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Predator-Prey Dynamics in Demand Destruction and Oil Prices
Posted by jeffvail on August 26, 2008 - 10:01am
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: demand destruction, lotka volterra, oil prices, oil production, original, predator, predator-prey dynamics, prey [list all tags]
One of the classic ecological modeling problems is the oscillating populations of predators and their prey in an ecosystem--as prey population rises, predator population follows suit until prey population begins to fall off, resulting in a subsequent drop in predator population (illustrated below). The same dynamic also applies, to some degree, to the relationship between oil price (prey) and marginal production/demand destruction/energy policy (predator). This post will explore that relationship and its ability to help us avoid poor energy policy choices.
The prey-predator dynamic has been mentioned in the context of peak oil occasionally on The Oil Drum (1 and 2), but usually in the context of human population and carrying capacity. Both oil price and demand destruction can be modeled, at least in theory, as a predator-prey system. Here, I would like to look specifically at the relationship between demand destruction, marginal production, and price through the predator-prey lens.
Classic predator-prey system
The simplest predator-prey dynamic is described by the Lotka-Volterra system of differential equations. The exact values obtained by this system of equations is predicated on several assumptions--such as exponential growth of a prey population when a predator is absent and that predators can consume infinite quantities of prey. I don't propose that these assumptions apply to oil, nor that the Lotka-Volterra equations can accurately predict either oil price or production. Instead, I propose that the relationship dynamic is analogous between the general predator-prey model and the behavior of oil price, demand destruction, marginal production, and energy policy choices.
Seeing Oil as a Predator-Prey System
When oil price rises, there is an increasing incentive to 1) reduce elastic demand, 2) produce more oil, and 3) make public policy choices that mitigate the impact of high oil prices (or at least use it as a lever to pander to a voting population or enrich oneself). Likewise, to the extent that each of these three results bears out, it exerts downward pressure on oil price due to relatively greater production and relatively lower demand. Lower prices, in turn, remove the incentive to reduce demand and to produce more oil--especially where the lower price impacts the economic viability of marginal production.
Since there is an uncertain lag time between rising prices and reducing demand/increasing marginal production, it seems likely to me that the sequential corrections in price and demand/production will overshoot and create oscillations similar to the Lotka-Volterra predator prey model. This may not be the case if oil production potential and cost was a constant (as well as human population, economic growth, etc.), but the uncertainty created by a background environment of peak oil will make it very difficult for these oscillations to eventually settle at an equilibrium.
To some extent, we are seeing exactly this effect in America today. As prices rose steadily from $110/barrel to $147/barrel in early Summer, national attention zeroed in on "America's Oil Crisis," as a perpetual counter on CNBC labeled it. The stage for much of today's Presidential contest was set during this period. As oil prices dropped, and CNBC's "Oil Crisis" ticker unceremoniously disappeared, I've actually heard more than one person comment that "I guess I don't have to sell the SUV." While the macroeconomic situation adds a complicating wrinkle to the simplified predator-prey chart above, we may have already entered the phase where ramped up production plans are being scrapped, efficiency measures postponed, and political will to enact bold energy policy measures fade.
Figure 2: The predator-prey oscillations of price increases and demand destruction/production increases superimposed on top of a geological depletion scenario--note how the volatility fo the predator-prey dynamic works to conceal the underlying geological and geopolitical trends.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this is a very crude model. It is not intended to predict actual price or production, but rather to illustrate how production and price may interact similarly to predator and prey populations in an ecosystem. The importance of this analogy is that it may help us to avoid certain policy mistakes (or at least be aware of them). When the oscillations of price and demand/production are superimposed on top of geological depletion and geopolitical feedback loops, the resulting volatility effectively masks the underlying fundamentals (see Figure 2, above). This presents several problems, each of which may be more avoidable if the medium-term fluctuations in price, production, and demand are seen as oscillations on top of a very worrying underlying trend of peak oil.
At the risk of invoking the problematic "awareness" issue, the problem of peak oil cannot be effectively mitigated through political or economic choices until it is understood. (how effective this mitigation can be, even if the problem is fully understood, is debatable, but at least some mitigation is possible.) Awareness of the underlying problem, in turn, is being masked by the oscillations of the price/demand/production "predator-prey" dynamic. If individual consumers realize that price drops (at least relative to purchasing power) are temporary in an environment of geological depletion, and if policy makers learn to effectively communicate this point, then we will be positioned to best mitigate the effects of peak oil on a personal, regional, and global scale.
