Geopolitical Feedback Loops in Peak Oil
Posted by jeffvail on October 3, 2007 - 10:00am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: Export Land Model, feedback-loops, geopolitics, mercantilism, nationalism, original, peak oil, privateering, return on investment [list all tags]
It is quite common to hear experts explain that the current tight oil markets are due to “above-ground factors,” and not a result of a global peaking in oil production. In reality, geological peaking is driving the geopolitical events that constitute the most significant “above-ground factors” such as the chaos in Iraq and Nigeria, the nationalization in Venezuela and Bolivia, etc. Geological peaking spawns positive feedback loops within the geopolitical system. Critically, these loops are not separable from the geological events—they are part of the broader “system” of Peak Oil.
Existing peaking models are based on the logistic curves demonstrated by past peaking in individual fields or oil producing regions. Global peaking is an entirely different phenomenon—the geology behind the logistic curves is the same, but global peaking will create far greater geopolitical side-effects, even in regions with stable or rising oil production. As a result, these geopolitical side-effects of peaking global production will accelerate the rate of production decline, as well as increase the impact of that production decline by simultaneously increasing marginal demand pressures. The result: the right side of the global oil production curve will not look like the left…whatever logistic curve is fit to the left side of the curve (where historical production increased), actual declines in the future will be sharper than that curve would predict.
Here are five geopolitical processes, each a positive-feedback loop, and each an accelerant of declining oil production:
1. Return on Investment: Increased scarcity of energy, as well as increased prices, increase the return on investment for attacks that target energy infrastructure. Whether the actor is an ideologically driven group (al-Qa’ida), or a privateer (youth gangs in the Niger Delta), the geologically-driven declines increase the ROI for attacks on energy, which will drive both decisions to act, as well as targeting decisions for that action. This is a positive feedback-loop because attacks on energy infrastructure and supply drive up the price, which further increases the ROI for such attacks. John Robb has calculated the Return on Investment for the most recent bombings of oil and natural gas pipelines in Mexico this September at as high as 1.4 million percent.
2. Mercantilism: To avoid the dawning “bidding cycles” between crude oil price increases and demand destruction, Nation-States are increasingly returning to a mercantilist paradigm on energy. This is the attitude of “there isn’t enough of it to go around, and we can’t afford to pay the market price, so we need to lock up our own supply.” Whether it’s the direction of a pipeline flow out of Central Asia, defending only specified sea lanes, or influencing an occupied nation’s laws on Production Sharing Agreements, there are signs of a new energy mercantilism all around us. This is a positive feedback-loop because, like an iterated “prisoner’s dilemma” game, once one power adopts or intensifies a mercantilist attitude all others must follow suit or lose energy share. It will act to accelerate oil production declines because mercantilism prevents the most economically efficient production of a resource, accelerating the underlying problem of diminishing marginal returns. This issue of energy mercantilism has recently hit the headlines again with the intensification of the race by several nations to to lay claim to the Arctic with its uncertain but possibly vast oil and gas potential.
3. “Export-Land” Model: Jeffrey Brown (westexas on The Oil Drum), has proposed a geopolitical feedback loop that he calls the export-land model (most recently discussed in his Iron Triangle post). In a regime of high or rising prices, a state’s existing oil exports brings in great revenues, which trickles into the state’s economy, and leads to increasing domestic oil consumption. This is exactly what is happening in most oil exporting states. The result, however, is that growth in domestic consumption reduces oil available for export. In states, such as Mexico, where oil production is also in decline, the “export-land” model predicts that oil exports will decline much faster than oil production—and this is exactly what is happening, with the latest PEMEX report showing 5% production decline year-on-year, but 11% export decline.
