DrumBeat: August 2, 2006
Posted by threadbot on August 2, 2006 - 9:30am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Oil tops $76 as storm heads toward US Gulf
Oil rose above $76 on Wednesday as a tropical storm gathered strength and headed toward the Gulf of Mexico, threatening U.S. oil and gas rigs still recovering from last year's devastating hurricanes.
Heat wave strains power grids in half of nation
In New York, Consolidated Edison asked customers to disconnect computers and TVs. Thermostats at train stations were raised, bridge and tunnel lights were turned off, and the Pepsi-Cola sign on Brooklyn's waterfront was dimmed."I am asking New Yorkers to conserve energy and say a prayer," said City Councilman Eric Gioia, who criticized ConEd's performance in last month's blackouts.
Not looking good for Cantarell: Mexico's Largest Oil Field Output Falls to 4-Year Low
Mexican crude oil output at Cantarell, the world's second-largest field, fell faster than expected in June to a four-year low, signaling the government will miss production targets.The field, which accounts for about half of Mexico's crude production, yielded 1.74 million barrels a day in June, 13 percent less than a year ago and the least since November 2001, according to Energy Ministry data. Petroleos Mexicanos, the state oil monopoly, forecast Cantarell output would fall 6 percent this year to average 1.9 million barrels per day.
The drop worsens the outlook for Mexico's crude exports, about 80 percent of which go to the U.S., and for the country's public finances. Taxes on oil sales account for almost 40 percent of Mexico's government revenue. Cantarell is the world's No. 2 field by output and Mexico's biggest.
"The situation is probably much graver than the government would like us to think it is," said David Shields, an independent oil consultant based in Mexico City who has covered the industry for 18 years. "Oil production and oil exports are going to decline considerably over the next three years."
It's time to invest for $100 oil
Peter Lloyd is preparing for a ghastly future. The world he foresees is one in which it will cost $700 or $1000 to fill the family car - if petrol is available for private use.It will be a world in which the scarcity and expense of oil, widespread pollution, environmental ruin and climate change will bring down modern civilisation in terrible anarchy as countries go to war over oil, fresh water or arable land; as ordinary people try to adjust to living primitive lives without the medicines and technology that support their lives in the 21st century.
Dr Lloyd, an anaesthetist at the Hawke's Bay Hospital, estimates about 80 percent of the world's six billion people will die of hunger, disease or "slaughter on a scale never before seen in history".
On the other side of the oil ‘peak’
Heinberg in San Francisco: Peak experience
* "Whale Blubber Scarce -- World to Go Dark"No, I didn't make it up. And no, it wasn't Herman Melville.
The month - November. The year - 1857. The source - The Boston Globe. Really.
Gasoline's fledgling rivals: the race to power your car
U.K.: Study warns new energy law will see prices plummet
New legislation on energy efficiency could sharply reduce the value of much of Britain's commercial property, an architecture firm warned today....In a report published today, the international architects Gensler said 75% of property developers believe that the impending legislation will have a negative impact on the value of older, more energy inefficient buildings.
Rationing could be key to war on climate change
Governments may be forced to turn to wartime-style rationing to combat climate change, or risk mass migration and more than 40 million deaths, an expert in global warming has warned.
Customers pony up for renewable energy
[Update by Leanan on 08/02/06 at 10:53 AM EDT]
Oil off highs on supply report
Gasoline stockpile posts smaller drop than expected; crude dwindles, distillates in-line.
You can read the Weekly Petroleum Data Report here.
"Stop whining; ExxonMobil is doing its job"
by Jim Jubak
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/JubaksJournal/StopWhiningExxonMobilIsDoingItsJob.aspx
excerpts:
Sorry, but ExxonMobil (XOM) critics are just plain wrong. They've picked the wrong target for their rage. ExxonMobil is actually doing a good job at what an oil company is supposed to do: find oil and gas and sell it to make money for its shareholders.
...
Face it. The world has a shortage of cheap, easily refined oil. It's become harder and harder to find significant new reserves of oil -- especially reserves outside the control of the national oil companies of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the rest of OPEC. And much of tomorrow's supply of hydrocarbons is going to come from unconventional sources that are expensive to tap and that take a long, long time to get into production. I don't think we're ever going back to the days of cheap gas.
Greg in MO
Love affair with cars starts to skid
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 1, 3:22 PM ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060801/ap_on_go_ot/driving_americans
-or-
http://tinyurl.com/o3hmb
WASHINGTON - Americans love their automobiles, but not as much as they used to.
Nearly seven in 10 drivers enjoy getting behind the wheel, while the rest think it's a chore. In 1991, nearly eight in 10 said they liked driving.
The biggest reasons for dreading the road: traffic and the behavior of other drivers. Only 3 percent point to high gas prices.
"Other drivers get on my nerves," said Steve Heavisides, a 45-year-old teacher from Vernon, Conn., who had just returned home from a short drive. "There was a women who could have gone right on red and she was just sitting there talking on her cell phone. People don't pay attention and that gets on your nerves."
About one in four drivers thinks of his or her car as "something special" instead of just a "means of transportation," according to a poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center. Nearly one in three thinks it has "a personality of its own."
Americans have been loving their cars for about a century, buying increasingly bigger, faster and more expensive cars while the rest of the world moves toward economy and efficiency. But the new poll suggests that driving is becoming more of a burden for many.
The souring attitudes evolved as many Americans moved farther from central cities, generating longer commutes and more congestion. By 2001, the U.S. had more personal vehicles (204 million) than licensed drivers (191 million).
Urban drivers endured an average of 47 hours of rush hour traffic delays in 2003, a threefold increase from two decades earlier. The worst problems were in Los Angeles, where the average driver suffered almost 100 hours of traffic delays. That's about four full days of waiting for the car in front of you to move.
"I sit there in traffic when it should take half an hour, now it's taking an hour and 15 minutes," said Stacy Baglio, 36, who drives 28 miles to her sales job in northern New Jersey. "People are weaving in and out of traffic. There is no common courtesy whatsoever."
Pew conducted the survey of 1,048 drivers from June 20 to July 16. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. The results were compared with a Gallup poll done in 1991.
The new poll's results were consistent among drivers of cars, pickups and SUVs. There were few regional differences among drivers, although northeasterners were more likely than drivers in the rest of the country to have "shouted, cursed or made gestures to other drivers" in the past year.
The key to rediscovering automotive bliss: Zen out. Too many people think of driving as competition, says Leon James, co-author of the book, "Road Rage and Aggressive Driving." Happy drivers think of traffic simply as part of the process of getting from one place to another, kind of like the process of taking a shower to get clean, he said.
"Americans are nice people," said James, a psychology professor at the University of Hawaii. "But there are certain areas that have to do with games and competition, where we become less nice to each other."
Jennifer Geisinger seems to have it figured out. The 31-year-old Realtor from suburban Minneapolis said she loves to drive her 1999 Honda CRV.
"It's something about being in control and getting out on the road," Geisinger said. "I don't have a sports car and I don't speed. But I love my car."
Geisinger also has something in common with 68 percent of all drivers: "Oh I sing, of course," she said, adding that her stereo plays country, opera and Broadway show tunes.
_
On The Net:
The Pew Research Center, Americans and Their cars: Is the Romance on the Skids?
http://pewresearch.org/social/pack.php?PackID16
I wonder, seriously, if the lady at the stoplight made a conscious "golden rule" decision that she would be willing to wait for anyone else?
Regardless, I observe her behavior, and that of the man behind her, as entirely within our semi-monkey nature.
What do you mean, "semi"?
And who's to say who is being rude in that situation? What if she hadn't had her blinker on, and he thought she was going straight? Would he still be annoyed?
For me, it's a matter of safety. There's a monster intersection outside my office. Split-phased, arrows, divided highways, cat-tracks, jug handle, etc. Many of those who drive through it are commuters. They drive it every day, and know how it works. They recognize the timing of the light, and know when it's safe to turn right.
People who aren't used to it find it very intimidating. They sometimes try to turn right on red, and get nailed by people turning left. (The split-phasing throws them off.) If you you're not familiar with an intersection, there's nothing wrong with waiting for the light to turn green.