If, on the other hand, we do not see through the fog of these predator-prey oscillations, then we may miss our best opportunity to adapt to the long-term energy reality. Technophiles may be right--efficiency gains and high-tech substitutes may allow us to continue "business as usual" indefinitely. While I don't share their optimism, my overriding concern is that the lure of their sales pitch--especially in an environment like today's where prices are dropping and production is (arguably) rising--will convince us not to make the difficult choices about changing "business as usual" now and force us to make much more difficult choices later.
Good.
I'm glad somebody finally tackled this.
Up till now it seems that the only possibly paradigm has been an algae boom and subsequent bust as a model for peak oil.
The top post graph is one of many possible models. It would be interesting to see some of the others too.
By merely tweaking the values of α, β, γ and δ you can get an entirely new and different model:
Note that the choice of predator and prey species are merely convenient names to assign the axes of these plots. Given appropriate parameters for Lotka-Volterra, you could just as easily be talking about SUVs and gasoline supply.
As a biologist I love these analogies and I never thought of your example.
When I was learning about peak oil it became easy for me to see parallels in my field. For example:
Optimum foraging theory can likely be used to explain how the big fields are discovered and exploited first and how as these are depleted the "predator" (i.e., resource consumers) switches to alternative resources that are generally smaller and have a lower flow rate, causing a decline in the predator population.
Another good analogy is from macroevolutionary theory and is called the Red Queen hypothesis. It is basically the long term evolutionary consequence of the Lotka Voltera dynamics. As the predator gets better at capturing prey the prey evolves to elude the predator. As the prey evolves to elude the predator the predator evolves to be better at capturing the prey, etc. This is the same dynamic with resource exploitation and economic efficiency--we run faster and faster and find ourselves staying in the same place.
You could add to the analysis the ability of some predators to switch to other prey (Coal, Natural gas, Biofuels). You might also look at EROI from each to see how long the predator can last on each one or how many predators can survive on each prey. Some prey cannot be eaten by certain predators. The predator list can be expanded to the various economic sectors like transportation, food production, steel making etc. It might show a nice path to prioritize our use of all fuels. If you could somehow tie in water use, the model can be expanded.
Indeed, "resource switching" as it is called can include whatever a consumer can consume!
Another analogy that comes to mind is from the field of ecology and is called the "Diversity-Stability Hypothesis." It posits that ecosystems (or food webs) with many species tend to have fewer wild swings in population size because a diversified resource base allows switching to prevent any one "prey" item from being over exploited. Species poor ecosystems, by contrast, would be characterized by the fluctuations of the Lotka Voltera model.
What this means in practical terms is "Don't put all your eggs in one basket." There are obvious parallels with energy portfolios, but this is really a general strategy. So when economists preach the notion of specialization, sure it can improve efficiency, but that always comes a cost that may not be known until it is too late and the formerly diversified economy is gone. I think of this most often in the terms of the U.S. food system. Where I live gone are the facilities for potatoes, grains, meat processing and dairy, for example. But we plenty of vineyards and wineries! Oh, and another crop-based economic sector is even larger but I'll not talk about that.
Jason to be clear we do not find and exploit the big fields first. The search reveals the normal distribution of fields it does not find the big ones first. However we search well in advance of exploitation and we always exploit the best known fields at the time first. We may find a better field later on that we exploit Alaska is a perfect example.
Over time of course the net result is we take the most easy to produce oil first.
Its important to understand that WebHubblTelescope is 100% right in his discovery mode and 100% wrong in interpeting it because he does not include the bias in selection for the best fields at the moment over time.
For all intents and purposes once peak discovery is reasonably in the past i.e 20 year we can assume that we found and exploited most of the best fields.
Of course most of the models on the oildrum assume that despite this selection pressure we will have a nice smooth post peak decline. In reality the time delay between when the best fields in a region are produced and the worst fields can be decades. This is why EROEI is growing rapidly for example it simply because of this selection factor. If we where not able to do significant selection then EROEI would be constant.
Its not.
Nice clarification. Just as a predator develops a search image for the most rewarding prey and will ignore the "second and third best" while it can afford to even though it may be aware of their presence.
Well this gets into the Maximum Power concept exergy EROEI etc etc.
Your hitting the tip of the iceberg of the relationship between predator and prey and energy concepts.
