…because we’ll want the juice to light up the last pixels on our flat-screens.
Let’s begin with this:
The world may have no more than half a century of oil left at current rates of consumption, while surging demand from the developing world threatens to create “very significant price rises” before substitutes like biofuels can serve as viable alternatives, the British bank HSBC warns in a new report.
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“We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left,” Karen Ward, the bank’s [HSBC’s] senior global economist, said in an interview on CNBC.
Now, before I get too deep in the weeds, let me concede that all measures of resource reserves are suspect. The key phrase above is “may have no more” — as in we may in fact be able to extract more than half a century of oil left at current or even greater rates of consumption. The central issue, though is that the driver of additional supply is price. We’ll find more oil — maybe lots more — as the scarcity of the easy pickings drives prices up to levels that make the more exotic, more difficult to access sources economically viable.
__
Which ends up at the same place: an economy based on cheap energy can’t survive as we push past peak oil.
__
That dismal thought provides the segue to this (pdf):
The Americas region is a distant third in the race for clean energy investment, attracting $65.8 billion overall in 2010. Investments in the United States rebounded 51 percent over 2009 levels to reach $34 billion, [roughly 2007 levels] but the United States continued to slide down the top 10 list, falling from second to third. Given uncertainties surrounding key policies and incentives, the United States’ competitive position in the clean energy sector is at risk.
This bit of cheer comes from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ latest report on the state of renewable energy investment around the world. The picture painted there is mixed. Investment in renewables worldwide has shot upwards from lows attained in the midst of the 2008-9 banking/economic collapse. But the US continues to relinquish the field to more ambitious and focused competitors:
For a variety of reasons, the United States’ competitive position appears to be eroding. Stimulus funding that helped the clean energy industry recover from sharp recessionary declines will expire this year, and there is little indication of any significant policies or incentives to fill the gap in the near future. In fact, investors have noted ongoing uncertainty in United States policy as a key reason that capital is sitting on the sidelines, or looking for certainty and opportunity abroad. Concerns include a lack of clarity on the direction of energy policy, uncertainty surrounding continuation of key financial incentives (e.g., production and investment tax credits), and disproportionate government supports for century-old fossil energy sources. These uncertainties for clean energy are reflected in the United States’ subpar standing on a variety of key measures, including the five-year rate of investment growth and investment intensity.
Translation: Big Oil plus Republicans means the Chinese (especially) and the Europeans are going to eat our lunch in our energy future.
__
If current trends hold, we will lag both on installed capacity and on the international economic opportunity open to those who can provide the renewable energy sources that will become more important, and more economically viable, with each hike in the cost of a barrel of crude.
__
Put that another way: we could and should be playahs in what seems likely to be the most significant economic transition since Pennsylvania crude first knocked the whaling industry into the dustbin of history, but we most likely won’t because of fools like these.
This is how empires die. We won’t disappear; our trajectory seems to me to resemble Britain’s, or perhaps Spain’s. We’ll continue to think very well of ourselves indeed, whilst our children, maybe even my own beloved son, will trip off to Beijing or Berlin the way in 1949 my mum escaped still-rationed Britain in to check out this side of the pond.
__
We’ll grumble. That our neighbors might have figured out another way will seem somewhere between unpossible and unacceptable.
Images: Vincent van Gogh, Factories at Asnieres, seen from the Quai de Clichy, 1887.
Frank Robbins, Drake Well, the first oil well, 1846
Blue Carolinian
I can believe Germany is advanced in this, bit I’ve been to Beijing. It is the most polluted, dirty, filthy city I’ve ever set foot in. My snot turned black after a few days, FFS.
It makes Houston in the middle of summer look like rural Vermont by comparison.
Their green energy is smoke and mirrors for foreign consumption, and so people don’t get on them for burning so much damn coal.
MikeJ
With the world running out of oil, wouldn’t the smart move for US reserves be the opposite of “drill baby drill”?
An analogy. The world eats one can of bean per day. I’ve got 10 cans of beans. You’ve got five cans of beans. When are you going to maximize the price you get for your beans?
The oil companies seem to think my math is right. They have rights to drill all over the place that they aren’t using.
chopper
We’re already a few years into the plateau. Just wait until debt-based modern capitalism, which demands constant growth, bumps up against a decline in energy, the thing that growth absolutely requires more and more of.
Ain’t gonna be pretty.
Elia Isquire
All of this data will be very useful when President Bristol Palin points to China to argue that democracy is insufficient to the task facing the United States and suspends the Constitution until we’re AMERICA #1 again.
Tim C.
Nahh… as a patriotic American I want my country to do as well as possible. But I’m a human first, and I’m glad that the Europeans and Chinese are willing to face things as they are.
And when there’s always hope that once the real pain hits that we as a nation might start to pull our heads out of the dark brown smelly tight hole they are in right now.
Martin
Koch Industries has patented a process to turn poor people into high-octane gasoline. The greatest economic threat facing America is running out of poor people. Republicans are promoting America’s new renewable energy policy.
Jim Kakalios
“Now, before I get too deep in the weeds, let me concede that all measures of resource reserves are suspect. The key phrase above is “may have no more” — as in we may in fact be able to extract more than half a century of oil left at current or even greater rates of consumption.”
