Every - single - thing you own... will become a great deal more expensive in a very short time once the shit hits the fan
every single thing i own WOULD be more expensive, if it continues to be made out of oil.
here's the point. RIGHT NOW there are many alternatives to oil to burn in a car. hell, most cars can run on e85 (an 85% ethanol fuel) with under $1,500 in modifications. Biodiesel works like regular diesel and is in production RIGHT NOW.
there are sources of oil that no one is using, because it would cost too much money to extract it, based on CURRENT oil prices.
fact is, as oil becomes scarce, alternatives will become viable that don't work today.
so my clothes are made out of petrolium products. if the price of one raw material in my clothing quadruples, manufacturers will use something else.
our reliance on oil is in large part to its relative abundance and low price. if the price goes up, people will start using other products that just weren't an option when oil was $30 a barrel.
every single thing i own WOULD be more expensive, if it continues to be made out of oil.
there are sources of oil that no one is using, because it would cost too much money to extract it, based on CURRENT oil prices.
And when oil is expensive enough to cause us to try and exploit post-peak oil, we are already DEEP in shit.
Oil's amazing energy efficiency has been underpinning the industrial economy by making every dollar that goes into looking for it / exploiting it / transferring it / burning it into cheap economic benefits. There's nothing else that does this so efficiently, so the economy has the rug pulled from under it if there's jitters in prices, or if the cost of exploitation goes up. Think 1970's, which was due to POLITICS not fundamental SUPPLY issues.
Now, we've found 90% of the world's oil. Production of existing oil is peaking / has peaked. Cost of exploiting the remaining oil just isn't economically comparable. And when the myth that prices are related to reserves (not exploitation costs) is blown, prices will go nuts.
Now, your shirt: by the time it becomes economically efficient for your clothing manufacturer to use something else, the entire basis of our economies have fundamentally changed. Pretty simple.
Here's one tiny example: the US economy can support its astonishing home and trade deficits because oil is priced in dollars. The US can write IOUs up to the value of all the unexploited oil underground. If oil prices go crazy high, well obviously that doesn't mean the US is rich, it means the US economy is screwed. But if we move to a non-oil economy, the US is ****ed too.
Now oil *is* passing its peak. Prices *are* going to go up.
I finally read something not so depressing about this by this guy ... we go crazy with conservation and research and we miiiight just be OK.
But it's real, and it's here ... I mean, why the hell are we ignoring this issue of global importance and meddling in oil-rich Iraq?
fact is, as oil becomes scarce, alternatives will become viable that don't work today.
so my clothes are made out of petrolium products. if the price of one raw material in my clothing quadruples, manufacturers will use something else.
our reliance on oil is in large part to its relative abundance and low price. if the price goes up, people will start using other products that just weren't an option when oil was $30 a barrel.
I think you're missing the importance of the very points you're making.
Suppose the next viable option after oil costs the equivalent of five times as much for the same amount of energy, the equivalent of $150/barrel oil. The world economy would be in really bad shape having to pay those kinds of prices for energy.
Once that point of pain had been reached, that's when switching over to a new energy source would start happening, not when it would be accomplished. It would take years after that point for any significant switch-over to occur. In the mean time, large portions of the world's economy would still depend on ever-more-expensive oil, and sudden demand for the new energy source could drive its price higher, due to greater demand, before any downward price trend due to economies of scale could kick in.
The only hope for such a switchover to be reasonably painless is if a cheap replacement for oil comes along well before oil climbs to crippling prices. If something just a little more expensive than oil, or even cheaper than oil, came along reasonably soon, we'd come out of this mess okay.
But that's a lot to hope for. Nothing so appealing is on the horizon. Unfortunately, in a world where the profit report for the next quarter weighs far more heavily in directing economic resources than 10-20 year long-term thinking, we aren't putting enough effort into finding and developing alternative sources of energy before a crisis strikes.
Nah... couldn't be a fourth straight year of production decline that is on our horizon, could it? Even if it was, these speculators must surely mean a lack of crude in the short term only, right...?
The NYT actually has a story this morning about Peak Oil, but of course oil industry people constitute the the primary information source, so the outlook is rose-colored as ever. "Gosh, it can't possibly happen till 2050 or so, because of all those 'untapped reserves' that we have not verified, but only suspect as being present in the Caspian sea and elsewhere.