4. Nationalism: Because our Westphalian system is fundamentally broken, the territories of nations and states are rarely contiguous. As a result, it is often the case that a nation is cut out of the benefits from its host state’s oil exports. This will be especially apparent when the “export-land” effect reduces the total size of the pie to be divided. As a result, nations or sectarian groups within states will increasingly agitate for a larger share of the pie. We see this already within Iraq, Iran (Khuzestan), Nigeria (Delta State), Bolivia (indigenous groups), even places not normally associated with oil production such as Nagaland in India. This process will continue the spread and advancement of the tactics of infrastructure disruption, as well as desensitize energy firms to ever greater rents for the security of their facilities and personnel--both of which will drive the next loop…
5. Privateering: Nationalist insurgencies and economies ruined by the downslide of the “export-land” effect will leave huge populations with no conventional economic prospects. High oil prices, and the willingness to make high protection payments, will drive those people to become energy privateers. We are seeing exactly this effect in Nigeria, where a substantial portion of the infrastructure disruption is no longer carried out by politically-motivated insurgents, but by profit-motivated gangs. This is the ultimate positive feedback-loop: infrastructure disruption further degrades any remnants of a legitimate economy, increasing the incentive to engage in energy Privateering, and compensating for any diminishing marginal returns in Privateering caused by enhanced security or competition from other privateers.
We may see some or all of these effects in any given area, and are already seeing this in some trouble spots. Some states, like Iraq, have been thrown into full-fledged “Nationalism” and “Privateering”-driven geopolitical disruption by the actions of an outside power—in this case, the US invasion was itself largely the byproduct of a shift towards energy mercantilism. This is just one illustration of the synergistic interrelationship of these processes.
The big-picture effect of these geopolitical feedback-loops is this:
Peak Oil theory takes the logistic curve decline of oil from individual fields and producing regions and extrapolates those effects to the world. The result of that extrapolation is that world oil production will follow a geologically-driven logistic curve, and that it will peak and decline in a manner similar to individual fields or producing regions. The decline of a logistic curve gradually tails of in a "long tail" of oil production. The result is a phrase that has become virtual dogma: "Peak Oil is not the end of oil production, but rather the beginning of an inexorable decline in production." Geopolitical positive feedback-loops, however, do not act like logistic curves. They are positive feedback loops that are both self-intensifying and intensified by geologically-driven declines in production. While the geologically-dictated baseline in oil production decline may exhibit a long tail of ongoing production, geopolitical forces may abruptly chop off that tail. Commercial oil production requires some threshold level of security, rule of law, etc. to operate at all. Below that threshold, oil production does not gradually decline, but rather stops completely. Will geopolitical forces, combined with geologically-driven decline, be sufficient to bring oil production to a total halt in the near-term, at least regionally?
Excellent delineation of political and market forces and motivations.
Nationalism could be extended into Regionalism, where contiguous states join together to buy/sell energy products and perhaps enter into mutual critical infrastructure protection arrangements.
Also ethnic and/or religious entities in different nations (or even different regions) may seek to form similar energy pacts or privateering (with some seeking to disrupt instead of distribute).
Note that Saudi ARAMCO has been recently reported as establishing a 35,000 persons security force, so the ROI calculation will vary greatly depending on whether protection of CI is sought to ensure production income and market stability, or whether disruption is sought for price spikes with the possible result of market instability.
The above ground issues mentioned above are certainly factors limiting oil production (in addition to field declines), though I believe some oil execs combine these types of events with the slow rate of tar sand and oil shale infrastructure establishment and petroleum production for obfuscation purposes. The latter are really partly 'in ground' if we refer to THAI and other extraction methods for non-conventional oil. Refinement of non-conventional would be above ground.
So we should help establish a vernacular that helps the average interested person understand the issues. Perhaps we could say the issues are;
- Political Factors: includes Mercantilism, Nationalism, Privateering, and Cartel actions.
- Peak Net Export: includes the ELM in its various sensitivity analysis forms
- Above Ground Technical Factors: Transport and refinement of non-conventional oil, both technical challenges as well as rate of infrastructure establisment.
- In Ground Technical: Methods to extract non-conventional oil and the rate of infrastructure establishment; methods to extract a higher percentage of conventional resources.
Thoughts and suggestions?