Most sources put current oil reserves at one trillion barrels. At the current rate of consumption/production (basically the same thing) of 80 – 100 million barrels/day, this means that the last drop will be soaked up in 30 years or so. (ANWR extends this by one year). Even if estimates of oil reserves are off by a fatcor of two – which is a pretty big margin of error, we still don’t get to the end of the century. This has nothing to do with price or difficulty of recovery. It just takes a distance and a speed, and divides the two to get a time to the end of the journey.
Tom Levenson
@Jim Kakalios: Not disputing your figures (haven’t looked at the peak oil debate since 2008). But I do remember the Ehrlich-Simon bet, which makes a little shy of getting too far out on a limb.
But we don’t disagree about the basic point: the moment when the last barrel of oil becomes just a bridge too far (mixed metaphors anyone?) is a lot nearer than anyone under the age of 70 or so should feel good about.
BR
Glad to see Tom post on this. Just a bit more info for those who are interested.
I can’t claim to be an expert by any means, but I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years reading about these issues, so I thought I’d pass along some thoughts.
To begin, the more I read about it, the more it seems that it’s not possible to separate the issues of energy use, peak oil, climate change, a growth-based economic system, and the modern food system. I’ve found that when I read information from those who focus on only one issue, they often come to the conclusion that the problem in question can be “solved” through some mitigation / switch to alternatives. However, each of these compounds issues in the others, and the best evidence seems to suggest we have a rough road ahead. (I hate writing that, because it sounds too pessimistic. But I’ve tried to approach all of this scientifically, and it’s where things seem to be realistically.)
Ok, so on to some real info. Saul Griffith’s talk on energy and climate is very enlightening and is a great place to start, because it approaches the problem from an engineer’s perspective: how do we use energy, what’s going on with the climate, and what do we have to do to fix it? The conclusion he comes to is that it may be within our ability to make the necessary energy transition, but it’d only be feasible if we switch all our global industrial capacity towards building alternative energy systems – a WWII like effort. (And even that leaves out nuclear power plant construction, which is hopelessly slower today than it’d need to be in his calculation.)
http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated
He doesn’t however discuss oil depletion. There’s nobody better on that issue than Richard Heinberg – his book The Party’s Over is a great place to start. Google for his talks – they’re generally very informative.
In terms of understanding the connections between climate change and peak oil, there are few who get it better than Bill McKibben – Eaarth is a must read. I had come to the same conclusion as McKibben – that we’re actually in far more trouble than we generally acknowledge – and it was good (and worrying) to see someone of his stature come to that conclusion as well.
There are a lot of very recent studies on peak oil (UK taskforce, German military, Kuwait University, US DoD, Lloyds of London, etc.), the best of which is the UK report:
http://peakoiltaskforce.net/download-the-report/2010-peak-oil-report/
The question that there’s a lot of debate about is this: what will peak oil look like? From reading a lot about this, it seems that it won’t be an event – it will be an oscillation. We’ll have recurring oil price spikes every 3-5 years, each spike causing a new recession. We are unlikely to fully recover from each recession before the next one hits. The long term economic trend and energy trend will therefore be down with short-lived recoveries in between. This seems likely to go on for 2-3 decades, which is a scary prospect.
Of course the real root of this is The Limits to Growth (the 30-year update) by Meadows. Though the book generally avoids saying that their “scenarios” are projections, it seems that we are following their baseline (i.e. business-as-usual) scenario, which shows the start of a permanent decline in global industrial output (and pretty much everything else) sometime in this decade. It’s ironic that the book is thought to have been debunked, but looks like it’s more right than even its authors probably thought it’d be.
Also, check out The Long Descent by Greer and Deep Economy by McKibben – both books are very wise and don’t fall into the peak-oil-doomer-survivalist trap that so many books do (nor are they in the growth-growth-growth camp).
different church-lady
Without digging around too deeply, my immediate thought is: why are we listening to an economist who works for a bank tell us how much oil there is?
The Moar You Know
@Blue Carolinian: I wouldn’t be so sure that it is THE most polluted city. I’ve been to Shanghai.
I never knew that the entire time I was there, I was less than 500 yards from the largest sports stadium on the planet, until we drove by it on the way out of town. Couldn’t see it for the smog.
Green energy my ass. The Chinese don’t have it, or have any use for it.
Tom Levenson
@different church-lady: For the same reason you listen to military folks when they tell you it’ll take 500,000 soldiers to secure Iraq: when it’s their asses or their money right on the line you can get some very useful information from generals or banksters.
Put this another way: when insurance underwriters start putting climate change riders in policies, you know something you didn’t before…
Judas Escargot
@Martin:
The W brothers got it wrong. We’re not batteries, we’re biodiesel.
Martin
@different church-lady: Because they finance exploration and extraction projects, as well as speculate on the commodities market.
They have a vested interest in knowing if their loans are going to be paid back.
BR
@different church-lady:
We shouldn’t have to. The UK peak oil taskforce I linked to got a well-respected oil analyst to do their main study, and Richard Heinberg and others are also good people to read on the subject.
Also, there’s this classic video from the original man himself, M. King Hubbert:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImV1voi41YY
Blue Carolinian
Shanghai is WORSE than Beijing?
How the fuck is that even humanly possible?
