387 thoughts on “Peak Oil”

  1. Thanks for that, Steve. Yes, the use of such technology is plausible. After all, militants in the US were able to place large areas of forest off limits to the chainsaws with plastic spikes in trees; if a chainsaw hit a spike it would explode.

  2. Can I just say how goddamned proud I am of you maniacs to make it to 300 comments, without a single Jackerstrocchi infection. Well done!

  4. Ah damn!!

    I just remembered that mentioning Hitler means that you have lost the argument.

  5. Yes, the ‘N word’ is the world’s most debased coinage. Max Hastings, the famous British editor, prohibited his journalists from mentioning N-ism in any article that wasn’t about N-is. Would that we were all as wise as wise Max Hastings.

  7. Andrew Reynolds wrote : Does this mean Ender’s 20:1 EROI has already been reached? Excellent – peak oil problem solved.

    Is this supposed to be a serious contribution to the debate?

    The news about Honda’s solar thin-film solar panels, may well be a very welcome technological breakthrough, but, even if the claims can be borne out, it will only help to give us a fighting chance in facing all of the emerging threats to our survival.

    It can be a cause for hope, but not for reverting back to ‘business as usual’ complacency.

    In any case these solar panels require copper, which seems to be running out.

    Andrew Reynolds wrote : NEXT!

    Do I have spell out to you again all of the other dire threats to our survival?

    How about global warming, which would be even worse if there were not so much fine soot in our upper atmosphere?

    How about the increasingly erratic climate patterns, which this year casused the devastation of New Orleans and disrupted much of the US’s Oil production in the Gulf of Mexico, or, in Australia, drought and the threat to the water supplies of Canberra, Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, and South East Queensland?

    How about rising sea levels, melting glaciers and the melting polar ice cap?

    How about the loss of topsoil, soil acidty and soil salinity?

    How about pollution, depeletion of underground aquifers, loss of rainforest, bleaching of coral, depletion of fishing reserves, loss of rainforests, extinctions and loss of biodiversity etc, etc?

    I ask, again, what more does it require to make you accept that our planet is in serious trouble?

  8. James has presented an excellent summary of the problems the world faces. I hope that humanity and the environment can find some balance that will carry us through, even if it doesn’t look good to a citizen born in the sixties. I suspect that nature and technology will throw up some happy surprises.

    The USA consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil. Apparently, the majority of American economists believe that the best course to take is to increase gas taxes (the New Yorker, 26 Sept 2004).

    Let’s hope that Blog world will throw overboard ‘Debate N-is’ who hope to invoke an obsolete (Godsbodkins! 1990) law by cheaply invoking ‘N-ism’ in order to ‘AH’ (1889-1945) the discussion. It’s cheap and childish and N-ish. Tut Tut. Ja achtung I mean du, TJ. It’s so adolescent. So Maoist. Spoilt, really.

  9. Does this mean Ender’s 20:1 EROI has already been reached? Excellent – peak oil problem solved.

    Improvements in solar energy don’t solve the problem of energy storage and portability. Particularily in the transport sector. Even if we could double the efficience of solar cells and halve their cost we are still going to be using petrol in our cars.

  10. Or ethanol, methanol, hydrogen and helium, wood spirits or sugar sprites, home-made vodka or turpentine, at the Killigrews’ Soiree! (see Old Canadian poetry).

    The Peak Oil debate was always about what we put in cars or whether we should use public transport. Brazil has used ethanol for a while. The Yanks have tried to muddle through the debate with fuel-efficiency standards, when all along they needed higher gas prices.

    Here’s a notion: Melbourne has wondrous areas devoted to trams and light rail. Could certain public corridors be used for light cargo transport to replace trucks on the off-peak? For example, the 11.43 AM tram could be a routine cargo vessel. If the cargo is light and safe, the corridor could carry a great deal. Photocopy paper is never urgent. Cargo trams? Still a half-baked notion!

