DrumBeat: August 16, 2006
Posted by threadbot on August 16, 2006 - 9:10am
| TOD's own Robert Rapier in the news:
Robert Rapier talks about Vinod Khosla, Proposition 87, peak oil, and the need for transportation electrification - An audio interview. Internet Explorer recommended (I couldn't get it work with Firefox). Raising Cane - An Australian article on ethanol production. |
|
OPEC cuts 2006 oil demand growth forecast
World oil demand will rise more slowly than previously expected in 2006, partly because of record high prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries said on Wednesday.
Militants release four hostages in Bayelsa. The oil company who employed the kidnapped workers agreed to address some of the militants' concerns.
Meanwhile, Nigeria promises kidnap crackdown
Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo has promised to act against those suspected of involvement in a string of kidnappings in the Niger Delta region.He said he had ordered 24-hour patrols in the Delta's creeks and swamps, and threatened action against oil firms who paid ransoms for their workers.
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Iraq has struck a deal to supply neighbouring Jordan with cheap oil by laying a new pipeline across the desert between them, the countries' prime ministers have announced.
Oil, water, weather crises will hit cities
Municipalities are facing a "perfect storm" once the era of cheap oil, cheap water and altered weather patterns hits with full force, says Ontario's environmental commissioner.In a chilling speech to municipal leaders yesterday, Gord Miller said municipalities are not ready for the massive effect on communities.
"We are entering a period of consequences," said Miller. "Our present public policy is inadequate to deal with these immense problems that are upon us right now."
Peak Oil and Relocalization in Ohio
Global warming affects hurricane intensity: study
Global warming is affecting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, according to a new study by a university professor in Florida who says his research provides the first direct link between climate change and storm strength.
[Update by Leanan on 08/16/06 at 9:43 AM EDT]
More protests over power outages in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has been struggling with energy shortages for awhile now. According to the article, the suburbs are the hardest hit.
Sharp rise in oil-cash investments forecast
The recycling of surplus petrodollars through the global financial system is set to intensify, with Saudi Arabia and the five other members of the Gulf Co-operation Council exporting at least $450bn of capital over the course of this year and next, the Institute of International Finance predicted on Tuesday.
Demand destruction in Scotland:
SCOTLAND'S love affair with the motor car is waning, with Scots increasingly leaving their vehicle in the garage and taking public transport or walking instead, new statistics have revealed.End of the road for the Chelsea tractor...Experts said huge rises in fuel costs, increasing congestion on the roads, coupled with increasing investment in public transport and growing awareness of the environment was behind the change.
Shareholders sue BP over Prudhoe Bay
Namibia: Fuel Hike Boosts Agrigultural Production Costs
Wall Street's New Love Affair: Why some of the world's smartest investors are betting billions on clean energy.
Forecast puts Earth's future under a cloud: 3C increase would bring fires, floods and famine.
Australia: Brace yourselves, warns Costello
INVESTORS and home owners have received a rare, dire warning from the Treasurer to brace for the economic fallout from "world record oil prices".
Western Cape now hit by gas shortage. It's affecting tourism and manufacturing.
Contact
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I was pondering the fact that we normally discuss gasoline prices more than diesel prices on this forum.
Maybe we should spend more time periodically watching diesel prices as it may be a better leading indicator of a possible supply-demand crunch in certain geographies. The recent shutdown of half of Prudhoe Bay really affects the West Coast of the US as this geographic area is severely pipeline-constrained from receiving crude overland from the GoM. From this Platts link:
----------------------------
The International Energy Agency said August 11 the shutdown of Alaska's
Prudhoe Bay output creates crude quality issues that could be a concern for
the currently constrained global refining sector.
"Crude quality issues are more of a concern than volumetric outages," the
agency said in its monthly report.
"In the case of BP's Prudhoe Bay, the crude lost is medium sour and
possible replacements from Saudi Arabia are likely to be sourer," said IEA.
"But this crude could be blended and will be processed by sophisticated West
Coast refineries with more flexibility to remove sulphur than refiners who
typically rely on Nigerian light sweet crudes.
According to the IEA, recent data indicates West Coast refiners are
importing crude from such countries as Angola, Argentina, Iraq, Oman, Saudi
Arabia and Yemen. But, it added, "the transit time from many of these
locations suggest refiners are likely to need to draw on stocks by late August
if already-on-sea cargoes cannot be diverted."
BP said August 11 it has bought more than 4.5 million barrels of crude on
the global market to help cover its Prudhoe Bay shortfall, with further oil
and products to be bought as necessary. The crude is coming from West Africa,
South America, Asia and the Middle East, said a source.
----------------------------------------------
Consider that California Gasoline only went up two cents in the past week, but Diesel just jumped $0.23 in the past week. Is this an early indication of what lies shortly ahead for the West Coast gasoline consumer, or can it be delayed till after the November elections? Is the Governator and CA oil companies hoping to delay future rampant gasoline price increases as far as possible into the upcoming election cycle? If it takes a long time for that sour crude to arrive and be processed, your average pissed-off voters won't be in any mood to study Peakoil and the West Coast's oil infrastructure!
Consider that most diesel burned in this country is used for commercial and farming purposes--these people don't joyride, but watch their fuel costs very closely. Contrast this with a lot of our gasoline use and one can clearly see that diesel demand inelasticity is much more tightly constrained than our gasoline demand inelasticity. Diesel demand also has alot less seasonal variation than gasoline too. This link on California petroleum is excellent info [pdf warning].
The other consideration is that over time it will be alot easier to improve gasoline mpg than diesel mpg. People can switch much faster to higher mpg cars, car-pooling, mass-transit, scooters/motorcycles, bicycles, etc versus a big-rig hauling our goods or a tractor trying to plow a field. In short, you can't carpool two semi-trailer loads into one trailer. This diesel equipment generally costs alot more initially so they need to get the full use and depreciation out of it before they can trade up to a more efficient replacement. The diesel problem is: how much more efficient can you make a bulldozer, diesel locomotive, or a diesel powered fishing boat? Most diesel vehicles really work, versus most gasoline vehicles cruising with hardly any load [like the one person/car commuter mode so popular in the US].
So logically, the price of diesel/gallon should increase less than the price increase of gasoline/gallon. But we need to remember that people vote, not corporations. But companies can pass off their rising costs to the end-user, and most of us are unaware that this corporate method is the most powerful vote of all.
From this Energy California Govt. webpage we can see that CA refineries turn 51.4% of a barrel of crude into gasoline, but only 15.3% into distallate/diesel. If refinery processing problems from late and heavy, sour shipments can be publicly hidden or delayed by decreasing diesel production and keeping gasoline production up-- it benefits both the IOCs and the Governator by keeping the easy-motoring, drive thru, laidback CA voter uninformed for as long as possible. Thus, it takes longer for diesel fuel costs to work their way into the price of consumer goods versus the immediate consumer outrage of high gasoline prices.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I am listening to RR's audio interview--He is an ALL_STAR rep for TOD--MUCHO KUDOS! I hope all the TOD experts can vastly increase their MSM penetration to offset Yergin's media pervasiveness and evasiveness.
Perhaps we need to form a TOD Speakers' Bureau and formulate a basic platform so that we can be relatively consistent in what is presented to the public.
Consider RR's comments on California's Prop. 87 and Khosla's support for it. The IOCs best chance to derail the voter approval for it is to keep gas prices as low as possible for as long as possible before November. Now consider my top posting on the price disparity between diesel and gasoline on the West Coast, in fact throughout the entire Rocky Mountain region. Notice how diesel is much higher out west? My guess is most of the IOCs are currently upset for BP's corrosion screwup in Alaska. Overall--it really is bad timing for the West Coast until a big pipeline is built to the GoM to equilibrate prices and volumes. We already know the Alaskan Governor & Revenue Office are plenty upset already.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Perhaps someone else recalls the article or comment where this was discussed in more detail?
Thxs for responding. I don't dispute the potential energy savings of RRs and mass-transit at all--in fact, I have posted before how I hope everything AlanfromBigEasy advocates comes true, and soon! But this is mostly a political voter decision, not a true supply-demand decision. Unfortunately, RRs & mass-transit companies are outgunned by widespread Peakoil ignorance and denial, combined with the influence exerted by the Iron Triangle as explained by TODer Westexas. Only when gas prices put a solid hurt to the typical SUV owner is when they will vote in mass for RRs, and mass-transit.
The CA oil companies are having to fight Prop 87 with one hand tied behind their back due to BP's Prudhoe screwup. I really feel they are trying to give the gasoline motorist a break hoping to get them, in exchange, to vote down Prop. 87. By further refining and chemical upgrading of diesel: you can get more gasoline, but at a increased cost. If Prop. 87 wasn't on the CA ballot, the IOCs could pursue the higher goal and lower cost of optimizing the efficiency of the refineries' chemical output production mix instead of having to pursue a politically driven output production mix. In other words, since they are having to use ever heavier and sour inputs-- it would be normal to expect more diesel and less gasoline per input barrel of crude. The price disparities between diesel and gasoline should actually be reversed for optimal refinery efficiency on a chemical and cost basis.
I would argue that this is better for the West Coast in the long run too, as it would encourage gasoline conservation from higher prices, yet make diesel relatively cheaper for the farmer and trucker to provide us with food.
Please bear in mind that I am not an expert, but the API degree, sulfur content, and other crude factors chemically predetermine the optimal refinery outputs.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Nope. Not completely. In part, and in fact some long haul work is now being done by rail.
But not completely. The capitol costs of moving all the rail to the business or the businesses to the rail will make sure that does not happen.
It seems to have lulled now though, but even many executives at these co's know that the future is rail. They realize that it is simply more efficient to move distances on rail and move trucking back to strict local. The funny thing is when I approach the topic of diesel prices and question changes made to personal habits etc and many just don't see the WHOLE forest.
The change consists of additional particulate traps, catalytic converters, etc... got a few friends that work in the heavy truck sector emmissions... it's all they talk about
our current rail infrastructure can't handle the load if the vast majority of long haul trucking was moved back to being moved by freight train.
if we were to do this we would have to have a massive build up of our rail infrastructure which will gobble up any of our savings(capital and energy) we would gain by putting the freight back onto rails.
The way you put it, it sounds like you don't accept the aggregate savings of cheaper fuel needs (plus, I believe, better maintenance performance, too)
Bob Fiske
our current rail structure is a shadow of what it once was before trucking took over. to go back too having things sent mostly or all by rail would mean we would have to rebuild lines that we either tore down for recycling or let rust into uselessness and build more locomotives, rail stations, etc.
the cost of such a build up will either make the savings from ditching the fuel hog trucks dry up to next to nothing or nothing at all.
there was a reason we originally switched from rail to trucks. and that was it was cheaper in both energy and money and it was relatively faster.
That in turn inspired the Interstate Highway System and the rest is history.
Given that context, I find it astonishing that Denver has built light rail. I suppose the bad memories are fading and lots of newcomers have moved in. Still, I don't know that I'd look for any love of freight rail anytime soon. Alanfrombigeasy, are you reading, from wherever you are?
I think DART in Dallas would be a good candidate for trolley freight (single containers/ flatcar) once current expansion plans are completed.
The Green Line in Los Angeles is in the middle of a freeway, and that location has reduced rail ridership (per analysts that I believe). Would you want to wait even a few minutes amongst the noise & exhaust of a nearby freeway.
Although running an Urban Rail line down a "freeway" is the "least best" option; it could be cheap and fast and we may need to do this.
All sorts of detail issues (overhead clearances under bridges, entering & exiting freeways) make this option a site specific "maybe".
So
Alan you call it an auto sewer, but that's ONLY predicated on a belief in cars. I'm talking a pardigm shift in peoples perception of local travel. My sprawling metro area is maybe 75 miles end to end. By car it's no issue since I can get anywhere I need to in about an hour. Once you destroy that relationship of a car and a mile, you'll see more people willing to get into the sewer to get to work.
What caught me in the headlines is this OPEC statement:
What a twist of words! Now it turns out that demand is growing or slowing because of price. Do we need to write a new OPEC-specific economic theory?
The place that economic theory does not match with reality, or at least with the claimed reality, is that high prices should cause increased production as well as reduced demand. OPEC claims that they could increase production if they wanted to, but they choose not to. Instead they watch as production falls because of lowered demand due to high prices.
So that's the real mystery: why, if your prices are so high that they are driving away your customers, you don't lower your prices? That would bring demand back up, you could ship more product, and make more money.
Two possible explanations: (1) OPEC doesn't increase production because they can't despite what they claim. They don't want to admit it, so they just talk about falling demand. In other words, we are at peak oil today.
(2) OPEC doesn't care about lost profits today because they know that oil will be even more expensive next year, and more so they year after that. They could increase production today if they wanted to, but why piss away their oil at $75/bbl when they know it will be worth $100 and more in a few years? In other words, they anticipate peak oil in the future and are taking steps to conserve now.
The overused and inherently ambiguous term "demand destruction" refers to lower quantities being demanded because of higher prices--other things staying the same.
Prose just does not work well to express these ideas. Either equations or graphs (i.e. graphical equations) are almost a necessity to avoid the freshman Econ 101 confusion between changes in quantity demanded (solely because of price changes) and changes in demand (which are caused by a whole bunch of things such as changes in income, population, expectations, tastes, technology advances, and the weather, etc.).
As it was taught to me, at a given point in time, the demand curve has a particular shape and position. However, as you note at the bottom, demand curves do change over time, and expectations, including expectations of possible ranges of price, would seem to me to be one of the things that can alter demand curves over time.
That is, demand and supply curves apply at a given point in time, but change over time. To use Tertzakian's favorite example, there were once demand and supply curves for whale oil. There's not much of a market in that anymore.
The standard economic theory predicts that the price is set by the demand and the supply. That is demand and supply are the causes and price is a consequence. Saying that "demand did not grow because of the high price" is deliberatelly omitting half of the picture - namely that the high price was caused on its turn by the unability of the supply to grow as fast as consuming countries would want it to grow.
The correct statement would be that supply did not grow as much as they expected and as a consequence we have the high price to balance both.
Quick primer on fundamental economics:
Say you own a candy store (I have a massive sweet tooth this afternoon).
20 kids want a gummy bear. That's the demand.
You only have 17 gummy bears to sell. That's the supply.
You raise the price of gummy bears until 3 kids can't afford one, and go home. That's demand suppression (often mistakenly referred to as demand destruction).
You sell the 17 gummy bears you have to the 17 kids remaining "in the market". That's consumption.
"20 kids want a gummy bear." is NOT an example of demand.
To be an example of demand, you would have to specify at what price each would purchase one or more gummy bears. Here is an example of a demand schedule for a two person market, Alice and Bill.
At one cent Alice will buy one gummy bear and Bill will buy two.
At two cents Alice will still buy one gummy bear, but Bill will now buy only one.
At three cents Alice will still buy one gummy bear, but Bill will buy none.
At four cents, nobody buys any gummy bears.
Demand schedule for gummy bears equals Alice's demand schedule plus Bill's demand schedule.
one cent, quantity demanded is three G.B.s.
two cents, quantity demanded is two G.B.s
three cents, quantity demanded is one G.B.
four cents, quantity demanded is zero.
Thus "demand" refers to a whole schedule, often plotted as a line on a graph. "Quantity demanded" refers to a certain amount actually purchased at a particular price.
The distinction between quantity supplied and "supply" is similar to the distinctions in regard to demand and quantity demanded.
Prose is tricky stuff for discussing supply and demand; schedules, graphs, and equations really help a lot here.
The reason I post no graphs on TOD is that my sad experience from teaching economics for thirty-one years is that few people can read and interpret them properly. Very careful prose and a clear understanding of economics will work, but few college-educated people now understand prose well, and fewer still grasp even the most elementary fundamentals of economics.
BTW, "demand" is not the same as "want." Demand includes both the willingness and ability to purchase a good at a range of prices. Thus it is quite wrong to speak of "an unsatisfied demand for food among the world's poor." They need food or they will die, but without money or credit to buy the food they will die, because they have no effective demand.
This is "positive" economics, i.e., the way things are. "Normative" economics discusses the way things ought to be. This distinction was first and most clearly made by the notable economist John Neville Keynes, the father of John Maynard Keynes.
Oh go ahead and throw caution to the wind Don - post some graphs. I think you'll find that there are people here who will understand them ;-)
Also, nearly fifty years ago, when I first got into serious research in the social sciences it was hammered into me that real researchers loved to wallow in raw data, which usually means tables of numbers rather than graphs (which are, after all, nothing more than plots of tables of numbers).
I may post some small tables of numbers, especially for illustrative purposes, and then anybody who wants to plot them is free to do so. Whenever I see a graph, I am tempted to ask, "Please sir or madam, could I see the numbers too?"
Another problem with graphs is reification: When somebody posts a pretty multicolored graph there is a temptation to immediately jump to the conclusion that it means something. And for the evil in heart (none of whom, of course, ever post on TOD) it is too darn easy to lie with graphs.
For a horrible example, almost all the supply and demand curves in economics books are outright lies--lies to simplify matters. In reality, these graphs should never show straight lines but should show fuzzy somewhat curved areas instead. There was once a book that tried to do this in one of its editions (Heilbroner and Thurow, about twenty-five or thirty years ago), but the publishers said: "None of the other econ texts do it this way. So do it their way if you want to see another edition of your book."
Indeed.
Its almost as bad as the monthly post of world oil consumption that appears in a place not too far from here the conversation goes something like this:
Hmmm... those point don't line up, run a smoothing filter over them.
What kind of a smoothing filter?
Well, a thirteen month equally weighted one, thats obvious isn't it?
Ummm... the line has some bumps in it.
