The Oil Drum | DrumBeat: July 22, 2006

227 comments on DrumBeat: July 22, 2006

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kgmqt on July 22, 2006 - 4:33pm

This is one of the common reactions that I get when I bring up peak oil to others. Those that have the least amount of knowledge about physics, thermo, chemistry, and technology seam to be the ones that are the most certain technology will save them. They seem to get the most upset when you tell them the ramifications of peak oil.

I usually ask them about their background, their education, and what they do for a living. Most of the time I already know, but by having them say that they have an education/work experience in sales/marketing/managment/customer service/interior design/accounting or what ever non-scientific/technical background they basically admit they don't have the ability to argue the information. Then I tell them my background - degree in chemical engineering, work in thermodynamics, worked on the solar race car team, work in computer systems - and they start to understand that I can backup what I am telling them.

They usually try to end the discussion with some wild statement - that somebody/thing will save us - that they will find more oil - that I am just missing something. "It won't really get that bad."

Then I realize that they don't want to know.

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Prodigal Son on July 22, 2006 - 4:48pm

they don't want to know.

I think this is more important than their lack of technical expertise. I'm not an oil geologist or chemical engineer and have a background in the 'soft' social sciences -- but peak oil seem credible to me.

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Mad Maxout on July 22, 2006 - 6:52pm

I'm pretty much of an ordinary citizen too. That tends to explain why I like to focus on the commuting end of the deal. I often mention the conversion of money to the gas, just for fun. Things like "here's a couple fifths of gas" or "here's a tip of a couple gallons and a litre of gas" are part of my common parlance. Energy is Money.

the ultimate of this style of thinking is that pennies are $60/gallon and quarters are $800/gallon. A $10,000 surgery job is 4 barrels of pennies! When thinking about large amounts of money, you can easally imagine a warehouse with drums full of pennies. A million bucks is 400 drums of pennies, 20 to a side in that warehouse. Imagine standing on a mezzanine looking down on the floor with those drums of pennies. There is a website about extreme numbers of pennies. (megapenny.com?)

More so than time, energy is money. What a businessperson calls "time is money" ends up being time * energy = money.

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sketch on July 23, 2006 - 4:23am

found the link:

http://www.kokogiak.com/megapenny/default.asp

a very interesting visualisation, well worth a look.

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TrueKaiser on July 22, 2006 - 5:01pm

well i may not be as smart as you but when i look deeper into things i begin to see that we have dug ourselves into that much deeper of a hole. and it's hard to tell people how deep a hole we are in to other people, mainly family.

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step back on July 22, 2006 - 8:02pm

... they have an education/work experience in sales/marketing/managment

One of the more interesting tragic-comedies I've witnessed is a group of marketing guys working for a large corporation.

They came up with an idea for new product. Common sense said that building it should be a no-brainer. They went off on their own; raised millions ... spent the $$$ mostly on marketing ... got orders ... then found out there was this ... err ... engineering problem that had not been solved by anyone ever before.

They lost their homes ... lost everything.
Technology did not come to the rescue.

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fleam on July 22, 2006 - 8:15pm

I've experienced a nano-scale version of that, come up with a bright idea to save my company boocoo money, get 'em to front me the money for some metal tubing, try it out, oops, heat transfer characteristics of the tubing shot me down. Neat to actually use the kind of thinking/research learned in college chem, not too neat to look like a fool and $100 of the company's money and some of my work time lost on a wild goose chase.

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AlanfromBigEasy on July 22, 2006 - 8:16pm

What was their vapor product ? (as in vaporware; software or hardware that does not exist "yet").

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step back on July 22, 2006 - 8:35pm

I'm not free to give out specifics, but it was the hardware part of the project that sunk them. Some things seem like they should be easy no-brainer engineering tasks and yet, not everything is as trivial as it might seem.

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GliderGuider on July 22, 2006 - 8:59pm

Even engineers aren't immune.

A small high-tech firm I worked for was founded (funded) in 1988 on the certainty that we could couple 1.7 Gbps of digital data onto standard coax for a distance of 30 feet or so. After the equity R&D investment was all spent on "R" with no results, we admited that the low signal to noise ratio had killed us, and there would never be any "D".

Interestingly though, the need to recover from that failure led us to develop the world's first 100 Mbps Ethernet-packet LAN on fiber-optics, several years before the early 100 Mbps standards were developed. That, in turn, led to one of the world's first, and possibly the world's very first, pure-hardware Ethernet switch.