I think that Saudi Arabia's 35,000 man security force is an interesting point. There are several ways to view it. One is that it represents probably in excess of one billion dollars a year in expenditure on security in the absence of any actual investment in an attack. I'm not convinced that it will have much preventative effect, as it is quite possible that it is really a PR move and works program for unemployed Saudis, but who knows. Having spent some time in critical infrastructure protection, there is a fundamental problem at work. There are functionally infinite valid CI targets. If you pick the top 10, 100, or even 1000 to protect, then, assuming that you make these invulnerable to attack through your protection (which doesn't happen), the net effect is to push adversary targeting down the list to the 11th, 101st, or 1001st target, respectively. In most CI scenarios, it is economically impracticable to protect all valid targets. It is the fundamental flaw in a reactive notion of CI security versus a proactive notion of CI security (which is much more difficult, especially for governments, to implement). That said, there has been an unexpected (in my view) calm in Saudi Arabia lately, so who knows?
Regarding your proposed vernacular, I think it is a great idea in the sense that it may help bring the reality of geological versus "above ground factors" more into the awareness of the public. I'm not sure about the specific labels. Several of the comments down thread suggest (and RR's post yesterday) that quite a few TOD readers and contributors (myself included) have recently finished reading Nassim Taleb's "The Black Swan." We should be careful to avoid applying inappropriate categorization to these matters--I think it is reasonable to categorize in this way for the purpose of raising public awareness or separating two commonly conflated issues, but we should avoid it in the quest for actual understanding. For our purposes I think it is important to view these phenomena as inseparable and part of the "system" of Peak Oil.
Thank you Jeff for changing the discussion from "depletion rates" and "mitigation/subsitutes" to the systemic analysis of Peak Oil.
I would even make the claim that the PO-System was born in the early 1970s once the USA geologically peaked. Just remember that the USA had been the world's largest producer and a mojor exporter!!
As evidence for this, the world production curve left the logistics (Hubert's) curve at the end of the '70s - making Hubert analysis and reliable predictions increasingly difficult. The "typical" event demonstrating this change(apart from OPEC's actions) was the overthrow of the Shaw in Iran and the ensuing Iran/Iraqi war.
We are currently entering Phase II of the SYSTEM of PO, now that the world is at peak.
The US seemed to have forgotten in the late '80s and through the '90s that this system exists. Living in Germany since the beginning of the '90s, I would however hardly imagine that most of the rest of the world was not aware that this system and the constraints of our FF resource base. Especially the Germans have kept "The Limits of Growth" in the back of their heads and are painfully aware that energy subjects will most likely dominate the future.
Cheers from Munich,
Dom
----------
Just remember the Golden Years, all you at the top!
I think privateering may also be a tactic used by nation states. The pipeline explosions in Mexico were apparently professional, but not seemingly tied to any recognized political movement.
Sheer speculation, of course, but somebody hopes to profit from such targeted attacks, and various economic interests may now be making longer term plans, as the gameboard shifts.
WARNING
This comment is pure speculation.
I was talking to a friend of mine who is going for a masters in political science. He thinks that the attacks were by drug cartels. The drug cartels are threatening the infrastructure to get Mexico to back off from their recent crack down.
If perpetrated by a drug cartel the attacks would be professional and no one would claim credit. It would not be in the interest of the drug cartel or the president to make the facts known to the public. If the public found out who was responsible they would demand a harder crack down which would cause more attacks and cause political damage to anyone in office.
I don't know anything about Mexican politics or drug cartels but it seemed like a good explanation to me so I am passing it on.
Tim
More pure speculation: the attacks were Venezuela dredging up the ghost of a long inactive revolutionary group to damage Mexico's economy and perceptions of Mexico as the safest place for FDI. Even if it isn't true, it makes a good story to get people motivated to do something about Hugo... I seem to remember something about Yellowcake?
http://politics.reddit.com/info/2w4c0/comments
if you are so inclined...
Brilliant -- though pretty frightening stuff.
Seems so obvious once one says it, so how come so few people are saying it?
Cathal Copeland
I was thinking about this topic this morning. When Jim Kunstler was in Dallas for a joint presentation with Matt Simmons, on 11/1/05, I arranged a meeting with the Dallas Morning News editorial board, and I sat in on the meeting. Jim spoke with them for an hour, laying out "The Long Emergency" case.
Except for the local NPR station and the SMU student newspaper, we had a local media blackout regarding the Simmons/Kunstler event, and there was no reference in the paper to the hour long interview with Jim.
