Peak Oil: Say Hello Again to $100 Oil

Sorry, Jabba. Gonna have to call bull**** on that last statement.

The reason why there is so much female infanticide (or "gendercide" as it's been coined) is mostly because there are still cultures where females are held in less regard than males: China, and to a lesser extent India and elsewhere in Asia. China's one-child policy has helped keep their population manageable for the moment, but it's also meant that girls are killed/abandoned at a high rate because a male child is more desirable, if a family's limited to a single child by law. Ths means that there is a fast-increasing gender gap in China's younger population--more boys than girls. What happens when those boys reach adulthood? How do they expect to get married and have their own sons?

A global one-child policy could only have a realistic chance of success if the world, as a whole, saw a change all cultures' views toward females, and not just within the West's national identities. If girls were considered equally desirable in all cultures, both socially AND economically, then we wouldn' have to worry about 'choosing' one sex over another due to antiquated traditions.

 

No, you misunderstood me. I agree with everything you wrote. But I've run across any number of people on the internet, where admittedly anything goes as you can tell by my presence, who applaud the high rates of gender selection in China and India because it amplifies the population control benefits of a one child policy in China's case at least, and makes it harder for men to procreate in India in general.

Some people argue that the high rates of gender selection there also help improve the status of women over time. I don't know if I believe that, but it's hard to argue against the idea that an enforced one child policy combined with cultural practices that lead to more male than female births is going to reduce the population faster than a one child policy alone.

 

Education of women is key I think. In certain parts of India where female education is much higher women often say they want either one child or are unsure they want any at all. If women voluntarily opt to have fewer children it will beneift the human race in the long term.

Of course, with someone like The Pope preaching anti birth-control messages to so many people things are not going to go that well. Frankly I'd opt for destroying organised religion as a viable option to save humans from eradication.

 

Killing religions definitely sounds better than killing people (take note Mr. Pope, that's why atheists are not like Nazis). I'd want to see some hard numbers on the extent to which large family size is the direct result of religious belief worldwide. But in general, faith-based opposition to birth control is pure, unfiltered evil.

 

You're wrong; it is a filter. It siphons off all that makes this planet good and green, leaving behind only the untreated filth and toxins that makes up God's 'gift' upon this world. That gift, known as humankind, is more like a plague than anything else.

If these religious folk desire so much to discourage birth control, then why don't they volunteer to take those children of which other cultures don't want? Right... nothing more hypocritical than that.

 

I'm pessimistic about our future, but not necessarily bitter about humans. I don't think humans are a plague on the face of the earth. This is highly biased, I admit, but to me intelligent life is the most interesting thing that a universe can produce.

Humans are smart, but are we smart enough to use our high level cognition and override our biological instincts and evolutionary heritage that emphasizes reproduction ahead of almost everything else? If we were smart, we would not wait until the last possible second to do something about population growth, we would make plans and take decisive action.

Conventional wisdom tells us that our advanced cognition makes us immune from Malthusian population collapse. Deciding what to do in the event that we're wrong to be so confident is a risk management challenge, no doubt about it.

 

I don't know whether I'd call this a relief or just another chance for people to denounce peak oil, but Iraq's oil reserves have been estimated at 25% greater than previously expected. Which means that there can potentially be much more oil in places where it's already been confirmed. And again setting back the date in which peak oil is expected to hit hard.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/10/04/iraq.oil.reserves/index.html?hpt=Sbin

It's a relief to know that they are predicting more oil than previously expected. It's also something which leaves me worrying about growing expectations that we'll always find new ways to deal with the impending energy crisis that we're staring right in the eye. The last thing we need is to feel more complacent.

 

These may be what we refer to as "political barrels," oil reserves that come into being by issuing a press release stating that they are there. It is a time-honored tradition in the region.

Meanwhile, the world has been following the peak oil playbook more precisely than even the most histrionic doomers could possibly have <s>hoped</s> feared.

The model is straightforward.