A better model may be lean meat starvation we need fat to live. In oil light sweet oil and natural gas are the fat and heavy sour etc are the lean meat.
I least my investigations indicate that once we have problems with both light sweet supply and NG then our civilization will begin to fail.
What really interesting is we seem to have hit peak everything at roughly the same time.
I don't think this is a coincidence and it seems to come from maximum power coupled with energy conversion concepts. As long as we had cheap energy we where able to leverage it to continue to extract other resources at higher levels and lower and lower EROEI.
For example with enough energy coupled with technology we have been able to exploit lower and lower grade ores.
As the cost of energy has increased it tends to cause peaks across the entire resource base as deposits become uneconomical and price increases result in and explosion of feedback loops and the receding horizons problem. Everything becomes exploitable at some price point that just happens to be higher then today.
Its fascinating that with all this complexity that the result is and implosion or collapse.
The real underlying reason I've come up with is a bit amazing.
Consider the perfect lead glass crystal wine glass it can be used for a indeterminate about of time but the only way it can change is to shatter or break.
Complex systems work this way once they are refined their future is predetermined from that point on the only way they can change is to collapse or shatter. The refinements prevent adaptation and coupling cause feedback.
Historically people note that civilizations always seem to collapse from some maximum the height of power is very discernible. But what really happened was as the society reached its zenith it did so by throwing away flexibility and alternatives in favor of a complex refined coupling. The moment it goes down this path its future collapse is certain. Just like with predator prey relationships as the predator become more efficient either by higher population vs prey or via adaptations then your certain to see the collapse.
The way out if you will is to recognize the danger and aggressively decentralize and decouple and example would be some monster corporation recognizing that it would collapse under its own weight and aggressively spinning off business units while retaining most of the depth. The hope is that the new smaller specialize companies can grow not only enough to pay off previous debts but eventually to provide greater revenue as they in total grow larger then the single entity ever could.
However in general like the beautiful lead crystal glass the parts are not viable thus the solution which is to decentralize and the failure mode which is to shatter are the same.
Life has come up with a incredible solution to this problem it lets collapse happen but then via evolution it recreates a new complex system. Thus as long as some life can exist it incredibly has figured out how to take both routes.
The irony is that man the supposed peak of evolution is unable to grasp these simple concepts in aggregate we as a group refuse to even understand what we are and how life works.
What Nate Hagens and Jeff Vail write about should be self evident truths taught in grade school not subjects of debate. Some how our species fallen into group psychosis brought about by our belief we are greater than the rest of the life on the planet and can "defeat" mother nature because we are clever. What we fail to realize is that every day a clever homo sapien is ran over by a bus.
"The way out if you will is to recognize the danger and aggressively decentralize and decouple and example would be some monster corporation recognizing that it would collapse under its own weight and aggressively spinning off business units while retaining most of the depth. The hope is that the new smaller specialize companies can grow not only enough to pay off previous debts but eventually to provide greater revenue as they in total grow larger then the single entity ever could."
Catch 22...ironic!
Theoretically a large company or government can accomplish more than a small one for the following reasons.
1. A large entity can invest $100 million on a risky potential market or product. A small entity might never have gross revenue of $100 million so it can only invest proportionately MUCH less.
2. Economies of scale.
3. A large company can have MANY specialists... a small company will have proportionally more generalists. Specialists are probably 3 times as efficient IN THEIR SPECIALTY. The large company will have the efficiency of specialists.
The other part of the catch 22 is; to survive Peak Oil society needs to become LESS efficient and have more redundancy IE small companies with local shops instead of Wallmart.
I don't see any good solution to this catch 22. Darnit! I know what I mean, but I am not eloquent enough to explain explicitly.
The problem in a nutshell is the inability to solve new problems. Peak oil is a new problem. In Predator prey terms the predator only knows how to capture prey any thing he does to do a better job at capturing prey simply makes the problem worse not better.
What I think your missing is the loss in flexibility. Most 100 million dollar problems are 10 10 million dollar problems and these 10 million dollar problems are actually 1 million dollar problems. 1 million dollar problems are solved by small groups.
Efficiency of scale only works with very well known problems that are reasonably well understood or can be better understood via specialization. When the problem is ambiguous and much less the solution economies of scale fail. This crystallization the support economies of scale also seem to be exactly the wrong way to solve new problems.
The problem is that efficiency only makes sense with well understood problems and solutions inefficiency is absolutely required to solve new problems with novel solutions. This of course implies excess energy/money largssee whatever to persue these new problems however the original system is efficient and leaves no excess.
