huge resources will be switched to other energy sources, possibly unknown to us today. Remember when copper was going to run out because we ‘consumed’ so much of it in cabling? Then some bright spark invented fibre optics. So go jump into your SUV, burn up a few gallons and cheer yourself up!”
Rather well put, I thought!
Aidan’s dead right about scientific illiteracy though - and I despair at people who wear their ignorance as a badge of honour.
David, it took over 100 years for the theory of fibre optics to become a commercial proposition.
We need a better analogy or, considering we’re currently nowhere near finding an adequate replacement for oil, the scientists looking for new energy sources need to get a move on.
There have been relatively few technological advances in the field of energy - you are up against thermodynamics. You can’t make energy out of thin air.
In any case given that it takes 10-15 years to build a nuclear power station, for example, there isn’t time to invent things, we need to go into production now.
Gosh, no, don’t do anything now! That might involve spending money! That’d bugger up my annuity rates! Shocking suggestion!
Don’t tell Jim (or n.i.b., or Justin, or Aiden, or Ryan, or Dearieme) but Ford are just about to introduce an alcohol-driven Focus to Britain. Apparently they’re already in wide use in Sweden. Ford are pushing for more service points to dispense this new fuel which is obtained, apparently, from vegetables!
So get yourselves an allotment and put a sprout in your tank for some happy motoring. Well, not that you lot will ever be truly happy, but you know what I mean.
But why are they bothering? The oil’s not running out anyway! It bubbles up from the Earth’s core doesn’t it? And aren’t the Swedes just a bunch of do-gooding socialists when all is said and done?
Anyway, would you mind if our flat-dwelling correspondents requisition your back garden for the sprout production? Just wondering, like.
Sounds fabulous David, although as you’ve probably already guessed, I prefer to drink than drive.
Any idea how big my allotment’s going to have to be to fuel my car for a year? Will I just need one annual crop or two or more? Will I need to practice crop rotation when I exhaust the nutrients in the soil or will chemical fertilisers be ok? How are we to produce the fertilisers when the oil gets too expensive? Or can I use horseshit? Can I produce enough vegetable matter to fuel both my car and my horse? Which crops provide the most energy and do we have the correct climate to grow them? What’s the process for converting vegetables into fuel? Does it require energy as well? How much? Can I do it in my airing cupboard like I used to do when I brewed my own beer? What happens if the crop fails one year or the fermentation process goes wrong (as used to happen with my beer)? Can we use the new fuel to produce plastics and pharmaceuticals?
Still, alcohol-fuelled cars, eh? Sounds simple enough.
Could I also add that, far from being depressed or even unhappy about the impeding situation, I am actually looking forward to the day when only the wealthy landowners and economically productive among us can afford to drive. Let’s face it, there are far too many underclass scum and doddery old ’sunday driver’ farts on the road today!
Poop poop!
David, I suspect you know this already, but at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious:
Whilst it is relatively easy to find a substitute for oil in individual instances, the problem comes when you scale it.
Virtually all arable land is currently in use already. We simply don’t have spare capacity to plant up for bio-fuels in the required quantities.
Demand will also come from vegetable matter to replace oil as an industrial feedstock. When you take this into account as well, we have a big problem.
This also illustrates how empty the cupboard is in terms of new technological solutions. Alchohol as a vehicle fuel has been around for decades. Why hasn’t it taken off? Because oil is cheaper. Even if enough could be produced (which I suspect it couldn’t), then it will be more expensive, which will not do wonders for the economy.
In addition vehicles currently last about a decade - it takes a very long time to replace the entire fleet even if every single new car was alchohol fuelled. If this is the solution, then there isn’t much time to take it up.
Sounds like another ‘no action needed’ fantasy to me.
“[D]oddery old ’sunday driver’ farts”. There’s no need to be personal, ‘n.i.b.’!
Justin, you will have to direct your questions to the Ford Motor Company and/or the Swedish government. I’m not much of a scientist, and I’m an even worse gardener. I am just a humble bearer of good news - not that I get any thanks for it! And here’s another cheery item; apparently this vegan petrol produces half the green-house emissions of oil-based fuel. (Personally, I find this hard to believe when I ponder the result of my finishing my sprouts ‘like a good boy’!) And not that I give a hot damn over these nonsensical scare stories about greenhouse gases, anyway.
Aiden would have us believe that “Virtually all arable land is currently in use already”. Really?! I thought we were getting to the stage where we were scratching around thinking of ways to pay farmers to prettify the countryside because there was no money in normal farming. One thing’s for sure, if this stuff becomes commercial, you’ll soon see every piece of spare land turned over to growing the stuff required. In fact you might find the Brazilians re-planting their rain forests.