Comrade Luke
My $.02: I don’t think we’ll ever really see a plateau, or a “long descent”. I think we’ll go from “There’s no issue!” to “Holy Fucking Shit, we’re almost out of oil!”.
At which point there will be chaos.
Tom Levenson
@BR: Thanks for this reading list. Maybe this summer ;)
FWIW, my book on climate science and climate change, Ice Time: Climate, Science, and Life on Earth beat McKibben’s first book, The End of Nature, into print by a few months. I left the topic, mostly, back then, in 1989. Bill stuck with it, to enduring value for the rest of us.
Jim Kakalios
@Tom Levenson: I double checked the usage rate numbers – 85 million barrels a day worldwide is a pretty safe number. The big question is the global reserves. But as I said, if there is another TRILLION barrels out there undiscovered – that still only gets us to 68 years or so. And I’m assuming you can soak it up with a bounty paper towel (or only the half that Rosie will give you!), and that there is no issue in getting it.
You can price it at a million dollars per barrel, and that won’t make there be any more in the ground.
BR
@Comrade Luke:
Agreed. Though that will probably happen once the actual decline is well underway. I think it’ll take at least one or two of the recession cycles I mention above before politicians catch on. That means there’s unlikely to be a frank discussion of peak oil until 6-8 years post-peak, so sometime late in this decade. Maybe it’ll play a minor role in the 2016 presidential election…
BR
@Tom Levenson:
Cool – awesome you were on the case so long ago!
Tom Levenson
@Jim Kakalios:
Word.
That’s the ultimo ratio naturae. (OK experts; how badly did I maul the language of Cicero?)
wasabi gasp
This is very exciting. It’s like if you can’t get a meteor, this is still pretty cool.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
You do realize, don’t you, that these two statements are contradictory:
When prices are driven to the level that make difficult-to-extract oil viable, they stop the economy that’s based on cheap energy.
Next steps: recession, unemployment, business failures, demand destruction, falling energy prices. Which makes the difficult-to-extract stuff economically unviable.
We’re going to leave a lot of oil under deep water, in the oil sands, and in the oil shales because the economy won’t support its extraction.
The Dangerman
@Blue Carolinian:
I’ll see your Shanghai and Beijing (coastal cities) and raise you a Chongqing (center of the country, in a geographic bowl; filthy on a scale practically unimaginable).
O/T: Speaking of ugly, Butler.
Turbulence
The US is screwed relative to Europe and China but not because we’re failing to invest in research; we’re screwed because our built infrastructure only makes sense when oil is cheap. We’ve built vast amounts of homes, schools, and commercial buildings at extremely low densities. In fact, we’ve made it illegal to build high density structures pretty much everywhere, including in our cities (Cambridge MA and its 4 story height limit has a message for mother earth: fuck off and die bitch). As the price of oil rises, we’re going to be fine for a while but we’ll be pumping larger and larger shares of our household and national incomes into transportation costs. That’ll be an economic milestone about our necks that the Chinese and Europeans won’t have to deal with.
Now, maybe we could convince people to fix the screwy laws and enable more density, but I don’t think so because Americans are stupid. I’ve been to city council and neighborhood group meetings. Everyone is convinced that green living means lots of city parks. They think that people living in rural areas have less environmental impact than people living in dense cities. This is beyond stupid.
And even if we did make high density building legal again, it wouldn’t matter because Americans still have a crazy high home ownership rate. That means that many many American families have most of their wealth trapped in their houses. When the price of oil goes up, the value of most houses is going to plummet because most houses are built in suburban/exurban areas where you can’t do a damn thing without driving like crazy. Falling house prices will trap people in the suburbs/exurbs, which will kill investment and political will for higher density housing.
Chad N Freude
@BR: I have nothing to add to this discussion, but I want to thank you for a well-written, snark-free*, profanity-free* list of references on a subject on which I am inadequately informed.
*Are you sure you should be posting like this on BJ? Do we now have intelligent & informative discussion trolling?
Chad N Freude
@Tom Levenson: They don’t talk that way in Illinois.
MikeJ
@Tom Levenson: We have an in house classics expert at balloon-juice (paging DXM), but until he shows up I’ll take a shot and say it should be “ultima ratio natura”.
Linda Featheringill
@BR:
Thanks for the reading suggestions.
DonkeyKong
There has been too much violence. Too much pain. But I have an honorable compromise. Just walk away. Give me your pump, the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound, and I’ll spare your lives. Just walk away and we’ll give you a safe passageway in the wastelands. Just walk away and there will be an end to the horror. -Cheneymungus
Ron Beasley
The problem has never been peak oil but peak cheap oil and we are there. At somewhere between 120 and 150 dollars a barrel economic growth will stop. Everyone seem to be excited about reserves in the arctic and the very deep water off of Brazil as the savior. Yes there may be a lot of oil there but it will take 150 to 300 dollars a barrel to produce it – that’s before profits and taxes – so it’s not going to help. There are no substitutes on the horizon and even the Chinese are screwed.
Tom Levenson
@MikeJ: Maybe so. I think the Ultima ending is correct — but I think we need the genetive for the noun natura, which, if I remember my distant high school Latiny (hi, Mrs. Small!) would be naturae.
And with that misbegotten attempt to reclaim perhaps the nerdiest bit of my long lost youth…
Goodnight y’all.