No one wants to even believe the possibility that we've already reached Peak Oil or are only a few years away. No one even allows for the possibility seems, most likely because it scares the crap out of them, so it's much easier to do what we've always done.
Gee, if Peak Oil fears proved false after WWI and WWII, they must be false now too. We'll just drill more and with more efficient rigs; everything is A-OK.
The chief financial officer of Royal Dutch/Shell stepped down today in the wake of an investigation into the company's surprise change in oil and gas reserve estimates in January.
The officer, Judy Boynton, who has been at the company since June 2001, is the third top executive to be forced to leave as a result of the investigation.
Her departure comes as the company released a report on an internal probe into why the Anglo-Dutch group had inflated its reserves. It said that some Shell executives had known about the reserves shortfall since 2001, and that the company would be downgrading its reserves once again. The downgrade is its third in three months.
Two other executives ? the chairman, Sir Philip Watts, and the head of exploration and production, Walter van de Vijver ? were asked to leave by the company's audit committee in March because of the investigation.
Jeroen van der Veer, the company's new chairman, promised action to address Shell's problems and said in a statement, "Despite the difficulties of recent months, Shell is a sound and profitable business."
Ms. Boynton, who previously served as chief financial officer for Polaroid, will remain an employee of Shell's financial group. The company said Tim Morrison had been appointed as acting Group Chief Financial Officer,
Ms. Boynton has come under increasing scrutiny as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and European regulators investigate the company. Chief financial officers have added responsibility to ensure their company's reported numbers are correct under the Sarbanes Oxley law passed in response to corporate scandals in the United States.
Even though Shell is headquartered outside of the United States, the company trades on the New York Stock Exchange, so it is subject to the new United States rules.
Shell'saudit committee, made up of non-executive directors, hired the law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell to investigate in January. The firm prepared a report of several hundred pages detailing why the reserve change happened. The report has been reviewed by the board over the past four days.
Shell said in January that its proven oil and gas reserves were 3.9 billion barrels, or 20 percent, lower than previously reported. Proven reserves are one of the most important assets for any oil company, and Shell's stock fell 15 percent in the days following the January announcement.
This has nothing to do with peak oil. Shell simply lied about an asset to bolster stock prices. They have access to the oil but it was more cost effective to lie about how much they pulled out of the ground than to actually pull it out of the ground. Are we going to hold Enron responsible for your dooms day peak oil scenerio as well? Enron traded in energy market futures, lied about the availability of said futures and manipulated the market to reap profit. There are many companies that have lied about their corporate valuation: Enron, Shell, Health South, MCI, Duke Energy... Read the news from about the end of 01 until now and you'll find a dozen ot so large companies which have played with their stock prices by fibbing on their financial reports. It has nothing to do with the availability of a commodity.
Are we running out of phone lines because MCI lied about its worth? Are we running out of doctors because Health South lied? Are we running out of electricity because Enron lied (we thought we were but lo and behold California DOES have enough energy as long as greed doesn't manipulate the reserve market).
Lets see where can we get alternate sources of fuel? Corn, solar, wind, water... What other sources of oil are out there? Synthetics derived form veggie oil, silicone based lubricants, Polyalphaolefin...
though PAO'S are derived from hydrocarbons their actual structure is more uniform and can be used for longer periods (I do oil changes every 10K in my car because I use AMSOIL).
First of all, let me clearly state that I don't think that Peak Oil Armageddon is inevitable, merely that it's a real and worrisome possibility that shouldn't be dismissed too lightly. You, however, do seem ready to completely, or nearly so, dismiss this possibility, and it's that casual dismissal with which I can't agree.
You can't derive from general trends of technological advance that specific solutions to specific problems will come out of that advance.
Plenty of needs go unfulfilled by technology all of the time. Bubonic plaque rampaged through Europe, all without spurring medical technology beyond leeches and chanting in time to save millions from untimely deaths. In the 1330's, one third of the population of Europe simply died.
In more recent times, the death toll on all sides in World War II was around 50 million. 50 million people needed to be saved, but technology mainly rose to the cause of helping to kill them. Technology was also used in defense, of course, but net balance of technology's assistance was in death's favor.