Most intersections are timed so that that the longest you have to wait is 4 minutes. (Any longer than that is a safety hazard, because people will try to run the light if they have to wait too long.) So this guy was having a cow at having to wait at most four minutes.
Another driving example is the "slower traffic keep right" rule. Most people follow it, probably out of a "golden rule" instinct. The few people that violate it are met with honking, flashing headlights, gestures, & etc.
So sure, maybe this was a "special" situation and the guy misjudged. Maybe the intersection was the factor and not the cell phone.
But in terms of illustrating human nature that doesn't matter. It was the perception of anti-social behavior that provoked the response.
But hey, this is California, I understand that we honk less anway ;-)
There was a delay in getting both aboard and six cars were stacked up behind.
Both visitors were amazed that there was not one honk from anyone.
I've got something similar to this. It's a left on the highway and if you miss the light when you are suppose to get it you sit for roughly 2.5 minutes. If you miss that one, whose to say if you had been on that highway 2.5 minutes ago, the traffic would be less and result in a faster commute. During these 2.5 minutes I wonder how many cars have managed to be added to the highway? This is cumulative and those first 30 seconds adds to the chance at shaving another 30 and so on. If some idiot hadn't been typing in 2pt font on their cell, I could have gotten there quicker.
I know I'm too aggressive, but the alternative is gritting my teeth as I watch people not drive. Here in the STL we were just name in like the top 5 best drivers (not driving because the roads blow bigtime) and I can't figure out why. NO ONE uses a turn signal ANYWHERE. Now I hate making blanket statements b/c I realize the fallacy, but on my daily commute I see it everyday.
As aggressive as I am my fiance thinks I'm fair. I always signal, even before cutting you off. I know people are out there just darting in front of me if I don't ride your ass so I'm going to ride your ass because all those cars that want those extera 30 seconds adds up when 10 cars manage to fit between me and that car that used to be in front of me. So I'll cut you off if you're going to slow in the far left lane, but I'll let you know about 2-3 seconds and give you a moment to keep me out. I think it's fair enough.
My driving is concentrated on the highway so you would think its a simple trip, but when people are constantly failing to use their signal and simply barge into traffic (many times large SUV's) rather than merge. WTF happened to MERGE or YIELD!? I really don't enjoy driving at all. I hate it, I hate traffic and I hate dealing with the idiot people who attempt to jabber on the phone or any other activity besides actually looking ahead.
On second thought maybe I've just got Intermitent Explosive Disorder and need to be treated.
Also, the driver who thinks about their longetivity signals EVERYWHERE and EVERY TIME. People here are working a minimum of 60 hours a week, stressed out unbelieveably, and you have to think of them as the extreme ADHD cases or simply mentally ill - the mentally ill are generally unable to determine the motives of others, and this translates to driving by their having no idea at all what you're going to do unless you signal. So you signal. Every damn time. From when you leave your parking space, for every turn, lane change, every turn in a parking lot, when leave a space, entering a space, to when you finally return home from your errends and of course have a car or two right on your tail when you're simply trying to get into your own parking space. You signal.
I can't imagine anyone actually likes to drive any more.
The solution is to quickly swivelneck to check the blind area you are ready to occupy, give the turn signal one blink as you do an instant lane change! This helps explain why I always drive with my right hand on the wheel and my left free to do the turn signals for the one blink. Becuse I do this instant lane change move, I don't like to drive trucks, becuse swivelnecking doesn't reveal the car in the blind area becuse you're too high up.
Then the woman referred to in the article should have hung up her damn phone. THAT is what annoys me most.
And most of the laws allow handsfree phones, when those are just as dangerous. It's the distraction that's dangerous, not having something in your hand.
That said, if you are going to use a cell phone, doing it while stopped at a red light is better than doing it while the car is moving.
Personally, I hate cell phones. I don't own one, and don't want to.
Breaking News from ABCNEWS.com:
IRAQI PRESIDENT SAYS IRAQI TROOPS WILL TAKE OVER SECURITY OF THE COUNTRY BY END OF OF THE YEAR
http://abcnews.go.com?CMP=EMC-1396
***
Not only will the Iraqi military be miraculously transformed into a fine and effective homeland security force, but if we "Conserve energy and say a prayer" we will also be rescued by Technomagic and the Second Advent.
The political scene is mighty ugly in the USA.
Most folks want to be told that Iraq will be OK, that Global Warming will be OK, that there is an infintie supply of petroleum and other easy stuff to extract from the planet, and that we can continue to dump toxins into the infinite waste-sink of the planet as well.
"Tell 'em what they want to hear in such a way as they will believe it and also believe that to make sure things will be OK, you must vote for me."
The USA is politically paralysed in the face of real challenges. I hope the GOP does not fare at all well in the coming elctions, but the Democrats might have a tough time managing the mess all the same.
"Tell us a soothing bed-time story," saif the Voters to the Politician. Please don't make it too scary, just enough to be exciting. Make it come out all right so I can get back to sleep." "OK," said the politican, wanting nothing more than a sleeping electorate.
There is no viable political solution, no matter who wins in November. As has been discussed here ad nauseum, no alternative fuel is going to coming riding in to rescue the future. Neither democrats or republicans have even stratched the surface in preparing America - and the world - for the massive societal upheavals that are soon to occur. In the meantime, millions of Americans go about their daily tasks, somehow thinking that no matter what happens, the status quo - or at least something close to it - can be infinitely maintained. Its mind-boggling.
I just read the "When chaos replaces oil" article, and it dovetails 100% with what we'll certainly be seeing within the next decade. Who's ready for the advent of subsistence living?
I'm depressed.
I agree with you. Ultimately humankind will be better served by localization and subsistence living, but how to get from here to there? Right now I feel like this guy did who witnessed a pig getting killed on his cousin's farm:
I think that's great advice, and thank you for it. However, even among those that are mentally prepared for the coming rigours, the physical aspects of tending to a farm and growing/killing your own food will be much more than expected.
Here's the link. I forgot to include it with the excerpt.
The people who are most likely to be aware of GW (and to a lesser extent, PO) are the same ones who gasp in horror when I tell them I enjoy small game hunting. The gasps get louder when they realize that yes, I really do eat squirrel and rabbit. It's going to be very difficult for some people to adjust.
I just can't imagine the average cubicle-dweller doing anything else. They're idea of roughing it is making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on their granite countertop at home.
I just can't imagine these people butchering a hog or a stray dog, and sewing up the holes in their clothes by hand. I can't imagine them making an educated guess as to whether the water in the ruts by the side of the road is safer to drink than the water trapped in an old stump.
If the Fall is fast, we're going to see a lot of people make, for them, the most logical decision and just sit down and die. The problem is, the fall will in all probability be rather slow, because of complexity and inertia in our system.
I disagree. I predict that the fall will be both fast and brutal. The situation is far different from Europe's in that for the vast majority of the population, there is no cushion whatsoever. The overall personal savings level is actually in negative territory, which means that most people are just a couple of paychecks away from disaster. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that a negative savings rate, along with unbelievably high levels of personal debt, has been present in any other global super-power in history. Once the general population runs into the coming adverse conditions, a good number will lose everything -- and quickly.
Another factor is that the chief source of energy that is becoming scarce cannot be replenished. As you all know, there's nothing no energy source that will be able to replace cheap oil. So once Peak Oil really starts to make itself felt, there's going to be no place to turn and society will be forced to change. This will feed into the first reason given, as once economic growth is no longer possible due to energy scarcity, then the lack of savings and high personal debt will act as accelerants to the collapse. Add to that the incredible amount of bad will that the US is building all around the world. Who is going to want to help to get us back on our feet?
So, I don't see any way that this crash will not be chaotic and rapid. I see no major ameliorating factors that would tend to augur a slow collapse.
If by inertia you mean "we have a lot of capital we can burn in place of depleting resources", I'm tempted to agree. I read the Greer article Leanan linked this afternoon, and his idea of "catabolic collapse" - makes intuitive sense. It's like a body surviving without food for a long time by burning its muscle mass.
How those two competing factors (complexity and mass) will balance out is anyone's guess at this point.
I'm not trying to sound ignorant, but I'm curious - is there any degree of flexibility in the systems with which you are fammiliar, or is a crash inevitable once it begins? Are there opportunities for mitigation?