Shoot, that can't be right, the largest trade system in the world MUST be bumpless. Run a smoothing filter over it.
What kind of a smoothing filter?
Well, a thirteen month equally weighted one, thats obvious isn't it? Are we at peak yet?
I'm not sure, your filters ran out of data to window 6 months ago.
Look, stop giving me a hard time, just lock the window for the last 6 months and draw the damn line!
O.k., Wow, looks like we are really past peak (takes another drink and squints at the graph) Yepper, definatly pointing down!
Thats my boy...
What about a data table, error bars, correlation coefficients, frequency analysis of the raw data, distortion properties of the smoothing filter....
Would you knock it off already! Put a pretty picture in as a background, I see those at the conferences all the time!
You mean EVEN LENGTHIER than the ones you already disgorge so liberally!
Not good, I understand...
Ceteris paribus, of course. (isn't that greyhound bus in latin).
Is there anywhere a price schedule for Oil?
How are dynamics incorporated into a schedule?
It's clear from the world oil consumption graph that the price spike of 1980, caused a fundamental shift in how people used Oil and the coupling between World economic growth and Oil consumption was substantially weakened following the 1980 peak.
In inflation adjusted terms, we are now approaching the 1980's peak. Is there any research into how this will affect the coupling between economic growth (or decline) and Oil prices?
If I do a straight line projection of the world oil production from 2002 to 2004, we are now sitting about 3 MPD below where the projection says would have been if Oil remained at $40 per barrel.
So does that mean that an extra $30 per barrel removes 3 MPD of demand, or does it mean that $70 per barrel mean that world demand is decreased by 1.5 MPD per year? (given Oil production has been roughly constant since 2004).
I guess we'll find out in 2007 if production remains flat and Oil says at $70 per barrel.
Supply and demand curve analysis is comparative statics and says absolutely nothing about dynamics.
Estimates of price elasticities of demand for petroleum products are fairly good so long as you are close to existing prices. What the impact of doubling or trebling prices would be is anybody's guess--except (and this is a huge exception) we know for sure that the price elasticity is greater (Let us pretend that the minus sign is not there, just to simplify, as we usually do in undergraduate economics.) as the length of time increases.
In other words, over a week there is hardly any price elasticity of demand for gasoline. Over a year there is some but not much. Over ten years there is a helluva lot, and over twenty years a lot of economists think it is maybe close to unity. What does unity for price elasticity of demand mean? It means that when price (in real terms, adjusted for inflation) goes up ten percent, then quantity demanded goes down ten percent.
Unit elasticity is handy, because then all demand curves become rectangular hyperbolas, and with those you can do some nifty math stuff.
CAUTION! CAUTION! CAUTION!
The price elasticity of demand depends a helluva lot on price itself. At low prices (fifty cents for a gallon of gas), gasoline is nearly price inelastic in any kind of a short run. At a much higher price, say five or ten dollars for a gallon of gas, we can expect to see far far higher price elasticities of demand for gasoline, especially in intermediate and long runs.
BTW, the price elasticity of a straight-line demand curve on a graph varies enormously, depending on price. In the real world we never see straight line demand curves; they are for purposes of illustration only. On the other hand, for small percentage changes in price, a straight line is a fairly good approximation to most real-world observations, but here we're talking about changes of three percent or maybe even six percent, but nothing too big.
If you understand the limitations of economics you can get a lot of mileage out of it. Alas, that is a gigantic hugeous humongous "If."
Demand can be either need (fundamental necessity) or a want, (optional, luxury, desired). Don, contrary to your assertion, "demand" IS the same as "want". Demand has NOTHING to do with the ability to pay, and J.M. Keynes makes this point abundantly clear with his lengthy arguement that demand (eventually) creates its own supply, because they are equal (inherently) equal. You presume (and argue) that they are.
A reduction in price does not necessarily increase the demand (number of such commodities desired) for a needed good, this is typically only seen with wanted goods.
To illustrate:
You need water. You will not live long without it. The minimum quantity you need is fixed, regardless of the price. This is need demand, and it is fixed, regardless of price. There may also be some additional demand for extra water, above and beyond this needed value, for which price matters.
If the price of water is sufficiently high, you cannot buy any at all, and must go thirsty. Most will then resort to non-market means by which to secure it.
If the price is sufficiently low, you may buy additional water beyond your need demand, with the extra water being considered a desired demand (as in your example of what various children are willing to pay for gummy bears, very much a desired good, although I had intended to illustrate them as a need demand), or 'luxury' purchase, not a need.
Regardless, the amount purchased is the consumption, which as I have already illustrated is not necessarily the same as the quantity demanded.
You can only consume so much water at a time. Later, you will need more, no matter how much you have consumed in the present.
Likewise, it is difficult to carry or store any "excess" purchased water without either further expenditure (such as hiring someone to carry it for you) or difficulty.
In addition, if the extra water were purchased for "future use", then it is still a needed good as it would then be satisfying a future need, and in this case the extra water would be considered stockpiled inventory.
Petroleum is a needed good, not a luxury item. Hence you see enormous inelasticity in its demand. It cannot be readily bought in excess, even if the price fell precipitously, for even the largest tank farm on earth will hold only very short duration's supply. You cannot simply "stock up" and bank it.
"Need" connotes something to do with human survival.
"Demand" denotes both a willingness AND AN ABILITY to buy goods in varying amounts at different prices.
The concepts are as different as night and day.
- It is not that easy and is becoming harder with time
- Because they want to maintain the high prices and as you say profit from it more in the future
For political reasons I expect them to change this behavior if oil spikes for some reason.I compared the price action of oil since August 2005 to that of gold and silver to see what the numbers tell us.
Gold
August '05- $445
April '06- $725 (high price) 63% advance from August
June 15 '06- $575 (interim low price) 26% retracement from the high
Current Price- $628 9% advance from the interim low
Silver
August '05- $7
May '06 - $14.90 (high price) %112 advance from August
June 15 '06- $9.50 (interim low price)44% retracement from the high
Current Price-$12.20 26% advance from the interim low
Oil
August '05- $67
July '06- $78 (high price) 16% advance
Current price- $73 8% retracement from the high
(interim low?)
The price action of these 3 commodities has been similar over the past year but oils price movement has been much more muted than that of the gold & silver markets. This indicates to me that while there is a speculative force involved in oils price action , the price is more a function of basic supply & demand than investment speculation.
I think this conclusion is logical because the global oil market in terms of $'s exchanged is huge compared to that of the gold and silver market and less susceptible to the daily push /pull provided by commodities traders.
IMHO, If the price of oil was as sensitive to trading sentiment as gold and silver are we would see much greater price swings than we currently are.
http://cbs4.com/topstories/local_story_227132606.html
Did we really go?
c'mon Tate,,i know you're kidding,,but don't open the door to get that started
It's not likely we are going back without Nuclear Fusion or "Zero Point energy"?
So it might as well be fiction.
Ahhh...so many childhood dreams gone. Over population sucks...if only Hawkins could finds us a planet to go to and a way to get there. Doh...more fantasy.
Sorry to be dreary, a bit down today.
=========It's all about population!
http://www.badastronomy.com (although site seems to have temporary problem, try a bit later)
very nice site, also has critiques of all the impossible plots and devices in famous SciFi films, debunking of astrology and more
I've seen it happen, with a friend's Starsky & Hutch tapes. S&H was one of the first shows to come out after VCRs came on the market. They were wicked expensive, and not everyone could afford them, but some did. So the '70s was when TV shows first started to be recorded and saved by viewers.
S&H, being a '70s show, was very colorful. But by 1990, the tapes were not. They were all muddy brown. Still watchable, but noticeably drab and dull.
When they finally started airing the show again (presumably with new tapes made from the original film), the difference was eye-searing.
There is some soul that has been tasked with archiving junk NASA's produces from the rovers to tapes, so wouldn't they quickly backup the only proof of this footage? When the original account is lost for whatever reason, nothing truly replaces it. We know all about ancient civilizations, but to this day nothing survived as to why Stonehenge was built for. There's tons of plausible reasons with astronomical associations, but nothing survived to say this is how we did it and why. The only original space footage that says we landed on the moon is "lost" so other than everyone telling me it happened what proof do I have since I wasn't alive? End of stream of consciousness or stream of rambling depending on perspective....
The missing tapes are of interest for historical, not scientific, reasons.
They also lent them to a museum to display.
Would they do that if they carried irreplaceable scientific data? Of course not. Heck, I make backup copies of my favorite movies before lending them out.
Unlike with digital formats, you cannot make a copy as good as the original. Every copy will be slightly degraded from the original. Each generation will be lower-resolution than the last.
But as far as conspiracy theories go...why does it matter? If NASA produced the tape tomorrow, how would you know it was "real," and not shot on a Hollywood movie set? Or a copy, falsely claimed to be real?
IOW...if NASA is set on fooling us all, why would they even admit the tape was missing?
You could analyze the video in all the places that you can't see. You need to analyze the guts of the film, etc. I really don't think it was faked, I just believe there are irregularites that have remained due to the nature of space travel. However, space is far different than what we understand here so the same rules don't apply up there. That misunderstanding creates an opportunity to exploit ignorance.
"Armstrong's famous space walk, seen by millions of viewers on July 20, 1969, is among transmissions that NASA has failed to turn up in a year of searching, spokesman Grey Hautaloma said."
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/14/space.tapes.reut/index.html
Here you go....This link is not from CNN (they don't offer transcripts of everything said on their broadcast), but it has the same info:
"This would obviously be a big disappointment to Nafzger and the rest of NASA. The tapes contained the highest resolution images of the moon landing in existence. Because NASA's space video system was incompatible with broadcast standards, it retransmitted the live images to the world by pointing a standard television camera at a TV screen, offering lower quality video still available today.
"It was pretty good, but nowhere near as good as we can do today with the digital technology we could use on the original tapes to convert it to broadcast TV," he noted.
If the tapes are located and still in good condition, we might finally see the moon's surface almost as Neil Armstrong saw it."
http://voanews.com/english/2006-08-15-voa79.cfm
If you want to blame someone for this state of affairs then look in a mirror (unless you are not a US citizen) because the people that you sent to Washington are the ones that put NASA in the budget situation in which it finds itself today.
It gets worse: the only machine in existence that can play those tapes was going to be decomissioned in a year.
Information survives by copying. Die copyright die.
Copyright proponents would have us reinvent the wheel every few decades, or better yet, liscense the "technology" and pay royalties every time we used it.
the problem i see with these things is that anything contrary to what the government says is labeled as a conspiracy theory/theorist and then promptly ignored.
the end result is they all get lumped together preventing people from rationally looking at each and judging them by a case to case basis. This makes it extremely easy to prove conspiracy theorists wrong because they purposely frame the debate in such a manner that they have to prove all of them right to make their case while the government or those defending them only have to prove them wrong once.
Personally the theory that we did not land on the moon is bull.
Did you ever see the security tape of the lab when all the physicists who made the miscalculation on that probe were fighting? It looked like the cast from Revenge of the Nerds acting out a saloon fight from an old western.
Matt
I would love to see this video!
So this is one controversy that will ultimately be solved.
I would be curios to know how powerful this telescope truly is.
What the public SAW(You and I) was the image that came from a TV Camera pointed at the Monitor at the space agency. Grainy, Sketchy etc.
The ORIGINAL was HIGH quality.
Just heard it on NPR(US public Radio) from the engineer who was there. The tape was stored somewhere and he is trying to find it. He's 80 something now.
"It was stored somewhere" my vision is the last scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark and his crate being stored at a gov. site.
Yes the US of A via NASA really did land on the moon. Just go and ask one of the astronomers who has measured the distance from the moon to the earth with a laser.
Why? Because they bounce the laser off an array that was set up by Apollo astronauts.
try:
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/ApolloLaser.html
Wikipedia has an exhaustive article about the whole hoax thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_moon_landing_hoax_accusations
cheers,
BadOS
The promo consisted of a clip from the "Mad Max" movie. The intro was taken from End of Suburbia, with audio clips of Kunstler and Heinberg.
Megan said that we are probably at the half way point for conventional oil reserves, and that we should hope for the best while planning for the worst. Tyson said if we hadn't peaked, we were certainly close, and he listed a list of actions.
John Stossel said that "Megan's Group" thought that we had peaked in 1970, and that we have lots of coal and nuclear energy sources. He said that as prices go up, lots of new energy sources will be brought on line. His clincher--in response to Tyson's point that lots of our oil comes from unfriendly places--was that Shell estimates that the Canadian Tar Sands alone have enough oil to supply the US for 100 years.
Note that we had all of the elements of the Iron Triangle: A media guy, Stossel, quoting a major oil company source, Shell, while advertisements, largely by the auto/housing/finance group, ran between the segments.
The net result was to reassure Americans that they can and should proceed with their plans to buy a SUV to commute to and from their suburban mortgages.
"Iron Triangle" Explanation: http://www.energybulletin.net/15126.html
Economist Magazine reports Saudi oil production can continue unabated
August 14, 2006
Excerpt:
In its August 10 edition, The Economist magazine asserts that Saudi Arabia can continue producing oil at its current production levels for 70 years, without having to look for another drop. Further, the magazine claims that the nation could find "plenty more if they look", calling for privitisation of national oil companies to help increase oil production.
The language is provocative - the world has plenty of oil, and only requires sufficient investment and exploration to find it. This is a line that The Economist has held for some time, certainly since before its now infamous March 1999 issue proclaiming that we were "drowning in oil" and featuring a prediction of US$5 per barrel. That issue was followed by an embarrassing retraction in December of that year, as oil started its steady climb. It now sits above US$70 per barrel.
That is my thing. Why bother to argue with people that the supply is going to go down. Just ask them where the increase is going to come from as the world demand keeps growing and growing.
And yes, I usually get the answer that "science" will figure it out...forever and ever...and we will never have to stop growing.
Rick D.
1.02^70 = 3.999
3.99*85MBPD = 339.96
339.96*365 = 124GB/yr
hmmmm...
Note: I do find value in good economists but they seem to be few and far between.
Some of economics is science, much of it is not.
BTW, most economists hate and despise sociologists, because sociologists say that we do what we do pretty much because of sociological variables such as norms and values and social institutions such as family and religion and roles and statuses and forms of social control. Economists postulate rational humans, and it is from this axiom that mainstream economics gets into humongous trouble.
For example, most (not all) economists say that the goal of a corporation is to maximize profits. O.K., then explain corporations in the airline industry;-)
The best sociologists, such as Max Weber, take economics seriously, and the best economists, such as Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon, do not fall into the mainstream errors. Milton Friedman is much more of a sociologist than most people give him credit for--see for example the readable book, "Capitalism and Freedom" that he wrote in collaboration with his economist wife, Rose.
The original Economist article (here) says:
Pay attention to the hedge words ("likely") and actor-unspecified language (who exactly "will be able to pump at the present rate" and pump what? water?) I can keep the world "supplied" all by myself also. Just dole out a drop a year from my fictitious oil can (my proved reserves). It won't match demand. But it will keep the world "supplied".
I mean, how the heck can a TV producer turn down an opportunity like that, given that PO folks do believe that stuff?
The problem is not with us, it's with Scarborough Country. That show is only one step up from Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh.
Next time, we should send the most "out there" doomer we have. At least it will get people's attention. If that's the idea, then Roscoe Bartlett types aren't going to cut it.
I would also argue that doomers don't give the PO movement a bad name. Most of us don't try to convince anyone about anything. What does give PO a bad name is the lack of a consistent view within the community of what the data show, i.e., sharp peak, undulating plateau, rapid decline, slow decline, timing, etc. Further, there really isn't a consensus as to the proper approach to transitioning away from FFs and whether it is feasible in reality, especially considering the Hirsch Report.
You know, you're probably right. The right-wing spin machine knows this, and uses it to great advantage. It doesn't matter what you say, as long as you keep saying it. If you're consistent, people will believe you are correct.
Unfortunately, reality is messier than that. I'm reminded of the early days of "creation science" movement. With evolution under attack, some scientists suggested that the best thing to do was rally around the most conservative, mainstream flavor of Darwin's theory. "Just until this blows over."
Probably would have been good PR, but would have been terrible science.
Some might call that "on message" and some might call it media discipline. I call it Stalinism. Interesting the best Stalinists are now the Republicans.
Unless you count those who think everything is explained by the market and scream when you tell them that that's a political position.
We have a bit of common ground there.
For what it's worth, I don't think consensus has to mean a single percent rate of depletion. It be as simple as saying "estaimtes from oil industry experts(*) range from X to Y percent, and naturally people looking at the higher percentages see more dire outcomes."
* - i know, groan.I have run a number of local political campaigns and so my comments are from the persuasions perspective. Much is in how things are framed.
In my thinking about this -- The immutable fact is that oil is a finite resource and WILL be depleted. The question is when.
So when I try to talk to people about it, I say that... and then go on to say that no matter when it is, we better be taking steps now to deal with the inevitable dislocation that will come with decreasing supplies of cheap oil and then all oil. And try to convince them that what could that hurt to be prepared.
I think a lot of people want to do the right thing, but no one is telling them what to do. I try to ease them into it with suggestions on conservation, etc. The whole scenario is further complicated by Climate Change and the interconnectedness of the two issues. With so many people scientifically illiterate it is an uphill climb (particularly when they care more about the American Idol that life on this planet.)
Often the stuff I read here is quibbling about trees and missing the forest.
And I am not ready to learn how to skin a deer and tan his hide to make clothes as one poster suggested... I expect that the clothes that currently hang in my closet will last me until I die if they have to. Just because there is peak oil doesn't mean that all the things we have just disappear.