    In Sydney, because the tram lines were torn up, there is plenty of room for new tram lines. Perhaps they’ll make a comeback.

    Every large tram allows hundreds of people to avoid driving. Which is nice.

  12. For a long time, Lagos was only connected to the mainland of Nigeria by a single bridge, Carter Bridge. This once had a tram line on it; when trams were discontinued for normal use, the bridge section got a new lease of life to carry night soil off the island at midnight when road traffic was lighter. Even this had been discontinued by the time I was there in the ’60s, though.

    Biofuels run one risk, that of displacing food production. It was one of the theoretical exceptions to mechanisation improving aggregate wages that Nassau Senior noted in his work on wages in the early 19th century. Australia has sufficient excess food production capacity per head that this would not be a problem here, but I gather that if the USA went over to completely renewable biofuels that would entirely use up their present excess margin of food production capacity.

  13. The current expanded demand for biofuels from Europe is being supplied by widespread clearing of Indonesian and Malaysian rainforest to make way for oil palm plantations.

    There are however much more environmentally sustainable alternatives – assuming they can be made economically viable.

    I’m particularly interested in the potential of perennial dry-land crops such as Jotophra and oil mallee, which can be grown on land which is currently either marginal for food production or used for grazing.

  14. IG, I once looked at the references on the Honge nut as a biodiesel feedstock, as it can be grown along the long paddock. I believe it can also be grown on marginal land as you describe. (I wonder, is that just another name for one of those you gave?)

    Interestingly, one of the reasons the early classical Athenians exempted olive oil from the general ban on the export of agricultural products was that it didn’t compete with grain production. It’s the same reasoning.

  15. PM, I’ve never heard of the Honge nut before. It appears to be native to India whereas Jotropha is North African.

  17. A. Chapman, we’re probably flogging a near-dead horse here, but anyway:

    Complexity theory deals precisely with how the little bits add up to the big bits. Or don’t (as is usually the case). If you thinks that the way a human mind works has no bearing on the economic
    and social institutions that govern our lives

    In quoting me, you very carefully excised my reference to neuroscience, I notice. I wasn’t saying the small bits weren’t relevant, but I was doubting that the small relevant bits will have much to
    do with the psychology of individual brains. Perhaps I should have been more explicit. Defensible scientific explanations of human behaviour aren’t (in my view) going to contain
    references in their lawlike descriptions to any of the entities relied on by naive commonsense psychology. To whit, ‘beliefs’, ‘desires’, along with the panoply of explanatory devices they connect with (like ‘incentives’) will not be part of science’s ontology. For economics to rest much on an outdated crude folk ontology would be a very risky hostage to fortune.

    What designed what!? Did the hare I was trying to catch or the sabre- toothed tiger I was trying to avoid design me? Or was it changes in the weather? Are you suggesting that Darwinian mechanisms
    (some omnipotent being, I presume?) can design anything? There was no multitude of beings from which the weakest have been removed, leaving only the finest specimens. Complexity always exists and
    emergence constantly occurs.

    I said Darwinism mimics a designer. Again, the statement could be made much more carefully, I guess. There’s no designer, but Darwinian evolution is a design process of sorts. For an
    ecological system to exist in a state that looks ‘steady’ (at least over relatively short time periods) it has to have been designed by some process or other. Complex systems don’t ‘self-organise’
    themselves over short time scales in the semi-mystical way Terje seemed (to me) to be suggesting.

    why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and start advertising the end of the world

    I don’t have any money surplus to needs, and gaining more doesn’t interest me.

    Why would you become an agriculturalist if there was no market for your produce?

    Perhaps because you’ve hunted everything to extinction, and are starving as a result?

    It’s all about incentives, people!

    It’s all about incentives, economists! The rest of us don’t need them.

  18. Complex systems don’t ’self-organise’
    themselves over short time scales in the semi-mystical way Terje seemed (to me) to be suggesting.