As an example of the first sort of failure, a large-scale telecommunications crash that took out phones down the east coast of the US in the mid '70s was caused by a programmer neglecing to put in a check for an out of range value in the code for a big telephone switch. That value was normally never out of range, so the problem was never encountered. Then one day a bad value got passed in to this section of code, maybe due to a memory fault, and the code bombed. The fault cascaded through all the switches in the network as the bad value was passed along - because they all had the same code - and the whole system came down.
An example of the second type of failure is what happens when you try to access an out of range memory location in an application running under a good operating system. The error will be intercepted by the OS, and the application will be shut down (catastrophic for the app) but the whole system stays up (good for the system).
So, if the failure is one you can predict, and do plan for it, you can mitigate the crash. If it happens because of a bug in the system design or implementation, or if you simply neglect to guard against a fault scenario, all bets are off.
Just like real life.
One fallacy here though. A program is prone to crash because it is a single entity (a single CPU core, if you will, not to over simplify...) performing instructions in serial. Any problem (a single byte flipped in RAM by cosmic background radiation, say) can cause the system as a whole to crash, because (at least in system mode) it trusts every piece completely. Whew, that was a lot of parentheticals. :-)
However, when was the last time the internet went down? Sure, it went down for one guy here, one guy there, and systems on the internet fail daily, but the whole network continues to operate, why? The answer is that the internet doesn't trust each element completely. All the communications protocols have checksums, and each node just discards stuff it can't deal with rather than crashing.
Basically, I'd say a person is analogous to a computer, each one will, eventually, crash, for lack of a better word. A society is like the internet, much less pronet to blanket failure if the general design is good. Complexity alone is not enough to make a system like that fail, because it has to cope with failures. A human has no backup if his heart stops working, but there is no single person alive today whose loss would dramatically affect the functioning of the society as a whole. There is not even a single building (or, some might argue, city) whose loss would terminally undermin the society.
A society can still fail due to systematic pathology, but it is not really clear that complexity makes this any worse. In fact, having large groups of overlapping rules (cities, states, feds, different departments, etc...) it makes it less likely that any one loophole has a catastrophic affect. In this way, complexity might actually help to stave off systematic failures, as there is no single loophole whose exploitation allows a full circumvention of all the defenses.
My $0.02.
OK, I can see that. I'd actually disagree with it as a general statement, but surely lots of infrastructure will have to be swapped out by any real solution, so there's definitely more reliance than would be liked.
It does bring it back into the technical realm though, as a problem based on a very specific issue, not a broad indictment of complex systems in general.
Let's go back to the good old days, when pilots flew planes.
Grump.
Planes may seem necessary, but the world might be better off if we all embraced the boat.
I thinking about building one of the bigger Pelicans for sailing across Lake Superior. They are so well designed, so sturdy, so forgiving. Now, if I could only find a woman with the qualities of a Pelican . . . :=)
Wooden boats are the answer, never mind the question.
And oh yes, the junk or sampan rigs are very practical and efficient.
Reminds me of this (it's fake, btw)...
http://www.coolest-gadgets.com/wp-images/bluescreencockpit_01.jpg
I fail to see what an electrical distribution grid has to do with peak oil. We don't make electricity from oil, and soon enough we won't be making it from natural gas either. Coal, nuclear, wind, those are the options. There are pros and cons of each (please, please, please, let it not be coal....), but I don't think starvation is option #4.
I really doubt that is true.
- the emergency backup systems are usually diesel (buildings like your hospital and businesses like your ISP)
- the repair crews who carry the line and transformer replacements aren't riding bicycles. They are in big trucks with lift buckets.
Oil is a bit like oxygen. You may only need a little bit, but what you need is mission critical.Can you say, "Mid-term elections?"
Yup, repugnican skullduggery all over again. Next we'll see the Iraqi president standing in the green zone in front of a banner declaring, "Mission Accomplished."
The sad thing is, the feckless American people will buy into the propaganda. Stalin is alive and well and living in the White House.
How California Failed in Efforts To Curb Its Addiction to Oil, by Jeffrey Ball
I did not see it at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette yet.
People who drive from the ocean (Pacific) to the river (Colorado) with boats and jet-skis in tow have always outnumbered the non-fossil-fuel cars on the road.
Anyone know how crowded the river is this year?
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06214/710490-185.stm
Indeed. California continues to build more roads at the expense of rail. There's no will to tax gas guzzlers through vehicle registration fees. Here in Northern California, there's an unused railroad line that extends from Sausalito all the way to Eureka. Plans for passenger rail have sat on the table while residents voted an increase in their general-revenue sales tax to widen their freeway in Santa Rosa.
In my rural area, citizens of a smallish town passed a general-revenue sales tax increase just to maintain the city's asphalt streets!
Last night's entry at The Stormtack is about why they were wrong about Chris. (They didn't think it should even be called a tropical storm yesterday.)
Natural Gas Surges in New York on Hurricane Threat, Heat Wave
The National Hurricane Center says a hurricane watch has been issued in the southeastern Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Chris seems to be developing an eye.
Path still looking a lot like Rita.
Most of the models still have it heading into the Gulf.
From today's article:
"The data show that Cantarell, the world's second-biggest field after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, is living up to what is known within the state oil apparatus as a worst-case scenario, detailed in an internal oil company report that suggested earlier this year the field's output could fall by nearly 75% by the end of 2008."
Note that on Khebab's HL plot, Mexico is past the 50% of Qt mark.
Again, East Texas is to Texas, as:
Ghawar is to Saudi Arabia;
Cantarell is to Mexico;
Burgan is to Kuwait;
Daqing is to China.
I can see this with Lopez in power, but not with Calderon.
With Calderon, Mexico continues to export oil to the US, while the poor in Mexico do without, and the North/South tensions escalate, until Mexico's government and economy either (a) collapse, or (b) turn toward Lopez's policies.
Eventually, unless the US can maintain an export favorable government in power in Mexico, there will be a substantial shift of power between the two countries, and not in the US's favor.
What about us? If their production tanks, do we have to export oil to them?
The problem with that scenario is that the Mexican government currently derives more than 40 percent of its revenue from PEMEX exports. If they suddently decided not to export any oil, what would make up for the loss of income? Waiting for petrolem-dependent industries to move to Mexico would be a time-consuming process -- it certainly wouldn't happen overnight, or even come close to making up the revenue shortfall in the short run.
Besides, do you see any US administration allowing Mexico to use all of its oil for domestic purposes, and forgoing exports? I don't.
Specific items of interest are:
- Exploratory drilling costs
- Startup costs and time to bring online
- Oil and Gas production data
- Operational expenses
- Added expenses due to (and timing of) enhanced recovery efforts
What I am looking for is a life cycle assessment of energy inputs and outputs. I imagine this has been done, but perhaps not all the relevant data has been made public. Even a detailed case study would be of interest. Thanks.Cantarell crashing is pretty sad, but geologically inevitable. But consider this post, or this post on future shortages and resource wars. Our future is looking increasing (pdf warning)thirsty.
Our future will be very interesting to say the least!
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
In the above comment the two posts that you reference both point out a link and contain (lengthy, non-blockquoted) passages from those links. You could have just pointed at those links directly. Bam! You look better.
Just trying to give you an edge. And sorry for doing this out in the open. I would have much rather emailed you, but couldn't track down your email.
Thxs for the advice, I appreciate it, but I was just trying to make it a short & quick post by referring people to the earlier posts that had brief excerpts and supporting links. When the threads nowadays routinely reach 200-300 posts: I am assuming that alot of readers don't go back very often to the older threads, but instead use the "your comments" tool on the right hand column as I do to respond to other TODers.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
A question about imports. As Cantarell rapidly declines, we have to make up for that loss of imported oil. Where do we go for to make up for the loss of Cantarell oil? It doesn't really seem like there is a swing producer left anymore?
Also what percent of oil is available on the 'open' market for purchase vs oil that is locked up in contracts? example, say we wanted to import oil from country X, but all their oil is currently being exported to country Y via a pipeline, would we still be able to buy it even at a higher price?
Since you asked. . .
