Oil Crisis

TruthSeeker, its funny to watch the reactions of Club of Rome types, who predicted mass starvation of Chinese and Indians by 1970s, try their worthless chicken little antics time after time. FWIW, India has been a net exporter of food for past few years.

http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/003/X8731e/x8731e07.htm

 

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If I notice you about to step out in front of a truck and cry out 'Look out. A truck.' thus causing you to stop your step towards oblivion, is that a worthless chicken little antic , or the reason you are still around to carry out your next dumb, life threatening move?
The question is rhetorical. You can sense my implied answer I'm sure.

 

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Before I stepped onto the street, I noticed that you were blind, so should I pay attention to you?

 

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these indians & chinese could always just order a pizza. when i'm real hungry i just get extra pepperoni & bacon.

 

Your option, but as a blind person my sense of hearing is excellent. I know my other senses are limited and that this might be someone playing truck sounds on a high quality sound system, but I would be remiss if I did not issue the warning. You would be pretty stupid to ignore it. (Although I ignore the little voice that says 'let the idiots perish'.)

 

If your track record is bad as the Club of Rome types, I would safer ignoring your shouts of warning. What is bothering you? Is it the fact that India went from a country which was experiencing famine to a net exporter of food while doubling its size of population, something which directly contradicted the warning shouts (predictions)?

 

What is bothering me is your misinterpretation, through ignorance or intent, of the nature of the warning. The authors made it very clear what they were, and more importantly what they were not, taking into account. It was not a panic laden "we're all doomed" cry, but rather a sober, factual account of where certain trends would lead if corrective action were not taken. They were not responsible for the chicken little attitude adopted by elements of the media.

 

"It was not a panic laden "we're all doomed" cry, but rather a sober, factual account of where certain trends would lead if corrective action were not taken."

What do you think of the methodologies and models they used to make these predictions? Shortly after they published their findings, "Limits to Growth", the oil crisis of 1973 happened, which was purely caused by politics not lack of resources. So, why did the authors let their study be misused by energy industry? Why didn't they publish a series of articles in 1973 or 1974 stating that the oil crisis was not created by lack of resources but by politics? They could have cleared up the media confusion if they wanted to.

 

Groundbreaking and innovative at the time. Simplistic and provincial today. We would not be working with the sophisticated economic and environmental models we do today if this, and similar, pioneering studies had not been conducted.

Politics and economics. The price was too low.

In what way did the energy industry misuse the study? Please be specific.

It is not the job of researchers to run around countering claims made by industry or media based on an erroneous interpretation of their work.

 

What do you imply? Have you read my Poverty Statistics thread?
Exportation of food doesn't imply that the domestic market is healthy.

 

LOL, only "Groundbreaking and innovative at the time" thing they did was to use a super-computer to run simple exponential increase calculations of "what if" scenarios. Same calculations can be run on your excel spreadsheet today. At that time, there were better models which took into account feedback loops and self-correcting. Club of Rome presented the most simplistic model based on erroneous assumptions to make their point that eventually we will run of resources. Neither their models nor their methodologies were innovative nor groundbreaking.

"The price was too low" - it was based on market forces. Only way oil price goes up is if there is market manipulation not lack of oil. If the price of the crude oil goes up too high, then a wide range of alternate forms of energy become viable.

But for transportation, liquid hydrocarbon fuel is hard to beat in terms of convenience, range and price. Currently, the price of biodiesel is $1.25/gallon in USA for large quantities. Biogasoline can be made from the same process as the biodiesel with addition of cracker units in the refining process. With the price of gasoline hovering around $2.00/gal, you may start seeing more interest in biogasoline production in USA.

"In what way did the energy industry misuse the study? Please be specific." - Oil industry used the Club of Rome book as an excuse to put into action a range of policies such as invasion of other countries to something more mundane as raising the price of oil. But as you have already admitted, that report is "Simplistic and provincial today". Unfortunately, this flawed and simplistic report has been misused by wide variety of people ranging from race supremacists to doomsayers for many years.

"It is not the job of researchers to run around countering claims made by industry or media based on an erroneous interpretation of their work." - lol, any serious researcher would go out of his/her way to correct any misinterpretations of their work, especially if it was caused by limitations, mistakes or omissions in their work.