    It seems to me that complex social systems frequently do “self-organise” and that its not terrible mystical. By this I mean that disparate individuals are frequently capable of coming together in new ways without the dominant influence of a central planner. This is not to say that the catalytic effect of a few individuals are not significant or necessary in providing a behavioural template.

    In game theory such concepts are illustrated by Nash Equilibriums. A convention of behaviour can emerge from a game such that behaviour that leads to win-win outcomes becomes a stable locked in state of behaviour.

    I can understand that somebody might find emergent systems to be sub-optimal, such as the socialist may view market emergent systems, or a conservative might view certain sub-cultures, however to suggest that complex social systems don’t self organise seems to me to be denying the existance of society itself.

  19. Terje, far from suggesting that social systems don’t self-organise, I am agreeing that self-organising is crucial. But I doubt that the kinds of massively complex systems that human societies constitute can self-organise their way to sustainable steady states without some design (eg. via evolution, be it purely Darwinian, Baldwinian; genetic or cultural/symbolic). Design and self-organisation are not antithetical. There’s plenty of evidence, for example, that there are elements of self-organisation in human language-learning, but there is clearly design apparent in the co-evolution of languages and individual cognitive capacities.

    What I find semi-mystical is the notion that ‘the market’ will magically find solutions to some of the global problems facing us today. It’s shown no capacity to do so thus far, and it’s adherents’ insistence that it will save us at the 11th hour seems to me a matter of religious faith.

  20. While I doubt if markets alone will provide evrything needed, it’s fairly clear that markets haven’t been operating properly for generations, and that they may well prove a valuable part of a solution – if only by freeing up resources that are currently being used to distort them. It’s a bit like not lifting with your back.

  21. “It is time that our Governments started to act to fix up the mess and told the corporations to get out of their way.”

    I always find it interesting that people are always so passionate and supportive and find so many different opinions about splitting hairs over organized crime and what it should do. Remember: Anarchy works if only people give it a chance.

    When most people think of “organized crime”, they think of criminals that challenge the unity and overarching domination of the current criminal empire. When most people think of the “Mafia”, they think of Italians, Russian Jews, Asians, and Native American Indians. While I in no way imply that people in those groups are completely separate from the rest of society, the underworld is just small time.

    The real Mafia uses people from all races, favors white people, has tanks and fighter jets, and is mainstream society. It is the Official MaFia Group (OMFG), or the MainStream Mafia (MSM). It’s just the mesmerizing effect of television, parents, schools and the methodical omission of important facts that has created a vacuum of ideas on whether organized crime is a good thing or not outside the underworld’s competition.

  22. Wait a minute. I don’t mean the word “anarchy” that The Man has created. Anarchy is the rejection of all forms of hypocrisy and exception. An example is rejecting the IRS putting extortionists in prison because of tax evasion needed to hide the income from the police, because putting it on one’s tax forms is a confession. Domination and control is closely related to hypocrisy and crime, which is why many define anarchy as the rejection of domination and control.

    Now this word “anarchy” that The Man created is really sad. It means burning, stealing, rioting, and raping. The Man does exactly the same thing when his power is threatened: it is called Defending Your Country by Opening New Markets and Spreading Democracy. Even when his power is absolute, he still does these things on a massive scale. He burns, steals, riots, and rapes by global warming, taxes, government accounting, riot cops starting fights with protesters, and imprisonment, respectively.

  23. P.M.Lawrence, markets may well be one means of implementing self-organisation for many domains. I’m not disputing that. But they won’t be ‘free’ (there’s obviously no such thing as a free market), and they are not a part of the natural order. They are specifically-designed attempts at political solutions to some problems of organising mass society. Where they work, good. Where not, dump them.

  24. Design and self-organisation are not antithetical. There’s plenty of evidence, for example, that there are elements of self-organisation in human language-learning, but there is clearly design apparent in the co-evolution of languages and individual cognitive capacities.

    I really don’t understand the way in which you are using the word “design”. Perhaps you could expand on it a little.