Jc
Quick question – on that vanity fair article by stiglitz – shared that via facebook, and a florida family member then shared – her fb friend then wrote a comment – “that richest percent pay 50 percent of the taxes!”.
Obviously wrong, but where can I get easy to comprehend tax rate information, including all taxes?
Martin
@Comrade Luke: I don’t think so. The speculators are going to get in on this game. Once demand clearly outstrips supply, the prices is going to skyrocket because the price of oil is going to have to rise to the level that some nation is unwilling to drive their cars. And 20 years out the oil companies are going to start massively investing in whatever business they’re going to be in after oil. Anyone notice that ExxonMobile has been selling off all of their gas stations and are buying natgas business as fast as they can manage?
gex
Here’s yet another area where almost all of big business bites its tongue about an issue that hurts them economically rather than force one of their peers to suffer even a tiny bit.
MikeJ
@Tom Levenson: When David X Machina shows up he’ll have both of us writing it out 100 times.
BR
@Chad N Freude:
Welcome. I could add some snark or profanity if that’d help :)
There are a few other related talks / books I’d recommend – they’re on the broader issues of overusing our resources of one sort or another, and how those problems are converging.
Jeremy Jackson on the state of the ocean:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/7530487
Dmitry Orlov on the US vs. the SU:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259
Finally, some books:
Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, MacKay (available for free online)
Six Degrees, Lynas (about what different amounts of warming really mean)
Crude World, Maass (about how we mess up the social structure of countries that have oil)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Pollan
Collapse, Diamond
trollhattan
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
IIUC it’s more than just price per barrel, there’s the pesky EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) problem. Oil’s no longer viable when it takes close to the amount of energy it represents to extract it.
At some point oil will probably primarily serve as a raw material rather than propelling transportation/heating/electricity generation. It would seem that day is approaching at breakneck speed.
Blue Carolinian
Again, right on the Europeans, wrong about the Chinese. They looooooooove their cars and have sprawl just as bad as us.
People read too much Tom Friedman.
gex
Another thing… I think it will be a good thing when America considers itself one of many rather than the one on top always and forever. It’s not like these boundaries mean anything to the companies in question. Just the poor schmuck citizens who don’t have the freedoms and mobility of capital and resources.
MaryQ
What the bloody f*&%ing hell was I thinking, on that fateful night nine years ago, when my husband and I decided that I should stop taking The Pill, and we should start f*&^ing indiscriminately, and I should begin folic acid supplementation and alcohol avoidance and Am temperature monitoring, all of which lead to the production of a beautiful healthy girl 18 months later who now wants nothing more than to be a “mom and a doctor who helps babies get born”?
F*&%.
I should have just tied my friggin tubes. Or my husband should have snipped his nuts.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Comrade Luke: We’ve already started the Long Descent. Greer pegs the start at 1973, when the deindustrialization of the US started.
Back in 1979, in the Nine Nations of North America, my section of the country was called The Foundry. You know it by its more recent name: The Rust Belt. QED.
That was the first ratchet downward. The current recession is most likely the second.
Chad N Freude
@MikeJ: “Naturae” is the possessive. Prof Levenson’s phrase would be “Nature’s last argument”. I have no idea what Cicero said/would have said, but “naturae” looks OK to me. And I had the best high school Latin teacher ever (Miss Ledyard), so I can speak authoritatively.
BR
@trollhattan:
This is a very important point. Heinberg has a great report on this issue, and concludes after a survey of what alternative energy sources are out there that we don’t really have any options:
http://www.postcarbon.org/new-site-files/Reports/Searching_for_a_Miracle_web10nov09.pdf
MaryQ
And……
Gardening. Sustainable, f*&^ing, back yard gardening. And canning. and a few friggin chickens out back. Oh, holy crap.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@The Dangerman: Wow. And here I thought the San Gabriel Valley (SoCal) was bad in the 1970s because I couldn’t see a 10,000 ft mountain that was 10 miles away.
I took flying lessons there for awhile and we occasionally had days where you had to be instrument rated even though there were no clouds and the sun was shining because visibility was less than 3/4 mile, from the smog.
China sounds like Pittsburgh in the 1940s, where the streetlights were on at noon.
BR
@MaryQ:
The good news is that this doesn’t mean the end of the world or anything catastrophic. It just means that living a downscaled life is going to be the norm. We’re going to need to grow our own food, live locally, buy only essentials, bike and walk everywhere, etc. Sure there’ll be upheaval, but these things historically take a long time on human time scales – decades.
Speaking of growing food, two of the best books are:
How to Grow More Vegetables, Jeavons
The New Self Sufficient Gardener, Seymour
wasabi gasp
Adios, Super Saver Shipping. – Thomas Friedman
Martin
@Ron Beasley: Well, over $150 bbl we’re going to start stripmining Utah for oil shale. And we’ve got 2/3 of the world reserves of that.
Chad N Freude
@BR: I think you’re understating the difference between upheaval and catastrophe.
The Political Nihilist Formerly Known As Kryptik
I still find that amazing. I mean, I believe Earth Hour to be a kind of empty gesture and not really as awareness raising as it hopes to be, but the sheer blatant contrarianism and middle-finger waving of the concept of the “Human Awarenesss Hour” is just….well…
Actually, it’s par for the goddamn course, isn’t it? It’s all about contrarianism, and pissing the libs off so they know who their betters are, and fuck you if you dare deny us our right to waste as much goddamn oil as we damn well please.