Even more recently, consider the AIDS epidemic. Medical technology has only helped treat, but not cure, those in the industrialized world, at great economic expense. After a two decades of research and effort, AIDS still spreads in poorer countries, like the nations of Africa, killing millions, yet technology hasn't solved issues of economics and infrastructure needed to help all of these people. They simply die.
I can't refute the existence of those cars, but there is a lot that I can refute, or at least seriously question:
Are such vehicles gaining popularity fast enough to avert crisis, or does the speed of adoption only seem fast when compared to a very small current supply of those vehicles?
Will enough people adopt such vehicles in time to make a difference in world oil consumption?
Will the energy savings, even if everyone drove such vehicles, be enough to make much of a dent if Peak Oil is just around the corner?
Is simply using less oil, rather than using a different energy source, something that necessarily gives us the time to switch to another energy source in a timely manner? Or again, is this only a hope, not a guarantee?
There's no guarantee, however, how high the cost of fuel A will need to go before it reaches the unknown price of replacement fuel B. If the next energy source costs even twice what oil now costs, that will cause serious painful ramifications to the world economy before the switch-over happens.
Also, existence of technology is not the same as deployment of technology. High levels of technology adoption often take many years after a technology first appears on the market. Technologies often don't hit the market until many years after they've first appeared in laboratories.
You can't compare the transition pains of switching the world from one fuel source to another with, say, moving from VHS to DVD. No one dies if DVD takes a few years to reach 50% market penetration compared to VHS. If, however, oil is skyrocketing in price before a serious effort to switch to a new fuel source is underway, people will die over the years that it could take to switch, and the fighting that could well break out during the attempt to make such a transition could disrupt the transition efforts too much for the transition to succeed before catastrophe becomes inevitable.
You're missing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about access to existing information... I'm talking about discovering as-yet unknown, but needed information. Market pressures and profit motives encourage, but do not guarantee, that research will produce desired answers or needed information to solve as-yet unsolved problems.
No one on this planet has "worked with new technologies long enough" to validly make any sweeping generalizations about the supposed inevitability of technology generating specific answers to specific problems.
Our known history is very brief, and our technological, especially technological/industrial history, is far briefer. Two hundred years of industrialization is merely enough to outline some basic trends, trends that haven't yet been tested against enough different situations to treat them like laws of physics.
You can't look at the growth of a child between birth and age 12 and validly conclude that the child will be 25 feet tall at age 60. We've reached greater levels of technology than ever before, but also unprecedented levels of dependence on technology. Nothing in the past parallels with our current situation closely enough to predict anything at all using such gross oversimplifications as "technology always finds a way".
Looking beyond our own brief history, and generalizing to other species, extinction is closer to the rule than the exception. Merely surviving repeated and massive population crashes counts as a great success. Human intelligence perhaps offers us a way out that other species haven't had before, but that same intelligence has also helped us get into the very perilous situation that we need to resolve.
One thing that history makes very clear is that, acting as a collective body, human intelligence en masse is a scary, unpredictable, and highly irrational thing. It produces both great good and great evil, great accomplishments and utter stupidity. I can hope, but have no unshakable faith, that our better natures and clearer minds will prevail in what will be an unprecedented crisis.
I know this is dredging up a long dead argument but shetline you mention AIDS as proof that technology wont prevail. AIDS is a virus and is not in the same catagory as developing a new cost effective source of energy. See, if we beat one virus it can mutate. A virus is a living thing (by some accounts) and as such defeating a virus is more akin to fighting a war than developing a new form of energy. We may never beat AIDS but we will develope a new source to fuel the planet.
Your war analogy is flawed also. A lot of medical and technological advancements are derivatives of the war industry. Sure war=death but saving gun shot victums is a direct result of the war industry. The airline industry is a result of the war industry. OnStar is a direct result of the war industry. War kills a lot of people and its tragic but the war industry also saves many people.
So to recap: AIDS is a virus--an organism-- like to mosquito. We can heal people who get malaria but we can't elliminate mosquitos completly. War kills, but a lot of technological advancements which save people are direct results of the war industry.
