Apocalypse Soon?

Clearly, my statement, above, is not contradictory in any way. The problem is that you see some sort of contradiction where none exists.

As long as there are no contradictions, go for it.

Yes. It reflects your world view, which you are certainly entitled to. But I don't see anything inherently contradictory to object to in your statement, above. I would object to the whole thing based on stuff other than you getting to have your cake and eat it too. The details are important. They determine who's world view most closely resembles reality. And they make up the basis of this discussion. Please stop trying to cancel my argument by saying it is contradictory when, clearly, it is not.

If I have offended you, I am sorry. But I don't see what you are offended about. Here is the thread in question:

I guess I was being a bit sarcastic, but you are the one who brought up icebergs.

And I do understand the analogy, but you don't seem to. You say: "...you are predicting that something will make 90-95% of all ships sink in a short time". But that doesn't fit the analogy at all. I am predicting that something will make 90-95% of all people die. In the analogy, the Titanic represents civilization, not a single person. We are the passengers along for the ride. You just introduced your fleet of Titanics from out of nowhere.

---Futilitist

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When you state that a factor supports your argument, then state that its opposite also supports your argument - then those two arguments are, by definition, contradictory. One contradicts the other. For example:

Having the same or less money makes you poor.
Having the same or more money makes you poor.

Those two statements are either contradictory - or how much money you have is not a factor in whether you are poor.

Not offended at all. I did not bring up the Titanic analogy; you did, and are now arguing against it. (or trying to say that since an iceberg sank the Titanic, an iceberg will destroy civilization or something.) Feel free to do so!

Ah. Then I will use a similarly poor analogy where civilization is represented by insects. Can't kill all insects in the world - or even most of them - no matter how hard you try.

 

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This is what currently happens to 1/3 of US natural gas production.
Why many chemical and fertilizer and other energy intensive comanies mentioned in post 831, are rushing to get their new billion dollar plants built in US.

The US has more energy than it knows what to do with now, but as ANY event is for Futilitist proof of coming high cost energy caused economic collapse /apocalypse, this for him is just more proof the 90+% killing of global populations is coming "soon."

Since I have long argued for slightly carbon negative sugarcane alcohol to replace ALL use of very carbon positive oil as car fuel, this flaring is more proof of how urgent serious efforts for switching, as Brazil has done, must be more wide spread. The growing use of oil (or fossil fuel) heating of tight oil /oil sands to produce oil is also reason to switch soon, ASAP.

 

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No they don't. If oil prices rise too high they will damage the economy. That is a true statement. If oil prices drop rapidly, it is likely a sign that the economy is getting weaker. That is also a true statement. The two statements are not the opposite of each other. The first (high oil prices), would damage the economy. The second (rapidly falling oil prices), would be a sign that the economy was damaged. I did not say that both high oil prices and low oil prices would damage the economy, and, thus lead to collapse. Only high oil prices could cause damage. But rapidly falling oil prices are not a good sign.

Thanks, but I don't think I am arguing against my analogy at all. The Titanic analogy is not a proof of anything. It is just a good analogy to highlight the danger of hubris. We should not underestimate the graveness of our current situation.

How is your insect analogy similarly poor? The analogies are not similar at all. Just because your analogy is poor, it doesn't make my analogy poor.

---Futilitist

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I have never said that the current natural gas glut was proof of the upcoming apocalypse. That is just silly.

You are claiming that the current natural gas glut is proof that any chance of an apocalypse has been averted for the foreseeable future. That is highly debatable.

---Futilitist

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To supply the US alone would require about 10% of the total area of Brazil. Currently about 1% of the land is cropland there so that would be a pretty big change.

However even supplying 1/4 of our fuel would be a big step. A mix of gasoline, natural gas, ethanol, biodiesel, regular diesel and electric as fuels would do a lot to:

-reduce CO2 emissions
-end reliance on any one source of energy
-prevent economic shocks from supply disruptions (i.e. Middle East wars)
-drive down fuel prices

 

Have any proof? I plan to start a thread on this question, but earlier in this thread posted actual data from Braskem and later extended that to met the total world require ments for all cars - as I recal only 10% of arable tropical lands* are required, assuming cellulosic alcohol is NOT economical. If celulosic alcohol is economical, just the current required thinning of forest for fire control, and sawmill scraps, etc. will about do the job alone.Too busy now to search for new links. Here is link to the BrasKem data (copied form even older link in anothe thread): http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?133084-Apocalypse-Soon&p=3058339&viewfull=1#post3058339

There you can see 1 hectar (100m by 100m) of land yeilds 7,200 liters of alcohol (more now that the DNA has been improved) and also that 0.02% of Brazil´s arable land (arable land is small fraction of the total Brazilain land as most is forest, wet lands, or too hilly to be arable) is producing 400,000 TONS of plastic each year.