Therefore if your resource constrained you have no choice but to dismantle the orginal system to cause and excess to allow the overall system to adapt. You have to generate a surplus. When this need is not recognized then the system will suffer catastrophic failure to free up resources.
Its like a law of thermodynamics efficiency and specialization is always exchanged for adaptability. Its a real force in complex systems just like any other law of nature.
These effectively physical forces cannot be ignored. Predator prey cycles and other models of complex systems are simply examples of the effective forces created in complex systems that behave identically to natural forces. Its absolutely no different from the concept of hole or phonon's in semiconductors.
For and example consider simple majority voting. Voting creates a effective force that causes a new condition to result i.e you choose a winner. Voting is just as real and powerful in a complex system as is the real force of gravity. For some reason only a handful of people seem to really understand that these effective forces are just as real as natural forces and have as big of and impact.
The "American lifestyle" can be identified as the effective force that got us into the peak oil mess. Underneath the complex or group forces is plain old greed and willingness to kill. This has lead us to wreck our ecosystem and will eventually result in the death of billions. Indeed the virtual forces of our complex society actually rival anything nature could do in destructive power.
I think if you can see what I'm saying and visualize the "real" complex forces in our society then its trivial to recognize that it absolutely must collapse. Our only choice is how we collapse the system. The current worlds population must be reduced significantly below its current level it can be done with dignity or with violence thats the only choice we can make and the chances of a dignified ending are sadly probably already in the past. Everyday we deny the truth about our situation simply ensures the violent death of a few more million people. Probably every year we do nothing about peak oil ensures that at least 100 million people will die and early violent death. On a individual level what this would mean is say for every person that manages to concentrate resources to maintain a high level lifestyle ten people die.
I'm not all that much better then anyone else and its hard for me to accept this.
I've already started to take steps in hopes that one day I can give more than I take but this does not absolve me of my role in todays society and the damage I inadvertently caused in the past because I was ignorant. Its hard to not just run off into the woods and start growing my own food etc and stop contributing to the madness but I think or more hope that I might be able to help by staying connected.
All a world leader has to do is stand up and explain to the pigs in America what they are really doing I'm sure if they understood the real truth of the situation that they would be willing the change.
Memmel,
It looks like you hold a similar position to Jared Diamond and The Club of Rome?
I think that it is fair to say that some areas are moving towards solving peak oil and others are already fairly well buttressed against the effects.
The slow moving elephants in the Room are China, Europe and the United States.
I still believe that we can have a partial collapse and a reconfiguration after a period of pain round a more sustainbale solution.
I base this on the assumption that problems become evident over the next five years and some countries (such as Israel, Denmark (perhaps Japan)) show what the solution is and the slow movers subsequently get on the bandwagon.
On the other hand if we get large scale fighting over oil instead I think it might well be game over for the big players along with a catastrophic Alec Scarrow style population collapse.
Dan, I'm intrigued by the notion that "some areas are moving towards solving peak oil and others are already fairly well buttressed against the effects."
Could you (or anyone) specify what areas you have in mind, and what evidence of resilience.
I'd have thought that Pakistan, Haitii, Indonesia and much of Africa (etc?) are already very much suffering the effects. Just because they are poor countries doesn't mean they are not dependent on globalised high-tech and aid from G7 countries.
Memmel: "Peak everything". No. just looking at merely my piano, peak ivory, peak ebony, and peak soundboard pine were all long ago, not to mention peak craftsmanship. Quality buckskin for the keys action has also become scarce. Probably other woods such as pear too. Whale-oil? Furniture used to be rountinely made from solid oak and elm (the latter now extinct in uk). Hopefully peak japanese knotweed but I wouldnt count on it.
Re predictions of civil war - I think many people here continue to severely underestimate just how low-technologically-crippled everyone has become. In aftermath of any breakdown of globalisation, people will be desperately struggling to merely survive (ie find food) to such an extent that they'll have no time or energy for warmongering even on a local scale.
There'll be a huge die-off from starvation/stress/disease. And soon the population will be so much lower that the survivors will have more need to cooperate than conflict.
PS to memm- you do post some(times) interesting ideas but if you could make your posts a bit briefer they might fit better in the limited reading time of myself and many others! (Though I appreciate this can be difficult.)
The current worlds population must be reduced significantly below its current level it can be done with dignity or with violence...