So there you have a laywoman's view.
so how are you going to teach your kids and grand-kids. your cloths may last as long as you live but how are you going to cloth them?
hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
you should at least learn to do it so you can show your kids how to supplement their tattered clothing that was made by children in china and shipped overseas.
and in my opinion a sidetrack that detracts from the deadly seriousness of the issue.
What each of us has does not just disappear and it doesn't disappear overnight.
No kids or grandkids, but I would first teach them to knit and weave before skinning.
either way my point stands, go out and learn now because you will not be able to later. chances are the people in your area that already will know might die during what will happen during the collapse or the library you have been meaning to get the information might be ransacked for fuel during a cold winter.
Only if you're running. Each of these examples is like a frenetic, running scared response to 'what if I lose this?', 'what if that's suddenly gone?', which only supports her point.
She's not advocating a passive, sit by and wait response, but one that says you do have to stop, look carefully at the whole scene, and really think about which actions and preparations you really have to enact, while the last-minute crowd is fighting over the peanut butter tubs and ammo.
True enough, unless stolen or we have to move quickly and leave some things behind. Although I hope things here don't get that bad, "prepare for the worst...." I currently work in the "Yacht Management" business and when I'm doing hands-on work my clothes can wear out pretty fast...could be more manual labor in the future for many of us too.
As part of my PO preparation, with the idea that this business might not be around if the economy gets real bad and with "essential needs" (food-shelter-clothing) in mind, I recently purchased a heavy duty sewing machine and am learning to sew boat canvass. Might be a useful skill if there's less yacht work and more clothing/tent work down the road. In the meantime, I have a new hobby.
Best,
Brad
On the other hand, everybody and her sister-in-law seems to want to become a sail maker. It is a noble profession, but from those sail makers I've known there is no money in it except at the very very top echelon's of sail makers for the most elite racing yachts.
On the other hand, if you can sew awnings, sail covers, biminis, etc., then you may have a good trade.
Actually, it was Nate and me. I spent a weekend there, but Nate spent a whole week with him. I am hoping Nate finds time to write something up.
http://vtcommons.org/node/551
As she says,
It's harder to post "kick-me" signs on those who lead by example.
IMO the main thing that came through was that when she was presented with the stick and mud houses and composting toilet crowd, she wouldn't separate them from peak oil. She allowed the suggestion to stand that those were the peak oil believers.
It would have been more affected to say "A lot of people are attracked to the peak oil cause, but peak oil is not simply a hippie or survivalist movment. Congressmen, investment bankers [...] find realistic concerns in peak oil."
Frankly, I'm in the stick and mud houses crowd, not because passing peak demands it, but because the momentum and strength of our current cultural values make any significant accomodation for a reduced energy consumption lifestile extremely unlikely. It isn't the lack of oil that will take us to S&M houses, but the cultural and social conflagrations we will go through as we try to avoid the reality.
In my book, anyone who is looking for a "solution" to PO is barking up the wrong tree. PO is not the central issue - the issue is the growth values that come intertwined with global capitalism.
Which the popularity of shows like Scarborough Country only reinforces...
Mankind has shown a hard-wired propensity for growth, in population (though this can show local and regional declines) but more importantly in per-capita consumption. There are precious few examples of per-capita consumption being reduced in the absence of resource shortages. This serves to swamp any mitigating effect of reduced population growth. Combine this aspect of human nature with a global economic system that has an exponential mechanism at its core, and you get gloomy predictions very quickly. It would be nice if it were just demon capitalism that is at fault, but I strongly believe the problem is more fundamental than that. Of course that doesn't speak against your argument that there is no "solution", but rather strengthens it.
Here I'll drop in another plug for William Catton's remarkable book "Overshoot". He makes an utterly persuasive case that the problem is so intrinsic that no amount of fiddling at the edges will improve our prospects.
As for the condition of "human nature" I'm afraid you may have succombed to western enlightenment version of history where we move from Hobbes "state of nature" to civilization. The fact is our ancestors survived quite nicely for 90,000 plus years without a growth ethic. Sure they were poor by our present standards - but isn't that the point?
Economists know that GDP does not measure human well-being; economists know that and admit it. The main reason to focus on GDP is because of the close link between growth in real GDP and growth in employment.
In societies where income is tied to personal production, then GDP will continue to be a key concept. However, as there are more and more transfer payments (as we find in all advanced countries, such as those in Europe and the U.S. and Canada), then the link between income and production is weakened and stretched.
Hey, I don't work. But I get a decent income because society has set it up that way--fine with me, and there is nothing wrong with me going to Jamaica or Tortola for a sailing vacation from Social Security and Teachers Retirement Association pension income. The problem of income distribution is closely linked to almost all other core questions in economics and sociology.
The only consensus position I can find in the PO community is that there will be a production peak at some point. Beyond that, all bets are off.
I maintain that due to what the Club of Rome calls the "world problematique" we are in for a very hard time. Humanity is facing a multidimensional set of challenges, all of them intertwined, and all of them having the simple notion of population growth at their root. "Solving" the oil linkage doesn't address any of the dozen or so other problems, though solving it is of course preferable to not solving it. IMO an ecological perspective is essential to understanding what's going on, which is why I keep plugging Catton.
(to tell me about "peak energy" you'd have to be able to tell me about the final EROEI of thin film, nanotech, or concentrator solar cells, 50 years out.)
That's not the same as saying we'd be out of the woods, but if we could successfully transition away from petroleum we'd at least be able to turn our attention and energies to any of the other dozen potential civilization-busters lurking in the wings.
Do we have a consensus on this?
if we could successfully transition away from petroleum we'd at least be able to turn our attention and energies to any of the other dozen potential civilization-busters lurking in the wings.
Well said...
But this is precisely where it hurts, "any of the other dozen potential civilization-busters" !
The true problems are population, growth and diminishing returns.
Peak oil is only the most pressing problem right NOW (short of GW which is a somewhat different kind of beast).
Even stabilizing population and growth is no guarantee against the vicious side effects of the "low hanging fruit" preference.
John Browne himself admits this preference :
Companies work by prioritising what they do. They take the easiest steps first - picking the low hanging fruit - and then they move on to tackle the more difficult and complex problems. That is the natural business process.
Why not looking for a more general approach?
Having to chase next for the "other dozen potential civilization-busters" will only be more hellish than peak oil (due to the very efforts and ressources used to "solve" peak oil).
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate.
You have to be a little careful with that example. I don't think many people want to emulate the Japanese economic experience over the last decade. We could say the same thing about Russia, or even Europe. Their consumption has fallen, or not grown, but their economies have collapsed and not shown that much growth, respectively.
I agree with your point, but the choice of examples is difficult when people assume greater growth is automatically better.
I don't think there's even a consensus that energy growth is a bad thing, although it's a common idea.
The only consensus is that fossil fuel growth is a bad thing.
All of these will continue in the absence of fossil fuels if we simply replace our energy sources. In the long run, the main problem that fossil fuels cause is global warming. However, even if we get a handle on that there is still plenty of ecological devastation to go around, simply due to our numbers, and our consumption imperative.
And I agree that finding a whole new solar system would be an expensive solution to the problem ;-)
Exactly, Peak Water soon!
Cost of water shortage: civil unrest, mass migration and economic collapse
Of course given the names in the study (Shell, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Cargill) I expect the conspirationist minded to howl "scare propaganda" but nevertheless...
On the question of stable human societies, I would argue that they are an example of climax communities that are inherently limited by the energy available in their environments. As such they will exhibit a constant rate of excess births and excess deaths. As people move into more energy-rich environments, or learn to exploit energy sources previously unused, they have always always grown both population and consumption to the limits of their new circumstances.
And yes, lemurs and bobcats follow the same laws. All species will grow if the excess death rate is reduced, because they all exhibit excess births to compensate for such things as accidental deaths, resource scarcity and predation. It's a survival mechanism that results in rapid population growth if the excess death rate is reduced. Humanity is in no way different, no matter how much pride we might take in our exceptional reasoning ability.
I'm talking about fertility rates, of course, not absolute growth rates, but fertility rates tell you about people's ability to choose not to have children, and eventually will reduce absolute growth rates.
" the fact that our overall, global fertility rate continues to rise in lock-step with our food supply"
Fertility rates are falling, not rising.
This rate has been relentlessly dropping for the last 50 years (It peaked after WWII in large part because of the introduction of public health practices in the 3rd world which suddenly dropped infant and child mortality rates). It was around 5 for the whole world. In 1992 it was 3.0, and in 2000 it was 2.8, and in 2005 it was 2.6. It's expected to drop below replacement relatively soon for the whole world. At that point absolute growth will continue because of a demographich overhang: a large young generation which which will replace itself, after which in about 2050 total population is likely to hit around 9 billion, and start falling.
The US is right at 2.1, and would be pretty stable if not for immigration. Japan is at about 1.4 IIRC, and is expected to start falling in 2007 in absolute numbers (the Japanese are kind've alarmed: their longevity continues to increase, and their birthrate continues to fall. They hate the idea of immigration, but they like early retirement - something has to give. Probably the early retirement, which is not so bad).
I meant to say:
"Overall, global fertility rates are falling, not rising."
I'd add, the've dropped from about 5, post WWII, to about half of that (2.6), and show every sign of dropping to replacement of 2.1 and continuing to fall below that. That's what has happened basically everywhere in the world except Africa and the ME.
China is at or below replacement fertility rate. India is still above, though some regions have gone below.
Africa and ME is perhaps 15% of the world's population. Their still-high numbers are countered by even lower numbers elsewhere.
http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/wpp2004.htm
China, IIRC, is 1.7 due to forced sterilization for many years. India is above replacement rate, and will pass China by 2050. FWIW, the "medium" UN projection of approximately 9 billion by 2050 scares the hell out of me, given the resource depletion and environmental destruction we've seen with 6.5 billion.
why? it's statistics statistics can easily be made to always come out in favor of what you say, all you have to do is control how many people you survey, who you survey, or how you survey.
If we were able to stop all further births and maintain our population at 6.5 billion for the next 25 years, would that help our predicament significantly?
Well, what I'm trying to get at is that the "overshoot" model assumes that birth rates never fall (until malnutrition, perhaps), and that death rates rise at the end due to resource constraints. In fact, we have falling birth rates due to conscious decisions, and falling death rates. Completely the opposite of the overshoot model.
Why is this important? Because the overshoot model suggests that our growth is out of control and will stop only due to coercion by resource limits, when the facts suggest that it is in some sense under our control, and that growth is slowing due to reasons entirely unrelated to "overshoot".
"If we were able to stop all further births and maintain our population at 6.5 billion for the next 25 years, would that help our predicament significantly? "
Thats's a whole different question, and could be phrased as: While humanity may have put the brakes on population growth for reasons unrelated to resource limits of growth, is it possible that we've done so too late?
That's a good question. I think the answer is clearly "No, if we handle things properly", but that's a big if. It's clear that we have our work cut out for us, and no time to waste.
Do you mean to ask: "Would aggressive pop control measures be a good idea?"?
As to "Are we in overshoot?", my understanding is that overshoot isn't defined by birth and death rates, but by current population level relative to long-term carrying capacity. In other words, I believe that a population can be in overshoot before the essential resource is exhausted, and this can come about either through continuous population growth or continuous overconsumption of the resource. As soon as you know that a scarce, unsubstitutable resource can limit or reverse the population's growth you are in overshoot. Once the resource limit bites, you are onto the crash side of the curve as opposed to the growth side.
While we haven't hit the resource limit yet, we do know that one will probably occur. The fact that we face multiple potential resource limits of which oil is just the closest and most drastic makes the probability of hitting "a" resource limit much closer to 1. That makes it overshoot as I understand it.
I think the answer is clearly yes. I think it might be helpful to come to a consensus on this, as some posters on TOD seem to think otherwise.
Now as to the question of whether we are in overshoot as you define it: that's what I was trying to address in my second thing about whetther it's too late. I guess I simply say I'm more hopeful than that.
No.
How can we come to a consensus when there's clearly strong disagreement on the issue?
Population growth worldwide is slowing, but it is not ending. Having three kids instead of four is not the end of population growth.
Moreover, I think peak oil will unwind many of the factors that led to the slowing growth rate. If people are forced to go back to farming, suddenly kids will be free labor again, instead of a burden.
Even in China, rural families are exempt from the one-child policy.
All true, except that their policies are not caused by hitting a resource wall, but by the chinese planning in order to avoid hitting a resource wall. Those two things are very different: they demonstrate people are not yeast, that they plan ahead and don't just grow until resource constraints stop them by raising death rates.
It's conceivable that it's too late to avoid hitting a catastrophic wall, but we're definitely not yeast.
"Population growth worldwide is slowing, but it is not ending. "
If you define it as exponential growth with no end in sight, it actually is ending. See my other posts in this drumbeat.
Yes, the general consensus in the public health/population planning community is that population growth is likely to continue, at gradually falling rates, for another 40 years or so.
Something I don't understand about this overshoot:
6.5 billion is a big number, people cite that as "proof" that we are in overshoot, as if it is self-evident.
Well I think that 500 million is a big number. The people who call it overshoot might have said the same thing if we were at 500 milloin people. Who know's what number is too much. I can come up with some other big numbers:
How many square metres is the surface of the earth - a lot - does that mean it is to big?
How many insects are there on the planet? More than people, probably. Does that mean the insect population is also in overshoot?
I think for overshoot to have any credibility, you have to come up with a credible, objective way of measuring what is the capcity of a planet? I think that is almost impossible to do, so presumably people who call it overshoot are just talking bla, bla, bla?
Can anyone here derive the capacity of the planet from a set of sensible objective starting principles?
If you would really like to get a quantitative look at the situation regarding humans, take a look at the first three chapters of the book "Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update". In them you will find your request addressed explicitly, with all the assumptions, techiques and numbers laid out for your delectation.
If you are interested in being able to do any critique beyond a drive-by, I'd recommend the book as presenting a dispassionate, objective and above all quantitative look at the question of overshoot.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/193149858X/103-8763986-5949409?v=glance&n=283155
... add 'em up and I think there is a global overshoot going on. It's just an open question in my mind whether that leads to a more monochrome future with increasingly reduced biodiversity, or a genuine crash.
Try it, you'll like it.
Why not?
Because Malthus was right. Look at Bangladesh or Pakistan or most African countries--mass misery primarily because of overpopulation.
The ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle thought that population policy was of prime importance to good and sustainable societies (by which they meant city-states).
In ancient Rome, proletarians got their name because of fertility. Having lots of kids makes your society poor. Ask any Bangladeshi. The tragedy of the commons is that the way incentives are set up in agricultural societies it may benefit a family to have many (poor) children so that each can contribute a pittance to the support of their elderly (i.e. over about age forty-five) parents.
What would be an ideal population for the earth? Based on contemporary technology I'd say that it would be far below five hundred million--possibly as low as fifty million. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating mass murder and genocide, but in terms of human flourishing I see almost no advantages (and many disadvantages) to a large human population. And by "large" I mean any population much above the relatively stable population of homo sapiens that the earth supported rather well during the first ninety-eight percent (or thereabouts) of the time humans were on this planet.
Imagine what a paradise China could be with only ten or twenty million people. Now it is a pit, and rapidly getting worse in terms of environmental destruction. For China, population stability came much too late.
Will the human population crash? I do not know, and neither does anybody else. But the larger the population (above rather low levels), the greater is the likelihood of a crash. Even without a crash, mass misery based on overpopulation is increasing every single decade, and the probability of this trend being reversed is slim to none.
Although Malthus got some details wrong, in essence he was correct.
Holland, Japan, Hong Kong, Britain.
Oh yeah... these coutries are really suffering as a result of over population. BS.
BTW, I believe Taiwan should be on your list of prosperous and densely populated countries.
What happens when the cheap fossil fuels stop flowing??????
Huh?
Another case of selective blindness/selective dumbness.
Did you READ Don's reply?
BTW, another amateur for "dialectics" :
not making any assertions about what happens when oil runs out.
Making a diversion on the main argument (dense populations not sustainable on a LOCAL basis) by switching to a subsidiary point.
This seems to be everyone's favorite trick.
They only exist(as someone pointed out) because of input from other areas.
I could appear to be "Economically" prospering if you look at a very short period of time while I run up my credit card. If you don't include what will happen to me when the bill comes due. I might not look so "Economically" properous.
It's just that the whole world has been living on it's Petroleum "Credit Card" for a hundred years.
Well, The bill is in the mail and will need to be paid.
Holland, etc will not look so properous when they have to pay up. And not "Borrow" any more.
JC
Sure.
What happens when the cheap fossil fuels stop flowing??????
They switch to renewables. I'm not saying it's easy, or guaranteed, but it is possible.
Again, Deffeyes: "there are plenty of energy sources other than fossil fuels. Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem. The bind comes during the next 10 years: getting over our dependence on crude oil."
The city of New York imports food. It's not a problem in a complex economy.
I agree that in a complex, energy cheap world this is not a problem, simply buy it elsewhere and have it transported. But that seems problematic in a future setting.
according to this http://web-japan.org/trends00/honbun/tj000604.html
"Japan used to maintain quite a high self-sufficiency rate on a calorific supply base; in fiscal 1960 it was 79%, about the same as that of Britain now."
The article says that in 2000 Japan grew about 40% of it's food, and suggests that much of the decrease was due to switching from rice to meat.
Yes, Japan will be in for a hard time if food transportation becomes difficult due to energy shortages.
I would think that Hong Kong and Holland are pretty close to their food suppliers, and that transportation to them wouldn't take much energy.
I don't know specifically how much energy water transportation takes. Anyone?