(Repetitive information follows)
IMO, we will see the following cycle over and over again: (1) a decline in net export capacity (because of falling production and/or rising consumption in the exporting countries); (2) a round of bidding as the remaining export capacity is auctioned off to the high bidders and the low bidders do without; (3) a period of stability; and then the cycle starts all over again with a drop in exports.
The decline in consumption will initially show up in poorer countries, but it is only a matter of time before the developed counties (and rapidly developing countries like China and India) start bidding against each other.
All but a handful of the 2006 four week running average numbers of total imports into the US are below the 12/30/05 number, while oil prices are up 15% to 30%, and the price increases this year correspond to import declines (note that oil was back at $75 prior to the conflict in Lebanon).
In regards to point (2), when you say remaining export capacity, is that just export capacity after domestic use, or domestic use + prior export commitments? Can a higher price from country X trump an existing long term export contract to country Y?
I first raised the export question in a January, 2006 post on TOD:
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/1/27/14471/5832
My prediction was that we would face an export crisis--before we see a large drop in total world oil production.
I found it here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14313.htm
"Stop the Band-aid Treatment." (Carter focuses on the Middle East, but the same could be said for energy policy, environmental, economic, and educational policy... health care policy.....)
Carter's conclusion:
>>>
A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
<<<
"Dialogue...[is]...a reward for subservient behaviour." That kind of sums up the authoritarianism of fascism, does it not? So who needs dialogue when subservience is the prerequisite?
http://tinyurl.com/ldupk
If you haven't read Catton, Morrison or Tainter because you do not have time to read a whole book, at least you should read Price. His essay takes about 5 to 10 minutes to read, depending on how fast you read:
http://dieoff.org/page137.htm
Question; Am I the only one on this list that believes this is the future we face? Has anyone read William Catton, Reg Morrison, Joseph Tainter or David Price? Do you deny that collapse is inevitable.
http://tinyurl.com/ldupk
I don't know exactly how it will work out, but it seems to me that the political powers that be will try for draconian powers in order to guide the situations that they can.
I heard on Air America Radio this AM that the bush administration had asked Congress to consider allowing Don Rumsfeld to decide who goes before military tribunals - that is, allowing the Secretary of Defense to have anyone, anywhere, arrested, held indefinitely, and given a secret trial before a tribunal whenever the government decided to get around to it.
The geopolitical situation and the domestic political responses of nations to the crisis may involve authoritarianism such as we never dreamed would come to the "civilised" nations of Europe and "the West."
The collapse is so far being met with denial, bargaining, and angry scapegoating.
Yep, collapse is already ugly for millions, soon to be ugly for billions. Please read my earlier post with the link about soldiers dying over control of a small water sluice gate. Then extrapolate that incredibly violent desperation to the last link: "Lester R. Brown, Plan B 2.0 Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble".
Excerpt
-------------
His concerns are mirrored in a World Bank report: "Anecdotal
evidence suggests that deep wells [drilled] around Beijing
now have to reach 1,000 meters [more than half a mile] to tap fresh water, adding dramatically to the cost of supply." In unusually strong language for a Bank report, it foresees "catastrophic consequences for future generations" unless water use and supply can quickly be brought back into balance.8
Since expanding irrigation helped triple the world grain harvest from 1950 to 2000, it comes as no surprise that water losses can shrink harvests. With water for irrigation, many countries are in a classic overshoot-and-decline mode. If countries that are overpumping do not move quickly to reduce water use and stabilize water tables, then an eventual drop in food production is almost inevitable.76
-----------------------------------
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I fear catabolic collapse is the most likely outcome, which can take centuries. It will also maximize the damage we do to the environment, as we desperately try to maintain our way of life while converting all resources and capital to waste.
Anyway, as one might expect, Sorokin looked at the rise and fall of civilizations through a sociologists lenses, and he focused on value systems. According to his analysis, there are secular master trends that fluctuate between sensate (i.e. materialistic) and ideational (spiritual or faith-based) extremes. Either extreme is likely to cause collapse. Civilization flourishes best at the midpoints, brief periods between the extremes--e.g. Golden ages of Athens or Rome, U.S., c. 1776 - 1950.
Clearly Sorokin's analysis is incomplete, but I do believe that he was on to something important.
If U.S. society collapses, I will point my finger right at our insanely extreme materialism (sensate to the max), and say to Sorokin's shade: By golly, Miss Molly, you were right.
This "mystical explanations" nonsense has been rightly trashed by Tainter.
You don't breed any kind of civilisation without an adequate ressource base to foot the energy bill.
How far does the "civilisation" of the Inuits or the Khoisans goes?
For example, he uses the concept of "diminishing marginal returns" from economics. However, by definition, in economics diminishing marginal returns ASSUMES that technology is fixed and unchanging. To assume that technology is fixed begs all interesting questions in regard to the collapse of civilizations.
Thus, it is not too much of a stretch to speculate that all of Tainter's world view may based on one huge monster false analogy fallacy.
Personally, I find Tainter tainted by mysticism in contrast to Jared Diamond who is doing hard solid science.
I've heard people complain about errors in Diamond, and many of them are legitimate complaints, but you're the first person I've ever heard call Tainter into question quite like that before.
Is Tainter doing science?
Or, is he doing something else?
My reading of Tainter says that he is doing something else.
Why? Because his premises are dogmatic and not to be questioned. His interpretation of the data is somehow "special" and superior to the many, many other and diverse interpretations of the same data.
The issue of diminishing returns is fundamental for evaluating the cogency and validity of Tainter's work. Based on my reading, he made what is in logic called a "category mistake." In other words, he is applying the theory of diminishing returns where (by definition) it cannot apply.
In what way is diminishing returns inapplicable to an investment like complexity? Complexity has an energy cost, and an energy return, so it would seem to me to be as subject to diminishing returns as any other investment. Could you back up your assertion?
IMO, Tainter did not do his homework.
His logic is riddled with deep fallacies, including the "self-sealer," in which case if you puncture his argument, that proves that you "don't get it."
N.B. Marxism and Freudianism also have "self-sealers" built in. Thus I see Tainter on the gray border area between science and ideology.
Diamond, on the other hand, is clearly a scientist--not only by his credentials but also by his transparent methods and willingness to be swayed by evidence.
For Tainter, IMO, evidence is all to often something to be explained away or swept under the rug when it does not fit his grandiose "model."
I am also a fan of Diamond although he does stretch a bit trying to be even-handed and not go into diatribes for one point of view or another, but hey, this is what a scientist is supposed to do.
Broad paintbrush characterizations like "Stupidity" and "Complexity" fail to home in on the detailed mechanisms that underly a Civilization behaving in a manner that appears "slow and stupid". It doesn't get us to root causes. It doesn't help us in seeking solutions.
If a professional teacher spots a student who appears to be "slow and stupid", that should not end the inquiry. Why is the student acting in a way that can be termed "slow and stupid"? Is the student suffering from a particular pathology, and if so what are the details of that pathology? What steps can be taken to correct or compensate for the pathology?
- Homework was not done.
- Student has severe personal problems (with parents, money, significant other, drugs, alcohol, etc);
- Illiteracy;
- No motivation, no idea why in school in the first place;
- Panic.
Out of about one thousand five hundred students who flunked or dropped out of my classes, I think exactly two were significantly below average in intelligence.Indeed, I found one student who was about a standard deviation below average in intelligence who got on the honor role consistently. Nobody had ever told her that she was stupid, and she attended every class, took notes in shorthand, typed them up, memorized them and also memorized much of the textbook. On multiple choice tests she often got one of the highest grades in science classes because of her "brute force" approach to learning.
Many many times I have seen brilliant students flunk out.
So all of your students were at or above average?
Interesting, how did you manage to pick the "cream"?
Some IQ tests, or your "intuition", or ferocious screening at entry?
Otherwise (if the classes WERE representative of IQ distribution in the general population) this only proves that this "education" sheds the intelligents (only 2 dunces over 1500) and makes a lot of "learned idiots" (the bottom of the bell curve who DID NOT flunked nor dropped)!
CONGRATULATIONS Professor!