  25. A most renewable new year to all.

    Ian Gould has said:

    ‘I’m particularly interested in the potential of perennial dry-land crops such as Jotophra and oil mallee, which can be grown on land which is currently either marginal for food production or used for grazing.’

    In the 1980s, the Nobel Prize-winning American chemist, Melvin Calvin – can any name be more memorable? – promoted (as Sir Mark Oliphant promoted hydrogen), the development of any oily desert shrub as a biofuel. Calvin was absolutely crazy about the shrub. Can anyone remember its name?

    Abstract discussions of language acquisition and theories of neuronic auto-whoops-a-daisy only cause my tiny mind to self-implode with ennui and Weltsmerz. Aargh! Let’s have more biofuel!

    Yo, Bro, I’s a goin meet the Main Man. He’s from Palermo (another desert community).

    Sorry, wrong dialect. You’ve always been a good boy, Joey. We’re worried about you and this thing of ours.

  26. Nestor says

    ‘Anarchy is the rejection of all forms of hypocrisy and exception’.

    Well, what a terrific idea that is. We all suspect hypocrisy and would like to shampoo it out of our hair every morning, but hopefully it’s here for good. Hypocrisy makes the world go ’round and the day more liveable. Macho anarchists who pose as truth-speakers are often hypocrites.

    Never trust anarchists. They’re usually macho tossers. Viva hypocrisy! And have a nice day.

  27. Terje Petersen wrote : Uranium offers an almost endless source of energy …

    A good summary which comprehensively demolishes nuclear as an alternative to either coal fired power or petroleum can be found here.

    I include some of its summary :

    Known uranium reserves will last for about fifty years at the current consumption rate.

    If the nuclear share is increased to 10% of the current world energy supply by construction of 1500 GW(e) new capacity (more than four times the current world nuclear capacity), the reserves will last for about fourteen years.

    If large new rich uranium deposits will be found, doubling the known reserves, which is improbable from a geological point of view, global reserves will last for less than thirty years.

    Uranium-bearing rocks with grades lower than of the leanest ores processed at present, should not be regarded as energy source, because extraction of the uranium from the rock consumes more energy than can be generated by fissioning that uranium in a reactor.

    Breeder technology has proven to be unfeasible and it never will be feasible.

    Fusion for energy generation (other than thermonuclear weapons) has been a moving target for fifty years and will be so for at least the next fifty years.

    See, also, above for links to other articles by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen.

  28. Seawater contains very large quantities of uranium as a trace element; this can be extracted with filters. Breeder technology can be used if we’re prepared to risk it (large amounts of plutonium travelling around).

    I agree that fusion is highly overrated and might not be viable for decades.

    Has anyone in Melbourne noticed all the Lyndon La Rouche robots scurrying around (esp on the Swanston St bridge?) They all look beautific and fanatical. La Rouche began popularising fusion power some years ago: I fear the Geeks, even when they bear gifts.

  29. James, I’m not convinced that it’s energetically impossible to generate net energy from uranium-bearing rocks below what’s currently considered ore-grade.

    However it’s likely to require radically new and different mining and processing technologies – anyone who’s followed the lateritic nickel story or the problems at BHP’s HBI plant will grasp that such technologies can often take considerable tiem and money to get right.

    Mining low-grade ore, by definition, means shifting larger amounts of both ore and overburden to get a given amount of uranium. Heavy-duty mining equipment, like air transport, is goign ot be one of the most difficult applications to replace fossil fuels in.

    So almost inevitably the carbon-intensity of uranium mining will rise considerably.

    Anyone who’s familiar with Roxby Downs knows the environmental impacts of a large-scale uranium mine are considerable. Roxby Downs is near the lower end of what’s currently feasible to mine in terms of its uranium content (really its a copper mine which extracts the uranium impurity from the copper ore). Mines for lower-grade ore would pobably need to be considerably larger again.