I have trouble envisioning any dignified way in which the human population can be significantly reduced "with dignity." Do you have some such imaginary scenario in mind (even if unlikely)?
Food, Clothing, Shelter, Basic Medical Care, Education, Pension.
The first three are well known but the last three are just as true and just as critical if you wish to control population. Large families are formed to ensure pensions in your old age and to potentially cover medical costs and finally as a collective to potentially allow one of the members to be educated.
I could write forever about how to solve these problems but I'll try and give a brief review of each.
Food intensive agricultural methods coupled with drip irrigation can provide enough food
in addition land is often poorly distributed. I'm not saying you should bust up the larger farms by force but you can support smaller farmers in buying more land potentially via collectives. If you think about it for a bit formation of collectives of various sorts makes many of these problems solvable.
Clothing is not a real issue these days.
Shelter can be greatly improved with some engineering work and small factories to convert scrap materials to decent building materials. Probably one of the biggest gains would be to open up small brick factories that use solar kilns for the bricks.
So the idea is that with some light localized manufacturing we can develop ways to create good housing from local materials and scrap.
Basic Medical Care:
The easiest way to start solving this problem is to take in some of the poorest members of the society and train them as Doctors and Nurses if they agree to help their communities in exchange for their education. Over this Doctors and Nurses who receive a subsidized education could pay it back in the form of a tax either money or working in the poor areas. I know from first hand experience that the medical industry is not designed for the needs of the poor regions a move back to renewable supplies robust equipment etc can greatly increase the quality of medical care in the poor regions we have gone to disposable supplies because its easier then using autoclaves.
I could rant forever on this but the bottom line is with some thought medical care can be vastly improved and equipment and supply costs can be minimized. Local manufacturing of medical equipment could play a large role in this. Next of course decent synthetic labs could produce most of the needed drugs. Lab testing can be reviewed and optimized. I'll stop but the medical profession is so far from whats needed by the worlds poor its in my opinion one of our worst sins. Finally of course birth control and sex education come into play.
Education: Like with Doctors but more tractable its a matter of education of people within the community to be teachers and sending them back to their local communities.
Communal communications with new wireless technologies opens up the chance for almost every part of the world to have equal access to mankinds knowledge. This extends into adult education and practical education. The key point and where I differ from most efforts today is that the educators must come from the community.
Pensions:
This is probably the biggest issue and primary reasons for large families. The first and foremost issue is dealing with single people and widowers. I feel that communal monastic like living arrangements open the doors for people to live a single life for as long as they choose. In the past in most cultures these sorts of communal living arrangements where common often tied to the local religions but the point is that we have removed them in all our cultures with our focus on family living. A family is not the only solution and if we can bring back these alternative ways of life then we can create a population of people that choose to have no children or join the communes with just a few. The problem is of course money and a small global pension would go a long way to helping these types of living arrangements. Pensions can be scaled on the number of children you have with zero receiving a healthy pension. You can argue this for a long time but the key for me at least seems to be communal living arrangements that lessen the need for large families. If enough people choose to have zero children it makes a really big difference. Two people choosing to not have children allows a fairly large family of four to exist without causing population growth. So you can see how its in my opinion what makes the difference not just small families.
Certainly with a social safety net in place and education you can then have smaller families. Finally of course with modern birth control methods being single does not mean you have to risk having a child so it all ties together.
You can break these problems down a number of different ways but the core idea is reintroduction of communal living/collective living for people that are not interested or able to form the traditional family. These same communes could readily be the source for doctors, teachers etc and also be the provider of the pension plan. Done correctly it need not even be a cash issue simply a matter of setting aside sufficient land to allow the commune to support itself.
We should have never ripped these out of our societies I think modern manufacturing and economies of scale is what did them in since light manufacturing was often one of the primary ways these communes continued.
Dignified death? A lot of people are going to be driven crazy with negative life-events, especially those who currently have "wealth" and "status". A lot of them are going to be suicidal.
Another high proportion are more likely to die of hunger, shock, and fatal diseases than by violence.
At Global Guerrillas, Robb argues that big companies have to break up and downsize for very related reasons. That the companies that do not will not survive. [The on-topic post was in July 2008 I think. Something is wrong with the site right now - only showing one post per month.]
Another point I think Jeff is skipping is the issue of limits. We're bouncing around between demand constraints and supply constraints and will shortly move into an environment nearly always supply limited. Like an audio amplifier, when the signal starts clipping, all sorts of nasty harmonics appear. That's the noise.