* Even if, and it certainly would not be the case as there is a huge amount of abandoned pasture, the entire 10% were stolen from food producing land, the introduction of GM seeds and modern agricultural practices could get 10 to 20% more food from the 90% of the land still in food production. Agriculture in Africa and most of S. America (not the large modern industralized farms making soy etc) is much like in the old cotton growing pre-civil war South - wear out some land and move on as land is so cheap. Sugarcane is a grass and will grow well with little care and fertilizer in these old abandoned pastures.

 

Proof? No, just stats from Internet sources that I have no reason to doubt.

US gasoline usage: 134 billion gallons a year (source: EIA)
Alcohol yield per acre annually: 800 gallons per acre (source: Wiki on ethanol fuel)

From there it's all just math. I made the assumption that you can replace gasoline with ethanol 1:1 which isn't quite true; ethanol contains less energy. So it would be a bit more land area.

 

A large part is "conventional" oil.

 

Braskem got 7200 liters per hectare. That is 7200/3.7854 = 1902 gallons per hectare or 1902/2.471 = 769.7 gallons per acre, which is quite like your data from wiki (800/ acre). I´ll accept your 800/acre as the Braskem data is four or five cane crops back in time, and the DNA of several types of sugarcane is now known and yields per acre are starting to improve.

However, I can not be as generous as you were. Alcohol has only 70% the energy content of gasoline, so I will assume each acre, without the crushed cane making cellulosic alcohol can replace only 560 gallons of gasoline and guess that if and when cellulosic alcohol is economically feasible, each acre can replace 1000 gallons of gasoline. I note that the crushed cane is already in great piles at the alcohol plant so if any cellulose is ever to be economically competitive, crushed cane is most likely one as has zero collection cost.

As March is neither the winter driving slump nor the summer peak and as a barrel contains 31.5 gallons, I take US to use 31.5x365x8.43E6 = 9.69E10 gallons, significantly smaller than your 13.4E10 gallons.

As it would take more than a decade to convert the US car fleet to ethanol and many cars would then not be using any liquid fuel, especially if natural gas continues to be more than three times cheaper per mile driven, I think less than 5.6E10 gallons of alcohol would be required. Each acre, assuming still no cellulosic alcohol, yields 5.6E2 gallons or 100 million acres, or less, in alcohol production are required.

Most of Brazil´s alcohol production is slightly south of the tropics and as sugarcane is a grass, which with suitable DNA adjustments could grow almost anywhere that grass grows, I´ll compare the 100 million acres required to the world´s total "arable land."

Thus, I´ll assume the land which could be growing sugarcane totals 4,000 million Hectares, but of course most of it must remain in food and fiber production.

4E9Ha = 4x2.471E9 = ~E10 acres and could produce 5.6E12 gallons of alcohol. The land needed for US´s cars using alcohol fuel about a decade or more hence, was 100 million or less acres or E8 acres.

SUMMARY: No more, probably significantly less, than 1% of the arable land, suitable for growing sugarcane could supply fuel for all the cars in the US still using liquid fuel. Now during this transition decade (or more) much of the primitive agriculture practices could switch to modern GM seeds, crop rotation, better irrigated where rainfall is less than desired. Etc. with at least 20% more production of food and fiber from the 99% of the arable land not growing sugarcane.

Sure it is a very challenging task, but "doable." Continued burning of some much petroleum is a more serious challenge - possibly even a threat to life on earth if it triggers a self accelerating release of methane now stored in the methane ice hydrates of the sea. Note this assumes that cellulosic alcohol is NOT economically viable. If it is, then far less, perhaps none, of the arable land would be needed – just the collection of scraps for sawmill, etc. and forest fire prevention trimmings might be all that is needed.

 

On an energy basis, yes. In an engine designed for use with ethanol that number is considerably higher since the higher compression to expansion ratios possible increase the overall efficiency of the engine. But OK, 560 is a good lower limit.

I took the yearly total usage, which seems like a better number than a monthly number.

Definitely. As I mentioned before, at most ethanol will become one of our fuel options. Even a 25% share of the vehicle fuel market would be huge and would do a lot to keep the cost of oil based gasoline down.

I think a common misconception goes something like this.

"Corn is a grass, and if corn can grow anywhere grass can, then we can easily grow huge amounts of the stuff!"

The problem is that you can't get anything like modern farm yields on corn by just plopping the stuff down and hoping it grows - even in a rainy area. That 769 gallons per acre is for fertilized, tilled fields, not wild sugarcane.

Agreed that replacement of a significant part of gasoline usage with cellulosic or sugar cane ethanol is pretty doable.

 

Certainly - it would be a well tended cash crop, as it is in Brazil, but I have seen a stock or two growing wild among many other weeds / grasses along the side of a road.