I agree that a researcher who is a member of our own society will be blind to certain machinations because he (or she) will take them as givens (i.e. Why of course no one would disgrace himself by becoming a fisherman in our bountiful "Green"land). However, a researcher from a foreign society might not be blinded. So part of the "scientific" approach should be for us to study foreign civilizations and for us to ask them to study us.
Thus his approach fails the "falsification test" which is essential in science. For similar reasons, both Freudian theory and Marxist theorizing fail the falsification test.
In other words, if a hypothesis can in no way be tested to see if it is false, then it is not a scientific hypothesis at all.
So I ask you: Where exactly is any falsifiable hypothesis in any of Tainter's writings??????
By comparison, I see scant little of this in Diamond.
But by no stretch of the imagination was increasing complexity one of these factors.
Since a single counterexample serves to demolish a sweeping generalization, here is what I have to say in regards to Tainter's single-factor explanation:
R.I.P.
Since your "opinions" are balderdash (*) that does not prove the point.
* Something that does not have or make sense: blather, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, garbage, idiocy, nonsense, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, rubbish, tomfoolery, trash, twaddle. Informal tommyrot. Slang applesauce, baloney, bilge, bull, bunk, crap, hooey, malarkey. See knowledge/ignorance.
I couldn't disagree more. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was all about diminishing returns on complexity, from every angle. This is a topic I was interested in long before I discovered Tainter, but Tainter's case is the best I've ever read explaining the many trends that converged to bring down the Roman Empire. I won't repeat Tainter's case here, except to note that he explained the fall of the Roman Empire in terms of complexity, at length, in Collapse of Complex Societies.
Thus the Tainter hypothesis of societies becoming ever more complex is simply flat-out wrong.
Or, is he doing something else?
YA BETCHA!
Tryin to befuddle the newcomers to TOD.
You have been warned...
Diamond's theory is that civ's succeed or fail based on how their constituents "choose" to deal with resource shortages. Tainer does not depend on states of mind, he simply looks at definable things like energy inflows, complexity, etc. Diminishing returns as the process you use to get paid, get fed, etc are a well-known occurrance whether you're a corporation or an individual.
In Diamond's studies, the more spectacular crashes have been among civ's in environments with a winter. Greenland's Vikings simply died out. Tikopia's people, on the other hand, downscaled and were able to keep on chugging along, with the help of their much more forgiving tropical climate. Easter Island, despite being an island in the Pacific, with speakers of Polynesian, is really not a tropical place. It's rather barren and although the size of the island of Oahu, is far less forgiving - so, their crash was a good example of a middle ground. Not the total dieoff of Greenland, not the successful Powerdown of Tikopia. There's a good arguement that Occam's razor is on the side of this arguement than on the side of theoretical mental states like "the Greenlanders decided not to eat fish".
One cannot "decide" to not eat fish until the question is first raised, seriously considered and answered.
I don't think the question was ever raised in Greenland society. It was simply taken as a non-negotiable way of going forward. The option of forming a fishing industry and eating fish never rose into the minds of the Viking elite in Greenland. (Maybe because it would be an admission that the land was not as "Green" as the politicains in Greenland wanted outsiders to believe?)
Similarly, in our current American Dream society, one cannot decide to forego fossil-fuel transportation until the question is raised and given serious consideration.
So far, our elites have decided that the question of foregoing fossil-fuel transport has a "non-negotiable" outcome.
Questions?
Why People Starve:
Wow! Do you expect such a short life?
I think it is at most a matter of years til TSHTF.
The numbers given in catabolic collapse by John Michael Greer (somehow a weirdo if a brilliant one) are from onset of collapse to utter devastation.
Our own collapse will be much faster thanks to financial tricks and much tighter constraints on the daily operations of commerce and industry than in ancient times.
We could learn the "appropriate" policies from the Iks.
Not entirely kidding...
Not really. My great-grandmother lived to be 106.
I'm not ruling out a much faster collapse. But I think in all likelihood, it will be a slow-motion wreck. We're a very large system, and there's a lot of inertia involved.
Life will get much more difficult for everyone, economically and politically, but I don't think the dieoff will come right away. At least, not the U.S.
Incorrect in that European settlers pushed their advantage and practiced genocide without pity or scruple for the simple economic purpose of taking land.
It is a hallmark of most civilizations that they expand or die, and most have done so violently at the expense of societies around them.
So my point remains. Sure it was capitalism and Europeans that destroyed the native peoples in the Americas but any encroaching civilization that began colonizing in large numbers would have done the same. China would have had the same impact if they had heavily colonized the west coast instead of just visiting it. Read Diamond. It's glaringly obvious what would happen and why. The Eurasian landmass tamed far more animals than the Americas, Africa, and Australia, and was consequently exposed to far more diseases of animal origin than peoples in the Americas, Africa, or Australia. The richness of the plant species available for cultivation also was stronger in Eurasia than elsewhere. The two factors are what gave Eurasia such a gigantic lead over other continents. Again, as I said, read Diamond, particularly Guns, Germs, and Steel. It will give you a new perspective on many things.
There's the thing about collapse: it gets pretty far before anyone notices it. The Romans show little sign of recognizing their own collapse until it is well underway. It's a tricky thing; not every indicator turns negative all at once, and there's a slow squeeze that can easily disguise the true state of affairs.
I've debated the issue of collapse timelines with Greer before—I even had him on the Anthropik Podcast (episode #6), where we talked about this—and I think much of the disagreement is a matter of perspective. If you take the perspective of someone staying inside civilization to the bitter end (as I feel Greer does), then it seems much, much longer. Most collapses suffer some major catastrophe from which the society never recovers, that takes place in a short period of time, but many also manage to limp on for some time to come. Greer points to Maya cities that managed to survive for up to a century after the Maya collapse. I, too, would not be surprised if there are some cities left in 100 or even 200 years: small, brutal places hanging desperately to the last days of their lives. My perspective, however, is of someone trying to escape civilization, so my criteria of collapse is less when the last vestige of it dies off, than when a space outside it opens up that allows me to escape. When you look at that perspective, collapse looks like a much quicker process. The Third Century Crisis from which Rome never recovered was one of the longest ones, taking 49 years (Rome's collapse in general was remarkably slow), but after that, slipping beyond the empire was fairly easy. The empire was never really hegemonic again after that, though many starts and stops attempted to reassert that dominance.
In our interview, Greer compared collapse to falling down a set of stairs, and I think I agree with that. If you're judging the length of the affair by when civilization reaches the bottom of the stairs, that may be some time; on the other hand, if you're judging by when the fall begins, that can be quite short.
Even by the long view, though, we may already be up to 100 years into our collapse already, and only now are we figuring that out. That's about what you'd expect of a collapse, too.
"I'm not afraid of all hell breaking lose, I am more afraid of only part of breaking lose, and nobody noticing."
That is where we're at boys and girls.
JC
We will keep doing what we're doing, until we can't, then we won't
If the next hundred years provides TEOTWAWKI, I do believe that both historians (assuming that two remain) will agree that the beginning of the End came in August 1914.
Before that date, the Idea of Progress was alive and well and had much to back it up. Since then, we have lived in excessively "interesting" times.
No one, as I'm sure you know Don (speaking more to others in this thread) has correctly predicted the path of human society a century ahead. Indeed it might be an amusing discussion to name how fast the world "as we know it" tends to veers to the unpredictable.
(he typed, on the internets, known by a few in the late 40's but invisible to the masses until the 90's)
Should I ask whether any PO pundits have the same inside track with an omniscient Deity?
Or should I ask what fraction of all far future predictions have to be correct (70%, 80%?) in order for the entire genre of predictions to be trustworthy?
There is no fraction at all; that would be far too binary in a situation that demands a sliding scale. Like I said upthread, every prediction comes with a probability and a bracket. When predicting something farther in the future, all that means is that your probability goes down. Even events in the far future can be accurately predicted with a sufficient bracket to offset that: "The sun will expand into a red giant somewhere betwwn 1 and 10 billion years from now." That's pretty far in the future—at least a billion years—but because I gave myself such a ridiculously large bracket, it's also pretty damn certain I'm right, isn't it?
You simply can't make such bald statements as "it's impossible to predict the future," or "you can't predict what will happen a century from now." That's nonsense; of course you can. The only question is what you're predicting.
