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?

Upvoted for this comment:

Additional details weigh down hypotheses. The more steps your argument requires, the less probable it's correct. None of your 15 things seem obviously objectionable to me, but any argument that requires 15 steps to be correct is unlikely.

I've been a bit concerned about Peak Oil for a while now and, as with many politically hot topics, it's hard to find objective facts or rational analyses in the din of Greens and Blues screaming at each other. I very much appreciate you (and others!) stepping in to point out what a rational analysis requires rather than specifically arguing for one side versus another.

I disagree with the second comment on pragmatic grounds, though:

I doubt the marginal utility of you specifically worrying about it is greater than the marginal utility of worrying about FAI, or any other neglected existential risk.

I'm not aware that the Peak Oil debate has really been resolved for rationalists. That makes it a neglected existential risk (specifically a "crunch") in my mind.

If Peak Oil really turns out to be a problem, there won't be an FAI crisis. There won't be enough power to run any computer that can go FOOM. Even if there's some possible alternative energy source that might be able to replace oil in theory, part of the concern with Peak Oil is that we've already run out of time to replace the energy infrastructure. I honestly don't know if this is true, but I don't know that it's false either and I'm not aware of anyone who has conclusively answered this concern from a rational point of view.

The main concern of Peak Oil doesn't need so many hypotheses to point out a source of concern (noting that I don't know how true each of these points are):

The production pattern of individual oil fields, and the rate of oil field discovery, makes it reasonable to conclude that there should be a global peak in oil production (or maybe a bumpy plateau, but there should still be a decline at the other end wherein we have basically exhausted usable oil).
We either have passed that midpoint or will do so very soon (i.e., within the next few years). (Note: Most people who are concerned about this seem to think we already passed it around 2005 to 2007.)
Practically everything in our modern world is driven by oil - sometimes literally (e.g., gas-powered vehicles), but in many ways not (e.g., fertilizer, lubricant for machines). Were oil to vanish fairly abruptly, some Very Bad Things would happen (akin to mass starvation, places like LA and Las Vegas becoming totally unlivable, breakdowns in transportation and communication across long distances, etc.).
Oil is so energy-dense that nearly all alternatives fall short of being realistic replacements. Most of them don't produce energy quickly enough, and even if there are some that do it's still debatable whether we have enough energy left to replace our energy infrastructure to maintain our current level of civilization.
Our main source of electricity is coal rather than oil, but coal is going through a similar peaking problem. (Note: Many people screaming about Peak Oil miss this point.)

Again, I don't know if any of these points are true. But they strike me as individually reasonable, and together they hint at a crunch. I think many of DavidPlumpton's other points are perhaps unnecessarily specific (e.g., the nature of the resulting food crisis) in the same way that specifying a paperclip-maximizer (as opposed to, say, a GAI Roomba) is unnecessarily detailed to point out the FAI problem. The point is that if Peak Oil is a real concern, then by some mechanism our heavy reliance on vast amounts of energy is going to cause a general collapse in civilization from which we may very well not recover for several million years.

We might not agree with whether DavidPlumpton's presentation of the problem (or mine, for that matter) is the most rational. However, I do think that it's important to recognize this as a viable existential risk, and at least from where I stand there does seem to be reason to take it at least as seriously as we do the FAI problem. At the very least, I think it's worthwhile for us to rationally work out at least the rough likelihood of Peak Oil being a problem since we're one of the painfully few communities who are likely to do so (as most others are obsessed with just shouting out applause lights on this topic).

I think this was downvoted. Would whoever downvoted this please explain why?

3KPier15y

I agree that a data-driven discussion on Peak Oil from a rationalist perspective would be a very good thing, although I don't think the data supports your concerns (see here and here). If I did a lot more research and spoke to some people I know in the energy forecasting business, would an article about peak oil as existential risk be something people would want on LessWrong?

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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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