 

Truthseeker, I gave an example of experts being wrong in the case of India's ability to feed her growing population because of posts such as this

and the post you replied to,

I am new to this forum, so I did not have a chance to read your poverty thread.

Unhealthy domestic market in an exporting nation indicates that they have a distribution problem not production. Proper resource allocation to fix these distribution problems is largely a matter of policy decisions which are in turn based on our decision makers' personal interests.

 

Well, how much technology do you think they have in India? Yes, they export food. I've heard they are a big exporter of it. But I also heard of people starving in the streets. Distribution is always the problem. We have a very rich world here. You know.... one of the things that the poverty thread shows is that the 20% richer in the planet consume more than 80% of all the world's resources while the 20% poorer consume only 1.3%. There is an obvious lack of fair distribution of resources. How many people do you think Bush could have helped with the money he spent on that useless war? And of course, feeding people is not going to do anything. We need to invest in their education as well as their ability to produce and sustain themselves. And population growth is also a key ingredient in the whole thing. Ever studied calculus? If you have had, you can probably remember problems such as what is the limit of a population where there is this much of resources. If resources are scarce, bigger populations only worsens the problem.

 

Ophiolite could order pizza with little pieces of chicken.

 

You are trying to infect me with Asian Bird Flu, aren't you!

 

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Hey Golgo.... are there graphs and statistics about that in this book?

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Peak oil is likely a real phenomenon, with all of the attendant smoke and mirrors like price fixing, wars on terror, and rampant corruption. Trickery and reality aren't mutually exclusive and trickery is most successful when occuring in tandem with a real event. It would be in the best interest of egocentrics to stop ridiculing other's concerns long enough to seriously consider the idea that ultimately the earth is finite, and will remain so, and technology is limited in it's ability to correct such a stark physical reality.

The snide references to Malthusians and Club of Romers, is limited, narrow and tragically unhip.

 

Such limited mentality was also thought of in the Dark Ages, look at us now. You can't predict what will happen to humanity after YOU! Perish. But the human spirit to continue is stronger than any freaking oil crisis, many wars will be fought, some won, some lost. We can't predict the future outcome of technology. If I were to explain to a simpleton 200 years ago, that we would reach the outer space, and have vessels that reach the moon they would think of me as a mad man.

We are barely scratching the surface of human ingenuity, however the disease of the mind, which is rampant around the globe, may be our doom. What is that disease? Mysticism.

Mysticism is the evil that has held us for so long, and mysticism will be our undoing.

Get rid of the disease, and human ingenuity would sore beyond the capacity of "Your" limited imagination.

Godless.

 

I'm sure the spirit to continue was strong on Easter Island as well. It still didn't stop people from dying when they depleted their key resource.

You can't eat willpower.

The root of the problem is too many people, too much exponential growth, and not enough resources to sustain it. The ultimate solutions are to either

1. Find an infinite source of energy in this finite world so growth can be sustained until the Earth is 1 person per square meter on the dry-land surface of the planet and the globe glows hot from electricity usage, or

2. Controlling the population, or

3. Let nature take care of the population problem.

Either way, the problem is going to be taken care of. It's just a hell of a lot easier if we're the ones doing the controlling.

Any of you guys that are still under the illusion that we're going to have anywhere near the energy capacity of today post-peak are missing the issue entirely.

Energy resources must produce more energy than they consume, otherwise they are called "sinks" (this is known as the "net energy" principle). About 735 joules of energy is required to lift 15 kg of oil 5 meters out of the ground just to overcome gravity -- and the higher the lift, the greater the energy requirements. The most concentrated and most accessible oil is produced first; thereafter, more and more energy is required to find and produce oil. At some point, more energy is spent finding and producing oil than the energy recovered -- and the "resource" has become a "sink".

There is an enormous difference between the net energy of the "highly-concentrated" fossil fuel that power modern industrial society, and the "dilute" alternative energy we will be forced to depend upon as fossil fuel resources become sinks.

No so-called "renewable" energy system has the potential to generate more than a tiny fraction of the power now being generated by fossil fuels!

- Energy Synopsis

The end of growth in consumption of energy means the end of growth. That means the population cannot grow, energy use cannot grow, and the economy cannot grow.

The same also holds true for decline in energy resources. Everything follows.