Humans will stupidly use up all fossil fuels and then die-off.
You tell me, is human history predictable decades in advance?
I guess the extra credit question is why those fringe leaders are right (doomers) while some other fringe leaders (cornucopians) are wrong?
* I hate that term, and I don't think it describes my viewpoint very well at all. I get more a sense of foreboding and dread from the cornucopian nightmare that this is the way things will always be and there's no way we will ever be able to escape it until we've succeeded in wiping out all life in the universe. But that's me.
If nothing else, one loses one's flexibility and ability to respond to changing circumstance.
You know ... shifting gears a bit, I think a lot of the frustration of Peak Oilers (Doomers or not) comes from the lack of response by society. An interesting possibility is just that we are early adopters by nature, and mistaking the lack of early response as a sign that there will be no later response.
I tripped on one of my earlier comments today, in which I wrote (may 2006, when an injury prevented capital letters):
To me, a Doomer has to be sure that this response is all there is.
I disagree. A late response will likely be too late to prevent collapse or even to enact some sort of semi-controlled contraction.
I like to use this analogy. It's winter in the Northeast. You can use the limited natural gas supply you have to
a) heat people's homes so they don't freeze to death
OR
b) use the energy to manufacture insulation and solar pv for next winter
I think the evidence thus far indicates society will choose option (a).
I don't disagree with you that there will be winners and losers. But price WILL regulate supply.
You may have a mass migration from New England to Virginia or North Carolina where you don't freeze to death in January, But some people will still be able to afford some form of heat. Other people will block off large portions of their home and heat smaller sections. Or live with more people.
We, as a civilization, don't require anywhere near 85mbd of oil to survive. We'll adapt.
You've confused me now when you shift from that to "supporting evidence" of some sort of problem. If the argument is really for collapse, and not simply trouble, isn't a proof required? If you believe in collapse without proof, merely uncalculable evidence ... isn't a leap of faith required?
You'd see me giving them as hard a time as the doomers ... if they'd only show up here ;-)
(There is the guy over at AltEng, still insisting that "Peak oil will be a non-event" but he's not so much blithe as superficial. For him a press release is as good as a solution.)
And in between "them" and "they" are about 6 Billion other monkeys pounding out predictions on their typewriters. I have "faith" that one of those predictions will turn out correct.
Cheers.
P.S. How dare you question "the Brain".
An hypothesis does not need to be proven 100% correct to be accepted as fact. It just needs to be accepted by the "majority" of the scientific community as a fact.
Evolution is one of those accepted facts.
Peak Oil is slowly becoming one of those accepted facts.
But unfortunately it takes a wrong turn when you say "An hypothesis does not need to be proven 100% correct to be accepted as fact."
Sorry, no. My dictionary still shows a difference between "hypothesis" and "fact."
Cause of collapse? Running out of helium.
I seem to remember that Vannevar Bush said some things earlier than that .... ah:
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/foreseeing_the_future_the_legacy_of_vannevar_bush
Now there was a smart guy.
I am reading the new Verner Vinge book right now (Rainbow's End). As with all Vinge books, it rocks, and spins an interesting arc from today's tech and social trends. For those who haven't read the guy's bio, check it out ... the guy has good tech chops to be writing about computer-tech trends.
- Wikipedia
When I read Tainter, I always wonder whether a society (or perhaps the clever leaders in a society) couldn't realize that complexity was creating diminishing returns, and "shed" complexity voluntarily. 20th-century Europe, for example, saw the "collapse" of the large, centralized empires into simpler ones since WWI: The dismantling of the Russian, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman into smaller and simpler nation-states after WW1, and the collapse of the multi-ethnic Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in the 1990's.
I know that a voluntary reduction in complexity has rarely, if ever, happened on a large scale, but that is not to say that it can't happen. For example, the world had never seen the voluntary reduction in fertility to levels below replacement until the 20th century, but now most of the OECD countries are voluntarily shrinking their populations in the absence of famine, war, disease, or economic crisis.
I am reminded of an essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote in Granta magazine in 1990. In it, he praised the political "demolition experts", as he called them:
His examples are Kruschev, Kadar, Suarez, and Gorbachev, who rose through the apparat, but realized that the ongoing existence of their respective regimes was untenable, and went about their dismantling. They occupy an awkward position; the establishment see them as traitors, while the reformers see them as compromised. None of them are loved, or even celebrated, in their home countries, yet their role in history may be, in retrospect, much more crucial than that of the conquering hero. Enzensberger concudes with:
Maybe, by making us aware of diminishing returns, the insights of Tainter, Diamond, and the rest offer us choices of whether to collapse or powerdown voluntarily. I just hope that some societies (which looks unlikely to be the USA, I'm afraid, although some regions and cities might do better than others) is clever enough to act effectively on the insight.
So how would you account for the EU??? An increase in complexity, surely??
I really have a problem with your use of the word "voluntarily"... it is simply a consequence of the above-mention factors...
Absolutely. Collapse is a start-and-stop process, where you have breakdowns of complexity, momentary returns, and then further breakdowns. If my guess is right, then the EU is a momentary return. Of course, this will remain only my guess for my whole lifetime--we'll only be able to really judge this with a few centuries of hindsight.
As the EU has grown, so has sub-national and regional autonomy in a number of EU countries -- Spain's 22 regional governments, devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, "unitary authorities and metropolitan governments in the UK, regional assemblies in France, Belgium's "dual federalism", etc. So while the EU represents a trend of centralization, there is a separate trend of decentralization in the EU member states going on at the same time. Both trends have progressed fits and starts, and both trends have seen progress and reversals in recent years. Whether we will see a centralized European super-state, something like the present loose confederation of nation-states, or Denis de Rougemont's decentralized "Europe of the Regions" is anyone's guess. For me, the bigger question remains whether a society, or the leaders of a society, might choose to dismantle its untenable infrastructures and institutions rather than face collapse.
On the surface (and perhaps for us pedantic engineers) powerdown is about energy use. Complexity is about information content.
But I'm willing to fudge that for a moment and say that some level of complexity/energy reduction is required for powerdown and continued "success" in our society. I can even say that we must need some value of reduction ... X%, in order to avoid "die-off."
With that premise stated, I'd ask the die-off folks if they've calculated X? Do they think they know what is a sustainable level of energy and complexity in human socieity ... or do we revert to faith, and simple mental concepts like "agricultural society?"
(I was thinking of a couple decades myself, and that ... per the Hirsch report, etc., yields values of X less than 50%. Stuat's "slow squeeze," etc.)
I think it should give pessimists pause that they seem less to start with numbers than to go from their gut. If an expectation of die-off really starts from a subjective view of human nature ... then you are really telling me more about yourself, and less about our world.
But the hard question for you is how you define complexity in this context, and how you show what constitutes "too much" complexity in a lower energy environment.
... we've gotten very good at increasing the bits/watt in both storage and communications over the last 50 years.
He's suggesting (emotionally, IMO) that with all of these things one of them must pay off. One of them must (in the TOD phrase) "save us."
That's unproven. He's wrong that some number of tries proves a success ... but I think you're wrong that the average success rate of all those tries determines our future.
We need "enough" wins in all those tries, and we won't know if we have them until they all play out. In my old phrase, "we can't count our chickens before they're hatched. we can't count 'zero' chickens as pessimists do, and we can't count 'enough' chickens as optimists do."
The correct (if painful) course, is to wait and see.
With diminishing returns, Tainter argues that our ability to answer problems is diminished. So, it's harder and harder to "win." The result is that our percentage of "wins" continues to drop. Whatever X may be, if the percentage is steadily dropping, we will eventually drop below X, no?
The only way to do otherwise would be to stop the decrease, and instead increase. For that, we'd need complexity to suddenly become much more cost-effective. In other words, as Tainter argued, we need a new subsidy, like fossil fuels once were. If there is no subsidy, then there's no way to reverse the trend of complexity's diminishing returns, so there's no way to stop our percentage from eventually dropping below X, so there's no way to stop collapse.
All you can do is reassert that "diminishing returns" means "reduced problem solving."