And has been done: At least 80% of all new cars made and sold in Brazil can run on pure ETOH and often most do, at least when it is cheaper than gasoline, per mile driven.

 

What sort of timeframe do you estimate would be necessary to get us up to supplying 1/4 of our liquid fuel needs with sugar cane? Are there any realistic plans currently underway to accomplish this?

---Futilitist

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Not much, unfortunately. Brazil had a military dictator ship ~35 or 40 years ago that did not like paying for imported oil and gasoline etc. so mandated that sugarcane be widely grown and converted into alcohol. All "gas stations" also had to install alcohol tanks and pumps. Car makers had to make cars that ran on pure alcohol. It will certainly take more than a decade to switch US to carbon neutral (or slightly negative), renewable, solar energy produced, liquid fuel.

 

Futilitist, I'm not trying to mislead, I'm trying to correct your poor/unclear writing style. "Falling into a recession" is confusing and your statement here just adds to the confusion:

Yes, to be considered a recession typically takes two consecutive quarters, but the start of the recession is still the first day of the first quarter of negative GDP growth. You seem to be trying to imply here that negative GDP growth in two consecutive quarters means the recession started in the second quarter. That's wrong.

In addition, the fact that we only had 0.4% gdp growth in Q4 means there really isn't anywhere else to "fall" but into recession if we're following a downward trend. 0.0%, 0.1%, 0.2% or 0.3% are the only non-recession-territory options and all of those would show a flattening trajectory of the downturn instead of an accelerating one. Since you are saying that the current recession is the start of The Apocalypse, it can't be flattening out and getting better, it has to accelerate downward. It has to be serious enough to cause "social unrest" by summer at the latest! Frankly, this smells like more hedging/downplaying of failure to me.

Just to add some clarity, here's the timeline of the 2008-9 recession:
-NBER declares a recession that started in Q4 2007, without negative GDP growth. Basically we had a year of stagnation and mixed economic indicators before the recession really exploded.
-May 19, 2008, stock market hits a peak, then starts to drop. In Sept-Oct, it lost 35%, most of it in a couple of weeks. That's a stock market "crash".
-2008 saw GDP growth of: -.7%, +1.3%, -3.7%, -8.9%. Minus a little waggle at the start, "falling into a recession" involves a very steeply dropping GDP growth rate. Note that the fallin GDP slightly lagged the stock market drop.
-2008 Unemployment rate was 5.1% at the end of Q1, 5.4% at the end of Q2, 6.1% at the end of Q3 and 7.3% at the end of Q4. It peaked at 10.0% in August of 2009, lagging the drop in GDP by almost a full year.

That's what a recession looks like. It takes a while for a recession to build steam and for a bad one like the Great Recession it was a year to bottom out. So even if you had been right that we were "falling into a recession", it would have to happen much, much faster and be much more severe to cause the types of problems you were predicting.

If we see "social unrest" as a result (and I agree it is a necessary component of the road to apocalypse), that's a pretty substantial indicator of an extremely severe economic situation. An apocalypse can't be an apocalypse if no one notices! (hey, why are all of those bodies lying in the street?

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) If we use the last recession as a roadmap, you'll see we're already well off the required pace to even match that. No, it isn't instant like a starting gun, but it should be pretty quickly noticeable.

Heh. Haven't seen that nonsensical claim in a while (and it is utter nonsense). Nice to see you again! This is of course your oft repeated and then obfuscated and backtracked-on because you know it is nonsense claim that standard of living is directly tied to per capita energy consumption, so standard of living can't rise while per capita energy consumption is falling. As you of course know, this ignores the impact of energy conservation, which is what has enabled per capita energy consumption to drop even while standard of living rises. Today in America vs 40 years ago:
-Houses are bigger despite smaller families.
-Cars are more advanced/luxurious.
-Applicance market penetrations are up (microwaves, computers, air conditioning, etc.).
-Healthcare/life expectancy has improved.

No one who isn't a crackpot doubts that standard of living has risen over the past 40 years.

More hedging: You said "total collapse" there and you said it might not happen all at once, but it would happen without a recovery in the meantime. Elements of the collapse are supposed to be happening now. A recession/depression that we never recover from. A stock market crash (also known as a "collapse"). Social unrest due to extreme economic harship. All you're saying there is that we might pause for a couple of years in Great Depression territory before the mass starvations start. But currently there is no evidence whatsoever of a recession coming in the near-term.

I do. It is poor technical writing/communicating style to highlight the hedge or secondary prediction instead of the primary prediction. My interpretation is that you're 60%/40%: that you were 60% sure the social unrest would happen before the summer, 40% sure it would happen during the summer. I reversed the statement of the prediction for clarity only.

Similar example: "I might not fail my class" or "I'm 40% sure I won't fail my class" would mean you expect to fail your class.