I think that they are ignoring the issue, to the extent they can, not because they dispute the reality of finite resources. I think that they are ignoring the issue because they are afraid that Jim is right. For the overall population, it's the "Sixth Sense" thing. Our old way of life is dead, but most of us don't know it--primarily because we only see what we want to see.
... we had a local media blackout ...
WT, I think the BEST example of the MSM IronTriangle is the new's reporting of Myanmar.
Look at the difference between MSM's coverage of the story,
Myanmar junta continues to make arrests
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/ts_nm/myanmar_new_dc
Soldiers hunt dissidents in Myanmar
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071003/ap_on_re_as/myanmar
versus this one
Chevron’s Pipeline Is the Burmese Regime’s Lifeline
http://tinyurl.com/2wsq9x
or this one.
Oil versus monks
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007%5C10%5C03%5Cstory_3-1...
The Energy Angle is buried in the details.
Because “robustness tests bury the most important variance.”
In other words, Black Swans are seen as outliers to
be dismissed.
The Power of Power Laws
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/05/the_power_...
...But it is not just social scientists who fall prey to this temptation to adopt a Gaussian (think Bell Curve here) view of the world. Business executives also are drawn to a Gaussian world. At one level it is much simpler – there is a meaningful “average consumer” that can be used to scale products and operations around – and it is a much more predictable world. In many respects, the history of Western business in the twentieth century represents an effort to build scalable operations through standardization designed to serve “average consumers”.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Err, one of the main characteristics of a black swan is it shouldn't be seen at all, before the event that brings it to prominence.
It's not that people ignore the outliers, its that they cannot conceive of it as credible within their mental models. An effect that is erroneously ascribed too low a probability of occurrence isn't a black swan - its a risk assessment failure. There are plenty of those, but black swans are much more disruptive.
For instance, a space shuttle disaster was assessed in risk terms incorrectly, but it was not a black swan (eg even O ring and tile damage risks were known). However the space shuttle pilot taking control and smashing the craft into the White House as a hypervelocity missile would be a black swan, since most people wouldn't ever conceive of it as a risk.
Equally an oil consuming bacteria that spread across the globe, eating all of our remaining supplies would be a black swan; Saudi not telling the truth in reserves would not.
In short, to qualify it has to sound totally, weirdly extreme to the majority of peers in the field.
If we constrain ourselves to the definitions offered by Taleb it would be a Grey Swan, but the point is still well taken.
“robustness tests bury the most important variance.”
I'll disagree.
A Black Swan is something not seen by the overwhelming majority and anyone like, say, Taleb or Mandelbrot,
who point out that Black Swans are inevitable once the Fat Tail of the J Curve has been reached are sidelined.
Only when the Black Swan -Subprime Crisis, anyone,
as part and parcel of PO- is revealed does CW
acknowledge that, yes, it was there.
"Platonic 'maps' based on (Gaussian) bell-curve probability/statistical distributions (what Taleb calls the "Great Intellectual Fraud (GIF)") are like Guillaumet's map; they are (as Kapuscinski would have put it) 'map-mementos.' Platonic maps are too devoid of detail, too vapid, to serve as a useful guide when navigating a world shaped by extreme, catastrophic risk; those maps exaggerate non-dangers (like Guillaumet's 'giant' orange trees and the platoon of 'fearsome' sheep) while totally ignoring (or severely discounting) very serious dangers (like the actual mountains and platoons of hostile natives that Saint-Exupery was really worried about)."
Again. I'm saying a Black Swan is hitting us now.
We've gone over the top of the Gaussian Hubbert's Curve and it's usefulness fades with each passing day.
Because Power Law states that once we enter the Fat Tail
of the other side of the Apostosis, a non linear event-another name for Black Swan IMHO is inevitable.
To wait for it and then react will put us behind the Collapse Event.
as you Jeff should know-
"Thanks primarily to Jeff Vail’s recommendation, I have recently finished Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies."
"a civilization is a society which adopts increasing complexity as a general strategy."
We know that a Black Swan is coming.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Thanks, I was not familiar with this concept of "black swan" before. Though it does remind me a lot of Iain M. Banks idea of an "Outside Context Problem". (He used the concept in one of his novels, "Excession").
Here's a description of an OCP in Bank's own (brilliant) words:
Great article!