I don't think he is skipping the issue of limits like you saying. The problem is that as you try to come up with any sort of model for the entire system it gets complex quickly and is in general chaotic. Chaotic models while they look cool are for all practical purposes worthless as predictive tools since by definition they are sensitive to the initial conditions. A small change leads to a major divergence in outcome.
You can look at parts of the problem geopolitical feedback, predator/prey, export land etc and show fairly convincingly that almost all the influences are negative and worse capable of fairly rapid large magnitude changes generally for the worse. The predator/prey model is important since it shows that short term price drops from demand destruction don't help even in the medium much less long run.
We have had numerous posts looking at the wedge effect of conversion our economies and all of them point to a 10-20 year time period at most to change with a fairly concerted effort. Add in the required political consensus and you get the 20-30 time for change common. Look at pollution issues and global warming as examples of the timescales for group change.
I think the intrinsic problem and it seems prevalent even on the oildrum with fairly enlightened readership is that people have a real problem with this sort of meta-analysis that cannot be easily reduced to some predictable simple graphics. But the whole point is thats the problem we actually face once you put everything together your looking at a highly unstable and unpredictable situation with the vast majority of potential outcomes being bad. Although we don't know the real outcome for sure without action its pretty obvious that its certain to be bad. Conveying this message to the public seems to be a hopeless task. The problem is that if you drill in on one detail lets say shale NG production then you can have a difference of opinion since it boils down to if we can drill enough wells. However if you put shale NG production into the global problems we face its obvious that we probably won't keep production up. For example consider a Gulf coast hurricane having a big impact on GOM NG production. Lets say a lot of production goes offline for 1 year. This will put tremendous pressure on shale NG plays and they will be extracted at the maximum rate and probably our ability to create new drilling rigs will be impacted by problems in the gulf. The point is one reasonably probably secondary event coupled with the rapid decline nature of shale NG production is sufficient to ensure that future production will always be less than todays. A fall in prices below the economic level that slows the drilling rate is another case. You can do this for a while and the consensus outcome is that we probably will see high NG prices in a few years as external and even internal factors result in overall declines in NG production. You can do this across the entire energy industry include EROEI etc etc.
So what you see time and time again is that as you try and understand even the simple complex cases the result is always worse then would be predicted by not including them. In fact it becomes obvious that in the case of Shale NG plays the ability to make up for conventional declines is a one time event early in the extraction effort that cannot be repeated.
We face thousands of export land like scenarios and as you dig you find more and more cases.
I found a big one just the other day for example. I was puzzeling over tanker traffic this year and thinking about WT saying that with declining VenMex production more traffic would have to come out of the ME to compensate. But one thing I came up with was that the density of crude varies by 40% so if your shipping more heavy crude oil you literally cannot ship as much by volume as you can light sweet crudes. So paradoxically you can see higher traffic with less total volume if the mix of crude being shipped has moved significantly to heavier crudes. This ties into my NG/Heavy problem.
What this would probably mean for the ME is that if you consider my NG/Heavy coupling and the price and the fact that tanker traffic is close to 2006 levels that Ghawar production probably started into rapid decline this year.
This highly probable solution requires a complex analysis approach since you have to put together a lot of events. For me the last piece of the puzzle was recognizing that less heavy oil can be shipped by volume leading to higher tanker traffic and less real oil.
But try explaining all this to people esp since these complex interaction models would require extensive correct data to refine and prove which we simply don't have. If anything transparency has declined dramatically along with data quality the last few years.
Anyone thats willing to spend some time understanding the problem using the approach of full systems analysis and considering some basic models most from the life-sciences can comprehend the whats happening. Taking a message to the masses that requires them to educate themselves to understand the problem is a hopeless task.
Silver bullets simply don't work when your playing a game of whack-a-mole.
I'm forcing myself to read the 2005 Millenium Assessment. The message is the same, though the UN typically won't use the same language you do. I'm not so sure that people cannot come to understand the situation. If the horizons are brought closer - and they will be - and if people are able to live the solution like they currenly live the problem, they could learn it. I don't expect that to happen.
cfm in Gray, ME
Not only will the failure mode probably not be consistent across classes it also will not be consistent across regions. This is why I'm predicting the formation of enclaves scattered throughout the world. The key issue is if these enclaves will simply use force to retain control of oil and food or if they will work aggressively to rebuild a new low energy intensity economy. Outside of the enclaves of course the overwhelming issue is if sufficient food and medical care exists to prevent serious problems.