Still, Aiden, is determined to be miserable and informs us that none of these alternatives will work because “oil is cheaper”. Exactly and precisely so! But as it becomes scarcer and the price rises, so the alternatives become viable, and as they do so, they will be refined so that we get even more out of them. Just compare and contrast the first motor engines with what we have today.
Now if you lot don’t cheer up, I may be forced to tell you jokes! And that is truly depressing.
Again David, I’m overjoyed! Please do stop telling me to cheer up, I could hardly get be gleeful without having an ‘accident’!
Emptier roads are better for me and, as we all know, what’s good for me is good for the country!
Also, another good side effect will be the gradual decline of the ‘two plus car family’, with their decrepit old ‘runabouts’ and souped-up Novas parked out on the road, making the whole area look like a messy cross between a scrapyard, a workshop and a pikey encampment.
What does concern me is that there will be even MORE bloody tractors (and combine harvesters - they’re the worst) on the roads if there’s some kind of arable farming renaissance.
David, you misunderstood my point. Of course The problem is not that oil will always be cheaper so alternatives will not be adopted.
If you compare the cost of extracting and refining oil compared to producing the equivalent amount of ethanol, the ethanol is much more expensive. This is because it requires a lot more in resources and human labour to produce it.
If we replace oil with ethanol, then the production of the ethanol will take a much larger proportion of GDP - in real terms we will be poorer. That is economic fact, unless there are miraculous advances in ethanol production. Your argument seems similar to that for photovoltaics, which was that they should be subsidised, so that with higher volumes will come technological advances leading to greater efficiency and lower prices. What we’ve actually seen is subsidised use supporting high prices, and precious little else.
In addition, because the resources required to produce ethanol are in limited supply, and are generally already in use for the production of other goods, the supply curve may be very steep - ie the price of producing ethanol will rise sharply with increased supply as it comes into competition for raw materials with the production of other goods.
Bugger.
Better get the crack in. At least when the crash comes, I won’t notice.
Wow, something wot I wrote has sparked a debate. I’ve even got emails in response! 4 telling me to cheer up cos it’ll never happen and 2 thanking me for opening their eyes to the issue. At this rate I’ll only have to write another 1.7 billion articles or so and I’ll have a clear majority on my side.
(there’s a silly mathematical joke in that paragraph that even I don’t think is very funny).
Firstly I’d like to mention that the article was primarily about the psychological effects of peak oil. And given what I wrote about denial and about depression, optimism and pessimism; I’m incredibly confused by David’s line:
>
> My advice is don’t read it. Dear old Jim
> has been parading up and down with his “End
> of the World is Nigh” banner for years and
> has thoroughly depressed himself
>
Given the context (an article about denial) I’d argue that advising people to deliberately keep themselves uninformed is a bizarre thing to do. Especially as I don’t say “The End of The World Is Nigh” and leave it at that. What I actually say is that it’s “Nigh” alright, so long as we keep ignoring it; but that an aggressive systematic response could mitigate the worst of the damage that irresponsible people like David invite when they preach deliberate ignorance.
The peak oil debate has moved on from where it was when I joined it. From “will it happen?” it passed quickly through “when will it happen?” and is now at “what do we do about it?” When the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the US Dept of Energy (DoE) all concede that the evidence provided by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) is sound, then the question becomes how we mitigate the damage.
The answer to that question is surprisingly simple to state, though perhaps impossible to implement. Put simply: we convert our civilisation from a high-energy, high-impact, consumption-driven one… into a low-energy, sustainable and self-limiting one. I can even tell you the first steps that must be taken to ensure this occurs with the least amount of human suffering. Unfortunately they require either a massive change in public consciousness, or a totalitarian regime.
Private cars need to be outlawed. That, or else they need to be abandoned en masse voluntarily. Carrying a ton of metal, plastic and glass everywhere you go is just about the most absurd use of natural resources that I can imagine. Also; it’s important to bear in mind that we’re talking about a finite natural resource which is about to go into permanent depletion and which also fuels the world’s food industries. It’s impossible to blame a public which grew up within car culture, and who were hypnotised by mass media into a fugue state. But I believe that future historians will quite rightly describe our culture as murderously profligate in its treatment of resources and the environment in general.
What appalls me most of all is the fear that western consumerism will continue well past the point where depletion starts affecting the poorer nations. Right now the fuel we burn in our cars is depriving future generations of food. Pretty soon though, it’ll be depriving our own generation. The average SUV driver will complain about fuel price rises, but ultimately can afford to pay more to carry their metal cage with them, than many people can afford to pay for bread.