Unproven. Indeed, "diminishing returns" may indicate cumulative completion of a great number of problems ;-)
FWIW, to answer your specific question about a threshold of innovation required to prevent collapse ... all I can say is possibly. These there are an interaction between social and technological forces ... that I still frankly see as unpredictable.
A problem does not need 1000 solutions, only one.
We do not need 1000 flavors of effective solar cells, only one.
But note, you are continuing to "assert" that the average changes the success rate of the particular. I still see that as flawed at the logical level.
Remember "diminishing returns" is all about innovation "per" something. Per year, per thousand researchers, per million dollars. None of those "pers" will matter a thousand years from now. All that matters is the success of the particular.
What's a good example .... do we care about the success rate of all pre-Wright-Bros flying machines? Or do we only care that the Wright Bros changed the equation?
(Certainly the pre-Wright success rate, was an indicator that man would never fly)
No, I'm not. I'm not making any claims whatever with regards to the particular. You keep asserting that I am, but I am not and have not. I have made two claims, both referring to averages:
1.) Supposing there is a class of problems that could break a society if unsolved, an increasing difficulty solving problems means that it becomes increasingly likely that at least one such problem will not be solved, which will cause collapse.
2.) Supposing there is some threshold of solved vs. unsolved problems beyond which a society collapses, the same increasing difficulty solving problems means that the ratio will continue to deteroriate until collapse occurs.
In which way does either scenario make any reference whatever to the particular case? Both deal with averages and probabiltiy, not particular cases. I have no idea which particular problem we will fail to solve that will be "the straw that broke the camel's back," I know only that the current trajectory makes that eventuality increasingly likely.
How does the average result in solar energy research effect me?
But, to reiterate, the reason averages are important are twofold: (1) there is a set of problems that crop up regularly, that must be solved, or they will destroy a society. Climate change is an excellent example of such a problem. Complexity is invented to deal with precisely this type of problem, but failure to solve this problem has resulted in many collapses, most famously the Maya. If our ability to solve problems is being diminished over time, the probability that one of these problems will go unsolved, and thus bring about collapse, approaches 1. (2) If, as you supposed upthread, collapse occurs when some threshold X is passed in the ratio of solved to unsolved problems, then the same degradation in our problem solving capacity will continue to lower that ratio until collapse occurs.
smacks self
Oy vey.
OK, one more time, for posterity ... averages do not dictate future events. But averages are averages.
(1) If you are dealing with an iterative phenomenon, like the incidence of problems that must be solved or society will collapse, then as your ability to solve problems is diminished, the probabilty of one of those problems will go unsolved approaches 1.
(2) If collapse occurs when a threshold in the ratio of solved to unsolved problems is breached, then as your ability to solve problems is diminished, the number of unsolved problems increases, and you will eventually cross that threshold.
This has nothing to do with the prediction of specific future events; it has to do with the understanding that if you play Russian roulette every day, you're eventually going to die. If every day, you load one more bullet than the day before, you're going to die more quickly.
There is no evidence that a ratio of solved to unsolved problems leads to collapse.
The need, as I tried to frame it some time back, is for "enough" solved problems ... and we won't know what enough is until we live it.
What could "enough" mean, except a ratio of solved to unsolved problems? Even non-critical unsolved problems can accumulate into major crises, unless you solve enough other problems to keep it under control. I agree that what that threshold might be is probably unknowable until we cross it, but that is your supposition, not mine.
I don't think so. To take it back to solar cells, there might be 1000 unanswered questions on all of the lines of innovation: trackers, concentrators, efficinecy, lifetime, etc., etc., ... or there might be 2000 unanswered questions.
I don't care. I only care if one (or one combination) of those questions is answered, and cuts solar cell costs/watt in any significant way.
... or one of the 100 questions in geothermal might pay off, and suddenly I don't care about those solar questions any more.
Indeed an answer might obviate a whole series of pending questions. Do I care how many geothermal questions are pending, if solar suddenly kicks ass?
Because, at any given level of development, complexity is COSTLIER than simplicity.
It is the COST that kills, not complexity per se.
Did you actually read Tainter before going into critiscism?
No need for elaborate "models" or "measures" to understand the metaphor of the LOW HANGING FRUIT.
Why does everybody picks the low hanging fruit first?
Because it is easier and cheaper.
Once there are no more "low hanging fruits" what do you do?
Reach for the more EXPENSIVE ones (the vaunted "market pressure").
But this IS actually the problem, after a few such moves it does not worth the trouble anymore.
BOOM!
State your definitinos for complexity, and cost.
(A CD-ROM costs, either in energy or materials or dollars, less than any text storage mechanism in the history of man ... help me understand how that translates into a crisis in cost)
You cannot have it both ways odograoh.
Asking for an accurate model AND being supportive of Fooled by Randomness which main thesis is that it is WHAT IS OUTSIDE the "accurate model" which brings failure.
So you are TROLLING.
Q.E.D.
Now, if I had a prediction myself, a firm model of the future I claimed to be true, while at the same time pointing people to "Fooled by Randomness" you might have a point.
Yes, you consistently try to confuse the issue and Jason is no match for your wickedness.
... you might have a point.
I DO have a point, EXACTLY the same one I just explained:
It is CONTRADICTORY to support "Fooled by Randomness" AND ask for an accurate model, it does not matter if you have a prediction or not.
Or, rather it DOES MATTER, it is yet another WICKED TRICK for you not to have a prediction, as soon as Jason or anyone else would come up with a model you will be able to shoot it down with the arguments from "Fooled by Randomness" without appearing to have switched policies.
You seem to have "selective dumbness" like not being able to understand a metaphor which can be grasped by anyone.
And trying to derail the reasoning with irrelevant mumbo-jumbo:
(A CD-ROM costs, either in energy or materials or dollars, less than any text storage mechanism in the history of man ... help me understand how that translates into a crisis in cost)
Which I attempted to preempt on Thursday August 03, 2006 at 9:11 PM CET by explaining the specifics of software complexity and to which you replied with your usual muddling on Friday August 04, 2006 at 1:20 AM CET, that is, 4 minutes AFTER writing the above drivel Friday August 04, 2006 at 1:16 AM CET.
Another "dumb, tired, post-ride, comment", what a pity or what a CLEVERNESS in the timing!
So, let me think...
Not a troll, not an asshole, not a lobbyist, a psychotic may be?
There is a Club at TOD you can happily join.
It's not that hard to find a list of definitions and to pick one.
But to keep going in circles about this "complexity" thing without ever nailing down some definition is not a sign of complex reasoning power. It is a sign of circular logic.
Many software packages have the characteritic of "complexity" in that they are intricate and entangled. Sometimes that complexity makes them more robust rather than prone to failure.
There is no one-to-one correlation between complexity and failure. There is no one-to-one correlation between simplicity and success. Simpletons often fail (even in Don's class :-)
May be he cannot, Jason is driven by his primitivist faith, not much by reason, so this argument is irrelevant to the core of the matter.
Simpletons often fail
Simplicity is not about simpletons :-)
There is no one-to-one correlation between complexity and failure.
Of course not, no one-to-one correlation (and correlation is not causation), but complexity does bring failure from two different courses of action :
- When increased complexity means increased cost, this is what Tainter is mostly about.
- When complexity entails brittleness upon unexpected changes in the operating conditions.
Software suffers from BOTH causes of failure.
Industry HAD suffered mostly from increased costs ("low hanging fruits" first syndrome) but it comes to suffer more and more from brittleness of operations too.
Too many single points of failure along paths of operations.
Earth ecology and life dot not APPEAR at first glance to suffer from brittleness in spite of complexity several orders of magnitude larger than our puny economic contraptions, but this is because they had matured and settled down for incredible lengths of time, millions and millions of years, over relatively STEADY CONDITIONS.
This has allowed natural selection to weed out most of the unstable and brittle gizmos no matter how "clever" they could look.
Evolution selects for stability, not cleverness nor even fitness.
The scourge of "civilisation" and "progress" is that they bring RADICAL CHANGES in operating conditions and are much TOO FAST with respect to evolution.
Occurring within the framework of an already overly complex system (earth ecology) those two factors are sufficient to bring trouble REGARDLESS OF ANY OTHER CONSIDERATIONS.
We should have been overly cautious with this, we were not and STILL are not.