Population growth + economic expansion + fundamental production supply restraints -->

record oil prices --> general commodity price inflation --> economic recession

--> decrease in demand --> cooling off of oil and commodity prices -->

economic recovery + population expansion + fundamental supply constraints --> next round of recession

Once oil production peaks, as it seems to have done, then the economy will continue to cycle downward in a series of supply shock recessions and attempted recoveries and deeper supply shocks and deeper recessions and weaker attempted recoveries until the economy hits an equilibrium floor in which oil supply shocks can no longer have a significant impact and the global economy no longer supports population growth.

The 1970s saw the first major oil shock caused by a regional oil peak. 2008 was the first global peak oil shock. The second one will occur in 2011 when oil prices climb above $100 again and food prices approach 2008 levels. The 2011 recession will drive U.S. unemployment above 15% (20-25% underemployed and discouraged workers). The 2011 recession will also drive politicians to focus heavily on jobs creation and with luck it will be aimed at energy infrastructure investment that may cushion the blow for the next round of oil shocks.

If you live in the United States or Western Europe, I recommend you do anything you can today to save up for a second recessionary wave next year and downsize your lifestyle strategically as carefully as you can to prepare for several decades of increasing austerity.

 

I cycle to work eight months of the year (and take public transportation the rest), I eat a diet that's almost vegetarian, and about 10% of my income is set aside each month for investments as stable as I can find.


And I'm really, really scared about the world ahead of us.

 

According to new reasearch, Humans will need 2 Earths to sustain lifestyle by 2030.

 

Goldman Sachs is on board.

Goldman Forecasts `Substantially Higher Prices' for Crude in 2011, 2012

If that holds I'd see the U.S. slipping back into recession no later than Q1 2012. Combine that with the misguided current quantitative easing efforts, what NYJedi calls "monetizing the debt" and I think we'll be back into a world of hurt.

 

Forgive me as my attention span for politics is greatly (and temporarily) diminished. But when I look at the guys promoting the idea of peak oil and a looming food crisis, they look suspiciously like the very same guys promoting man-made global climate change...a debatable lie. And the same guys who tell us every year that the hurricane season is gonna be extreme due to man-made climate change...and it never ever happens. The same guys who warned us about the Avian flue that turned out to be nothing. That warned us about H1N1 that not only tuned out to be nothing, but left us, The United States of America, with 75 million unused H1N1 flu shots in a time of great economic dispair.

When are we gonna wise up to the games of these guys who's only concern is stopping someone from making a dollar in a capitalist economy. It can't be any more obvious.

 

So far this season, there have been sixteen named storms and nine hurricanes. Weather patterns have kept most of it out of the gulf of Mexico and away from the U.S. coast - most of the storms have turned north into the mid Atlantic ocean rather than threatening the U.S., but this is just dumb luck, since the season has been every bit as active as the National Hurricane Center predicted. A typical season only has 11 named storms.

At the same time, this year is tied with the warmest on record.

Taking an ideological position on facts based on whether or not you want them to be true is a risky life strategy. Oil production worldwide is on a five year plateau. Production did not respond to high prices with the large increases that we've seen in previous years. All that is publicly known about oil megaprojects in the pipeline over the next 5-10 years do not point to any significant increase in global oil production during that time frame.

I don't know for certain that peak oil production has occurred, but I do believe that there are underlying structural reasons for why the supply defied increasing demand as we approached the 2008 economic peak, and why the price is now defying an economic slump.

The consumption trends of the oil producing countries are also hard to ignore. The amount of oil on the global export market is going to become America's biggest national security threat within 2 years. I believe that this is a done deal, that all the available data points to a looming oil import crisis for the United States regardless of what we believe about when global oil production has peaked or will peak.

I've followed this issue for more than half a decade now. Doesn't mean I'm right, of course, but as I noted before, everything has unfolded to-date pretty much exactly as I'd say the most moderate peak oil proponents have predicted. The oil price superspike, the global recession, the rapid recovery of oil prices, the stagnation of production in a plateau around the ultimate production peak. The data fits the model to date.

The U.S. military is in the early stages of planning for peak oil. The German military has begun planning for peak oil. The New Zealand government is planning for peak oil. The energy analysts at Goldman Sachs are peak oil converts.

Any government that does not develop a strategy right now for mitigating the economic effects of a rapid decline in global oil export markets is going to face a dire and unpleasant medium term future.

The one area where I'd agree with you is that climate change is going to be ignored. Whether the proposed consequences of human-induced climate change are true or false, real or imagined, catastrophic or just mildly annoying, climate change denial is probably the only cognitively healthy way of dealing with the problem. Because even if it is 100% as horrible as the worst climate catastrophists predict, we (and by we I mean the U.S., China, India, Western Europe and everyone else) will deliberately boil the planet in order to try to avoid the worst consequences of peak oil.

 

Your last line wrecks your steamrollin' train of thought; there are no such people.

Look at Jabba. Jabba is one of your "guys promoting the idea of peak oil and a looming food crisis". You really think Jabba wants to stop you from making a buck?
If you'd said: "...guys who freak out too easily"... "guys who misinterpret numbers"... "narcissists"... or just "scared people", it could have seemed well-thought out. But to think they're motivated by the need to curtail others - with no gain to themselves - is an idea that's too un-humanlike for me to bet our future on.

 

J-Rod sounds like one of these people who thinks the government is out to get everyone, probably in favour of voluntary taxation because "it's not forced on the people" (yeah, that will really work ).

Seriously, anyone who doesn't think climate change isn't in part caused by us should be filed in the same group as flat-Earthers.
Remind me never to save those people when a massive natural disaster destroys their house, because we did tell them it was coming but they refused to take it seriously.

The Earth has too many people who will overconsume resources.

 

Personally speaking, I don't worry about climate change. The Medieval Warm Period led to some parts of the world being significantly warmer than they are now, the 1816 "Year Without a Summer" things were significantly colder, two million years ago there were forests in what's now northern Greenland, etc, etc, etc. Whatever we do to the earth, life will survive and adapt. This isn't a "it doesn't matter if animals go extinct" nor a "I don't care about pollution" sort of opinion; it's more of a belief that what we do might hurt ourserlves and the world for a long time, but the world will recover.

Plus, I think that we'll probably run out of oil, gas and coal well before we eliminate the megafauna due to climate change.

 

The important thing to understand is that climate change loonies and peak oil whackos are not always fellow travelers and are often at odds about what needs to be done.

 

The Earthw ill recover, but Humans will die. We are insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but we can reduce the damage warming will do to our civilisation easily enough if we make appropriate changes within a set timeframe.

I object to dying because of the blindless and negligence of others, not to being killed by a natural process. Extinctions not caused by us should not be halted.

 

America for the most part just makes calorie-dense food. Meat's the most micronutrient-dense. I can see a huge problem when northern states can't get enough vitamin C.

 

Brent crude hits $90 for first time since October 2008

Meanwhile, OPEC declares $100/barrel to be a fair price for crude. I'm not sure exactly what they mean by fair, whether they calculate that as the most that can be charged without re-tanking, so to speak, the global economy, or whether that's what they need to clear a profit with the expensive, energy intensive tertiary recovery techniques now being employed in their aging fields to keep production rates up, or whether that's what they need to compensate for the increasing volumes of oil that are being diverted into their own domestic economies and can no longer be exported. Hard to say.

 

I thought the price of oil appeared to be rising but really it's because the US dollar is weakening?

 

It's more complicated than that. A weaker dollar drives up the oil price. But also, increasing global demand for oil may also push down the value of the dollar. But also the news that drives up the stock market also tends to push up the price of oil futures. And so on.

 

President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed says even developing nations should cut carbon emissions as well as Western countries. He described fossil fuels as "obsolete, it's yesterday's technology" and said it was silly for developing countries to claim they need fossil fuels in order to progress.

The Maldives is aiming to become carbon neutral by 2020

 

The Maldives become carbon neutral at the very latest when rising ocean levels put them underwater. Problem: solved.

 

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