This has nothing to do with peak oil. Shell simply lied about an asset to bolster stock prices. They have access to the oil but it was more cost effective to lie about how much they pulled out of the ground than to actually pull it out of the ground.
BZZZZT! Wrong!
Shell Exploration was under extreme pressure to report 100% replacement rate for exploited oil. When they could not -- that is, when they chose not to reveal that booked resources had peaked and are now in decline -- they chose to pretend they could.
This has EVERYTHING to do with peak oil, and the economic requirement that currently exists to ignore the plain evidence of our own eyes.
It has everything to do with Peak Oil. They grossly exaggerated their known reserves (albeit for financial / insider type reasons), but the implication is the same: they no longer have access to the amount of oil people have come to expect. The real reserve estimates are starting to dwindle.
I know this is dredging up a long dead argument but shetline you mention AIDS as proof that technology wont prevail.
I have demonstrated by example one case where technology has not prevailed soon enough to prevent great loss.
I do not need to, no would even want to, prove that technology won't prevail in all instances. Obviously there are many examples of technology succeeding in solving problems. It is sufficient for my point to demonstrate that wild technological optimism is not always warranted.
Quote:
AIDS is a virus and is not in the same catagory as developing a new cost effective source of energy.
So, in what category is finding and implementing a timely energy alternative to oil? The special category of "don't worry, be happy?"?
Quote:
See, if we beat one virus it can mutate. A virus is a living thing (by some accounts) and as such defeating a virus is more akin to fighting a war than developing a new form of energy. We may never beat AIDS but we will develope a new source to fuel the planet.
Uh, so, um... we will develop an alternative to oil because, uh... oil doesn't mutate! Hmmm... that's not it.
Hmmm... NURGY IS E-Z-AR THEN VIRUS! EN3RGY IS TEH WIN!!11!1!
Well, if I'm not getting this, I hope you will please explain the rule set by which one clearly distinguishes "don't worry" technological problems from the "do worry" ones, and how solving oil dependency so obviously falls into the former category.
Quote:
Your war analogy is flawed also...
...War kills, but a lot of technological advancements which save people are direct results of the war industry.
Ah, so maybe the "Peak Oil" horrors will come true, and billions will die in famine and war. but when the few hundred million left of humanity rise from the ashes, we may have learned a few nifty things that'll save billions of other lives in the future... Wow! What was I thinking, worrying about this stuff?
"Crucially, say analysts, the traditionally close relationship between demand and supply has partially broken down: for technical reasons, a number of the world's biggest producers, particularly outside Opec, have been unable to increase output significantly, leading to higher prices."
... which is exactly what the models predicted would happen.
Comments
Every - single - thing you own... will become a great deal more expensive in a very short time once the shit hits the fan
every single thing i own WOULD be more expensive, if it continues to be made out of oil.
here's the point. RIGHT NOW there are many alternatives to oil to burn in a car. hell, most cars can run on e85 (an 85% ethanol fuel) with under $1,500 in modifications. Biodiesel works like regular diesel and is in production RIGHT NOW.
there are sources of oil that no one is using, because it would cost too much money to extract it, based on CURRENT oil prices.
fact is, as oil becomes scarce, alternatives will become viable that don't work today.
so my clothes are made out of petrolium products. if the price of one raw material in my clothing quadruples, manufacturers will use something else.
our reliance on oil is in large part to its relative abundance and low price. if the price goes up, people will start using other products that just weren't an option when oil was $30 a barrel.
Originally posted by alcimedes
every single thing i own WOULD be more expensive, if it continues to be made out of oil.
there are sources of oil that no one is using, because it would cost too much money to extract it, based on CURRENT oil prices.
And when oil is expensive enough to cause us to try and exploit post-peak oil, we are already DEEP in shit.
Oil's amazing energy efficiency has been underpinning the industrial economy by making every dollar that goes into looking for it / exploiting it / transferring it / burning it into cheap economic benefits. There's nothing else that does this so efficiently, so the economy has the rug pulled from under it if there's jitters in prices, or if the cost of exploitation goes up. Think 1970's, which was due to POLITICS not fundamental SUPPLY issues.