"Hard to quantify" still has to be noticeable to be notable. And in context, it would need to/be expected to be worse than what we saw in 2011 (a full two years after the start of the recession!) with the Occupy protests. You can't hold an apocalypse if nobody comes.

 

GDP number is out; it is +2.5%.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/26/news/economy/gdp-report/index.html?iid=Lead

The article downplays the magnitude of the change in growth rate as a blip -- which I agree with. Typically blips come in mirrored pairs so in this case the Q1 up-blip is a natural consequence of the down-blip in Q4. The cause of which was probably pointless and temporary belt-tightening during the "fiscal cliff" circus. Whatever the cause, this means the next few quarters are expected to be lower than the Q1 growth rate, more in line with the previous average during the recovery of around 2% - or perhaps a little lower due to the cutting of government spending (which I don't agree with). The bottom line is that we're just continuing the decent but un-awesome growth we've had for the past 3 years and economists anticipating it to continue through next year. No apocalypse started this quarter or is on the horizon, according to economists.

An additional FoxNews article that was written before the release, discussing the same pessimism: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013...g-gdp-report-america-economy-is-slowing-down/

So lets review:
1. The economy is relatively healthy, growing steadily, if unspectacularly, and showing no signs of faltering/Apocalypsing.
2. Oil production is rising, as is expected in a growing economy.
3. Oil prices are not skyrocketing as a result of the economic growth and rising oil demand, indicating that producers are having no trouble keeping up with the demand and speculators are not seeing a Peak Oil problem on the horizon like they were 5 years ago.
4. All of this - as economists are telling us - points to slow but stable growth for a little while and no reason to expect an Apocalypse in the next few years.

Due to our debt/taxing-the-living-to-pay-the-dead and relatively high energy prices, I expect the continuing advancement of industrial society to be a lot slower than it was in the 80s and 90s for the next few decades, but I do still expect advancement. Our debt problem, completely unrelated to energy (except insofar as the growth in US energy production will counteract the debt problem, of course), is going to *appear* to get better for a decade or two, but unless we do something about it, the bomb will go off probably sometime in the 2030s. It would not surprise me to see a couple of decades of recession/stagnation while we dig ourselves out of that, mid-century. Hopefully at that point, socialism will be dead once and for all and we can go back to letting capitalism drive advancement. So that's my long term projection.

Now, you're right that one wrong GDP growth prediction isn't enough on its own to invalidate your hypothesis, but it doesn't need to be: In the grand scheme of things, it is just a few more ounces of wrongness in the bucketfull that you already have.

What it does provide, though, is a useful microcosm of the discussion. It shows clearly that you have an extremely poor grasp of what economic data is telling us about the present/recent past. All of that - now proven wrong - picking of one or two obscure measures showing negatives out of a pile of positives a few weeks ago is a clear indication that you are cherry-picking your data to support your hypothesis instead of analyzing the aggregate and coming to a rational conclusion about where we stand. This lack of rational analysis is exactly the problem that is causing you to/enabling you to (cause/effect may be flipped) hold tight to your failed hypothesis.

To put it another way: Understanding roughly what the GDP is doing right now/last quarter is the easy stuff. Seeing that the stock market is rising, profits are decent (two parts of the same thing) and unemployment is falling are obvious indicators of a rising GDP. Getting that wrong by so much shows a really bad understanding of the economic indicators as well as book-cooking logic. So if you have such a bad grasp of the easy stuff, how can anyone expect you to make accurate predictions about the more difficult, longer term stuff? If you don't even know where we are now, how can you know where we are going? It's like saying you're driving east from Pittsburgh and will be in Philadelphia in 7 hours when actually you're in Chicago.

 

This is what HFT can do to a stock in a very short time.

http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4178.html

 

Post of pretty photo:

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Caption was: "Gulf of Mexico heats up"
all from: http://us2.campaign-archive2.com/?u=ed58b19f2b88e4a743b950765&id=ca91af4afa&e=dcc19cfca1

I suspect this must be one of the new "platform drills" than can make up to 32 different angled wells from one platform. They save a lot of money (lowers cost) as moving drill rig to new site is expensive. - more cheap oil on the way.

 

I mentioned this many posts back but here again in article with title: "A Bottomless Oil Well 31,405 Feet Below the Ocean Floor"

Note also it is "conventional oil" - no fracking required.

But above must be all a lie - Futilitist told us "Peak oil happened in 2005"

 

Here in the US? About 25 years, largely with imports from South American countries. It took ethanol 37 years to go from zero to over 50% of the Brazilian market. We have a head start on that (we are already at 10%.)

We're already importing ethanol from Brazil in sufficient quantities that US farmers are demanding that the government put trade barriers in place. That amount will rise (or fall) as oil rises and falls, thus the speed of adoption from here on out will be set primarily by oil prices rather than government fiat.