I understand that oil depletion has very important and difficult effects. I made two points completly unrelated to oil depletion:
- I don't think anyone is able to calculate the capacity of the planet given it is such a complex system - again, we can't even get the weather forecasts right.
- A high population density has not historically led to a poor economic outcome. I would suggest it may actually be the opposite historically.
So why is everyone responding to me as if I had made any assertions about oil depletion?I agree with you there, and have stated as much. We don't know the carrying capacity. We "feel" that we are in overshoot, but who knows exactly what the capacity will be in 50 years?
On the question of whether anyone is able to forecast carrying capacity, you state an opinion. How much investigation have you done on the work that is being performed on this question?
I gave you a pointer above to the new version of Limits To Growth, in which the authors describe their extensive efforts to quantify this exact measure. They attempt this in full and explicit recognition of the complexity of the system. Nonetheless, they have been able to satisfy themselves that such a measure is achievable, though obviously with error bars that vary between the incorporated subsystems. Their position is that at the beginning of this millenium humanity had probably overshot the earth's carrying capacity by about 20%. You may disagree with their conclusion, but not if you haven't read their description of how they arrived at that number. To simply say "I don't think anyone is able to calculate the capacity of the planet" doesn't cut it. People have calculated it, so you need to deal with their analysis if you wish to remain intellectually honest.
On your second question of whether high population densities lead to poor economic outcomes, it all depends on whether a densely populated country has been able to exploit "ghost acreage" either in other countries (through trade or empire) or by using their own natural resources either domestically or as trade goods. Countries that can trade or that have high levels of resources (especially renewable resources) can tolerate high levels of population for long periods in relative comfort. Countries without those advantages cannot. The problem is that the global per capita ghost acreage is declining as the population rises, since most usable land area is now occupied and the seas are now fully exploited.
I strongly urge you to read at least "Limits to Growth" and William Catton's "Overshoot" if you wish to be able to make comments that are more than just an expression of your own opinion.
"1. increase the consumption levels of the world's poor
This is not the case when they are speaking personally. Here's Dennis Meadows at ASPO-5, for example:
He really doesn't sound that optimistic, does he? In fact, he kind of sounds like a doomer.
No, he doesn't. hmmmhhh....
He does say that "collapse is not inevitable", but then he says " it will very tough to avoid."
Not completely pessimistic, but really, really not optimistic.
OTOH, he says "There is no possibility that alternative energy sources will rise fast enough to offset the decline in oil", and that statement is clearly not true. It's certainly possible that alternatives will not rise fast enough, but I can find no good support anywhere for such a flatout pessimistic statement (I've discussed this elsewhere - If you'd like, we can discuss it further). I think it likely that renewables will not rise fast enough to prevent serious global warming( and I would agree that global warming is likely to be very destructive), but I don't think that's what he's talking about - he seems to be talking about economic overshoot and collapse, in part caused by peak oil. If he believes such a flat statement he clearly hasn't done his homework (I'm assuming he doesn't present himself as an independent energy specialist with information no one else has, but rather as a generalist who is integrating other people's work). As oil appears to be a key element of his analysis, I have to conclude that his analysis is flawed and his outlook is overly pessimistic.
I would be curious what the official LTG statements are about energy.
5% of current oil production is a bit over 4 Mbpd, or 1.5 billion barrels over the first year. To replace all the energy of that 1.5 billion barrels of oil we would need to put online over 2 trillion KWH of replacement energy. This of course then needs to be done every year thereafter to retain Business As Usual.
Now most of this oil is used for fuel, so the actual work done is much less than the raw energy available, duue to processing, delivery and mechanical losses. OTOH, if you are going to switch all that fuel consumption over to electric, biodiesel or alcohol-fueled vehicles, there will be serious energy losses incurred on that side of the equation as well. For now let's use a nice generous fudge factor. Let's say we need to replace only half the energy - 1 trillion KWH - and see where that gets us.
First we look at wind.
Global installed nameplate wind power is expected to go from 59 GW to about 210 GW over the next 8 years. Assuming linear growth that's around 20 GW of nameplate capacity per year. Given a 25% capacity factor, that gives an annual addition of (20*0.25*365*24) = 45625 GWH, or .05 trillion KWH. That's only 5% of what will be needed.
On the solar side, Greenpeace estimates that there will be 280 TWH of solar generating capacity onlune by 2020. That gives us 20 TWH, or .02 trillion KWH per year. That's just 2% of what's needed to cover a 1 trillion KWH decline.
Hydro will add very little, because most suitable sites are altready in use.
So, using the current growth projections of both solar and wind, we can plug 7% of the gap created by a 5% decline in oil production. Biofuel has too many problems to add more than 1% per year over the medium term, so that leaves nuclear power to pick up the slack. And of course nuclear power isn't renewable.
And of course this thumbnail analysis doesn't even address the probable peak of NG, which will affect the production of plastics and fertilizers. So, unless we can increase our production of solar and wind capacity by 15 times in the very near future, I think Meadows is entirely justified in his position.
If you're interested in LTG's "official" position on energy, I'd strongly urge you to buy the book. It's a very worthwhile investment.
First, my thought about Meadows opinion is that he was making an unqualified statement. He didn't say "If oil supplies fall as quickly as some analysts think they might....", or "Oil supplies could fall so quickly that..." He said "There is no possibility...".
I think you'd agree that there is considerable disagreement over depletion rates and their timing. For instance, Westexas is pretty pessimistic, and AFAIK Stuart thinks we'll have a plateau for at least a few years. I believe ASPO thinks peak won't happen for about 3 years. What if all liquids rise slightly for 3 years, and are flat for another 2 years, and then decline at, say, 2% per year? My sense is that most TOD people would feel that was a little optimistic but not impossible, and it would have to be far, far worse than that to cause collapse. So for Meadows to make such a flat statement reduces his credibility.
Secondly, growth rates (and cost reductions) for wind and solar are exponential. That means that growth will be smaller in the short term, and greater in the long term. This means that if a oil crisis were to hit hard, very soon, that renewables could contribute very little - greater efficiency, conservation and recession (or depression, depending on the depth of the supply crisis) would be the responses. OTOH, I think your sources greatly underestimate the growth rates, and potential for wind and solar in roughly 10-15 years. The average installation you used for wind, for instance, was 20 GW per year worldwide, and yet in the US alone there is 11 GW planned for 2007 - see page 8 of http://www.nei.org/documents/Energy%20Markets%20Report.pdf
Realistically, I think greater efficiency, conservation, reduced economic growth and renewables are all going to happen. The mix is the interesting question, and it depends on how well government, private firms, and consumers react, and on depletion. If serious depletion (greater than 4% per year, say) hits sooner than, say, 10 years, then I would guess that we would probably have economic stagnation or recession for several years until alternatives can grow.
That was longer than I meant to write right now. I don't mean it to be complete, but I wanted to give you an answer right away. I'll try to write more later, with better numbers.
no.
any country that will willingly submit to this will automatically put it's self at a disadvantage compared to those country's who continue on as normal. a higher population still gives one country a very good advantage, more feet they can put on the ground in any military conflict. and as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon now proves even high technology is defeated by simple numbers of willing fighters.
In general, we are beginning to see the breakdown of the old system. Humans will transition to a more sustainable society simply because they have to. It doesn't have to entail mass die-off, but it may. The end result may well be a more spiritual society in which cooperation and wise use of resources is valued more than greed, growth, and acquisition.
Let's hope so, that would be nice to everyone living by those times.
But what about the transition?
- WHAT has to be changed?
- How much does this COSTS in money, energy, deaths?
ALL species animal or vegetal DO HAVE a "hard-wired propensity for growth" otherwise they would just NOT SURVIVE.
It happens that the "equilibrium with their ecology" is met by the action of predators or ressources shortage.
We have ressources shortage (peak oil and others) and are our own predators (Middle East & als).
What are you complaining about?
I don't believe you can have a climax community if there are significant detritus stockpiles in the niche. A climax community requires constancy in the resource base in order to match excess births with excess deaths on an ongoing basis.
Yes, humans can theoretically live in dynamic equilibrium, but we'll have to get rid of the cheap, easy oil first.
Absolutely correct. History begins when? Maybe 3000 years ago? You want 5000? Most humans, by raw population numbers have lived in historical times, most human societies are prehistorical. What we know about them is diddle.
What we think we know about "human nature" is imaginary. What the doomers know about our genetic hardwiring is an ideological flight of fancy.
Get learned!
Plus, how is this more "imaginary" than philosophical/religious so-called "wisdom"?
What the doomers know about our genetic hardwiring is an ideological flight of fancy.
Even "hard science" is a "flight of fancy" OUTSIDE the error margins.
Are you pretending you know better?
Please explain.
Conclusions:
Mixed economies based on varieties of welfare-capitalism may be viable in the long run. The jury is out here. Countries such as Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Germany offer grounds for hope.
Socialism in any of its varieties has never worked for more than fifty years--and where it has "worked" it has been at horrendous human and environmental cost. Take Cuba for example: Without its underground American dollar cash economy (highly capitalistic, e.g. among sex workers), the society would have come crashing down years ago. Only by tolerating a parallel capitalistic gray economy has Castro been able to hold onto power. This dual economy is striking and has divided Cuban society into two classes--those with access to dollars and those with none.
If by that statement you are referring to the imaginary communism of Plato or "Utopia," you are correct by definition.
But the Soviet Union and East Germany most emphatically did exist, and their devastation of the planet in the quest of rapid economic growth is not in question.
There are real differences in economic systems. Some are vile, such as that of the Soviets. Some are pretty good and seem capable of improvement, such as the mixed-capitalism country of Sweden, where most resources are privately owned but there is a strong twentieth century tradition of transfer payments based on high taxes.
I find it rather funny when Magnus Reddin complains of the imperfections in Swedish politics and society, because these are mere warts on a very healthy body. He may acknowledge that his government is far more efficient, effective and enlightened than in most other places, but he grumps mostly about relatively little things in his society.
BTW, I've always thought that a big reason for Sweden's success was that it exported most of its poor people and failures to Minnesota, where there descendants now dress up in traditional costumes, gorge on smorgasbrod (sp?) and dominate the economy and to some extent the politics of the best of the fifty states. (Incidentally, I have no Swedish ancestry that I know of, but the Swedish/Lutheran/Minnesotans tolerate me and other mongrels with "Minnesota nice.")
Yes they did. Your error is believing the propoganda that these were communist states. Your belief in this propoganda is further demonstrated by your labeling of the soviet economic system as "vile."
Apparently I didn't explain myself very well, because you didn't address what I thought was the core of my argument - that these other economic systems remain part of the global economy. The scandanavian economies are an excellent example. They have been able to do what they do largely because of the global economy, in essence carving out eddies in the global flow where they could weather the business cycle storms.
West Germany benefited mightily from the Marshall Plan, and East Germany suffered mightily from Soviet depredations, but even taking those factors into account, I do believe that the striking difference in development between East and West Germany speaks volumes.
Just look at the differences in insulation of buildings in East vs. West Germany--remarkable; in the East it was cheaper to burn more coal, while in the West more efficient building codes encouraged large amounts of insulation, better windows, etc. Also, the pollution in East Germany, Romania, etc. was something out of a nightmare, while by the sixties West Germany was actively cleaning up the environment. Take a look at the history of the Rhine River, and contrast that to what happened to major rivers in the Soviet Bloc.
Warts or tumors, they irritate a lot, especially when you can come to a logical conlusion about a lot of them being avoidable and notice that there are reasonable suggestions for action against them. If reasonable solutions then are tested and things incrementally get better you have a very healthy society and if it isent it will be within a generation or two.
Now we need to exercise our democracy in a comparision of ideas and I hope the extremely successfull idea of expanding government and government transfers of money has come to its end. So far I am fairly pleased with the public debate, it is so far on a higher and more constructive level then during the last elections.
To come thru the peak oil downslope in good order we need to shrink our government and make it more efficient while making it easier to start new businesses and get more efficient production of all kinds of state managed services. It will be a time of change when old business die and new can and must be started and if we dont handle that well we will become nedlessly poor. We wont be able to pay as manny bureaucrats, state or private, and there wont be as much money for people withouth a job or retirees. Our economy must encourage manny more of these people to work for each other for this to work out well. They have learnt that the state provides and it has more or less done so but now will manny of these resources disappear or be needed for investments in infrastructure and so on.
Isent there an expression "biting the bullet" for something like this? We need to get about 1/3 of our state to willingly commit organizational suicide. The current government have built some parts of the gun such as initiating a very extensive commision about consolidation of regional municipialities and so on and they state that 20% of the man hours used in private enterprise for handling official papers could be avoided but the have been unable to pull the trigger and fire manny party members, instead the increase in state size have continued. Independant think tanks suggest that about a 40% reduction is possible. The opposition dont dare to mention so high figures but have a death list for authorities that can be closed down or consolidated with other authorities.
Such drastic downsizings have been done in some extensive municipiality organizations setting some intresting examples.
The first generation were often called "buy and sell". The producing part of the municipality organization that for instance provided care of elderly people were organized as a separate company that also were separated from the buildings. The local politicians then acted as buyers making a service specification and having an open tender that the municiality producing organizations often lost. I am not good with exact figures but some parts of my own municipiality care of elderly function is now about 2/3 private with about half a dozen companies. Quality have been more or less unchanged from this but costs are way down. This also solved the problem of having two crowds of picketing people at the same time, one demanding higher pay and one demanding better service for the money or lower taxes. This even proved popular with the local socialist party politicians. The savings potential is probably exhausted now and it favors larger companies.
The second slightly newer is like the US liberal school check. If you need a public service you get a check valid for a large number of service providers and then you choose any of them. The very first experiment were for medical pedicure, almost zero bueraucracy and one skilled person can start a hole-in-the-wall shop. It worked very well and when peiople get a taste for it it gets popular among all parties members. Tomorrow I will campaign togeather with two other opposition parties and one of the main suggestions within our municipiality is to start using this system. The expectation is for it to not lower cost but get more quality for the money, provide niches for lots of new small companies and thus create jobs and strenghten the entrepreneur culture, get a better worker/bureucrate ratio and get people to become less socialistic in the way they think. And regarding peak oil it will be a generator of social capital and if things turn ugly and the tax money dry up much of it can function as a regular free market.
This will all get better if the governmnet election goes well from my point of view since I am sure we will respect the traditional but weakening municipiality political freedom more. Such experimentation as above have been severely limited by the socialist governmnet but not completely stopped. I am sure that we will provide more slack if they want to experiment in the municipialities where the socialists win. Especially since the properties tax will be made into a municipiality tax.
Things would be more cheerfull if I only cared about peak oil preparations since both sides have promised a lot and it is logical for them to deliver on these promises given the economical changes underway. If the election goes against me I have to worry about any greens closing another symbolic reactor and having a few thousend new buerocrats in half a dozen new authorities organizing the building of post peak oil infrastructure etc in an inefficient way.
I have another but related theory. The poorest did not move to USA, they could not afford it. We had back then in the early 1800:s a very well organized and backwards society withouth industrialization but a lot of old raw material exporting industries if you get the difference. The ruling class were well off, farmers were free as allways but most were poor. But other countries pulled way ahead of us and we more or less decided to industrialize as the Japanese did and copied the best we could find in England and most of all Germany including all this theoretical stuff about a free marker. The industrial era also provided ships to enbale mass migration to USA and this bled the country on a very lartge percentage of the population wich I think scared the powers that were and this gave a major boost for liberalism and then a light form of socialism. We absolutely had to make it better to stay here then move to USA. I dont know if we succeeded or if you closed your borders.
I got a feeling that we are entering the same kind of era as about 150 years ago. We must make our state run better again and this time it is not for the population leaving but for a tragic waste of personal potential among the jobless and for the end of the oil era.
Btw, Finland is better run then Sweden and Denmark has made a good job with reorganizing and consolidating authorities. we used to be the best dammit. ;-)
Magnus, I think you are correct to focus on the gap between the ideal and the real, between good and better, but I do wish you would travel to the U.S. or any Latin American country or even to Russia to see how badly really bad government can screw up a society.
Do you live in Utopia? Of course not. But you live in a good society that has the potential to get much better.
The U.S. is living off its moral capital, and we are just about at the bottom of the barrel. Our public educational systems from kindergarten through twelfth grade are almost unmitigated disasters. Our health care system is shamefully unfair. Racial hatred and religious bigotry are widespread in the U.S. and possibly getting worse. We have relatively little support for public transportation (though that may be changing a little bit). The cars we manufacture are mostly low-quality compared to what Volvo and Saab put on the market. I could go on . . . .
There are a large number of Swedes who envy the US culture for integrating immigrants. It seems like it takes generations over here and we are quite clumsy when different groups start or continue hating each other. The basic Swedish behaviour seems to be the same as for sound or crazy neighbours, their busienss is not my business and as long as they dont do anything very stupid I dont care about what they do and ignore them. This makes it very tough to get into Swedish society, businesses and so on even if you have large freedoms in being whoever you want to be. This did not stop xenophobia, gayophobia, etc but when those battles were fought in the western culture it seems to have been easy victoriers in Sweden or have perhaps only given larger do-as-you-please-while-I-ignore-you zones. The intellectual trend of multu-culture fits in this pattern untill it crosses borders that dont budge and we for instance get a rucus about the tradition of cutting labia and sometimes more of females. I am definately sure that our culture sometimes is superior.
There is no recipie for making cultural Swedes out of immigrants but sometimes we have some luck. This hot summer has immigrants everywhere fancied taking a bathe or swim in the numerous lakes. This were reported in news media as a problem due to all the drownings. But if they go swimming in summer and perhaps even sign up for a course to learn to swim they are well on their way even if they swim in muslim style clothes.