In my post a couple of days ago on the Economics of Peak Oil, I talked about discontinuities of oil exporters. The things Jeff is talking about are precisely those kinds of things.
Besides the geopolitical factors Jeff talks about, I can think of at least three other factors that will tend to hold down production of oil exporters to levels below what geology would suggest:
1. Hoarding: If oil will be worth a lot more later, it makes little economic sense to pump the oil now. This is one implication of the work of Harold Hotelling. In addition, the country may fear that oil will not be available elsewhere at a later date, and want to save the oil for itself.
2: Monetary / Debt Problems of Oil Importers: A former importer with rapid deflation won't be able to afford much oil; one with hyperinflation will have money that is changing in value so rapidly that it is questionable whether the importer should take it. If the importer has recently defaulted on its debt, there may be a question of how much the fiat money of the week is really worth. In some cases, the exporter may choose to require payment in goods, not money.
3: Indirect problems: There are a lot of things that it takes to keep oil fields functioning including trained engineers, replacement parts for machinery, and a functioning method of transporting oil from the field. Seemingly unrelated events, such as a disruption in imports from a country suppling spare parts for machinery, or a lack of trained engineers because of geopolitical problems, can result in a reduction in oil output.
Indy
Jeff, thanks for reminding all of us of these very important issues.
Gail and others mentioned currency issues. Regarding currency, we must avoid falling into the trap of assuming today's FIAT currencies are holders of value. Virtually all of them are inflating between 10-20% / annum. This specifically means, if energy is considered a non-FIAT currency, that in energy terms, the current environment is DEFLATIONARY.
This explains the "HOARDING" issue mentioned above, but from the producer's viewpoint, he is not hoarding. He is merely prudent, since his alternative is expenditure of a valuable resource for a fiction (FIAT money)
Can we sensibly extrapolate the Nigerian experience, to the world forum? Perhaps as a worst case?
Not to make too many headaches, but has anyone considered the impact of declining energy supplies on metals, specifically steel and aluminum. Also the impact on portland cement.
INDY
Check out Aluminum Iceland
for eco impacts.
And I believe that the production of cement
makes it the worst greenhouse gas producer.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Look at the price of molybdenum as another great example of this. Moly is a key component in the steel blends used for oil wells.
While this is probably a pure economic positive feedback loop, it certainly fits into the larger picture, and, to the extent that it increases oil prices, will intensify all other feedback loops that are driven by oil price rises.
Moly is a key component in the steel blends used for oil wells.
and proper bicycles..
Hello Gail,
This would come under Nationalism I think:
Doomsday: Alberta stands accused
A huge fight between East and West -- over the oil sands -- is just starting
NICHOLAS KÖHLER | October 8, 2007 |
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20071008_110103_110103&source...
Alberta's energy industry.
Even now, fish pulled from the Athabasca downstream of the oil sands taste of gasoline and smell of burning galoshes in the fry pan. The landscape is perforated by more than 300,000 oil and gas wells. Water in some areas to the south can be set alight with a match, likely due to coal-bed methane developments. Doctors administering to Aboriginal communities not far from the oil sands report high rates of thyroid conditions and rare diseases such as cancer of the bile duct. Some from those communities have been employed at the oil sands raking in the carcasses of ducks floating on vast pools of rotten water, the by-product of the sands' oil-extraction methods.
Such are the claims contained in William Marsden's upcoming Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (And Doesn't Seem to Care)
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
This may be the perfect example of a "grey swan": nationalism (either pseudo Albertan nationalism or indigenous nationalist movement) leading to violence in Alberta's oil sands region.
Before the cries of impossibility ring out from all sides, I'm not saying that this is likely. However, it is possible. The confirmation fallacy--that it hasn't happened in the past, so it won't happen in the future--is at work here. If I were to suggest a nationalist/oil insurgency in some post-colonial third world country it would be superficially plausible, but not Alberta: rich, western, largely white/Anglo-Saxon, etc. But, despite its apparent improbability NOW, it would have a tremendous impact, exacerbated by how unanticipated such a scenario is. If there is continued economic decline, and Albertans realize that they are subsidizing the ballooning entitlement programs of the rest of Canada while seeing only environmental devastation for themselves, it may suddenly seem more possible. Especially as we use narrative to explain to ourselves, in hindsight, how such a thing was able to happen...
