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 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).

Your last comment about peak oil being fear-mongering is not supported by your previous statements. Your previous statements support peak oil not being true. Your last statement has nothing to do with this, as far as I'm concerned, and is considerably more complex to work out the truth or falsehood of. The idea of a political or social institution saying that peak oil is true because they wish to exploit common people for their own disparate agendas has nothing to do with whether or not peak oil is true. Consider:

Peak oil is true and political and social institutions say that it is true, because they a.) believe it is true, b.) want to exploit other people, or c.) both.
Peak oil is false and political and social institutions say that it is true, because they a.) believe it is true, b.) want to exploit other people, or c.) both.

I assume you are asserting 2b with your statement about fear-mongering, whereas your previous post put forth arguments that only support the statement in 2 that 'Peak oil is false'. I also feel that the connotation for fear-mongering used in such contexts is likely to produce either rapid agreement or disagreement.

My question is--which is more important to you, proving that peak oil is false, or proving what the motivations of various unrelated politicians and social organizations are? Do not mistake my criticism of your statement for a belief that fear is never used in politics. I just don't see how it at all helps your attempt to prove that peak oil is not true. See statements 1 and 2 above for my reasoning of why the first does not necessarily follow from the second. I think a more rational statement made after giving supporting arguments that peak oil is false would be something along the lines of 'don't worry about it and show others it is not true so they can devote their resources to solving things that are actually problems'.

EDIT: changed some erratic capitalizations and one 'denotation for fear-mongering' to 'connotation for fear-mongering' to more correctly express my meaning in that part.

Your last comment about Peak Oil being fear-mongering is not supported by your previous statements.

How not? I demonstrated that it isn't, in my view, a legitimate concern; that there exists at least one viable solution already being practically implemented. How can the topic -- which is expressed as a 'serious problem' -- remaining a concern for discussion possibly exist except through the agency of various groups attempting to drive up fear levels amongst the public in order to achieve their specific goals? ("specific goals" being synonymous ... (read more)

4lessdazed15y

This comment is fantastic.

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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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