And to say that the “alcohol car” wouldn’t help that problem is akin to saying that repeatedly stabbing someone in the neck wouldn’t help their throat cancer. In other words, biofuels (which is what we’re talking about here) would make things massively worse.
I spent a number of years as part of a group working on biofuel research. Our work improved the efficiency of a Brazillian sugarcane/alcohol programme by over 10%. We also did some work on corn-based solutions in the US midwest which exceeded all expectations. As a result, I’m now convinced that a public transit system based on grid electricity (trams and lightweight trains) and biofuelled buses is the way forward. However I am equally convinced that any attempt to replace fossil fuels with biofuels on a large scale would be an absolute disaster, and possibly the very worst route we could take.
In order to run the US personal automobile fleet (i.e. excluding freight, government, military, etc… we’re talking cars and SUVs in the United States only) on corn-based ethanol you would require an area of arable land under constant cultivation equal to at least half of all arable land in the US. The “at least” is because that calculation makes a whole bunch of “best-case scenario” assumptions about corn-ethanol (like engine technology improving to the point where a car will get the same mileage on biofuel as it would do on premium gasoline; or natural gas shortages not causing fertiliser prices to skyrocket and eventually leading to shortages of the stuff seriously impacting corn yields).
We could I suppose, using (market) force(s), covert huge zones of the “developing world” into biofuel plantations for our car fleet. Certainly I don’t deny that peak oil becomes far less of a problem if we starve a few billion poor people to death. But when I say I’m looking for a solution to mitigate the suffering of peak oil… well, that’s a big part of what I’m talking about.
Sense of proportion, chaps: oil is central only as a source of transport fuels, because that’s the application where the fuel’s being liquid is so helpful. For power stations and other applications, gas and coal, and perhaps nukes, do just fine. A few rational economic incentives to get people to work nearer their homes, or live nearer their work, would be a good thing and would probably require little more than governments dismantling perverse incentives of their own devising. Then more people can cycle to work, like on-the-side-of-the-angels me.
I’m sorry to say that you are wrong on a number of levels dearieme. Crude oil is still a significant energy source outside the transport sector (accounting for about 10% of all global electricity generated - not a small number). And about twice that is generated by natural gas (also about to enter a permanent decline in availability).
So that’s a third of electricity production affected by oil and gas depletion. As a source of transport fuels, crude oil accounts for 98% of all energy consumed. It is also constitutes 99% of the raw materials used to manufacture industrial oils and lubricants (having worked in the engineering side of industry I can can assure you that this is an oft-overlooked, but vitally important issue). Also oil and natural gas between them provide roughly 95% of the feedstock for all of the fertilisers and pesticides used by modern agriculture. HT Odum once said “late 20th century agriculture is little more than a method of converting fossil fuels into food” and he was right. US grown grains contain between 6 and 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every one calorie of energy provided by sunlight.
And we haven’t even mentioned the word “plastic” yet!
You are radically underestimating the importance of oil to our society, and forgetting the fact that “peak oil” tends to be used as a shorthand for “peak oil and natural gas”.
Jim, I disagree. “about 10% of all global electricity generated” is a small number in the scheme of things. The figures for natural gas availability worry me less than those for oil because unsuccessful oil searches still turn up gas finds, and there’s still a lot of unwanted gas being flared off that will presumably be recovered and used as it becomes more valuable as oil prices rise. Your point about lubes is fair, but the fertilisers point is less so: ammonia and so on were originally synthesised in the days of coal and we can go back to that if natural gas is put to more valuable uses. Moreover, genetic engineering might let us get off with less fertiliser and pesticide. I grant you that we do make our plastics from oil or “natural gas liquids”, but this activity consumes much less oil than do transport fuels. I still conclude that transport fuels are the key. It would be a good idea if governments stopped encouraging their needless use e.g. as a consequence of planning permission laws in the UK.
All these arguments seem to presuppose that the only ‘good, happy, successful, etc.’ human society will look and feel the same as the over the top, consumerist, instant gratification driven by mass marketed commodities (physical and cultural), model that we all currently inhabit. The end of oil will end that obviously unsustainable ‘lifestyle’. That will be a very good thing (No doubt the industrial interests that control the global economy will make it a very messy, difficult change, ie. US corners Iraqi oil reserves). Is it really a positive trend that everyone in China and India wants a 35 inch flat screen TV in their spacious well appointed home? Is unlimted, except by income, consumption one of the inalienable rights of humankind?
” Is it really a positive trend that everyone in China and India wants a 35 inch flat screen TV in their spacious well appointed home? Is unlimted, except by income, consumption one of the inalienable rights of humankind?”
Yes, and yes!