I think or rather hope I have seen some signs of secularisation. If we get sizable groups who insist on imposing new strict religious values on everybody besides themselves I think we will strect as a rubber band for about two generations and accommondate that and then bounce back with all hell breaking loose.
Some problems seems to parallell each other. The crime rates are higher in areas with manny immigrants. The worst part since it eats social capital is bully and hate crimes mostly among young immigrants but also against non immigrants. Its hard to do something about it and some of the reaction is tougher centences that usually start years too late for the criminals to chage behaviour easily. This has led to some crowding in prisons and now a prison building program to get back to single cells only, if I have understood it right. One intresting thing to do about it is to convert hired often municipiality owned flats into owned flats wich makes people care more about their apartment, the house they share with their nearest neighbours, and it seems to then go beyond that. It seems to be very good in combination with a 30-40 year renovation of the houses and perhaps some new bicycle lanes and so on. But most of the problem is jobs, jobs and jobs, especially now when times are going to get tough.
Btw, I suspect that manny americans should have an fairly easy time integrating in Swedish society. A Kunstlerian suburbia dweller could live here his whole life withouth any problem for anybody. :-)
Our education system is a mitigated disaster with some hopefull parts. I think the lesson to learn is that you should not prioritize quantity before quality and dont let theoretical socialist write the curriculum. Finland run their schools in a better way but liberals who would like to analyze a school check systems effect on a partly failed schooling system should visit Sweden.
A sailing ship, almost any sailing ship, can turn drastically in a distance no more than twice its length, partly because it is small but also because it is slow, has a relatively large rudder and especially because its sails give it far more turning ability than any steam-driven ship. Sweden is much smaller than the U.S., much more homogeneous, has a much better educated population than the U.S. and a political system that, while imperfect, seems to be able to make many important changes--maybe not right away, but soon enough to avoid disaster. Thus, I look at Sweden somewhat as I would a sailing ship in contrast to the U.S. Titanic.
For example, I suspect that genuine reform is possible for Swedish schools. American schools are so bad that I think they should all be turned into refuges for the homeless (of whom we have many) and the administrators all fired. Perhaps worst, fifty years ago teaching attracted many of the best and brightest people. Today fine people still go into teaching, but many of them soon leave, because the system is so bad; mediocrities rule the schools and too many (not all) teachers are in despair or ignorant or unmotivated. Our educational system has decayed beyond reform. If I were emperor, I would abolish it immediately and go back to one-room school houses within easy walking distance of home, and I'd staff these computer-age learning centers with smart and dedicated people of the highest quality. The teachers' unions must go. (But they won't.)
Over here they have for a long time been syncronized by strong government control and centralized teacher education. But this control have been loosed up by transfering them to municipialities wich sometimes have been bad for their budgets and so on. And the "free school" reform opening up for any kind of school that conforms to a list of requirements has opened up for large new differences.
The number of schools that have been closed due to awfull quality in the education is small but they excist and it is usually blamed on the physical building being bad. What usually happens (I dare not say more since I have not read the research myself) when a number of "free schools" are started is that the competition for pupils force a renewal of the municipiality schools and the average performance is better in all the schools but the worst do anyway shrink into nothing. This gives the local politicians one of the worst jobs there is, closing a school that a few old generations have liked and feel nostalgic about and moving around children to other schools while parents complain loudly.
The difference in quality, organization and ways to teach is then what ultimately drive the parts of the schooling system that are getting better. Those practical demonstrations are of course recieved with rabid hatered by the ideological people who are sure that even more of the same medication that has given us the quality problems is what is needed to create the perfect school and perfect citizen.
Its almost a textbook demonstration of the benefits with free markets even if the financing is 100% tax money. And it is the main benchmark for the oppositions new ideas. Get them rooted and popular across all groups in society in this way before the next election and they will continue to bring benefit in a way that cant be stopped.
This idea or something like it should be perfect for a free market society full of entreprenurship such as USA, have you tried it in any state at any time?
This is very similar in Germany. In some states (Bavaria, Baden-Würtemburg) schools are ok, according to PISA and other studies, whereas in other states (Bremen, Nordrhein-Westfalen) schools are bad.
As a matter of fact, Bayern and Baden-Württemberg have been governed by conservatives for some 40 years, Nordrhein-Westfalen by social-democrats.
However, the new conservative government in Nordrhein-Westfalen has recently started a reform. Parents can now freely choose the school they send their kids to across municipial borders. Schools can select their teachers, the number of kids per teacher is reduced. Rankings of school tests will be published now.
This will start competition among the schools, which is good, but a problem at the same time. We will soon have schools without any native German, so things will get worse where they are already bad, especially in districts with a high number of immigrants. How can competition improve that?
We have had free schools for decades, such as Catholic schools or Waldorf schools, but not all of them achieve higher quality compared with state schools.
You can achieve the same atmosphere by visiting the city of Santa Ana in Orange County, California. Same cuteness, er, lack of prevelent cuteness but some cuteness there, of the women. Same grizzled hard-cases (men), same general run-downedness of streets, buildings, people, trees. Same "hmmm.... I think I've had all my shots" food.
Cuba has a coast, so for that go to Laguna Beach which is nicer. Getting back to Orange Cuba, next door you have Little Saigon, incredible cutie-spotting and good food. You can't read any of the signs, but in case you get in trouble, Bac Xi is "doctor".
Now, back to the real Cuba, it's 'koo-ba' not "kew-ba" that will show you as an American right away, althought those are so rare there they'll just figure you're a Brit. They love dollars, and many shopkeepers will refuse to take the Cuban money if they smell a dollar on you. Cuba needs the dollars for international exchange, and I was happy to give 'em my American play-money. Cuba is an extremely class-bound society, there are different classes of political/security cronies, and these are often set up on racial lines - they'll have for instance, blacks doing general security police duties watching over the native Cubans, since someone's much happier to snitch on the "other" group than their own. They have encampments of black refugees, from Haiti or somewhere? They have these little shacks and seem to just stand around much of the time, not much to do. There's not much traffic on the roads and if you don't include the military vehicles, not much at all. The standard Cuban vehicle is an old bicycle, pedaled by a skinny Cuban guy with his obese wife on the back. Housewives stand in the street and gossip, no one watches for cars because there effectively aren't any.
When I was there, their Peak Oil experience was just sinking in. Cuba would be a good place to go to see a country a decade along in the Peak Oil experience. The farms and the methods they're using to provide medical care, clean water, etc., would be very interesting. I think their population now is actually healthier than the US's. Warts and all, I think Cuba is a heroic country for enduring under the shit the US has been handing it for all these years. It's a much better place to look at clinics and been seedlings than at T&A.
The existence of a 'cash-marketplace' is not the same thing as 'Capitalism', any more than having a group of oligarghs calling them selves 'the State' makes their ownership of 'the means of production' an actual 'Communism'.
As far as devastation is concerned, I would have to ask what would our 'Capitalist/Imperialist' nations would look like if we had allowed the destruction we've created to simmer and stew as much on our own soil as it has on our 'colonies' and 'client-states' .. of course, as our energy needs get more dire, we are literally 'eating our own national body' by chewing up our precious appalachians, and spitting out the sad remains of our great plains topsoils-blended with synthetic chemicals down our fine waterways.
I think we in the USA have had more land to destroy, so we've been able to go about it for longer and not have to really face the results, besides 'offshoring' much of it to the rainforests, the oceans, the new Desert-Republic of Haiti, etc. Capitalism might be strung up eventually by the rope it eagerly sells to us, but it has done plenty of hanging by it's own accord, in the meantime.
I don't know if it's the various economic systems or the modern, industrial arts overall that are more to blame.. or is that simply saying 'is the bug in the software or the hardware'?
Bob Fiske
Bob Fiske
I will certainly not enjoy the "just scrape by" Cuban life myself but in pretty short order this will not be a matter of choice anymore.
Cuban life happens to be better sustainable in hard times:
The power of community: How Cuba survived peak oil
It does not really matter if they have been driven here by communism, US hostility and quite unwillingly.
Your example of environmental devistation in East Germnay is not entirely indicative for Communism. What you aim at is what we in Europe call the "black triangle", which is a part of Germany, Poland and the present Czech replublic, which all dug/dig browncoal in strip mining operations, devastating entire ecosystems.
OTOH by communists way many swamps, wetlands, forrests and the like remained in tact.
As my wife grew up under the communist anexation in Eastern Europe, and her grandfather died in labor camp becausee he helped people accross the Iron Curtain, you'll understand that I'm not a communist.
However they did a fine job at conserving nature in Poland, Czech Rublibic, Romania, and possibly other countries, as far as I know.
I've been to the black triangle several times and it's killing you, no mistaking about that
IMO, I think that they deliberately decided to avoid oil industry people that would make a hard quantitative case that we are at or near Peak Oil and that could rebut the tar sands argument. Having said that, I'm sure that Megan probably could have done a good job of rebutting Stossel, but she wasn't given a chance. You could see that Megan was pretty pissed when they ended the segment without giving her a chance to rebut Stossel.
But they didn't make up their PO guests from whole cloth. They showed the viewers a segment of the PO "community" that is sure as heck out there.
Liefe After the Oil Crash is the number one google result for "peak oil," right?
In the gross depletion context, how does someone like Megan Quinn argue for the current "American Way of Life"? Logic suggests that if you understand aquifer depletion, you don't dismiss composting toilets. If you understand forest depletion you don't dismiss rammed earth construction.
Peak Oil advocates are destined to carry this baggage because oil is not the only resource in trouble, and, compared to water and soil tilth, probably not even the most pressing.
I think the mistake we make is catching rather than pitching.
In catching we field questions about caves and compost toilets.
By pitching we can toss the hard-ball:
How exactly do eight million 4,500 pound Silverado 4WD's contribute to the economy?
I'd probably have fun on a cob building day. But I'd want to make clear to the mainstream that my PO worldview does not require all their children to be cob builders.
Remember, the key thing for PO to be a driver for huge short term societal transformation is the global depletion rate. If we don't get a rapid fall in production, we are going to get neither die-off nor hippie utopia (even if I'd kinda like the latter).
I think we will. It's just a question of timescale.
If so, why do you believe that, given the ever dropping cost of renewables (wind, solar, wave, geothermal, etc), and the enormous supply of renewable (100,000 terawatts from the sun vs 4.5 TW used by humans)??
I wouldn't say that. I'd say there's not enough for us to continue to be supported in the style to which we have become accustomed.
Cost is an illusion. The "cheap" renewables are possible thanks to cheap fossil fuels. This is will become painfully apparent once TSHTF.
leaving them for the ultra rich to enjoy till it becomes just too costly in energy and in price to make.
todays solar panels are your grand-kids tables.
So you feel that its is unfair that the "ultra rich" get some advantage.
Beside the "market" the "other way" to distribute a scarce ressource is rationing, then the Apparatchiks get the boon.
No matter what the "social apparatus" is those in power ARE some sort of Nomenklatura.
I don't see any real difference but you prefer that may be?
Why not, it is all a matter of FEELINGS.
The real trouble is when the ressource is so scarce AND vital that distributing it evenly means that everybody dies.
Then it HAS to be unfair to avoid collective suicide.
Depressing, eh?
How are oil costs related to solar panel costs? Specifically, please detail what types and quantities of energy go into them, and then we can evaluate this question.
How are copper costs related to solar panels? There's not much copper in them. There's maybe $2 of copper in a $500 panel. If copper costs triple, that's a 1% increase in the panel price.
"skyrocketing electricity costs"
Given that Peak Oil is primarily a liquid fuels problem, what makes you think electrity costs are going to jump like that? And again, how much electricity would you estimate is used in the manufacture of a solar panel?
and there aren't highly advanced, energy-intensive mettalurgical (sp?) techniques used to construct them.
and copper, silver, platinum are not difficult and energy-intensive to mine.
and we're not on the verge of a natural gas crisis. and natural gas is not used to generate electricity
ANY kind of exponential growth will ULTIMATELY (*) bring apocalypse, not cancel it!
* Ultimately if run unabated for a while.
Of course short bouts of exponential growth are desirable for short terms goals and do in fact happens all the time in nature as well as in human societies.
You should know WHEN and on WHAT to apply the brakes, no difference with driving a car.
Who keeps accelerating full throttle and never steer nor brakes?
Oh! Yes, singularitarian junkies :
Have fun.
Well, as I understand it, that's what a E-ROI of 60 to 1 means: that the cost of energy is going to be roughly 1.6% of the overall cost of a windmill. That's pretty small.
"highly advanced, energy-intensive mettalurgical (sp?) techniques used to construct them."
Highly advanced, sure, but not especially energy-intensive. Sure, there's some energy used to make steel and concrete, but not much compared to what you get out of the windmill. Sure, there's power used to melt silicon, but it's between 3% and 10% of the cost of solar cells (E-ROI of 10-30 to 1), and dropping quickly.
"and copper, silver, platinum are not difficult and energy-intensive to mine."
I haven't noticed any silver or platinum in a windmill, or a solar cell for that matter. Sure, copper is a pain to mine. I wouldn't want to be a copper miner. But if oil prices triple, and copper prices are 40% energy (I haven't checked-it's probably 10%) then copper prices go up 120%, and if solar cells prices include 1% copper then the price of the solar cell rises 1.2%.
"on the verge of a natural gas crisis. and natural gas is not used to generate electricity"
Sure, but natural gas is only 18% of US electricity, and dropping as quickly as utilities can install windmills and raise coal and nuclear plant capacity factors.
Demand has really gotten ahead of supply. PV supplies are expanding at about 40% per year, but they can't keep up with demand, especially in Germany. Now CA has increased subsidies, and France has raised the price they'll pay for PV power to Germany's level, so demand is likely to stay ahead of supply for a while.
All this means that PV suppliers can charge a heckuva markup to ration their product, until supplies catch up in a couple of years.
Hell, I'd settle for under $2/kwhr.
But the reality is that I've had three companies give estimates now, it's roughly $30K for a 3.5KW system (installed, grid tied, no battery backup). We get 5 hours of "full sun equivalent" per day.
Grid power is $0.09/KwH (average consumption is 300KwH/day), so I'm looking at nearly 30 years for payback.
Assuming I don't borrow the cost, longer if I do.
There are no subsidies here.
That same $30K would pay my power bill for the next 30 years, 15 years if costs doubled.
Nanosolar is putting $100M into it. That's a pretty big bet.
Besides, even at $0.23/kWh, versus $0.09/kWh for grid power, that's still a no-brainer. The payback date is still decades away.
17.5kWh/day at $.23/kWh = $4.03/day.
$30K / $4.03/day = 20.4 years.
No can do.
I would have thought that the 5 hours per day of full sun equivalent would have included those adjustments. Did your source tell you the assumptions made?
If you include external costs (pollution, etc) or time of day costs, then the real grid cost is much higher, but of course that doesn't help you when you're deciding how to pay the bills, unless of course you have the money to mitigate costs that aren't in the bill (and subsidize the rest of us...).
Also, it would be much cheaper if it was installed as a building-integrated standard option in new homes, as California has just mandated by 2011, rather than as a retrofit.
It will be nice to see lower prices for PV, but it will be several years.
Also, see my reply to Fallout, next.
No one has really done this, and I suspect it would be quite difficult. When it comes to imagining life without oil, we are like fish, trying to imagine the desert. Energy has been so cheap for so long that we really don't take it into consideration any more.
But some things to consider:
We use petroleum to mine, refine, and manufacture metals, plastics, concrete, composites, etc. We use it to make the machines that mine, refine, and manufacture. To make and fuel the trucks, trains, and ships that transport it to where it's needed.
We can see a glimpse of what a problem this is in east Africa, which has suffered various energy crises this year. One leads to another: with one fuel scarce, there are runs on others, causing further shortages. Factories and mines have been forced to shut down, due to lack of diesel and electricity.
We've known how to make glass for at least 5,000 years. But for most of that time, it was too expensive for ordinary people to own. It was used for Egyptian temples or jewelry, and more recently for windows in the homes of the wealthy. Glass was so valuable that it was common for glass windows to be removed from the castle when the noble family was away, and replaced with wooden shutters. No sense in wasting a luxury like glass windows when only the servants are at home.
Why? Because it takes so much energy to make glass. It's the same with steel. I forget the exact number, but it takes a truly alarming amount of wood to forge a sword.
Strongly disagree. Peak oil is peak energy.
First, the uses you cited are mostly transportation. Electricity from renewables can power this - electrified rail, EV's, etc. Electric bulldozers can certainly do mining. Manufacturing can use electricity for everything it needs, except for a small amount of hydrocarbons for plastics, which can come from biomass.
Parts of Africa were a basket case long before oil prices rose recently. They have critical shortages of everything, including oil.
Sure, steel and glass require some energy - it mostly comes from electricity, these days. Of course, both can be recycled, and about 95% of steel is. I think aluminum is about 90% recycled. Scrap, of course, takes much less energy to process.
"Peak oil is peak energy."
I think you have respect for Deffeyes and Simmons: this is what they think:
Kenneth Deffeyes, author of both "Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage" and "Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert's Peak," writes that "there are plenty of energy sources other than fossil fuels. Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem. The bind comes during the next 10 years: getting over our dependence on crude oil."
Simmons: "I happen to think the world can make the transition into what we might call the post-Saudi oil era in some very rational way that will limit economic disruption. As a perpetual optimist, I believe the world still works beyond Peak Oil. While oil prices in this new world will obviously rise, this rise can be a blessing, not a curse. Far higher oil prices make all other forms of energy more competitive and spur on energy research programs that might discover some real long-term fixes."
The earth receives 100,000 terawatts continously from the sun, and humans use the equivalent of 4.5 terawatts on average, so clearly there's no shortage of energy.