Then, guess what...
I've defined both now several times: complexity is the number of cultural elements in a society, and its cost is energy.
As for my "faith," that's fairly uncalled for, I think. I wasn't always a primitivist; it's the view I found that made the most sense of the facts as I knew them. I've shown far more flexibility and willingness to change my viewpoint due to new facts than one usually finds, so I don't think a barb like that is warranted at all. As far as the religious undertone, you're right, but show me someone who doesn't have that.
Well, at least we are finally whittling things down to their nub. The next question is what makes an element "cultural" versus not?
Is a verse of poetry a "cultural" item? And if so, how does increasing the number of poems in a society increase its "complexity" and bring about its demise? What if a poem is written but never read? What if a solar powered computer is used to automatically generate random lines of poetry? What is the energy "cost" of such a cultural-item auto-generator (the poem generating computer)?
To be complicated,
Or not to be complicated?
That is the complicated question!
What say thee hollow friend?
"Complexity, Problem Solving, and Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter:
Actually, there's some practical application of that idea. We have a lot of poetry, a lot of literature and so forth. These things are referred and alluded to every day. To be basically conversant in our society requires at least a passing familiarity with a rather large body of literature. That increases the cost of education. Specialized training for a specific career usually happens, primarily, in college. Grade school education is all about catching us up with the basic, minimal requirements needed to be conversant in our society; a familiarity with Shakespeare, for instance, so we're not caught as idiots if someone drops a reference to Hamlet, as you do above. This kind of complexity increases the size of the "common knowledge" expected of everyone in a given society. That increases the cost of education.
Thank you for responding.
I think your definition of "Complexity" differs from Tainter's in that he looks at taxanomy within a society (how many different kinds of specializations are there?) and not at raw numbers.
In terms of example, adding a new math teacher to the school system increases the raw numbers of teachers according to your definition but it does not increase the number of specializations according to Tainter's. So under your defintion, complexity is increased everytime a new baby is born. Under Tainter's definition, complexity increases only when that baby grows up and adopts a new role within society (i.e. a complexity professor) that had not existed before.
With either of these defintions, complexity decreases every time the last sasquatch in a given field of speciality dies off.
You honed in on just one of the aspects of complexity that Tainter mentions. He also includes:
As for raw numbers, you seem to have neglected the last paragraph I quoted:
Emphasis added.
You misunderstand me then. I thought I'd taken care to distinguish this, but obviously it was insufficient. I don't have a definition of complexity of my own. I agree with Tainter's view: complexity is defined in terms of number of types. As I mentioned upthread, a "president" is a cultural element, but George Bush is not. A "thumbtack" is a cultural element, but the individual tack in that wall over there is not.
Part of the Complexity equation, is the in-rooted infrastructure for supporting an oil-based economy (plastics, gasoline, asphalt, ...).
Once such a complex infra-structure becomes pervasively entangled with the rest of our society, it is like an unstoppable ivy plant It becomes increasingly difficult to "weed" it out.
Anyway, has this relationship between "cultural elements" and energy been calculated?
Wouldn't it be non-linear? Surely each incremental web page added to the google cache did not result in an equal fixed increment of energy expenditure. Information, and costs of managing that information, have been on their own separate non-linear curves.
Or has someone both computed this complexity, and tested that computation against the real world?
That should read:
I do not know of anyone who has ever successfully applied the model to our society, but it certainly works in theory, and has worked as applied to other societies.
If someone calculates a complexity for our society, and weighs the number of public companies by factor X, and the number of public web pages by factor Y ... how on earth can we know that the result "works" in any meaningful sense?
To pick up one line that might support my view that such systems are unpredictable:
So sure, a complex system (our industrial society?) might fail ... but do you know not only initial (or current) conditions, but also every small perturbation that might occur over the next century or two?
I'm afraid that's the true insanity of any "knowing" of the future of a complex system.
As to the rest ("we can certainly observe that the system is becoming less and less capable of dealing with shocks"), has anyone done that with world economies (or more pertinent to die-off, death rates) in a numeric sense?
Or is this again a call to the subjective? I'm afraid that's really the way I'm experiencing it in this thread. My sudden thought as I walked away a few minutes ago is that the whole doomer thing relies on the lack of a formal definition of complexity. Is it just a scary word, or can you define it in a way to make the argument that we have "too much complexity" into something numeric?
How does any of this prove "too much" complexity?
The whole argument rests on the average result determining the specific result.
Consider 1000 projects to improve solar power by a factor of 2x in EROEI. What do we care about as consumers, the average result? Or the specific result of just one of them?
You know, I spent some time arguing against the methodology some use to determine "diminishing returns" in a past TOD thread, and I thought I convinced some people ... but I see now that I was dumb to even go down that path. I don't even need to go to the data, when the logic is flawed.
... fail to meet one of them ... geez louise ... you've never been in the "creative destruction" of the tech buisness have you? Did google succeed on the average utility of search engines, or the specific utility of their engine?
Peak oil is a fine example of problems in this set, but it's hardly alone. Global warming, mass extinction, the proliferation of nuclear and biological weapons, salinization and the loss of arable land, and a whole, long list of other problems belong to the same class.
A society must solve every problem in this class that it is presented with, because each, individual problem has the potential in and of itself to end a society. If we do manage to solve all of those problems except peak oil, we'll collapse just as surely as if we'd solved none of them at all.
These were the kinds of problems I had in mind—the kinds of problems a society develops complexity to deal with. Past the point of diminishing returns, it becomes more and more difficult to solve new problems that develop. Eventually, collapse follows. Collapse is an economizing process, remember; it downscales complexity to the point where it is viable again. It occurs when people decide that the solutions to such problems that depend on continuing civilization have simply become too costly, and that these problems could also be solved by reducing complexity, rather than increasing it.
ah ... this was the conclusion you were supposed to come to, from more basic data.
I don't see it breaking out to a grounding in projected barrels per day, and any rigorous computation of minimum acceptable barrels per day.
We are supposed to accept the general (IMO emotional) argument that not enough oil and too much complexity will take us down.
For what it's worth, I think it's fine to have a gut feel. It's fine to say "my gut says X will happen, and I'll bet Y on it." But I wouldn't make Y too big for something that is just a gut bet. And I certainly would not confuse a bet from the gut with knowledge.
Have you, or Tainter, or anybody else succesfully predicted one of the break points, where complexity yields collapse? Or is this a first time thing?
(We know in the stock market that people can come up with plenty of models to fit past data. Their record on fitting future results is pretty spotty. Beyond spotty, in fact, as they have a slogan: past performance does not dictate future results)
I see a flaw, when you simply pronounce things like "the probability of collapse approaches 1" ... but if you cannot, you cannot.
An EXCELLENT demonstration of either STUPIDITY or WILLFUL DECEPTION!
Holding off for a moment with the direct energy cost of computations,
(Re. your idiotic remark : ... we've gotten very good at increasing the bits/watt in both storage and communications over the last 50 years.)
why not asking Microsoft about the MTBF of Windows ?
It is not (yet) the cost of electricity nor even the cost of manufacturing a PC which threatens its usability.
It is the direct impact of software COMPLEXITY which COSTS everyone.
How many hours or days did you (or your IT staff) spent with upgrades, software crashes, virus, deleted files, unsuccessfull searches, unmanageable disk contents (I have 2843207 files and directories on the PC on which I am typing this).
Does not all this have a COST?
Do you expect this cost to decrease?
Do you think it is only Microsoft gouging which make the price of software so ridiculous?
Don't you think that Microsoft would not prefer to deliver their software on schedule rather that 2 or 3 years late?
The nominal performance DO increase (even for software reliability if so much slower) but Jevons Paradox has eaten all benefits.
Todays computers are about 20000 times more powerfull in both speed and memory capacity than since I began in 1968.
We are NOT doing 20000 times more work with them (except for a few specialized "number crunching" applications).
THIS is the "class" of complexity which will likely crash our civilisation.
You CANNOT build nor repair such large systems as banking software, power plants, army CCC etc... without enormous COSTS and DELAYS.
That's it!
Thanks for your attention.
To illustrate the fundamental failure of complexity and the pursuit of diminishing returns, I present - bloatware:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloatware