Peak Oil: Say Hello Again to $100 Oil

The thing is, neither excess excuses the other.

America's wastefulness does make third world overbreeding any less of a problem, or vice versa.

 

One of the reasons people in developing nations have lots of kids is because of the high death rate at a young age. As with many species, more babies = greater likelihood for survival. When someone on average dies every few seconds you need a high birthrate to fill the void (frankly I say leave it and then the population will decrease to a better size).

It's typical of the first world to blame the developing world, who have almost no way of fixing their problems without aid.

 

When someone on average dies every few seconds you need a high birthrate to fill the void

If that equilibrium was holding, those countries wouldn't have problems with overpopulation.

When 'developing nations' do the developing part, public health improves and death rates decline, causing the population to grow.

There are only two solutions: increase the death rate or decrease the birth rate. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the birth rate one is a better option.

It's typical of the first world to blame the developing world, who have almost no way of fixing their problems without aid.

The only aid this problem requires is contraceptives, hence my earlier railing against the religious groups who work to keep contraceptives out of third world hands.

 

I agree, it is a shame such nations are often strictly religious and listen to idiots like The Pope who tell them contraceptives are bad.

But, it's not just birth control that they need.
Without money or sound regimes to manage economy and development, these nations will continue to have the populations live in poverty.

First world nations can help with these things.

 

Your analysis is lacking in some significant areas. Yes, religious opposition to birth control is one way that large families are being created, but it's only one. More fundamentally, there is little reason to use birth control, even were it avaialable. In third world countries, the majority of the populace either works doing unskilled labor or (more commonly) subsistence agriculture. Where labor laws are lax enough, they can begin working as early as age 7 or 8, and can bring in just as significant of an income as another adult in the household. When families are struggling to make ends meet and surviving on a few dollars a day, such children are a net benefit to the household finances. Thus, to improve your financial situation, it makes sense to have a huge number of children. Only when you disincentivize this (either by banning child labor--impractical in subsistence agriculture--or bringing the economy to a level where skilled labor is required) do you provide a real economic motive for people to have smaller family sizes.

 

But, it's not just birth control that they need.

It is as far as overpopulation is concerned.

 

It come down to way of life. Agricultural families are far more likely to have more workers, while the average US citizen would be more interested in having fewer successful children. In Japan, reproduction has come to be less important that establishing one's career. That's why their population pyramid is going all funky.

 

This is essentially the reason I'm a doomer. We are already deep in population overshoot: rapidly overconsuming renewable and non renewable resources alike. If we overconsume a renewable resource like ocean fish (not just through fishing and eating but also by making the food source more and more toxic through pollution) then it might as well be a nonrenewable resource.

Even if through some miracle we were able to bring the global fertility rate down to its replacement value overnight, demographic momentum would still leave us with an increasing population for the next 20 or 30 years. In the best case scenario, we still have a population of 8 billion or more by mid century.

The more likely scenario is more than 9 billion people by mid century in the face of little or no meaningful global action on population control.

But by that point, we will have already seen a generalized resource collapse, followed by mass starvation in the developing world. Ultimately, it will be the death rate that fixes our population problem.

 

I suppose that I'm also just evaluating the likelihood that the US can avert the problems with an impending oil crisis.

Assuming that we can determine what the price of oil will become and when, I'm still skeptical as to whether action could be taken in time to make preparations. Most people are more interested in fuel efficient vehicles and few are advocating for higher population density. Because people recognize that oil is finite, steps are being taken to address the problem; but not the right choices.

It seems more to me that corporations are more interested in making a profit off replacement technologies which have very little impact on addressing the problems. Ethanol is truly a terrible solution, especially when using corn for the process. The electric car was killed for short-term economic gain. hydrogen is being promoted when it's actually demanding a significant quantity of energy to be too large to use on a large scale.

Rather than improving the situation, technologies in energy efficiency may actually be having the opposite effect than what people realize.

 

This is why I think there will be continuing gaps growing between richer developed nations and poorer, outright wastelands of nations. This will also lead to a rise in the developing world of revolutions and unrest as people stuck in the middle between those two worlds lash out. They will be squeezed.

 

This is because politics has determined that ethanol deserves massive subsidies along with hydrogen fuel-cell tech. It is government payouts that lift these techs above others. So you want an better deal: either demand an abolition of the subsidies or an equalization of them for all fuel efficiency tech.

 

I've been quite busy with semester exams in the last few days, so I haven't had a chance to post. Yet I have been finishing a project that has to do with this very subject.

One of the most significant issues with peak oil is not so much dwindling supplies as it is a sudden and sharp decline that often happen with little or no warning. Because you can't make an accurate measurement with oil production until after if goes into terminal decline. It's truly in this rapid and unpredictable increase in price that threatens to endanger the US transportation economy.

The US must make a transition to electricity as soon as possible, as oil supplies are becoming much more volatile the more we come to depend on foreign sources. We can't just start drilling again and hope to hold up supplies without severe impacts to the US economy. At least electricity has the benefit of being a universal source from coal or nuclear. Over 90% of transportation can only use petroleum.

 

The more I see, the more I know that "sprawl," "Peak oil," and "Global Warming" are simply shields for socialists and communists.