And again, these fuckers are winning beyond measure. They rule our fucking world, because hey, why not, who needs a fucking clean sky or drinkable water or actual renewable fucking energy anyhow?
trollhattan
OT but yikes, they’ve found wreckage and bodies from Air France 447.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/world/europe/05brazil.html?_r=1&hp
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@trollhattan: EROEI. True dat, although it seems it’s very difficult to calculate because it’s tough to set the boundaries.
Ethanol from factory-farmed corn pretty clearly takes more energy to produce than it delivers in return.
Here’s an example of setting the boundaries. The energy produced by a solar panel is probably higher than the energy it took to fabricate the panel itself … but what about mining the materials? Transporting the panel from the factory? Installing it? How about building the factory? What about the food that all the workers ate? It can go on and on.
Chad N Freude
@Chad N Freude: I should have added that for the last 65+ years, the trend of self-sufficiency has been increasingly downward, and the trend of I can just drive to the store and buy what someone else has produced for me has been increasingly upward. Today’s families are not going to adapt easily.
BR
@Chad N Freude:
True. I guess people use catastrophe more casually in everyday conversation more than the word should be used… This will be a major societal upheaval and downturn, not a catastrophe.
trollhattan
@BR:
Looks good, I shall give it a read. (Is that the same Jerry Mander who wrote “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”?)
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@gex: We were the ones on top because we were the first in the world to switch to the Oil Economy. It’s one reason we outproduced the Axis in WW II. The beginning of David Halberstam’s The Reckoning (about the US and Japanese auto industries) explained it pretty well.
Having most of our urban development occur after we were on the Oil Economy is the reason our built environment is as screwed up as @Turbulence described.
BR
@trollhattan:
Pretty sure it’s the same Jerry Mander…
Calouste
Ah, the usual bullshit by clueless economists about mineral engineering.
The only number we know is the proven reserves. Proven reserves are the reserves that have a reasonable certainty (normally at least 90% confidence) of being recoverable under existing economic and political conditions, with existing technology. Let me repeat that, under existing economic and political conditions, with existing technology. Classified lower than that are probable and possible reserves, which as the economic conditions change and technology improves, can become proven reserves. We don’t really know what the probable and possible reserves are, because there is no real reporting on it.
So there are 50 years of proven reserves, 50 years of oil that can be economically extracted with current technology at the current price level, at current consumption rates.
No one can predict how the technology will evolve in the next 50 years to turn probable and possible reserves into proven reserves, but what economists typically do is assume that technological inovation doesn’t exist at all. Proven reserves will increase, just not by today’s standards, but by future standards. To give an example from a different mineral, in the late 1800’s a typical copper ore contained 6% copper. A century later, a typical copper ore contained about 0.5% copper, and what was considered after extraction waste in 1900 was economically processed less than a century later.
I’m very skeptical about the certainty with which people predict the number of years of oil that are left, considering the massive unknowns there are about future technology and probable and possible reserves.
Chad N Freude
Fellow literate BJ-ers: I’ve found “Read It Later” invaluable in saving threads and web pages that contain book/movie/video/DVD recommendations. Highly recommended. (Offered in the anti-Galtian spirit of Communitarianism.)
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@BR: Mander (former ad man) was very eclectic. I folded a whole bunch of the planes in his Great International Paper Airplane Book many many years ago.
Four Arguments is next to me on the bookshelf. I keep thinking I should go back and see how it stands up in the age of cable and internet.
trollhattan
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
I’m guessing it’s hard to pin down break-even with PV solar due to site variation. With wind it can be sussed out, e.g., Vestas does life cycle assessments (I worked on a couple projects that used their turbines).
http://www.vestas.com/en/about-vestas/sustainability/wind-turbines-and-the-environment/life-cycle-assessment-%28lca%29.aspx
I seriously doubt corn grown in mid latitudes will ever give positive results. Take away the subsidies (please?) and it quickly collapses in an ugly heap. Brazil and their sugar cane might be another story, but I’m not up to speed on it.
BR
@Calouste:
So you should take a look at some of Jeffrey Brown’s analysis if you haven’t. His work is usually on oil exports vs. oil production (see the Export Land Model, for instance). But one of the observations he often makes is that the argument that “better technology will yield more oil production” falls flat when you look at the production curves for both the US and for the North Sea fields; both declined steadily following roughly their Hubbert curves despite that both were operated by wealthy nations with access to the most advanced technology.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Calouste: The one common thread you’ll find about new technology making poorer quality reserves economically viable is that the new technology takes more energy.
Compare Spindletop in East Texas in the 1930s with Deepwater Horizon, for example.
When the only way to extract more mineral energy is with new technology that requires more energy, you hit the EROEI wall. We aren’t going to drill the barrel of oil that costs us two barrels to get it.
BR
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
Next on my reading list is McKibben’s The Age of Missing Information…curious if it’ll be similar to Mander’s Four Arguments.
Davis X. Machina
@Tom Levenson: Spot on — naturae is genitive — hence, ‘of nature’
The reference is of course to ultima ratio regum ‘the last argument of kings’, cast into French cannon per order of Louis XIV.