  30. Ian,
    I think this topic has been done to death, so I have been avoiding it, but I have to correct one of your points above. Heavy duty mining equipment is one of the easier applications to replace oil in – it is already done frequently in deep open pits and in shaft mining, where the exhaust fumes generated by a combustion engine whould cause dangerous levels of CO and CO2, along with high particulate levels. Overhead electric caternaries are the usual power transmission mechanism.

  31. Crispin Bennett, you should check out http://mutualist.blogspot.com for a different perspective on what is artificial or not about markets, and just what gets substituted for them in practice and by whom.

    If anyone wants to know about people who go to try and promote capitalism on Swanston Street bridge, as well as the LaRouce people there are some (slightly) more rational types like Prodos Marinakis’s Celebrate Capitalism group. I have for some reason been banned from their meetings, perhaps in part for objecting to their elevating the US flag above our own traditions and their claiming that ideas of liberty all come from there. That link’s from memory, so you may have to google for the real site.

  32. PM Lawrence has said

    ‘If anyone wants to know about people who go to try and promote capitalism on Swanston Street bridge, as well as the LaRouce people there are some (slightly) more rational types like Prodos Marinakis’s Celebrate Capitalism group.’

    Yes, that was my enquiry: I’ve been seeing quite a few of these pesky LaRouche critters around lately and had a discussion about fusion with some of them on campus last year. They seem to have some odd bees in their bonnets; George Schultz etc

    Swanston St is an inconvenient location for promoting anything.

  33. Andrew, valid point.

    Hell, I’ve seen the massive electric drag-lines in the central Queensland coal-fields – when their regenerative brakes kick in it has a measurable impact on the entire state grid.

  34. Terje, I don’t really possess a well thought-out definition of ‘design’. We don’t seem to be that bad at spotting it when we see it. Perhaps a ‘designed’ system is one that requires some element of teleological explanation to understand?

    I feel on surer ground when I say that thus far only one kind of design process seems to exist, ie. Darwinian. Even in apparently human-designed systems, the existence of a ‘designer’ is in doubt if you take seriously (as I do) theories of neural Darwinism etc.

  36. Crispin,

    Actually I do think we are bad at spotting design. We see false positives everywhere. By that I mean we see design and purpose where there is none. Just consider the prevelance of conspiracy theories.

    Regards,
    Terje.

  37. Another example. I see people and animals in the clouds. And sometimes I see lovers in the clouds doing naughty things.

  38. ‘lovers in the clouds doing naughty things.’

    Welcome to the big bad world of nebulo-porn.

    Crispin: what in Natural Selection’s name is ‘neural darwinism’ and how can I take it seriously?

    Was ‘social credit’ invented in the 1930s by an American populist called Douglas? ‘Social credit’ seems to have it all, like ‘national socialism’: easy money with clear conscience.

  40. Uh, not to kick out the plug of the life-support system of a very long and rambling debate, but boy oh boy it has become obscure and nonsensical.

    Chrispin has said:

    ‘Perhaps a ‘designed’ system is one that requires some element of teleological explanation to understand?’

    Have we all landed in some strange smelly seminary, circa 1953? Urggh.

    How many angles are there on the head of a pin?

  41. One of my recent comments was put through Moderation, and rightly so, because I mentioned P^^^n, which is always a hazard. The comment was:

    ‘lovers in the clouds doing naughty things.’

    Welcome to the big bad world of nebulo-p&&&n.

    Crispin: what in Natural Selection’s name is ‘neural darwinism’ and how can I take it seriously?

    Was ’social credit’ invented in the 1930s by an American populist called Douglas? ‘Social credit’ seems to have it all, like ‘national socialism’: easy money with a clear conscience.

  42. Well, apart from Douglas being Scottish and active in the 1920’s, yes. LaRouche supports the idea, as do his supporters here in the League of Rights. Asking them about Social Credit or banker’s conspiracies is a good way to get them going. They can also talk at great length about global warming and other conspiracies.

  43. “How many angles [sic] are there on the head of a pin?”