These people in Copenhagen, who claim to be worried about "Global Warming", are cheering the man who produces much of the world's supply of oil. Why? They love his politics. And that love reviels their true motivations.

They don't care about fossile fuels. They only care that they don't get a cut.

 

That doesn't make them less real, even if they've been co-opted for political purposes (global warming, I'm looking at you)

 

It does, however, through into doubt the validity of claims.

 

The claims were there before they were hijacked, though. Obviously the claims from THEM should be ignored, but that doesn't erase the evidence there is for it.

 

The claims that the debate is over and that the science is settled came long after the hi-jacking.

 

My interest is in preparing the US for the oil peak that will heavily tax this economy. My concern about sprawl stems from four sources of conflict that have to be addressed.

-Transportation in the US depends upon oil for over 95% of its energy needs. There are few or any substitutes.
-US infrastructure is in desperate need of overhaul. That will require tearing apart roads and replacing power lines.
-Increasing population density. While renovating old systems, it would make sense to increase population density while in the process.
-With an increased density, it would allow light rail to take the place of the automobile in the US transportation infrastructure.

This would ease the economic threat of peak oil and make it possible for the US economy to survive such a transition intact.

 

Here is more evidence that global warming is a lie. A flat lie used to punish the successful. The brave. The free.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.
Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

Who still believes that global warming exists? And of that small, confused, misguided and/or willfully ignorant slice of humanity, who among them thinks that it's man made?

Stupid. The science ain't settled. Never was. Nor was there ever a concensis. Ever.

 

First, this is a peak oil thread, not really a climate change thread. There are important differences between the two, including that anthropogenic climate change has a lot more science behind it than peak oil, which is really just an observation resting on a few simple ideas:

1) oil is a finite resource. Petroleum geology tends to discover the easiest to find/easiest to access oil first. New discoveries depend on harder to access oil (e.g. deepwater offshore) that is also much more energy intensive to obtain.

2) oil wells, oil fields and oil regions historically follow a fairly standard production rate, moving from ramping up and production increases, to a peak flow rate, to an inevitable decline. The Cantarell megagiant field in Mexico was discovered in 1976. Its production peaked and went into decline in 2003, and Mexican oil production as a whole has followed. All the oil fields and oil producing regions in a country can be aggregated to find a peak production rate for that country. All the oil producing countries in the world can be aggregated to find a peak global production rate for oil.

3) This picture is complicated by politics, meaning that oil reserves and production rates in many countries are a state secret. Transparency in oil production and reserves data is critical for actually determining when peak oil happens. Without good data, it's pure speculation, and most of the people who are rabid about peak oil lack really good data.

4) There is no easy substitute for oil. Oil provides most of our transportation fuel. It is the engine of globalization. An irreversible global decline in oil production could therefore have devastating consequences for the economy.

5) The nexus of climate change and peak oil. The likely result of peak oil would be a stampede to electrify vehicle fleets with a heavy reliance on coal-fired electric power to make the transition. If anthropogenic climate change is a problem, an effort to mitigate peak oil through ramping up coal burning could be catastrophic.

 

While I understand your points, both topics are pushed by the same liars. In that way they are connected. While the science for both peak oil and global warming are flawed, there is so much more science on global warming than peak oil. And global warming "science" has been around long enough that the liars are getting outted. And because the same people are pushing both "sciences" it seems that if you can prove one wrong then both can be neutralized. So too can the overpopulation kooks. Again, the same far left communists.

Besides, there doesn't seem to be a Global Warming thread.

 

So make one. Or ask a mod to unlock the one from two years ago.

And, sorry, debunking one doesn't do anything to the other. You can have peak oil without global warming, or global warming without peak oil. They're linked in that oil use creates byproducts that can feed warming processes, but certainly not identical.

 

I don't have an opinion on anthropogenic climate change, not knowing the science myself. I know for sure that politicizing the facts is bad for the science, whether it comes from the right or the left.

I am definitely a peak oil and overpopulation kook, but you need to be careful about assuming that we're all communists. Matthew Simmons is one of the biggest peak oil and overpopulation kooks, but he runs an energy investment bank that did $3 billion in M&A and public offerings last year. Not a communist. Many of the peak oil heavy hitters are petroleum geologists who spent their careers in oil exploration and development. They know the industry.

 

You must be clear when debunking something not to generalise.
Global Warming is not a myth, you can see it happening all the time. What is debatable is how much humans contribute to its effect and how fast it is happening.
But it is happening.

And I don't think the scientists are liars, they misread things. Scientists get things wrong all the time, the point is to learn new things to disprove old ideas and get closer to the truth.

The matter of Oil is somewhat different. Companies buying out opposing technology to keep Oil as the big money making fuel and so that when it runs out they have ownership of the new technology to keep their pockets lined.
Even if, as some say, there is enough Oil to last the human rac for 200 years, that doesn't mean we should sit back and not find alternatives.

It is better to use the Earth's renewable sources then to rely on unclean stuff and only act when it runs out.

 

And I don't think the scientists are liars, they misread things. Scientists get things wrong all the time, the point is to learn new things to disprove old ideas and get closer to the truth.

You didn't read the link, then, where Dr Murari Lal admitted to lying in order to bring political pressure to bear. He misread nothing. He lied.

When I get home I'll (hopefully) start the global warming thread.