Does that help? Is there anything specific that makes you think peak oil is peak energy, that I can address?
Windmillls have a E-ROI about 60:1. How do cheap fossil fuels have anything to do with that?
Sun IS free, but catching it might not be 'cheap'..
PhotoVoltaics were dropping for a couple decades, as the tech improved, and though it still seems to be improving, the price/watt has now been rising steadily since '04. Installed system costs might still be lower, since people are opting for more grid-tied systems and don't have to purchase batteries for them. Other improvements and economies of scale might also be helping.
http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=42664
But with shortages in Polysilicon for at least another year, and demand continuing to grow as energy becomes a central issue for consumers again, I don't see these prices ever being 'cheap' in the 'cheap gas' sense. I still think it's more than worth it to have an independent and reliable source of your own energy, even if the payback is long-term. I've just bought about 200w of PV and will build on it every chance I get, but I don't think it will get cheaper as the basics of Supply/Demand both work against its doing so. (Supply WILL be going up, but hard to see how, at this point it will hope to keep up with demand)
Bob Fiske
It will take several years. The polysicon industry believes it will catch up in 2008 - they're building like mad. Some industry analysts are predicting a price crash in 2009.
Of course, with very cheap thin-film like nanosolar, silicon may be obsolete and unable to compete on price, even with cost-reductions from efficiencies of scale and reduced wafer thickness.
Exactly!
The question therefore is how to leverage the "31 flavors of doom" implicit in the cornucopian view.
There is indeed ONE main cause for collapse, the declining marginal returns.
I just happens that peak oil is the more blatant case and the FASTEST such occurrence.
I.e. declining ROI and EROEI of heavy vs light vs CTL vs shale vs Ethanol as a substitute.
So what's your beef with "every collapse theory" ?
E-ROI is high for renewables, and increasing.
none of them have been shown with hard evidence to be able to built and maintained in such a manner that would allow them to not only take over from declining fossil fuels but allow room for growth without input from said fossil fuels in any way.
i know your going to throw out X country and say they did it.
well thats because.
The 3 examples you gave are: nuclear in France, biomass in Brazil, and geothermal in Iceland/Greenland. I agree that it would be difficult for each of these three to grow to be single solutions. But, wind and solar are large enough. The US has 2.9 TW of wind potential, enough for twice our current electrical consumption. Solar is 100,000 TW for the world, vs. 4.5 TW consumption. The supply is there.
OTOH, due to intermittency, I think it would be difficult for wind and solar to be single solutions.
But I think they can be silver BB's. All of them together can easily provide a complete solution.
unless you ramp up coal your not going to have enough energy to make the high grade construction steal and carbon composites needed for wind or to power the machinery to get the copper for the generators.
it's the same with solar except you need to add the costs to make the high grade silicon for the best ones. hint they require the same fabs(short for fabrication plants) as for computer chips which require 24/7 electricity to keep the clean rooms clean.
this link posted yesterday shows this in some good flow charts
http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1275.html
Ramping up production of for instance nuclear powerplants must not increase the total steel production, something else can give, for instance car production and the steelmakers can retool for another quality. In reality it is much more complex but as long as the alternatives pay well in ROI and EROEI they will ad value and utility to this tough web of interdependancies.
Let me know by, say, the end of next year if you still think it was just incessant noise worthy of being ignored. I think there's a reasonble chance you might have changed your mind by then, but I'm quite willing to let time prove the point one way or the other. Of course, by then it will be too late to begin doing anything about it...
My own 'personal bugaboo' is the tendency to divorce issues from their context, as if the implications of one issue, however fundamental, could be adequately understood in splendid intellectual isolation.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=oil
Check out the #10 link for "oil" it's a sports news page? how the hell did that happen?
Houston Oilers?
OK, odograph, then why were you upset with me the other day when I got highly annoyed with Bryant Urstadt's "liberal apocalypse"? I don't believe that peak oil is like some episode of Survivor. The "buy canned goods, purchase a gun and head for the hills" crowd makes us an easy target. Hence Urstadt mentioning Peak Oil and Left Behind in the same sentence -- a really cheap shot. And by the way, I wasn't knocking Heinberg and the Yellow Springs conference. However, as opposed to APSO-USA which was largely attended by energy industry insiders or journalists, it was easier to find a small group of apocalyptic doomers at Antioch. Sure enough, Urstadt, to his great discredit, zoomed right in on them.
It's about this product, and how people percieve it.
Certainly, believers in apocalyptic collapse make their case here essentially every day. TOD's approach seems to be to let the site be what it will be. On one level that's to be commended. On another, it builds the peak oil and die-off connection ... and frankly from out here on the other side of the terminal I'm not sure if TOD is on board with that.
I wasn't sure how to read your comment the other day.
Re: I'm not sure if TOD is on board with that
I don't know about TOD, but I'm not on board with it. That kind of thinking detracts from the message some of us are trying to get across here. It is unfortunate that Urstadt's statements do apply to some minority segment of those concerned about peak oil.
I have no time for that. Nor any patience with it. I am worried about supply, depletion rates, discoveries, solutions, misleading Cornucopian analyses, prices, impacts and attaining a wider audience.
I haven't heard from Stuart lately, is he still on board with a "slow squeeze?"
I think that's important, because in the absense of that we get some rather worst-case values presented as mainstream:
That from a story that headlined at TOD about how we won't have computers anymore, and need to scramble to preserve human knowledge.
But note that in every controversy with a 'public intellectual' dimension there tend to be 'low-level' and 'high-level' advocates on both sides of the fence:
Peak Oil versus the Others:
Low level true believers: Cuba-loving survivalists versus the 'eternal economic growth' cornucopians
High level guys who are capable of civilised dialogue and the pursuit of knowledge: TOD versus CERA
Oops ...
And yet people like Lovelock, Hawking, Hansen, and others with clearly reputable credentials hold such positions. I guess Hawking must be a nut too and we shouldn't listen to him either? Nor Diamond, nor Tainter, nor Lovelock, nor Hansen... yep, let's listen to George Bush and Dick Cheney instead.
Yeah... right.
If civilization collapses, I will be very sad and even angry. But I hope that those who worked so hard to silence the Paul Reveres are the ones that suffer most and first. I don't want it to fall but I fear it will fall precisely because of people who disparage the alternative and refuse to consider those dangerous alternative scenarios seriously.
One says that there's some kind of inevitable doom, like a Marxist-Leninist prediction of the economic future, based on a global and pessimistic theory like Tainter's.
The other says that we face a great risk (say, from unexpectedly very high depletion rates, or a middle east war that closes down all ME production suddenly) which we ought to prepare for.
The two are very different. The first has very little support among reputable researchers and theorists (including the Club of Rome - they never said doom was inevitable, just that we faced great risks with business-as-usual resource usage). The second is (IMHO)...eminently reasonable.
My guess is that you aren't preparing for anything (sorry if I'm wrong). The essential problem with half-way measures/preparation is that it is difficult to determine what time period you need to prepare for (a month, year, multiple years, forever?) and what will be unavailable (power, water, food, fuel, clothing, etc.).
It is far easier to just assume society collpases and nothing will be available. At worst, a person will waste some time and money (perhaps significant money); at best they will survive when others do not.
There is a further advantage of assuming the worst - you get over the psychological bagage of continually wondering if you made the right decisions. In my case, I really don't care when oil peaks. I don't care if the grid goes down. I don't care if there is no fuel. I am not saying life would be fun but rather that I can go on with my life today without worrying about the future.
Todd
Please, let's avoid getting personal. I know it's very tempting, especially when one feels especially frustrated with someone's ideas, but it leads to no good.
Now, I think it makes an enourmous difference whether we assume society is going to collapse. Some people move to subsistence lifestyles, or decide not to have children based on these ideas. Those are very big decisions, and I think it would be very sad for people to make them based on false information.
Todd
I assume that both models of the world (inevitable doom (ID), and risk of really big problems (RORBP) require preparation. The preparation involved is different.
ID might mean moving to a remote location and being a survivalist. I think that would be a very hard life. Some people might enjoy it, but I think most people don't realize just how hard long-term self-sufficient farm life is - some people do it temporarily, but they have the support of a previous life and a larger society, and always know in the back of their mind that this choice is optional and temporary. To really make a long-term commitment to rural self-sufficiency is really tough. Actually, I think a lot of people would just shut down their thinking on the topic, and do nothing, but others might take drastic steps like that, if they really, really believed that nothing could be done to prevent doom.
RORBP means being active politically, changing what you eat, buy and drive, educating others, etc. What most people on TOD do, I think.
What I meant to say was that his theories for the future of our society are not generally accepted as an accurate model of the world, one which can be used to make predictions, say. I also know that some of his evidence is false, e.g. that medical research is slowing down and that human longevity increases are slowing down, and that E-ROI is fundamentally falling at the margin (as opposed to fossil fuel E-ROI, which I agree is falling, especially at the margin).
Now, I have to admit I haven't researched him as much as I'd like to. I just know enough to say the above.
Further, Tainter nowhere says we are toast. His point is that this society has three choices:
jason lays it out pretty well here.
http://anthropik.com/2005/11/thesis-16-technology-cannot-stop-collapse/
so our only choice is to either let it go willingly or let nature do it for us.
Now as I said, I am not counting on it or expecting it at all. But I have to realistically admit that there does remain a non-zero chance that such an event could occur. Increasing complexity may be a low to very low probability option but it is still a possible option, though it seems a very unlikely one.
Deffeyes writes that "there are plenty of energy sources other than fossil fuels. Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem. The bind comes during the next 10 years: getting over our dependence on crude oil."
Not "axiomatically", if you can manage to increase the energetic efficiency of your process.
Cost is the culprit but is not DIRECTLY related to complexity per se.
Cost IS related to complexity for a given state of technology development.
We could not handle todays' burden of say, banking operations, with pencil and paper with computers we can.
Unfortunately each time we gained such a technological advantage it has been squandered on continued growth.
THEREFORE the "problem" is our drive to GROW, not complexity, not technology, not even peak energy.
I agree.
I think your other question is, how can improved technology help if we always grow exponentially?
The answer is that we don't - people really do "get enough" of things that they need.
Look at the car industry in the US: it matured in the middle 70's, and car sales have levelled off since, growing at less than the rate of population growth.
See my other posts on pop growth in this drumbeat: the idea that it is continuing forever is not correct.
At the moment GDP growth in the US largely intangible, and not dependent on greater resource consumption. That's not true of the rest of the world yet, but there is a point where resource consumption levels off.
The macro picture is simply an aggregate of individual choices and people tend to make choices that benefit them, not all of us. I won't disagree that people get tired of stuff they "need", I fear many people "need" a whole lot of things that in fact they simply want, but won't give it up over their cold dead fingers.
hmmm. I've talked about this elsewhere on this drumbeat, but (like Paul McCartney, about silly love songs) here I go again.....
Fertility rate is defined as the average number of children per woman. So, a theoretical replacement rate would be 2 children, one for each parent. In practice the replacement fertility rate is defined as about 2.1, to account for infant and child mortality.
This rate has been relentlessly dropping for the last 50 years (It peaked after WWII in large part because of the introduction of public health practices in the 3rd world which suddenly dropped infant and child mortality rates). It was around 5 for the whole world. In 1992 it was 3.0, and in 2000 it was 2.8, and in 2005 it was 2.6. It's expected to drop below replacement relatively soon for the whole world. At that point absolute growth will continue because of a demographic overhang: a large young generation which will replace itself, after which in about 2050 total population is likely to hit around 9 billion, and start falling.
The US is right at 2.1, and would be pretty stable if not for immigration. Japan is at about 1.4 IIRC, and is expected to start falling in 2007 in absolute numbers. Russia's population is falling in absolute numbers, and their government is desperately trying to raise fertility. China is below replacement fertility rate. India is still above, though some regions have gone below.
These stats may be helpful: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/WPP2004/wpp2004.htm
That graph covers a very long period of time, and so you can't see the stabilization that's occurring in the last 50 years. I suspect you'd really need a logarithmic graph to see the change in growth rates. Even then, it'd be tough to see really clearly, because of the demographic overhang. What you need is a graph of growth and fertility rates, not absolute numbers - in effect the 2nd and 3rd differential of the graph you're referring to.
We've destroyed the world's fisheries. We're having issues with grain production. Clean, fresh water is becoming an issue in more and more places. Energy costs are up as energy availability gets tighter and tighter. I could go on but it would be simpler to point you to Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update.
I really hope the happy face view of the world is right because the alternative means billions of ugly and painful deaths.
There is a general consensus in the public health/population planning professional community that human population growth is slowing down, and is on track to stop completely. I've provided a great deal of quantitative backup for this. Apparently you disagree, but you haven't given me anymore than an anology with mammals. What are your reasons? (hint: use numbers, and numbers that relate to humans).
Population stability or crash, caused by resource constraints in animal populations (as in "Every other mammaliam population overshoot"), are caused by death rates which rise to equal birth rates. For modern humans it has been caused by decreasing birth rates. This is very different. There is a great deal of info to support that. I can't quite figure out why anyone would think there was a similarity.
There's no question that there are limits to growth in resource consumption and, what the heck, we may be in for a world of pain. I haven't had the time to research soil and water lately (the last time I did so was 30 years ago when LTG first came out - at that point it was pretty theoretical, but I read the whole thing carefully - lately I haven't gone into great detail on other resources besides energy). But, at the moment I'm trying to discuss population....
Are you even familiar with the reindeer of St. Matthews island? Birth rates in mammals fall also when population reaches its peak in an overshoot event. Birth rates in humans have been slowly falling for 3 centuries, well before modern contraception. Why? As you glibly admit, we don't know why, do we? And yet human population is doing very much what other populations do in the immediate period prior to a dieoff. As to why I think there is a similarity, it's because there IS a similarity.
And see? You try to divorce resource constraints from population growth in order to prop up an argument that fails to account for the facts. You are free to try to look at this in isolation but doing so invites drawing incorrect conclusions.
Finally, you cannot discuss population growth and its impacts without considering the finite resources of a finite planet. That is exactly the point! Finite resources coupled with geometric growth patterns has lead to catastrophe in other animal populations in the past.
Look at this chart and don't just look at the last few decades. This shows the very clear explosive human growth patterns since fossil fuels came into play. To argue that this level of population can be sustained as fossil fuels become less available unless we find an equivalent or better energy source is folly.
Well, I referred to http://dieoff.org/page80.htm
The researchers don't say birth rates fell, they say that the ratio of fawns and yearlings fell, and the parental body weight had dropped sharply. Clearly, infant mortality had risen, and the parents were malnourished. This is population control due to rising death rates.
"Birth rates in humans have been slowly falling for 3 centuries"
Well, based on http://www.econ.jhu.edu/People/arbatli/lee%20article.pdf
rates were as follows:
1700 6.0
1800 6.0
1900 5.2
1950 5.0
2000 2.7
That appears consistent small decreases in the US and Europe due to falling infant mortality in the 1800 and early 1900's, until around 1960 when contraception was invented.
"And yet human population is doing very much what other populations do in the immediate period prior to a dieoff."
No, both infant and adult mortality continue to fall, and parental health is just fine. In fact, obesity is a greater problem than malnutrition.
"You try to divorce resource constraints from population growth in order to prop up an argument that fails to account for the facts. "
No, I'm trying to divorce a discussion about the past and present population, from a discussion about resource constraints in the future. I think discussion of current and past resource constraints are fair game, and I'm arguing that current and past resource constraints have had very little to do with the deceleration of population growth. Again the mechanism through which such constraints would work would be nutrition and death rates, and clearly nutrition
and death rates have not been the cause of the reduction in population growth.
"Finally, you cannot discuss population growth and its impacts without considering the finite resources of a finite planet. That is exactly the point! Finite resources coupled with geometric growth patterns has lead to catastrophe in other animal populations in the past."
Well, I agree that we hav serious resource problems. I'd just like everyone to be clear on what the problems aren't. In this case, it would be nice for people to be clear that population growth really is going away, even if it is way too slowly.
I agree. I didn't suggest that non-majority acceptance was a disproof of a theory. It does suggest, however, a higher level of skepticism. For instance, GW is generally accepted by climatologists. Not having the time to research everything, I take their word on it.
I have to admit I haven't had the time to research him thoroughly, and I am curious. Let me take advantage of your knowledge: am I correct in thinking Tainter bases his work in large part on the idea of diminishing marginal E-ROI for the society as a whole (IOW,peak energy)?
Energy is one version (and perhaps a special case) of complexity. But we are seeing the same problems arise as we try to globalize commerce, etc. Our engineering is being stretched further and further and the returns from such investments don't match prior returns from prior investments. Tainter's point is that eventually people give up on trying to even maintain the social complexity of a given society because the cost is higher than the value. And further, as Tainter notes, this is completely rational behavior. Bones from the period immediately following the collapse of the Roman empire showed better average nutrition than before, probably because of the high costs imposed on those who were members of the empire (via taxes, for example). So they actually have rational incentive to walk away.
This may be behind some of the "back-to-the-land" movements we've seen by some people, who have concluded that the benefits of modern society are outweighed by the costs. We might consider these people "early adopters", a phrase the high tech marketplace sometimes uses for people adopting new technologies but in this case adopting new lifestyles partially or even fully divorced from modern civilization.
When you say "Such investments are made to solve problems", that seems to suggest that his analysis depends on the nature of the problems he feels a society faces. So, I have the impression that he considers energy to be a key one. Is that correct?
Another one who argues without having read the source I bet.
How convenient!
Now, believing Tainter is correct doesn't mean believing we are on the verge of collapse. Tainter himself does not believe our society is about to collapse. At least, he didn't when he wrote his most famous work.