I'm of the opinion that we will actually be able to retain a substantial amount of our manufacturing base even if it means continuing with coal fired electric plants for longer. The big question is are they going to be building electric powered SUV's for the enclaves or building wheelbarrows and windmills for the newly impoverished.
Comments made on this board tend to make me suspect that most will focus on electric powered SUV's.
Eventually of course the less fortunate people outside the enclaves that choose the SUV route will become sufficiently well armed by other enclaves and sufficiently desperate to take over the the enclaves that choose the SUV route. One thing that I can't see us having a shortage of is guns and bullets.
It seems the US has fired 6 billion bullets in Iraq as of a year ago and yes this is straining our bullet supply but its not even a fraction of all the bullets made in the world. We probably have enough bullets right now to give 5-6 to every single person on the planet. Peak bullets is a ways off.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-forced-to-import-bul...
http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2008/04/marine_recycle_042808w/
And it seems the Iraqi's have no problem selling brass for new bullets.
http://www.navy.mil/search/display.asp?story_id=9696
Memmel:
I love what you are writing here. Very thought provoking.
re: your comment about life's solution and a collapse being allowed to happen and a new complex system arising. I think it's happening.
There are also historical models showing the different kinds of collapse:
Easter Island = algae boom and total collapse
Rome = collapse almost all the way
China = oscillation between partial collapse and rebuilding (rinse and repeat) for centuries.
So are we Romans or Chinese?
Romans or Chinese ?
Good question I wonder. I think it really depends on how well we can relocalize manufacturing and at the same time keep critical trade routes open.
It boils down to getting spare parts in a lot of cases. One thing thats dramatically different today is that we have never seen widespread civilization collapse with the availability of modern weapons. Just the light arms alone make a huge difference esp coupled with light artillery. Few places are actually defensible without being reduced to rubble. Modern warfare tends to completely destroy the infrastructure of and area.
Mogadishu for example has had almost all its infrastructure destroyed and one could make a good case that a big part of Somalia's continued problems is from the previous destruction thats taken place. These sort of conflicts do not bode well for the future in a lot of places. I happen to think that these civil wars will actually be the most devastating not conflicts between nations. One of the big reasons I want to leave the Los Angles area soon is that this region will probably decay fairly quickly into regional conflict that results in most of the infrastructure destroyed.
I don't have the analytical skills to put numbers to why "peak everything". It's my sense, however, that the "peak everything" includes finance and climate change as well as more prosaic resources. Climate change is just a sink that can be maximized - for a while - with more money/resources. Hence the standard arguments that pollution decreases with increasing wealth (it gets exported). No different than extracting resources at different levels of EROEI. It feels right - how's that for a solid empirical basis - that everything peak at once - at least everything interconnected through the economic system.
What we read about at Automatic Earth is the money generated by reducing the planet to gray goo. [I've been thinking about it more in terms of emergy and entropy than maximum power.] That money - made possible by the energy/work/economy of fossil fuels - cannot put the ice caps back. All that money, but nowhere to spend it. We cannot spend it exploiting more of our resource base to repair our resource base - that makes things worse.
"She canna take any more, Cap'n! She's gonna blow!" [Which did happen on Scotty's final mission]
cfm in Gray, ME
I understand what your saying. The fact that we are seeing indications of peak everything which is the result you get from maximum power in that all resource will be exploited for maximum power not efficiency and associated with this is that cheap energy can be leveraged to increase the efficiency of extracting bottle neck resources results in the overall system effectively peaking across the entire spectrum of resources about the same time. It seems that a sort of central limit theorem is possible driven by the decline in net cheap energy.
Although not on a strong mathematical background even the conceptual approach lends powerful support to the concepts Jeff and Nate are presenting. We would not be seeing a broad spectrum of resource problems if technology was capable of solving the energy crisis. This includes pollution/global warming.
If we are lucky then the future will be better then the doomers predict but its clear to me at least that blind luck is all that can prevent the worst outcomes.
If you want a mathematical/systems model for "peak everything" look at the Limits to Growth/World3 outputs.
Specifically look at chapter 4 of the book "Limits to Growth: A 30-Year Update," (http://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193149858X)
and this description (pages 170-171) of their Scenario 1 (or
baseline) model run:
As
non-renewable resources become harder to obtain in Scenario 1, capital is
diverted to producing more of them. That
leaves less industrial output to invest in sustaining the high agricultural
output and further industrial growth.