And it's not like there have not been discussions of provinces splitting off from Canada, e.g., Quebec.
I expect to see "provincial nationalism" as a developing theme within countries/unions, something along these lines, why should we export our food and energy supplies outside our region, when we don't have enough (long term) for ourselves? I think that this was a factor in natural gas shortages in the UK in 2005 to 2006 winter, if memory serves, when other EU members reduced their natural gas shipments to the UK.
This of course is also true of nation states, which may be--and almost certainly are--thinking long and hard about the wisdom of maximizing their fossil fuel depletion rate.
We've had this for a while with water - witness the most recent "no water outside the watershed" stuff coming out of the Great Lakes region, and its a perennial story out west.
Could you include passive nationalism in your theory?
As in failure to actively support the Iraq war due to the perception that the action does not benefit the core constituency? even if otherwise it would make sense strategically?
It just depends how far the reasoning is taken.
As usual, I find Jeff Vail's commentary insightful, and as has been said, frightening in its implications. A couple of broad - but I think critical - points to add.
First, what is implicit in Jeff's article should be clearly stated - when a field or a region peaks, it doesn't matter 'so much', as there are other fields or regions growing that will mask the peaking, and allow overall growth to continue. But when the globe peaks, there will be no mask. At first, there will be pseudo masks, as some regions are still growing, so the globe plateaus for a bit. It would seem we are there, now. But once all regions peak, the effect will be very different than anything we've experienced to date.
Further, when I saw #1 ROI, I was expecting a discussion of declining net energy. I think it's important to note that the downslope will be steeper than the upslope for this reason as well. Even if the gross oil extraction on the right side were to match that on the left side, the net available to society will be falling ever more sharply as we go deeper, further and muckier than simply sticking a straw into the sands of Texas or KSA (apologies to those who work hard in the industry, but you get my point). In addition to that, global population is now very much more than it was 'then', whenever 'then' was - and not just of people, but of cars. These two things act as - let me coin a term - misery multipliers.
Here's what I mean. Say that in 2020 we extract 24 billion barrels, which is about what ASPO projects. By then, because of our heavy reliance on oil sands, polar and deep water oil, the EROEI may be on the order of 7:1 or 8:1, so we'd have about 21 billion net available. When we extracted 24 b/b/y in 1960, EROEI was probably more like 50:1, so we had 23.5 billion net available. Also, global population in 1960 was 3 billion, whereas in 2020 it's likely to be about 7.5 billion. So whereas in 1960 we had 7.8 barrels per capita, in 2020, with the same extraction, we'll have 2.8 barrels per capita. And it's worse than that, because in 1960, how many of those billions owned cars and were dependent on them for their livelihood? And how many will (or expect to) in 2020? Let me just point out that this is a scant 12 years off. A child born today will be in middle school. Now, combine Jeff's feedback loops with this declining EROEI/increasing population effect on the net energy available to society, and you'll understand my choice of pseudonyms.
Dan Combs
...and that same child will not drive a 20mpg SUV but a 150mpg+ PHEV or electric bike perhaps with a huge efficiency gain muliplier -see yesterdays
"How Can We Outlive Our Way Of Life" post
He will be eating healthy, locally produced produce, be studying PermaCulture in High School and have more respect for the environment than his Elders who only seemed intent on stripping the Earth bare...
Regards, Nick.
As RR noted in his review of "How Can We Outlive Our Way of Life" on TOD yesterday, the essential fact is that we need immediate and fairly radical change.
We are too invested in the present way of life to make those changes.
Nearly all of us who remain in the cultural and economic mainstream but are aware of PO and GW continue to be too heavily invested in the present way of life to be able to make the changes we need to make.
We need to spend too much time and energy supporting kids or surviving within the context of the unsustainable, politically-driven "Corrupt Crony Capitalist" economy to invest enough time, money, and energy into sustainability. Maybe enough momentum will create more opportunity for change, but right now we seem to be completely invested in radical habitat destruction and resource war.
The ultimately suicidal end game appears to have enough momentum to grind along to the predictable end: the metaphorical "Last Man Standing" might have time to look around and say "I won" just before falling over dead.
I count on nature's processes, on mystery, suprise and miracle in order to keep any sort of positive outlook at all.
JV's comments seem pretty spot-on to me. I just need a dose of thought that opens the possibility that my own small efforts toward sustainability are not meaningless.
The "Great Game" is "Kill Off" not "Let Them Die Off While We Keep Going." This is a rather hostile context for living any kind of life.
And so you describe the J Curve heralding the upcoming
non linear events which always show up once
apostosis has been passed.
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/05/the_power_...
The growth of the Paretian (80/20 ) world
Here’s the problem (or opportunity). Gaussian distributions tend to prevail when events are completely independent of each other. As soon as you introduce the assumption of interdependence across events, Paretian distributions tend to surface because positive feedback loops tend to amplify small initial events. For example, the fact that a website has a lot of links increases the likelihood that others will also link to this website.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Thank you. The essay is an interesting thought piece. I don't find it very convincing, however, in demonstrating that the events of today are necessarily the result of peak having been or soon to be reached.
1. ROI on sabotage: Saboteurs of any stripe (freedom fighters to terrorists) will always go after high profile targets. Oil pipelines present high profile soft targets irregardless of peak oil. (and sorry, but the ROI link is just silliness)
2.Mercantilism: the rise of the global economy has been characterized by frequent (and some would say cyclical) periods of reaction/regress against so called "free trade." It remains open whether the samples you select in oil are the result of impending peak or simply another reaction to globalization
3.“Export-Land” Model: It's not clear precisely what you are arguing here. Rising consumption in producing nations is not directly (and certainly not only) attributable to peak oil. So, what precisely is the geopolitical event here? If the argument is that there is simply less oil to go around, I'm not sure that you've said anything that can't be said from a "simple" market perspective.
4. Nationalism: You don't need peak oil to generate nationalistic sentiment. Nationalism predates the use of oil on any scale. So, unless you can show a particular cause in peak oil, and something beyond mere jealous "protection" of resources, than there is nothing here to look at (move along).
5. Privateering: As with saboteurs, privateers are not motivated by impending or past peak. If there is an opportunity to make money, privateers will be there. Yes, the recent high cost of oil has brought privateers, but until you can demonstrate that the price of oil is a result of peak (or at least primarily due to peak) than you can't make the connection between privateering and peak.
I want to emphasize that I am not saying you are wrong. And certainly your logic stands up. But the connection to peak in the present has not been demonstrated.
Re: ELM (Export Land Model)
There are three key points, once a region starts declining:
Rising consumption in exporting countries, aggravated by rapid increases in oil prices, is very likely, but it is not a necessary ingredient for net export declines/crashes (e.g., the UK).
The key geopolitical result will be the possibility of conflict over dwindling resources, resulting from a rapid decline in world oil exports.
thanks wt. I do understand your argument about ELM - what i missed was where Jeff was going with it. If I understood the intent of his essay, he was trying to point to ongoing geopolitical events resulting from/exacerbated by peak or perception of peak. Conflicts over dwindling resources due to contracting export supplies remain an hypotheses (however probable) about the future, not an explanation of the present.
ttp://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2007/05/the_power_of_po.html
So, why does this matter? In a world of power law or Pareto distributions, extreme events become much more prominent. Extreme events can take many forms. They can be sudden and severe disturbances like a class 9 earthquake or a financial meltdown like the one that occurred in US stock markets in 1987. As McKelvey and Andriani observe, “the lesson that we can draw . . . is that extreme events, which in a Gaussian world could be safely ignored, are not only more common than expected but also of vastly larger magnitude and far more consequential.”
As we live increasingly on the margins the current
MEME will be disrupted.
Gradualism will give way to a bifurcation
into a new steady state, which will, at the very least
, make Top Down hierarchy redundant.
People will not be able to wait for results from study groups,
for instance.
Specialization will be the worst thing possible
to adjust to the new MEME.
Arkansaw of Samuel L Clemens
Because some sense of causality satisfies our basic understanding of the world?
(And trust me, it'll be more than the MEME that is disrupted.)
mcgowenmc:
Re; specialisation will be the worst possible response to the peak oil meme
What about specialisation in some type of energy product