And Tainter certainly does not believe collapse is inevitable. In one of his papers, he discusses a society that avoided collapse by voluntarily simplifying. (The Byzantine "dark age.")
Let me be clear: I'm not suggesting that our future is necessarily easy..I'm just saying it's not necessarily terrible.
humans have voluntarily reduced their fertility rates
Voluntarily? It has been debated...
They choose not to grow all of their own food.
How would Hong Kong "choose" to grow all of their own food?
we're not doomed. The authors of LTG would agree
They asked 30 years AGO, nothing has been done.
Given that Peak Oil is primarily a liquid fuels problem, what makes you think electrity costs are going to jump like that?
Conveniently forgetting for once about the cherished markets "fungibility" for energy, mmm...
Sure, there's power used to melt silicon, but it's between 3% and 10% of the cost of solar cells (E-ROI of 10-30 to 1), and dropping quickly.
Ooops, caught red handed!
Arguing about the COST (which currently relies on low energy prices) and then pretending to compute EROEI from those percentages.
... actually, it may be much faster, with things like Nanosolar happening
Exactly, Santa Claus told me too.
The earth receives 100,000 terawatts continously from the sun, and humans use the equivalent of 4.5 terawatts on average, so clearly there's no shortage of energy.
Sure, we just need to collect it.
Given that oceans makes about two-thirds of the earth surface there should be no shortage of water either.
The US has 2.9 TW of wind potential, enough for twice our current electrical consumption.
Potential! Turbines all over the place.
Please, let's avoid getting personal. I know it's very tempting, especially when one feels especially frustrated with someone's ideas, but it leads to no good.
Not always, sometimes it leads to STFU.
Those are very big decisions, and I think it would be very sad for people to make them based on false information.
Very commendable, you start.
The preparation involved is different.
Not necessarily much so, plus why not hedging our bets?
Who said it is either/or, we can have BOTH a collapse and some recovery/continuation, ask Somalians.
I just know enough to say the above.
Fully unknown unknowns rather than known unknowns, it's been debated.
Running out of energy in the long run is not the problem.
Gratuitous affirmation.
I'm not suggesting that our future is necessarily easy..I'm just saying it's not necessarily terrible.
Will a die-off with NO collapse be "terrible" or just annoying?
Longevity is increasing by about 2 years per decade, and has been for many decades.
Except in Russia, Africa and may be now Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some of them make general statements about this, but none go into any detail.
Are YOU really going "into any detail" detail yourself?
Instead of asking others to do so:
Specifically, please detail what types and quantities of energy go into them, and then we can evaluate this question.
Well, ok I think we're making progress in this dialogue.
Yes, we "progressively" show that you don't know what you are talking about.
Where are your numbers?
Where is your "good model"?
Where is odograph when we need him?
I wonder why he did not scold you yet.
In all Truthiness this is the "Goebbels marketing strategy"!
If you repeat lies often enough they pass for true.
I've been discussing things in good faith. I've provided a great deal of detail, and numbers. I understand you're frustrated that I disagree with some of your ideas, but please, try to not take it personally.
I don't quite know what to do with all of your comments, especially because I've answered most of them in detail already, and you're just making flat denials.
I'll try a few:
Voluntary fertility reduction: What I mean is that drops in population growth were not caused by rising death rates, but by contraception, education, career opportunities for women, etc. I don't think anyone is suggesting that fertility reductions in the US and Europe have been coerced. Even in China, where there is coercion on a personal level, the Chinese government made a conscious, planned decision, as opposed to hitting a resource wall.
"Sure, there's power used to melt silicon, but it's between 3% and 10% of the cost of solar cells (E-ROI of 10-30 to 1), and dropping quickly.
Ooops, caught red handed!
Arguing about the COST (which currently relies on low energy prices) and then pretending to compute EROEI from those percentages. "
No, I started with E-ROI, and estimated the cost. The price of the input and output's are going to be relatively comparable, especially if the inputs are both electricity (if not, then the balance tips further in favor of the viability of the solar PV, because electricity is more valuable than other forms of energy). If the cost of the input energy rises, so will the value of the output.
"Given that Peak Oil is primarily a liquid fuels problem, what makes you think electrity costs are going to jump like that?
Conveniently forgetting for once about the cherished markets "fungibility" for energy, mmm..."
Well, sure, energy markets are fungible, with some time delays. For instance, when oil tripled in price, spot market coal doubled in cost. But, that was spot market coal. Most coal is on long-term contracts. What happens when the contracts are renewed? Well, it's a complex process of adjustments: coal production will go up, increasing supply and reducing spot prices. Oil and gas users will be switching to electricity, raising demand for electricity, reducing it for oil and gas.
The bottom line is, in the last several years oil and gas have tripled in price, and electricity has gone up perhaps 10%.
In the medium run, cheap electricity will become somewhat more expensive, and supply will grow a great deal (from wind, coal, solar, etc). In the long run electricity from renewables will replace oil (if we haven't fallen prey to something other than energy problems....). That's fungibility.
"Longevity is increasing by about 2 years per decade, and has been for many decades.
Except in Russia, Africa and may be now Iraq and Afghanistan."
You're right, there are big pockets of bad health in the world. There's no question that poverty, war and social disintegration cause bad health. I was addressing Tainter's discussion of marginal increases in public health, and using data from the US and Europe, as I believe he was.
Not at all, I appreciate you are doing an excellent job at confusing the doom issue with soothing claims never backed by reliable arguments, only anecdotes, fuzzy generalisations and exceptions ("pockets of bad health"!).
Which agenda is this?
WHOSE agenda is this?
It does not take a conspirationist disposition nor even the slightest stretch of imagination to figure out that the PR budget for Big OIL and Big INDUSTRY is large enough to allow for a handfull of "PR trolls" to care for TOD, LATOC and any such others at a negligible cost vs other expenses: elected representatives are SO much more expensive!
I'll tell you why I care, and put some effort into arguing about things that look incorrect to me: it's because people read TOD, and take it seriously. It's important that people not make life decisions based on erroneous information. For instance, someone who would be a great parent might decide not to have children at all (that's different from someone who decides not to for good reasons, conceivably including over population - such a person might choose to adopt), or they might make a career choice that would be much less satisfying than their first choice. If we're not necessarily doomed, as I suspect, then that would be very sad. OTOH, I don't think overstatement helps. Sure, some people will be spurred to action by overly pessimistic predictions, but others will dismiss them as extreme or give up doing anything at all to improve the situation. Of course, that's not my only motivation - I enjoy learning the info that is unique to TOD, and having conversations with people.
Now, on the one hand, I admit I don't know that much yet about water and soil issues, or some other related areas. I don't try to talk about those, just the areas where I'm knowledgeable. I focus on energy and renewables (though I also happen to be know about public health and population planning, so I address those too). After, TOD is primarily about oil and energy.
OTOH, I've been very careful to say that I think a great deal of urgency is needed on energy issues. I feel that we are at great risk of really serious economic pain due to unexpected disruptions of oil & gas supplies, the possibilities for which include unexpectedly high depletion rates and upheaval in the ME.
I think that renewables, especially distributed renewables (solar, PHEV/EV's, cogeneration, wind) that would reduce the market power of "Big OIL and Big INDUSTRY" are the path of the future, and that we should all work very hard to accelerate their development, including CAFE, carbon taxes, and a "Apollo Project" including increased R&D of renewables & electrical storage. There's nothing in what I say that would give comfort to oil companies.
I hope that helps.
I did just that, where do you think I collected quotes of you from?
It's important that people not make life decisions based on erroneous information.
...
I admit I don't know that much yet about water and soil issues, or some other related areas.
Trying to see only ONE part of the problems IS "erroneous information" because unfortunately it is all entangled.
This is why making a model is difficult and EXACT prediction impossible, but it is HARMHUL to cherry pick the most benign aspects to paint a rosy picture.
If there is some escape out of our predicament (which I hope, I am not a "doomer" only highly pessimistic) we will have to deal with ALL the constraints.
I think that renewables, especially distributed renewables (solar, PHEV/EV's, cogeneration, wind) that would reduce the market power of "Big OIL and Big INDUSTRY" are the path of the future,
It is even more devious to ignore or deprecate what has already been debated at length on TOD about the "cherry picked" points.
Even when ONLY focusing on energy issues there is NO "consensus" about the feasibility of ramping up alternate energy sources due to concerns about EROEI, technical feasibility, financial constraints, deployment schedules and societal/political inertia.
This brings quite a lot of suspicions about your intellect and/or your motives.
Well, I agree on that. I did say "I think" at the beginning of that paragraph to indicate that this was my opinion, which I was giving to clarify where I was coming from.
I didn't say there was consensus. I just try occasionally to identify possible points of agreement, and even consensus. When someone seems to agree with me on some things but doesn't say so explicitly, and disagrees on others, I try to clarify which we've come to agreement on, and which we haven't.
You see, I think part of the purpose of TOD is to allow people to communicate, learn things, change their minds about some things, and change other people's minds about others.
We can't all know everything. Some people know about rail, others about oil, others about coal, etc. I don't think we have to debate the "big picture" all the time, in order to discuss specifics.
It seems useful to me try to come to agreement on some things. That requires lengthy, and detailed conversations sometimes. I do think agreement, and even consensus, is possible, even if we just agree on some things, and agree that we don't have enough info to evaluate others. That's very valuable, it seems to me.
Longevity is increasing by about 2 years per decade, and has been for many decades. Around the turn of the century it was largely because of reductions in child mortality, but lately it's across the age spectrum.
People keep expecting it to hit diminishing returns, and it keeps not doing so. Same thing for disability: seniors are about 40% less disabled, on average, than 40 years ago.
It's not absolutely clear why: a combination of medicine, nutrition, public health...
Civilization is at a great risk of collapse.
Your specific wordings obscure the question, what "might not be fixable" entails?
Don't confuse pessimists with doomers, if doomers are the ones who see "inevitable doom".
Your're saying, I think, that you don't feel doom is inevitable, but that:
"Civilization is at a great risk of collapse."
Well, I would agree that there is a great risk of unnecessary pain, say economic stagnation for 10-15 years due to unexpectedly very high depletion rates. I would agree that there is a significant risk of a deep depression that lasted several years due to, say, a ME war that shut down ME oil completely.
I would agree that there is a very small risk of doom, if we had some major wars, say. I wouldn't have thought the Iraq war possible, so I have to admit the possibilities for screwing up are certainly there.
That's how I would lay out the possibilities. What do you think?
More info on the MSNBC piece. They tried to get both Jim Kunstler and Richard Heinberg. (Jim blew them off and referred them to me--I wondered how in the world they got my name).
I don't think that the Iron Triangle is a conspiracy per se, but I think that the segments of triangle have an overlapping economic interest in debunking Peak Oil.
I think that what transpired was basically an attempt to attack and discredit "End of Suburbia," perhaps because Americans are (slowly) beginning to wake up to the fact that the great American Suburban Dream is rapidly becoming the great American Suburban Nightmare.
Richard didn't say for sure, but I assume that he did. As you pointed out, the CNN piece on Peak Oil was a little more fair, but they felt compelled to end with "happy" talk about ethanol, in other words, we can keep driving our SUV's to the suburban mortgages, but we'll use different fuels.
IMO, the bottom line is that the auto/housing/finance group and the media group have a vested interest in trying to persuade Americans to keep buying and financing large homes and autos. Portions of the oil industry, for their own reasons, are more than happy to provide the intellectual ammunition for the media group.
Note that Toll Brothers' orders (a leading provider of McMansions) are down 50% year over year. I think that we just witnessed an attempt by the Iron Triangle to ambush and discredit Kunstler and Heinberg (and End of Suburbia).
Absolutely. As I said yesterday, "Regarding MSNBC's handling of Peak Oil, is there any surprise considering who owns them, and who their target audience is?"
The CD says duplication prohibited, so I assume I can't post the actual audio on the web.
I'm sending the CD off to a court reporter to get a transcript done. I'll try to get it posted on the web in the next few days.
Speaking again of "End of Suburbia," CNBC just used that line (with no apparent reference to Kunstler) as teaser for an upcoming segment this hour or next on "Closing Bell." Am going to try to watch it.
By the way, has anyone else given up on Kunstler recently? I've been reading his blog for 18 mos at least and within the last six weeks he's metamorphasized into a mouth-breathing psychopath. It's like reading Dick Cheney's or Michael Ledeen's MySpace page these days. He's in full-on "Kill all the filthy towel-heads because they're all terrorists and want to eat Israeli babies just for kicks and if you don't see it that way you're a terrorist and an anti-semite" mode. Revolting. Have removed him from my personal bookmarks list and would hope TOD will do the same if he continues to use the space to run interference for the the neocon regime of senseless (but highly profitable) violence that endangers the safety and stability of the entire planet.
Whatever I might think of JHK in his blood-drenched Zionist superhero costume these days, his message about suburbia is going mainstream. There was tinge of regret to this CNBC segment about the whole project of the 'burbs. There is a subtle sense that there moment has already passed. Interesting. I suspect the perspective will catch on like wildfire in the media over the next year or so.
Can;t wait for the word "densification" to go mainstream. God, why didn't they get somebody with an ear for language to coin that one? Ugliest single word in the English language, I'd agrue -- meaning aside.
Anyway, the expert witness assured CNBC viewers that "densification" was happening all across this great land of ours, not just in East Coast cities.
And the host, Bob Pisani, referred to Asians as "those of type of people." Yowza.
Who the hell is talking about conspiracies?
Get a grip, man.
Richard Heinberg
I've been invited on BBC to debate some dude from OPEC (I shit you not) CNN for "Glen Beck" and some big time Canadian financial show to debate Peter Huber.
My response is always the same, "no thanks, but consider my colleagues Richard Heinberg, Jeffrey Brown, et al."
My theory is the lumpen proles are going to go after somebody and logically speaking it makes sense for that to be Richard or Jeffrey or whoever instead of me. Why? Because I'm 28 and Richard, jeffrey, Kunstler et al. are in their 50s pushing 60 in some cases. Hey with some luck they might be dead before the proles start looking for scapegoats. I figure at that point I'm lilkely to still be alive and will have enough problems on my hands. The last thing I'll need is a bunch of nuts coming after me because I didn't have faith that Jesus would provide more oil once we got rid of the A-rabs, Jews, Gays, Blacks, Lefthanders, whoever.
In AMerica you're only real if you're on t.v. so I figure as long as I stay on the net I'll be okay.
Which is how my name appeared on the list to start with. After watching the show last night, I thanked my lucky stars that I was not asked.
Megan's facial expression at the very end said a lot--more or less something to the effect that "Why the heck did I waste my time coming down here."
I would think (hope) that the mobs might be more interested in going after the cornucopians, rather than the Peak Oilers, but I'm in a separate risk group--oilmen. I've put it this way--the primary thing that the energy producers have to worry about is angry soccer moms rioting outside their homes.
Given that I contribute occasionally over at LATOC, Thanks Matt! -- for not mentioning me.
That's what friends are for...
I think I've included you or at least a mention of TOD in general.
There was a NY Times reporter who wanted to do an interview on "people who are preparing for peak oil."tghis was maybe 2-3 months ago. I emailed him back:
it boils down to this:
- we're running out
- we're in iraq to grab what's left
- it's time to cover your ass.
and then I told him if he wants to talke to somebody go to tod.You see once you accept the human-nature aspect of this - that is the "genetic" aspect of what Jay calls the "thermo-gene collision", doing interviews is not all it's cracked up to be. Why? Well unlike others I have no hope we'll make it out of this. I figure the best we can do is position ourselves, well at least those of us with the resources/assets to do so, to benefit or at least not suffer as much as others.
So it's not much fun to tell the reporter "well basically we're all gonna die. But hopefully not for a while cause I'm starting an apocalypitc religious cult . . . I mean 'off-the-grid village' and I need some more time to get things in place."
So, I gather that your remarks did not appear in the Times?
I can't stop laughing here...
Completely Gratuitous Picture
Why is this man so happy?
Some people, e.g., President Nixon, never did learn how to do TV. Others, such as Ronald Reagan, had mastered the medium, and even when his brain was mostly gone with Alzheimer's disease he could still hold a TV audience in the palm of his hand by using his considerable acting skills. I mean a guy who has been shot in the chest and comes up with a line to his surgeon before the bullet is removed, "Are you a Republican?" hey, that guy had class.
Anyone high-school student seriously contemplating how to make the world a better place through political leadership would be well advised to act in school plays, get involved with little theater groups, and then major in speech or drama. I suspect but cannot prove that it is difficult to learn acting after a certain age--maybe early twenties, hard to say.
Actors can eat lawyers alive on TV. (And they do, on all the popular lawyer shows;-)
That is how she got her message out. Don't take the bate from moronic tv hosts, reframe , reframe, reframe.
The leaders of two of the biggest parties (the Social Democratic Party and the conservative National Coalition Party) have called for Finland to become an oil-free economy by 2030. I would be very surprised if the leader of the third big one (agrarian Centre Party), Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen, doesn't say the same thing tonight as he is scheduled to speak about energy policy right about now. So what are their solutions then?
As far as I have been able to find out, they all have bought into the usual suspects: biofuels, especially ethanol (from grain, presumably) and biodiesel (from rapeseed oil). In addition, at least the conservative National Coalition is generally very much pro-nuclear. So far nobody has said much about conservation or investing in wind or solar (which are the things I would emphasise). The National Coalition does suggest that buying a car should be cheaper and driving it more expensive, especially if it's not fuel-efficient, which sort of makes some sense; in Finland we have the second oldest cars in the EU on average, because of the high taxes, and naturally newer cars would probably be a lot more efficient than the current ones.