And finally, around 2020, investment in industrial capital no longer
keeps up with depreciation. (This is physical
investment and depreciation; in other words, wear and tear and
obsolescence, not monetary depreciation in accounting books.) The result is
industrial decline, which is hard to avoid in this situation, since the economy
cannot stop putting capital into the resource sector. If it did, the scarcity of materials and
fuels would restrict industrial production even more quickly.
The book and models describe various ways in which the human economy can encounter limits, and
Scenario 1 demonstrates the impacts of resource constraints. Another way to express what the authors are saying is that as more work is needed over time just to obtain the raw material resources needed for economic production, cost inflation eventually leads to industrial decline, followed by a shortfalls in food, medicine, and other basic services like delivering water supplies.
Right on I'm not surprised that a economic focused treatment would also not result in the Peak Everything effect as net energy declines.
I suspect that the some more fundamental model starting from Maximum Power concepts is the right one.
However these don't capture the essence of how fragile the system becomes to breakdown as it reaches this decline phase. We of course know from the historical data that TSHTF more times than not when the system becomes strained like this.
What we don't seem to have is a good way to "prove" this it must collapse. The underlying problem can be explained by looking at the export land effect. As long as oil was cheap it was not a major factor but as oil supply becomes constrained and expensive the flow of money into the exporting nations result in increased consumption lowering next exports. We have many potential other feedback loops that can grow exponentially or even hyper-exponentially that swamp the primary decline. In many ways these could well be black-swan like events that know one ever conceived of.
The interaction of peak NG and Heavy source the chances that finished products exports of diesel and gasoline may drop faster than oil production to stave off local shortages in countries with refining capacity. Etc etc any one of these secondary issues is a candidate for the one that causes real problems to start.
And I stress we have others that no one even recognizes that could be as bad or worse then what we have thought about.
In a lot of ways these can be treated as 1/f noise or spikes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise
But consider the case of limits of growth with and even this predator prey model with the addition of some sort of spike say a virus that kills half the prey.
The point is the stressed system is both highly unstable to strong random like perturbations and it friggin generates them naturally. A stressed complex system generates anomalous events that cause significant short term stress generating further anomalous events ... We can identify some of these but the reality is your getting spikes at all frequencies that are causing the system to generate more spikes.
Like a bad bearing in a motor as the bearing goes bad it generates vibrations that destroy the bearing.
Maybe this can be called the monkey wrench effect.
I'll add that we know about this in other physical systems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_time_between_failures
The solution of course is to replace the part with a new one well before we hit expected failure.
In this case the part is our civilization and the suggested replacement time was 30 years ago.
That's also the argument Hall made some months back where he had graphics showing the energy infrastructure expanding to take over ever increasing portions of the economy. Ultimately the economy has to collapse - you can't keep doing lower and lower EROEI work if you can't feed the workers. It will collapse well before that because all sorts of other ancillary services will fail - and they will not fail uniformly across classes in society.
I'm really looking forward to the Smart Growth forum tomorrow night in Portland Maine. I'm sure they will set me right.
The model isn't wrong because it isn't modelling production. It's modelling price and consuption instead, and production is an input to it.
Ok, later edit: It talks about production increasing because of price, but it is still one (and the smalest) of the two effects that change prices and field quality is still an input.
Excellent post, I was also thinking about a post around the same idea. I believe that we are heading for big price oscillations (or super-spikes) for the next few years. There are all sorts of mechanisms that will generate oscillations in oil prices:
1. There is a short term feedback mechanism (maybe 6 months-1 year):
demand growth -> tight supply -> prices increase -> consumption go down -> prices go down
2. A longer term mechanism (2-3 years):
demand growth -> tight supply -> prices increase -> inflation -> slow down in economic activities -> prices go down
3. A supply mechanism (3-5 years?):
demand growth -> tight supply -> prices increase -> more investments -> more supply -> prices go down
4. A long term structural change in demand (3-5 years?):
demand growth -> tight supply -> prices increase -> consumers buy more efficient cars -> less consumption -> prices go down
5. A long term structural change in supply (3-5 years?):
demand growth -> tight supply -> prices increase -> oil alternative become competitive -> less demand for oil -> prices go down
We have observed feedback 1 already. I believe that 3,4 and 5 require a stable high price environment for a long period for them to occur.