What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

DavidPlumpton

To me the following points seem hard to argue against:

Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore)
The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced
The amount of oil produced each year is declining
The price of oil (and therefore energy) rises
All the alternatives that were supposed to fill the gap are failing to deliver
Even oil that's harder to get (e.g. in deep water) doesn't help much as it is generally produced at a slow rate
Available energy production rate (i.e. power) drops
Since nearly everything needs power to create/mine/produce prices rise
Food for example becomes more expensive as fertilizer prices rise
The average person is mystified as the price of everything seems to rise at once
Business and whole national economies are squeezed by rising prices
As businesses fail unemployment increases
Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like "energy independence". Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.
Everything continues to get worse, and at an increasing rate
Within the near future the lights start to go out.

Sure there's a possibility that a form of nuclear fusion/thorium/cold fusion/zero point energy that is safe and cheap to build and operate might be invented tomorrow, but given that such things usually take a decade or so from inception to delivery it looks like there's no practical alternative on the horizon. Thermodynamics is a harsh mistress. Work out the energy in 73 million barrels of oil, and figure out how many wind farms are needed to offset a 5% decline. And then another decline the next year. Even uranium prices are rising as demand outstrips supply for just the current set of reactors.

The more we examing the situation the worse it seems to be. Some early wells had a enormous energy return on investment, e.g. for the energy of burning one barrel of oil we could pump 100 barrels from the ground. Now we are pumping wells that produce only about 5 barrels. This is known as EROEI (energy return on energy investment). EROEI is falling everywhere as all the low hanging fruit was plucking decades before, and only the difficult stuff is left. The net result is that it is ever harder to increase production rates.

Civilization runs on the constant supply of power. If that power declines 5% every year we are back to the middle ages before very long, and it's hard to develop a Friendly AI on an abacus.

One thing I've noticed a lot is reports about "Oil Sands", "Oil Shale", "Vast new possibilities of X barrels from biodiesel/microbes/algae/thermal depolymerization" etc. and none of these reports *ever* mention the *rate* of production that is expected (and years later they seem to have delivered nothing). The production rate is far more important than anything else; if the entire Earth was made of oil but we could only pump a million barrels a year for technical reasons then the total amount is pointless.

Please read at least the Peak Oil Wikipedia article before commenting. I'd rather not see a bunch of comments about "they don't even look for oil when there's 30 years of supply waiting in the ground".

So... what are my cognitive biases?

To me the following points seem hard to argue against:

Oil is harder and harder to find every year (we already took the easy stuff, nobody finds super-giant fields anymore)
The peak production year was 2005 with 73.7 million barrels produced
The amount of oil produced each year is declining
The price of oil (and therefore energy) rises
All the alternatives that were supposed to fill the gap are failing to deliver
Even oil that's harder to get (e.g. in deep water) doesn't help much as it is generally produced at a slow rate
Available energy production rate (i.e. power) drops
Since nearly everything needs power to create/mine/produce prices rise
Food for example becomes more expensive as fertilizer prices rise
The average person is mystified as the price of everything seems to rise at once
Business and whole national economies are squeezed by rising prices
As businesses fail unemployment increases
Politicians are powerless, so promise general feel-good nonsense like "energy independence". Nobody even tries to tackle the problem.
Everything continues to get worse, and at an increasing rate
Within the near future the lights start to go out.

Civilization runs on the constant supply of power. If that power declines 5% every year we are back to the middle ages before very long, and it's hard to develop a Friendly AI on an abacus.

So... what are my cognitive biases?

I reject and abjure the notion that topics of emotion are somehow irrational simply because the topic itself is emotional. If a person stands before me, raising his voice, using harsh language, displaying aggressive body language and conducting himself hostilely, it is rational to say, "This man is angry." The mere use of emotionally-charged terminology does not inherently relegate a statement irrational. Their context does that. I posted my 'answer' to the question not as a top-post but as a 'response' to my own as an indicator that it was contingent upon my top-level post.

I stand by my assertion that my statement regarding the use of 'catastrophic' Peak Oil is nothing more than fear-mongering, is itself a factual statement.

Had I made that statement 'ex nihilo' -- that is, as a top-level post and not as what amounts to a "too long; didn't read" version -- I would be more than happy to concede your position. As it stands, the statement that my arguments "contain no specific information that can be verified or refuted, and instead contain words designed to maximize for emotional effect rather than informational value", is one I cannot accept as valid. Please do not mistake the statement that something is an attempt to produce emotionally-charged irrational behavior for that statement itself being an attempt to produce emotionally-charged irrational behavior.

"Peak Oil" is fear-mongering. It is being exploited by an array of political and social agencies with sometimes conflicting agendas (and frankly your accusation of the term "agenda" of being emotionally charged I find to be without merit, by the way). And those various disparate and non-colluding groups are attempting to exploit the 'risability' of the so-called 'common person' to fear (i.e.; fear-mongering) in order to achieve their goals.

Fear-mongering and fear-driven politics is so common I find it rather surprising that it should be taken as a non-ordinary claim. Based on my top-level comment, which itself was in response to a question of a fearful nature regarding the topic, I can't see how it's even viable to call it 'unverified'.

At worst I could see a position calling my 'sub-comment' disrespectful, insulting, or condescending. It wasn't meant that way, but I could see that accusation being made and I would have to consider it seriously.

I do not believe emotional comments are inherently irrational. As all of us experience emotion, almost any comment we make is emotional, in that it elicits certain emotions from both ourselves and others. However, not all emotional comments are rational. I still do not believe that your last comment on what to think of peak oil was rational ( I also disagree that the term agenda used in that context is not emotionally charged, but this topic may be more subjective than the other and is less central to my point, so I won't discuss it further here).

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What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

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What is the most rational view of Peak Oil and its near term consequences?

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