103 comments on CBC: Your Basic Petroleum Depletion Story (a Story You're Likely Going to be Seeing a Lot More of Soon)
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103 comments on CBC: Your Basic Petroleum Depletion Story (a Story You're Likely Going to be Seeing a Lot More of Soon)
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But, consumption per capita was much more wasteful on the way up. And, we already know that populations in many of the countries that are high oil users can fall. ie. Japan and Western Europe.
In Canada, a substantial effort is made to keep immigration high in order to offset what would be a decline.
In addition, birthrates in places like Mexico, Iran, and China have fallen massively in recent times.
Do you have your "jump to conclusions" mat handy?
(1) Provide some evidence that consumption of oil per capita has decreased over time. We need more than claims and not just an individual case-study (use the world as the unit of analysis).
(2) If your claim IS correct (based on historical data), how can you compare that information to not-yet-happened-data (i.e. non-existent)? You cannot assume trends in data will continue (this is a fundamental flaw of all deterministic approaches).
(3) You provide several countries who have declined in per capita oil consumption (though lack corroborating data). But we already know that per capita oil consumption in the world's single-greatest consumer of energy has remained relatively flat for 24 years. See the following:
For the US, per capita yearly oil consumption has stayed steady between 24-26 barrels of oil per year from 1982-2006. How does this real-life counterfactual impact the world's per capita oil consumption over time? And what happens when you control for periphery countries who experienced rapid population growth, but still could not afford oil? You have to realize that oil consumption has been conducted by the wealthy nations of the world, and their per capita consumption has not variated in recent history. For these wealthy consumers, oil consumption has been a function of population (not technology or whatever Ecological Modernization theory (i.e. nuanced cornucopian) BS you're trying to peddle).
It's also important to keep in mind that for the US and the EU, total energy consumption and total population have remained incredibly linear for the last 25 years as well (see York 2006). If the EU's population is supposed to remain flat, but the US is projected to increase by over 120 million people in the next 40 years, what will happen to our overall energy consumption?
(4) Birth rates don't matter that much in the short-term (you are mistakenly trying to describe growth rates, not total population); it's the shape and dynamics of the demographic pyramid for each country that matters in the near term. That's why each country you mentioned (Mexico, Iran, and China) are projected to increase (projections be damned!--see #2 above) their populations for at least 25 more years.
My view is that per capita consumption is substantially a function of price as your graph helps show. Price is higher on the downslope = less consumption per capita. Short-term there are inelasticities, but consumption is responsive to price medium term. eg. Last year the OECD consumed less than the year before.
I agree total population is going to grow over the next few decades but mostly among low energy users. But I don't see massive consumption growth following from that. Again it comes down to price and the resulting conservation.
So what about total energy? I'm in the early plateau camp.
That's not what my graph shows at all. It demonstrates that regardless of price, per capita consumption has remained relatively unchanged for the past 24 years in the United States. In other words, it demonstrates a tendency towards relatively inelastic demand at the individual consumer level over a 24 year period. In the short term, price is incredibly elastic and demand is relatively inelastic (same trend as long-term).
A "high" energy user--the US--is projected to jump from 300 million to 420 million in the next 30 years. If historical consumption remained linear, that would require an additional 8.2 million barrels a day production. I also see India and China increasing their oil consumption at double-digit yearly rates.
I'm having a hard time figuring you out--are you willfully manipulative or just struggling with the information?
Prices have been low the last 24 years (except just recently), you have to go back further to get the picture.
All those new high energy users are going to be conservationists like you wouldn't believe! :-)
Prices have not been low in the last 24 years--they hit their historical peaks during this period. You need to check your data. Be sure to control for inflation. Be sure the data is from a reliable source:
BP Anual Statistical Review, 2006
US Inflation Rate Conversion Factors
?
The BP table gives 1980 as the peak for prices. That's more than 24 years ago.
But if your point is that once prices began to fall, there were no further decreases in per capita consumption even though prices were still rather high for a while, I'll grant you that. The expectation of rising prices was gone and so was the incentive to conserve.