Now, we've found 90% of the world's oil. Production of existing oil is peaking / has peaked. Cost of exploiting the remaining oil just isn't economically comparable. And when the myth that prices are related to reserves (not exploitation costs) is blown, prices will go nuts.
Now, your shirt: by the time it becomes economically efficient for your clothing manufacturer to use something else, the entire basis of our economies have fundamentally changed. Pretty simple.
Here's one tiny example: the US economy can support its astonishing home and trade deficits because oil is priced in dollars. The US can write IOUs up to the value of all the unexploited oil underground. If oil prices go crazy high, well obviously that doesn't mean the US is rich, it means the US economy is screwed. But if we move to a non-oil economy, the US is ****ed too.
Now oil *is* passing its peak. Prices *are* going to go up.
I finally read something not so depressing about this by this guy ... we go crazy with conservation and research and we miiiight just be OK.
But it's real, and it's here ... I mean, why the hell are we ignoring this issue of global importance and meddling in oil-rich Iraq?
Originally posted by alcimedes
fact is, as oil becomes scarce, alternatives will become viable that don't work today.
so my clothes are made out of petrolium products. if the price of one raw material in my clothing quadruples, manufacturers will use something else.
our reliance on oil is in large part to its relative abundance and low price. if the price goes up, people will start using other products that just weren't an option when oil was $30 a barrel.
I think you're missing the importance of the very points you're making.
Suppose the next viable option after oil costs the equivalent of five times as much for the same amount of energy, the equivalent of $150/barrel oil. The world economy would be in really bad shape having to pay those kinds of prices for energy.
Once that point of pain had been reached, that's when switching over to a new energy source would start happening, not when it would be accomplished. It would take years after that point for any significant switch-over to occur. In the mean time, large portions of the world's economy would still depend on ever-more-expensive oil, and sudden demand for the new energy source could drive its price higher, due to greater demand, before any downward price trend due to economies of scale could kick in.
The only hope for such a switchover to be reasonably painless is if a cheap replacement for oil comes along well before oil climbs to crippling prices. If something just a little more expensive than oil, or even cheaper than oil, came along reasonably soon, we'd come out of this mess okay.
But that's a lot to hope for. Nothing so appealing is on the horizon. Unfortunately, in a world where the profit report for the next quarter weighs far more heavily in directing economic resources than 10-20 year long-term thinking, we aren't putting enough effort into finding and developing alternative sources of energy before a crisis strikes.
Nothing to worry about here; move along people.
No one wants to even believe the possibility that we've already reached Peak Oil or are only a few years away. No one even allows for the possibility seems, most likely because it scares the crap out of them, so it's much easier to do what we've always done.
Gee, if Peak Oil fears proved false after WWI and WWII, they must be false now too. We'll just drill more and with more efficient rigs; everything is A-OK.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/we...541JjL0CLHb+ag
From the NYT
The chief financial officer of Royal Dutch/Shell stepped down today in the wake of an investigation into the company's surprise change in oil and gas reserve estimates in January.
The officer, Judy Boynton, who has been at the company since June 2001, is the third top executive to be forced to leave as a result of the investigation.
Her departure comes as the company released a report on an internal probe into why the Anglo-Dutch group had inflated its reserves. It said that some Shell executives had known about the reserves shortfall since 2001, and that the company would be downgrading its reserves once again. The downgrade is its third in three months.
Two other executives ? the chairman, Sir Philip Watts, and the head of exploration and production, Walter van de Vijver ? were asked to leave by the company's audit committee in March because of the investigation.
Jeroen van der Veer, the company's new chairman, promised action to address Shell's problems and said in a statement, "Despite the difficulties of recent months, Shell is a sound and profitable business."
Ms. Boynton, who previously served as chief financial officer for Polaroid, will remain an employee of Shell's financial group. The company said Tim Morrison had been appointed as acting Group Chief Financial Officer,
Ms. Boynton has come under increasing scrutiny as the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice and European regulators investigate the company. Chief financial officers have added responsibility to ensure their company's reported numbers are correct under the Sarbanes Oxley law passed in response to corporate scandals in the United States.
Even though Shell is headquartered outside of the United States, the company trades on the New York Stock Exchange, so it is subject to the new United States rules.