Ultimately marketing problems, competition from the industry's big dogs, and a severe case of management recto-cranial inversion sank the company. But the point is that even failed attempts to push the envelope can have subsequent benefits.

The message for those trying everything they can think of to mitigate a post-Peak Oil energy decline without making other problems worse is obvious. Keep trying, civilization depends on us finding as many alternatives as possible.

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IFeelFree on July 22, 2006 - 8:07pm

I'm a physicist (solid state photon detectors) and I've sometimes wondered if my technical background has allowed me to more quickly grasp the importance of peak oil and its ramifications (as well as global warming). When I've spoken with coworkers who have a technical background about this, they seem to grasp the magnitude of the problem. On the other hand, I'm astonished at people with economics training who have blind faith in the capacity of free markets to solve the problem. No problem, we'll find substitutes, they say. Well, there aren't any good substitutes. I just don't have any confidence in the latest alternative energy boondoggles. Yes, we should develop wind, solar, biodiesel, etc., but there's no question that our society is going to change in a big way.

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step back on July 22, 2006 - 8:44pm

Even among science folk, I think there is split among those who understand the enormity of the problem and those who think fusion is just around the corner.

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GliderGuider on July 22, 2006 - 9:13pm

Scientists are still heir to the human condition. The implication of peak oil is a very uncomfortable conclusion to draw, no matter how well you understand the reasoning leading up to that last mental connection. I think scientists are horses that can be led to water a little more easily than most, but it's just as hard to make them drink as anyone else.

I think there is a state of mind that is essential for making that last leap. I think you have to be capable of, and comfortable with, drawing dark inferences from the available data. In other words, you need to be a bit of a pessimist at heart. Scientists can be just as prone to unreasonable optimism as anyone :-/

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IFeelFree on July 22, 2006 - 9:32pm

I don't agree that it's necessary to be a pessimist. I think it's enough to see the magnitude of the problem and be willing to change priorities to deal with it. I think it's more important to develop new and existing energy sources, support conservation, life-style change, etc. Even some optimists see the need for these changes. You can be an optimist and still comprehend the extent to which our society depends on cheap energy, the finiteness natural resources, etc.

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AlanfromBigEasy on July 22, 2006 - 9:48pm

Perhaps courage can work as well as pessimism. Or both are needed.

But I have never seen myself as a pessimist. And I have been tracking the path towards both PO & GW for my adult life. And for both I am trying to do "something".

I don't think that I could idlely sit back and just observe, satisified with my greater knowledge of coming doom.

Better to forward some information, write an eMail to some politicans, write a letter to the editor, and all the other "small" measures.

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TheTransition on July 22, 2006 - 9:48pm

Well Fusion is a long way off, but regular Nuclear Fission works just fine and there is lots of Uranium out there. However with these, the real question is whether the required investments can be delivered in time to mitigate the downside of the peak.

In Australia we have lots of coal and gas but not much Oil. However the investments to turn coal and gas into Oil have not happened because the bankers keep getting told "Oil prices will soon decrease" and so won't fund projects that make a profit at $60 a barrel.

I wonder how long the forecasters will keep up the Oil will get cheap Real Soon Now? They're holding up the investments we need.

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Alfred on July 23, 2006 - 4:27am

I really think that people with MBA's should be included under the label "economist". MBA's have a quite disproportionate influence on business and politics these days. Most of them have little knowledge about physics, chemistry and engineering. The commander-in-chief is prime example of a Harvard MBA.

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tstreet on July 23, 2006 - 9:44am

While MBAs may have their limitations, it is simply not fair to throw them in the same pot with GW. GW would not have gone to Harvard without influence-- certainly not based on merit or his undergraduate performance.

I'll admit to a bias against bidness majors, but I would give them more credit than assuming they are all in the GW, no nothing category.

Also, don't lump economists into the same bag, either. There is such a field as environmental economics ala Herman Daily which is much more sensitive to resource constraints, environmental impacts, and externalities than your typical economist.

The key, I think is having the inclination to expand one's knowledge beyond one's chosen specialization.

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Apuleius on July 23, 2006 - 9:16pm

They say that because they have a legion of economists who say "saving humanity will make the geeks really rich, so they're bound to do it."

When I hear that line I say "I've a master's from MIT. I know technology. Technology won't save us." Sometimes it works.

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227 comments on DrumBeat: July 22, 2006

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“Where ideas are concerned, America can be counted on to do one of two things: take a good idea and run it completely into the ground, or take a bad idea and run it completely into the ground.”

—George Carlin