The good thing is, now it seems all the major parties accept the challenges of Peak Oil as well as climate change. I'm just worried that they may be making the wrong decisions, leading to the wrong investments, and eventually we'll be much worse off than necessary.
The amount of arable land in Finland to grow extra grain and rapeseed, however, seems to be limited. You do have plenty of wood, though. A great chunk of that in exported to Germany as paper. I once met a Finnish woman at Hamburg airport, and she was working for a huge shipping line. She told me that the only good they were transporting from Finland to Germany was paper.
Now, by exporting paper, Finland also exports a huge amount of energy. In Germany, we reuse old paper, and after a while, it becomes energy again in a power plant, in the future maybe as a synthetic oil.
If Finland can increase the tons of wood taken from its forests, you can make celulosic ethanol or gasify it into synfuels, depending if you have gasoline or diesel cars.
- Although I don't have any numbers here right now, I'm fairly certain we don't produce enough barley for food (and beer and booze) right now, so we'd probably have to import more of our food as a result;
- If corn ethanol is any sort of example, I don't believe the EROI of sugarbeet ethanol or barley ethanol would be significantly more than one (does anybody have numbers?).
Cellulosic ethanol may be much better, but if I remember correctly, it will not be produced commercially for quite some time, if ever, due to technical problems.I don't deny we'll need lots of liquid fuels in the future, but surely there must be better alternatives... Any ideas?
Or at least not leave Finland vulnerable to crop failures in case of complexity breakdown in international transport because of a limited nuclear war.
Until then, I suggest you budget for a national food reserve of a year or so.
I guess this will lead to a sixth nuclear reactor in Finland and a technology race with Swedish companies in making fuel and industrial chemicals out of wood biomass. Perhaps you even could dust off the old plans for nuclear district heating for Helsinki? That could revive the nuclear district heating plans for Stockholm.
Ethanol and RME will never give any large volumes but every addition helps and it makes more sense then fallow fields.
Wonder if Norway will follow? How about complementing oil with a nordic biogas and natural gas grid that transfers hundreds of local inputs and norwegian natural gas?
I was curious about energy number in Finland (I checked BP-2006) and I was very surprised about this:
So Finland has started a Powerdown!
You guys have comsumed 10% less in 2005 than in 2004. This is the record. Only Lithuania is close: 9% decline.
This has been achieved by cutting coal consumption by half. Of course electricity generation has declined: by 18%. Lithuania is champ is this cathegory with a 23% decline.
What is happening Jussi? Do you know?
Frankly, I am puzzled. I really didn't know about this, I haven't seen anything like this mentioned in the news. What's the source?
Off the top of my head I could say that weather can make a big difference here, a warm winter requires way less energy than a very cold one. But it can't explain 10% decline, now can it?
Incredible...
the sourse is BP Statistical Review of world energy 2006. In the this execel file
go to the Tab "Primary Energy - Cons by fuel". I made the graph form those numbers.
The data for the electricity generation is from the Tab "Electricity Generation". It looks that by Siggi's refference electricity comsumption decined only by 2.5% (while producuction declined by 18%).
http://www.energia.fi/page.asp?Section=3219&Item=15596
Finland usually imports about 15% of its electricity consumption. However, in 2004, net imports fell to 5% because of droughts in Norway, in 2005, net imports were at 20%!
Looks like nothing has really changed yet in Finland.
So the real (including the imported electricity) primary energy comsumption between 2004 and 2005 would be very similar, with a little decline due to high tempetatures (climate change has its positive effects).
In summary, IMO the explanation must be that coal burning was done in Russia instead of Finland.
As regards coal:
Power generation from coal was down by 7,4%. The electrical efficiency of coal powered plant should be about 35%, so coal consumption for power generation was down by about 20%.
The remaining drop of 30% of coal consumption occured in central heating stations because of the mild weather.
The coal burning was largely replaced by hydro power from Sweden. Imports from Russia have been at maximum capacity for years.
I don't know why do I venture into expanations when I don't have a clue.
Finland usually runs the coal powered plants only in winter, which makes sense. In winter, they can run them in co-generation mode, so the heat is not wasted, but used for heating. In addition to that, in winter, hydro electricity generation is down any way.
In summer, they usually import hydro electricity from Sweden.
In 2004, however, there was this drought in Sweden, so Sweden was unable to export, and Finland had to run their coal power plants in summer as well - and waste the heat.
Hmmm....
IMO, the Economist Magazine comment about Saudi Arabia is a huge buy signal for oil.
This year's October surprise will be cheap oil. Brought to you by our sponsors.
Crude stocks up slightly, gas stocks down slightly:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/weekly_petroleum_status_report/curren t/txt/table1.txt
- US production: DOWN 6.2% (YTD = 222-day average)
- US imports: UP 4.2% (4 week avg)
[ both numbers 2006 v 2005 ]Never a dull moment - BP closes another pipeline
Ethanol could leave the world hungry
How the energy business is drowning Louisiana
I'm not sure that the 'starving children of Gwondanaland' argument will cut much ice in the general public. I think that the real clout in Lester Brown's article lay in the sentence that followed:
"If today's entire U.S. grain harvest were converted into fuel for cars, it would still satisfy less than one-sixth of U.S. demand".
2006 ag losses worst single-year total ever
The planet needs to lose a few billion people. Most people want to survive and to live like waelthy "Americans" on a planet with elbow room or "living room."
My guess is that many political leaders are well aware that most people will not survive the next 20 or 30 years, and are simply trying to ride through the long, slow, violent crash as best as they can.
While global climate change sweeps over us like a tsunami, much of our resources will be focused on killing off other people so that "we can get our....cheap energy, cheap stuff at StuffMart."
We will in no way be prepared for peak oil, let alone the larger energy crisis, soil depletion, water shortages, and weather changes.
The most crucial aspect of this is that political and economic winners in our current robber baron culture do not see themselves as any npart of the cause of our problem, but only see themselves as being responsible for carrying on the staus quo.
Note that the Bill and Linda Gates and Warren Buffet have no concern for climate change or energy problems, but (sincerely, I think) want to help bring medical care and self-sufficiency to many who are being otherwise left behind.
Very little attention is given to the great "Die Off" and "Kill Off" related to resource depletion and habitat destruction. Instead, much of our supposedly philanthropic attention is structured to be blind to these issues and to simply "include more people" in the energy-and-resource-intensive status quo.
At any rate, I do think that the Die Off/Kill Off will short-circuit attempts to find solutions to peak oil, while climate change wreaks havoc with everyone all the while.
If they, or any of their panel of experts, had a hint of die-off you don't think they'd jump on it? Of course they would.
I'm sorry but to see this as denial, or missing the boat, or whatever becomes a self-serving loop: "we don't have a hope because no one sees the problems I see"
Be careful that a confirmation bias does not feed itself.
For what it's worth, I think they make a pretty good case.
And I have a great faith in Bill's drive to "win" at anything.
I'm using version 1.8.0.6 of Firefox with version 8 of the macromedia flash plug in, the PC is windows XP Home SP2
I have not updated past 1.6 yet, because it usually breaks my favorite extensions. I like to give them time to catch up.
"Most people keep a copy of IE around for sites that don't work with Firefox"
Fine, but the site in question is not one of those right? if we define "Firefox" as "the current version of Firefox"
There are lots of sites out there that won't work with obsolete versions of various browsers, IE included.
IMO it's a fairly unsound strategy to continue to use old web software in this age of web based security and other issues (spyware, addware, mal-activeware of various sorts)
I don't. Firefox is very much a work in progress, with constant updates, some more successful than others. It's not reasonable to expect people to have the most updated version of any browser, IMO. (And poor Web site design to require it, but that's another story.) But for Firefox, it's really unreasonable. 1.6 came out only a few months ago, after all. It's not like I'm still trying to run Netscape 3. (Which I do still have a copy of, though, just to test my Web sites with.)
(Everybody has a internet link to software updates Win, Apple, Open Source.)
The interview will not play with Internet Explorer version 6.0.2900 SP2, which I think is as current as you can get short of going to IE 7, as shipped and then autoupdated by Microsoft (just tried) because it requires version 8 (the most current version) of the Flash plugin which seems not to be part of Microsofts autoupdating, but needs manual updating by the user.
It doesn't work in Firefox for me. It doesn't even show you the link to click on to get the interview, so you're left not even knowing there's something wrong, let alone what you have to do to fix it.
If I'm feeling ambitious, I'll try it in Opera and Netscape tonight when I get home.
Tainter's right: complexity's going to kill us...
Especially in software and software is everywhere.
I suspect that the total time wasted by users in bugs, virus and updates is SEVERAL times greater that the total development time.
Energy Tribune - Leading the debate. Beating the Street
Energy Tribune's Editor-in-Chief is Michael Economides who has written a decent introduction to oil, The Color of Oil. Looks like they have some other interesting articles.
I'm not sure if this is the end of the article. Or just a teaser to get you to subscribe. If it is just the beginning, I don't know how much more there is. I know there are those here who will find it entertaining.
I find his use of the term "alarmist" to be cute. At first he vaguely identifies them as "analysts-usually geologists-." Then takes it all out on Simmons. Who isn't a geologist, as far as I know.
Does this qualify as good? From his International Petroleum Price, Supply and Demand: Projections Through 2020.
"But GRI's mid-March analysis, titled ''International Petroleum Price, Supply and Demand Projections Through 2020,'' offered the view that prices in 1994 dollars would stick to a narrow range between $16-to-$20 through the next two decades"
Anybody know anything about his real qualifications. As far as I can tell, he looks about as qualified as George Bush to make predictions.
"Oil scarcity, Oil crises, and alternative energies--don't be fooled again," Applied Energy, Vol. 64, no. 1-4, September-December 1999.
Oil Supply Security in 2004: Does the Song Remain the Same?
I don't know anything about Lynch's qualifications, but here are those of ARAMCO's Saleri:
Saleri is Aramco's head of reservoir management and in that role, he oversees the company's well optimization projects. He has also been leading Aramco's push to produce more natural gas. He holds masters and doctorate degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia and is on the advisory board to the petroleum engineering program at the University of Houston. Saleri worked for Chevron for 18 years before joining Aramco in 1992.
- The Energy Tribune, 30 June 2006 [http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=157&idli=3)]
The problem with the credentials issue ("My PhD is bigger than yours") is that it can cut both ways -- many of the leading peak oil activists are also 'amateurs'. For example, Richard Heinberg and Julian Darley were (I think) initially musicians!
http://www.energybulletin.net/19304.html
Very nice! With comments on the CERA report - hint: he's not impressed...(of course you knew that)
"It ain't what you know that gets you into trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Mark Twain
The entire brazilian sugar ethanol business is a unsustainable social subsidy--an employment program resting on the countries cheap petroleum and diminishing Panatel water supply. Sugar cane production uses the virtual slave labor of 8 workers/hectare and slash and burn methods that deplete the soil in 30 years.
Any link to support this statement, which appears inaccurate?
Brazil has been by far the world's largest exporter and producer of sugar for decades. This has bnot been done by rotating fields every few years. In Thailand, where I live, fields have grown sugar cane for many years and the conditions are no better than Brazil.
1) FO Licht presentation to METI,
http://www.meti.go.jp/report/downloadfiles/g30819b40j.pdf
EROEI Calcs: Page 20
2) IEA Automotive Fuels for the Future
http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/1990/autofuel99.pdf
3) IEA: Biofuels for Transport
http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2004/biofuels2004.pdf
EROEI calcs: page 60
4) Worldwatch Institute & Government of Germany: Biofuels for Transport (Link to register - study is free)
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4078
EROEI Calcs (for 12 fuel types): Page 17
5) Potential for Biofuels for Transport in Developing Countries
http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2006/01/05/000090341_20060105 161036/Rendered/PDF/ESM3120PAPER0Biofuels.pdf
This is pure speculation but could the Saudis or perhaps Opec with the access to their own data, determine the peak? Would they keep it to themselves? How would they take economic advantage of that information and what would be the signs to an outside observer?
I don't think they are keeping it to themselves to many foreign contractors work for Aramco for that to happen.
I think that our world goverments are aware of the situation in KSA but I suspect its not being pressed for political reasons the goverment of KSA has not figured out how to handle the internal fallout from public knowledge of the status of there oil industry. When millions of poor saudi's find out the pie is half eaten I think there will be serious internal issues.
The highest probabilty result once peak oil hits the average saudi is disruption of the remaining supply so the best course of action is to actually not talk about a pending collapse in production in KSA if it is in fact occuring.
I don't think anyone believes KSA will survive peak oil much less the following production drops.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/21/8383659/index.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4793455.stm
I agree that we still have huge looming population-related problems, but apparently we are carrying a little fat (literally) as we face that ...
I met a guy who turned out to be formery employeed at Bear Sterns and we started talking about all the oil issues. We talked for a while and since he was a finance man, I pelted him with the numbers facing the country as a whole(debt etc). I brought up the bankruptcy article written by the STL Fed reserve and he asked what would literally happen if we declared bankruptcy. I had no thoughts on the matter other than obvious quick ideas especially the reserve currency status. With the massive debt hanging over us, I don't know that we won't see starving people here as well.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/01/060130031548.htm
http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/1961.cfm
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article1219018.ece
http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=2315516&page=1
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/07/28/fat.virus.ap/index.html
"The Economist" calls obesity a disease of the world's poor.
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=998456
Poor and fat do not, historically or traditionally, go hand in hand. In primitive societies and in prior centuries, being well fed was a sign of wealth (and status). Something is definitely amiss here....
20% of the US is considered poor, but malnutrition is perhaps hitting 1%.
Poor people in England often make a habit of eating things like 'chip butties' (buttered french fry sandwiches) because they're cheap. These people may be overweight, but could not be said to be well fed. If memory serves, some of them have even been getting scurvy in recent years. (sorry, no link, just memory fragment from old BBC newscast)
Don't forget in many Third World countries that wealth polarization is even more extreme than in the US.
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MEXICO CITY - Carlos Slim is rich. Insanely rich. Astronomically rich. If you took his $37.6 billion and laid the dollar bills end to end, they would stretch to the moon and back seven times, that's how rich he is.
That the world's third-wealthiest man is from Mexico, a country still plagued by poverty, is remarkable. But what's more remarkable is this: He's not the only ultrarich Mexican out there.
Mexico is quickly becoming a land of business dynasties, families that have grown fabulously wealthy through a combination of government favoritism and the privatization of hundreds of state-run enterprises in the 1990s.
"We have a huge concentration of capital in this country," said Celso Garrido, an economist at Mexico City's Autonomous Metropolitan University. "They're the superrich, the fantasticos."
These are the Mexicans who drive Porsches and live in mansions in Lomas de Chapultepec, the Beverly Hills of Mexico City. The kind of people who have no trouble getting U.S. visas and who fly into Scottsdale Municipal Airport on private jets for weekend shopping trips.
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I can vouch for the personal jets because unfortunately I live underneath the Scottsdale Airport flight path--more and more zooming overhead as the years have gone by.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Please explain to me how the eruption of Tambora in 1815 was a factor in the French Revolution of 1789-1799.
That would be the fiat money system in operation. Inflation caused by the debasing of currency simply moves money to the people that control the money.
Oil is also a big part of that. The vast streams of dollars coming mostly from the poor and middle class go to oil companies and oil countries. They don't sit on the big piles of cash. It is returned to purchase assets, pay dividends, etc. Most of the return money ends up in the hands of the already wealthy, making them even more wealthy.
I believe that this transfer of money from poor to rich has increased exponentially in the last 5 years and will continue to accelerate until the economic crash. I predict the crash in the next 24 months.
You got that right!
Our (US) financial system is deliberately structrured to do just that. Money (whether inflated or delfated) is winding up in the hands of those who have had most of it to begin with. The goal of TPTB is to keep it that way .... at all cost.
I am becoming more and more convinced that it is a totally rigged game. But sooner or later (most likely later) the masses are going to realize that they have been being steadily screwed for a long, long time. And when they finally do realize that, look out!
Vast disparities in wealth within a society is little different than a large difference in electrical potential .... sooner or later there will be a big spark, after which things will equalize.
This situation in the US cannot go on forever. And it won't.
Consumer prices pressured by energy costs
Your interview was quite informative.
I agree on most points but not on others.
What I found interesting was mention that your previous work was on biomass->ethanol production paths.
Was this via gasification or bacterial fermentation?
Gaddy at Arkansas was looking at a gasification process at the same time, and I think my research advisor (Mark Holtzapple) collaborated with him a bit. Personally, I think a thermochemical process of gasification of the biomass followed by chemical conversion to fuel makes a lot more sense than the inefficient microbial processes.
They claimed they could make oil for $15/barrel, when in reality it cost closer to $80/bbl, even with subsidies (and has been rising steadily with the cost of fossil fuels). They've since closed their pilot project and are uprooting, moving to Europe. I'll re-locate some references/sources for you if you so desire.
I've seen the economics of a comparable process. It broke even in markets with high tipping fees (for waste).
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060814/nym198.html?.v=48
Platts gives the reason why the supply from OPEC was lowered and mainly we can attribute it to maintenance, repairs or attack on infrastructure. Altough it can somewhat affect prices because of localised transfer of supply or using reserves available.
It will be interesting to see how repair and maintenance will affect or delay planed increase in production in the comming years.
I know Chris Skrebowsky and Campbell predicted small increase of production up until 2010 but is the maintenance and repair problem could reduce that planed increase?
Can maintenance problem be big enough to reduce the net available production? I know it is more of logistic problem and that it is hard to predict unplanned problems.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060816/daw033.html?.v=67
All part of the Chavez plan to get out of US market before he lowers the boom?