Davis X. Machina
I’m saddled with an earlier snarky name…
Mark S.
I don’t know what you guys are worried about. The other day in the WSJ:
And my favorite from this genre:
So chill the fuck out. Our glibertarians have got this.
Davis X. Machina
@BR: May be less difference here than meets the eye — “downturn”, strangely enough, is an exact English translation of Greek katastrophē.
Etymology is very like Pringles — hard to stop at one.
Chad N Freude
@Mark S.: I just skimmed the Landsburg article you linked to, and it looks to me like sarcasm. I could be wrong, but I don’ thin’ so.
ETA: I think the WSJ quote you used is taken out of context. I could be wrong, but I don’ thin’ so.
BR
@Mark S.:
I’m reminded of something Al Giordano wrote what now seems like ages ago, about David Sirota:
I think the same is true of the glibertarians, so we must be screwed.
Chad N Freude
@BR: Go read (or skim like I did) the articles Mark S cites and tell me if you think his assessment of their glibertarian stupidity is accurate. I am always amenable to having my notoriously naive judgment corrected by smart people.
ETA: Dumb people have tried to correct my judgment, and I usually eviscerate them. Jus’
sayin’braggin’.Calouste
@BR:
The production of US and North Sea fields is partially influenced by political and strategic considerations. Neither the US nor Europe want to run out their oil fields first and then be completely dependent on imports.
Mark S.
@Chad N Freude:
I don’t think Landsburg was being sarcastic. He’s a contrarian idiot.
As for the WSJ article, it’s about obesity, but his conclusion is that maybe we don’t need to do anything about it because the super-rich are thin and we’ll all be super-rich in a couple of generations.
I don’t agree with either of these guys that economic growth will go on forever barring some Galtian free energy invention.
BR
@Chad N Freude:
I think you’re right about the second one – it’s pretty clearly snark. I’m not sure about the other one – it’s the WSJ after all.
Chad N Freude
Maybe so, but I thought the tone and style of his piece were sarcastic. I don’t know his work and can’t comment on his idiocy.
BR
@Calouste:
I’ll agree that neither the US or the UK want to be dependent upon imports, but they intentionally pumped like hell from both the North Slope and the North Sea, and depleted them faster than it would have been wise to deplete them. That tells me they didn’t really manage the resource or plan to deal with peak oil. They just wanted the oil as fast as they could get it.
Martin
@Mark S.: Cool. So my daughter grew from 17″ to 40″ in 10 years. Roughly 8.5% rate of growth. If she lives to 80, she’ll be 1250 feet tall, nearly 1/4 mile!
Why should I have to pay taxes when my 1250 foot tall daughter will be able to run roughshod over America and take what I desire?
Martin
@BR:
Well, someone prone to conspiracy theories would note that the US has an estimated 3T bbl of recoverable oil locked up in shale in dinosaur country – Utah, Colorado, Wyoming – 2/3 of the world supply. There’s an estimated 1.5T bbl of recoverable liquid oil in the world, so we’re sitting on a HUGE reserve.
In order to maximize the value (both economically and strategically) of that oil, it’d be prudent to use up everyone else’s oil reserves first.
Chad N Freude
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
“We” and “us” in that sentence are not necessarily the same people. If “We” can make a profit from drilling paid for by a different “us”, “We” most certainly will drill like crazy.
MattR
@Chad N Freude: I don’t want to sell the idiots on Wall Street short, but I don’t think there is any way to make a profit when your costs are guaranteed to be more than your revenues. No matter what tricks you employ, the math just does not work when it takes a gallon of gas to run the machines that extract half that amount from the earth. It is much like turning lead into gold. It can be done, but the cost to do so is much, much more than the value of any gold produced.
Arundel
And to think Sting thought the world was runnin’ down in 1980. Making the best with what’s still around. In his case, becoming astronomically rich, buying castles, and never flying public again. Makes you think. Hm. We should all try to be more like Sting, is my conclusion. ;)
Chad N Freude
@MattR: Yesbut. If my costs can be covered by the money you pay for my product, and my revenue is derived from the money you pay for my product, and the revenue is greater than my costs, I think I can make a profit.
Chad N Freude
@John Cole: We seem to be having a civil, intelligent discussion, and without cute photographs of dogs and cats. Is that not a violation of BJ policy?
wasabi gasp
If one spends their two cents to barely make any sense, there is no profit.
MattR
@Chad N Freude:
For this to happen, the price will have to continually skyrocket which would collapse the economy pretty quickly.
SST
OT, but: Shocked SHOCKED to see that Brooks can’t contain his own elation at the Seriousness of Ryan’s budget proposal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html?hp
patrick II
@SST:
Wow. I just threw up.
Mark S.
@SST:
Fuck Brooks. Ryan cuts taxes (a bunch) on the top 1% and raises taxes for the bottom 80%.
Oh, and fuck Ryan, too.
kdaug
@MattR: I’ll short the idiots on Wall Street.
Chad N Freude
@MattR: As opposed to the rate at which it is currently collapsing.
patrick II
@patrick II:
Yeah, I’m replying to myself, but re-reading that quote I’m wondering — why doesn’t he include those over 55 years old in his plan?
Because his “courageous” ass would be voted out in a heartbeat by the people already in a more efficient system.