    Interesting question. Given that the head of a pin is usually either a disc, or a sphere, presumably the answer is an infinite number of ‘angles’. 🙂

  44. Social Credit is an “almost” sort of idea, like many others, e.g. Single Tax. Once you get past their jargon you often find that they are very close to right about certain key problems (but don’t look beyond their narrow view, or the fact that the world has often moved on to new and improved problems), and then their policies – their recommended solutions – are further off the mark. You could say the same about Marxism, and a great many other things. As such they provide valuable food for thought and correctives to defective received wisdom of the day.

    One interesting thing about Social Credit ideas is that if, instead of just issuing a social dividend from newly created money, you do so from the yields of a “domain” or portfolio of assets in trust, you can then manage the capital needs of that trust/domain/portfolio from newly issued money provided you take a sinking fund view of how to manage it, i.e. don’t inflate over time but just use the seigneury to match real increase in the capacity of the economy and spreading the financial risk over the whole economy.

    Of course, this entirely ignores questions about the wisdom and alignment of interest of politicians with respect to our own interests.

    R.A.Heinlein was much influenced by the Social Credit people in his early days as a political activist, and it shows through in his early novels – especially his first, “lost”, novel For Us, the Living which was recently recovered and published.

  45. Will de Vere, your brief display of yobbo anti-intellectualism seems a bit out of place (here, or in the 21st century for that matter).

  46. Will de Vere, on neural darwinism see this book and this one.

    You take it seriously by considering that it might actually explain how the mind works.

    But as you’ve already expressed contempt for any area of thought outwith your experience, why would you bother?

  47. A landmark! This is the first time in my life I’ve been accused of being a yobbo! (Or perhaps friends suspected it but were too polite to tell me. Yes, that’s what’s been going on all these years. Bastards! I’ll give them a call! No, I’ll send them a letter! A card! An email! That’s what I’ll do!).

    Crispin: not contempt, just exasperation. There’s a huge difference. And areas of thought outside my experience receive my highest respect because I have no experience of of them, and therefore can’t comment. Whereof we cannot speak….

    On the other hand, there’ll always be a place in the 21st-41st centuries for yobbo anti-intellectualism. Perhaps like monarchy or foot-fetishism, it plays a permanent and useful part in a well-adjusted society.

    Isn’t there just a little bit of yobbo in all of us? Especially on these warm summer days? %—)

    Andrew R and PM L, thank you for the explanations of ‘social credit’.

    ‘Well, apart from Douglas being Scottish and active in the 1920’s, yes. LaRouche supports the idea, as do his supporters here in the League of Rights. Asking them about Social Credit or banker’s conspiracies is a good way to get them going.’

    Bloody hell, it’s been years since I’ve heard of the League of Rights. Has anyone noticed that any organisation with ‘League’ in its name is automatically from Weirdo Town?

    Sorry, must dash. I have meeting of the League of Young Saxon Defenders to attend.

  48. Will, if you’re exasperated, then explain your exasperation rather than make crude jibes. Or did you think you were being funny?

    I was asked about how I was using the word ‘design’, admitted I hadn’t thought it through to any great extent, but suggested it might have something to do with a requirement for teleological forms of explanation. A pretty modest suggestion for anyone familiar with contemporary philosophy of science. What’s the problem?

  49. Oh, and Will, re yobbo anti-intellectualism. It’s only useful when it’s funny, and that seems to be only be the case for the very occasional PJ O’Rourke paragraph. Otherwise, in a country where anti-intellectualism is close to being official ideology (even in its universities), it’s far too much like sucking up to the boss for my taste.

  50. Wow, 350 comments from a 2 line post. Is that a record for an I/O ratio, PrQ? We even got past a Godwin’s Law violaion attempt.
    .
    Will,
    Does that include the RSL? Most of my uncles and both of my grandfathers are / were members.
    .
    Crispin,
    I tend to find a few more than the ‘occasional’ P.J. paragraph funny. Does that mean that different sides of politics find different things funny?

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