Martin
@Mark S.: Brooks would merely stay that the bottom 80% should get a job like his, and then they’d be the top 1%. Problem solved!
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
the price of oil is a forward looking commodity, if scarity is real, it will be priced in, ahead of actual scarcity.
that said, if the world runs out of oil, being as we are the ones who consume the most, in boisterous and defiant fashion, they are going to be coming after us, like a mofo. from all angles……
Mark S.
courage n the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to
face difficulty, danger, pain, etc., without fearcut taxes on the rich and raise taxes on the poor and middle class; bravery.Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Chad N Freude: You’re missing the basic point here. You aren’t going to be able to cover your costs by selling a gallon of gasoline when one of the costs is obtaining two gallons of gasoline to produce it. Even if you already have two gallons of gasoline just sitting around, you’d be better off selling them than using them to keep this scheme going.
Martin
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): Today, Chad N Freude, a Balloon Juice commenter, has released the most comprehensive and most courageous oil extraction economic proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes.
Petorado
@Martin
Oil shale ain’t going to happen. The stuff has from 1/2 to 1/6 the energy content as coal per ton and if our future resides on turning solid substances into liquid fuels, coal to liquids and cellulosic ethanols are far more feasible. There’s a lot of this sub-par resource buried in the West, but it’s the most meager fossil fuel out there and the most stingy at giving up the very limited energy contained within.
Oil shale (the stuff in the Bakken is shale oil, the stuff in the Piceance Basin is oil shale and completely different) is not a “drill, baby, drill” resource, it’s “bake, baby, bake.” Each ton of ore has to be cooked at a minimum of 650 degrees F to convert it to a liquid. And that’s just the start of the long process to turn it into a functional fuel for a gasoline engine. No resource on this planet has yielded so little profit from so much invested.
When cars get 100mpg I can see oil shale possibly being feasible, but as long as folks are recreationally driving cars getting mileage in the teens on the highway, there’s no way oil shale has its day.
A ton of sh*t quite literally has more energy if burned than oil shale. It has the energy equivalent per ton of landfill waste. It’s not our silver bullet out of any energy crisis, it’s more like an anvil tossed to a drowning person.
All the biggest economies on the planet are net oil importers, very much to their detriment. Any hope of their staying on top resides with finding transportation fuels other than gasoline and petroleum diesel.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Arundel:
no way dude, who has time for that 6 hour tantric sex shit? i wanna blow my load and get out of there. the game will be coming on, i got beers to drink, i want to talk about the load i just blew etc…
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Sounds about right. If Carter could have sold alternative energy as a fun and aggressive f-u to the rest of the world, *maybe* the folks would have embraced it? Instead his admonitions gave real Americans a sad. They have deliberately reveled in inefficiency and waste (same thing, really).
Barb (formerly Gex)
@Chad N Freude: And if you get government subsidies, tax incentives, and tax breaks the profitability just goes up for the overlords. That’s not to mention the inevitable “too big to fail” insurance that the taxpayer provides free of charge…
Calouste
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
You’re talking about the energy content of two gallons of gasoline to get one gallon of gasoline. That energy doesn’t have to come from gasoline. It could come from solar power (lots of oil is located in deserts) or wind/tidal for offshore platforms, and it still could (could, not should) be more efficient to use the electricity to pump oil rather than build the infrastructure and cop the transmission losses to get the electricity from the oil field location to the consumer. Iow, pumping oil and putting it in a supertanker might be a more efficient way to transport your energy from your energy producing point to the consumer than laying electric cables or using a supertanker full of batteries.
And then there are situations where the high energy content of gasoline makes it the only realistic option. I don’t see battery technology improving that fast that electric planes are going to be there in the foreseeable future for example. EROEI is not only determined by how the energy is produced, it is also determined by where and how that energy is consumed.
PPOG Penguin
@patrick II: (fingers crossed for the block quote)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yes,_Minister#Episode_Six:_The_Right_to_Know
TheMightyTrowel
@BR: I know this is late to the thread, but as (one of?) the resident archaeologist, can I just point out that Diamond’s Collapse is really really really not a worthwhile book. It feeds into the whole climatic collapse fear really well, but the archaeology doesn’t support much of what he talks about. His popularity is one of the banes of my profession because we’re constantly having to ‘unteach’ Diamond.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
When the only way to extract more mineral energy is with new technology that requires more energy, you hit the EROEI wall. We aren’t going to drill the barrel of oil that costs us two barrels to get it.
Unless, of course, you use the energy from, say, wind or wave turbines to power your oil extraction.
BR
@TheMightyTrowel:
Is there a good “debunking” of Diamond you could point me to? Because I’ve generally liked his stuff. And what do you think of Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies?
BR
@Phoenician in a time of Romans:
Unfortunately, the scale at which we’d need to build solar / wind / other non-carbon alternatives is so far beyond industrial capacity that we won’t be able to even build out a small fraction of what we need in the next two decades (I’ve been researching this a lot, because I’ve wanted to figure out whether alternatives are viable).
Really, the only viable strategy that is left for us (as Heinberg points out), given the imminence (~2-3 years at most) of peak oil is massive conservation. If we don’t conserve we’ll still end up decreasing our use, but it won’t be by choice – it’ll be because we have to, and our “conservation” in that case will be a lot harder and less well planned because it’ll be forced.
befuggled
First, China has invested in clean energy. That just means that they’ll presumably be in a better position to profit from clean energy use when the times comes. No one is seriously suggesting that they aren’t using a hell of a lot of dirty energy now (and I too have been to Beijing).
Second, the fool that Roy Edroso links to is actually a Canadian, or at least lives in the GTA (Great Toronto Area to those of you who don’t live around here). The genius behind the Human Achievement Hour is apparently a Canadian talk radio host.
Chris
@PPOG Penguin:
Love that show. Well posted.
TheMightyTrowel
@BR: Tainter is very well respected in the field – though caveat emptor, I’m a prehistorian and thus not anywhere near a specialist in his field.
Among the things you might find useful:
http://questioningcollapse.wordpress.com/ [the website of the peer reviewed edited volume responding to Collapse]
http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2009/01/tainter-on-collapse-books-outstanding.html [a review of a review by Tainter – with link to peer reviewed source]
http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/2010/02/jared-diamond-yay-or-nay.html [the comments have some good links too]
http://savageminds.org/2010/03/16/questioning-collapse/ [a review of both collapse and questioning collapse]
TheMightyTrowel
@ BR – in moderation with many links. Start here:
http://questioningcollapse.wordpress.com/
BR
@TheMightyTrowel:
Ok, I’ll check it out. Btw, does this mean that you’re saying that the Limits to Growth is wrong as well, or just Diamond’s Collapse? (Because I’ve never seen a convincing debunking of the Limits to Growth.)
Looking on Amazon, Questioning Collapse gets bad reviews because most reviewers are saying the book attacks a straw man argument, not Diamond’s argument that societies underwent major upheaval…
Montysano
@BR:
Exactly. We’ll have to return to, for example, making shoes within 100 miles of where they’ll be worn rather being made by virtual slaves on the other side of the world. How rough will the journey from here to there be? In a country where our way of life is “non-negotiable”, it won’t be pretty.
The elephant in the room is population. World population is predicted to be 9-10 billion by 2050. I predict that will never happen.
BR
@Montysano:
The Limits to Growth baseline scenario has population peaking maybe a little over 7.5 billion in the middle of the next decade and declining to 6 billion by 2060.
TheMightyTrowel
Sorry this is brief. If you want more details, email me: mightytrowel AT gmail
good review of both QC and C (along with discussion of the fact that the most high profile review of QC, published in Nature, was written by Diamond who failed to note that QC was a direct response to a book he himself had written)
http://savageminds.org/2010/03/16/questioning-collapse/
As to Limits of Growth, I’m not educated enough to critique. My comments on diamond are related to (a) bad archaeology (b) environmental determinism to the detriment of facts (c) lots of bad journalism and ethical problems. Collapse is widely hated by archaeologists because he makes things up. QC has problems (writing style primarily) but it’s an attempt to bring actual expertise to bear on the case studies Diamond mangles.
TJ
@BR:
There is another strategy. Use what we piss away on the military to fund a war-sized effort to build alternative energy. Not that there’s any chance in hell of that happening with our politicians.
BR
@TJ:
Yeah, I was kind of assuming that was out of the realm of possibilities given that even in “austerity” budgets there are no military cuts.
BR
@TheMightyTrowel:
Ok, I’ll check it out.
I guess I should say I’m not so interested in whether Diamond is right or not, because it doesn’t really matter for our current discussion. I just thought the book was interesting when I read it.
The Limits to Growth on the other hand is the manual for our time – basically it’s a stark reminder that what we think of as the industrial growth economy cannot keep growing, and worse, the point at which growth stops by the baseline (business-as-usual scenario) is sometime this decade. This lines up perfectly with parallel but independent analyses that have come to that conclusion by looking at oil production and economic impacts.
TheMightyTrowel
@BR: No worries – I get where you’re coming from and I largely agree (there’s a reason I vote Green – in Europe I should add).
I just wanted to counter your enthusiasm for Collapse because people keep recommending it which means people keep reading it which means every year I have to keep teaching them that it’s largely based on fallacious readings of the past and little quality archaeology. It gets repetitive.
Paul in KY
@MaryQ: She’ll go thru 5 or 6 more careers before she gets out of HS.
Mandramas
@BR: Not that China or India helps us a lot on this.
toujoursdan
@different church-lady:
It’s not just a bank.
The U.S. and German armies and the U.S. Dept of Energy made the same assertion, and the former two are amongst the largest energy purchasers in the world, so shortages are of major importance to them.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,715138,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/apr/11/peak-oil-production-supply
DPirate
America is pretty much the end of emigration for white people, I think. No other country is going to take dirt-poor uneducated Walmart shoppers without a trade. Lots of talk in the Aleutians about geothermal, but there’s no money for it, afaik. If the fishing sustains itself, then the processing plants can provide the market, but really it would be beneficial just to start building them in order to get some expertise in it.
The likely scenario though is that in the case of a go, we will hire icelanders to do it and not learn a damn thing.
Mako
Wouldn’t worry too much about China eating anyone’s lunch in 50 years. Fifty years from now much of China will be uninhabitable. The air in Beijing is already poison.
jake the snake
Anyone translating “The Silent Spring” into Cantonese?