Shell'saudit committee, made up of non-executive directors, hired the law firm Davis Polk and Wardwell to investigate in January. The firm prepared a report of several hundred pages detailing why the reserve change happened. The report has been reviewed by the board over the past four days.
Shell said in January that its proven oil and gas reserves were 3.9 billion barrels, or 20 percent, lower than previously reported. Proven reserves are one of the most important assets for any oil company, and Shell's stock fell 15 percent in the days following the January announcement.
Nothing to see here citizens, keep moving please.
Originally posted by Moogs
Nothing to see here citizens, keep moving please.
This has nothing to do with peak oil. Shell simply lied about an asset to bolster stock prices. They have access to the oil but it was more cost effective to lie about how much they pulled out of the ground than to actually pull it out of the ground. Are we going to hold Enron responsible for your dooms day peak oil scenerio as well? Enron traded in energy market futures, lied about the availability of said futures and manipulated the market to reap profit. There are many companies that have lied about their corporate valuation: Enron, Shell, Health South, MCI, Duke Energy... Read the news from about the end of 01 until now and you'll find a dozen ot so large companies which have played with their stock prices by fibbing on their financial reports. It has nothing to do with the availability of a commodity.
Are we running out of phone lines because MCI lied about its worth? Are we running out of doctors because Health South lied? Are we running out of electricity because Enron lied (we thought we were but lo and behold California DOES have enough energy as long as greed doesn't manipulate the reserve market).
Lets see where can we get alternate sources of fuel? Corn, solar, wind, water... What other sources of oil are out there? Synthetics derived form veggie oil, silicone based lubricants, Polyalphaolefin...
http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com...olyalphaolefin
though PAO'S are derived from hydrocarbons their actual structure is more uniform and can be used for longer periods (I do oil changes every 10K in my car because I use AMSOIL).
Originally posted by shetline
First of all, let me clearly state that I don't think that Peak Oil Armageddon is inevitable, merely that it's a real and worrisome possibility that shouldn't be dismissed too lightly. You, however, do seem ready to completely, or nearly so, dismiss this possibility, and it's that casual dismissal with which I can't agree.
You can't derive from general trends of technological advance that specific solutions to specific problems will come out of that advance.
Plenty of needs go unfulfilled by technology all of the time. Bubonic plaque rampaged through Europe, all without spurring medical technology beyond leeches and chanting in time to save millions from untimely deaths. In the 1330's, one third of the population of Europe simply died.
In more recent times, the death toll on all sides in World War II was around 50 million. 50 million people needed to be saved, but technology mainly rose to the cause of helping to kill them. Technology was also used in defense, of course, but net balance of technology's assistance was in death's favor.
Even more recently, consider the AIDS epidemic. Medical technology has only helped treat, but not cure, those in the industrialized world, at great economic expense. After a two decades of research and effort, AIDS still spreads in poorer countries, like the nations of Africa, killing millions, yet technology hasn't solved issues of economics and infrastructure needed to help all of these people. They simply die.
I can't refute the existence of those cars, but there is a lot that I can refute, or at least seriously question:
Are such vehicles gaining popularity fast enough to avert crisis, or does the speed of adoption only seem fast when compared to a very small current supply of those vehicles?
Will enough people adopt such vehicles in time to make a difference in world oil consumption?
Will the energy savings, even if everyone drove such vehicles, be enough to make much of a dent if Peak Oil is just around the corner?
Is simply using less oil, rather than using a different energy source, something that necessarily gives us the time to switch to another energy source in a timely manner? Or again, is this only a hope, not a guarantee?
There's no guarantee, however, how high the cost of fuel A will need to go before it reaches the unknown price of replacement fuel B. If the next energy source costs even twice what oil now costs, that will cause serious painful ramifications to the world economy before the switch-over happens.
Also, existence of technology is not the same as deployment of technology. High levels of technology adoption often take many years after a technology first appears on the market. Technologies often don't hit the market until many years after they've first appeared in laboratories.
You can't compare the transition pains of switching the world from one fuel source to another with, say, moving from VHS to DVD. No one dies if DVD takes a few years to reach 50% market penetration compared to VHS. If, however, oil is skyrocketing in price before a serious effort to switch to a new fuel source is underway, people will die over the years that it could take to switch, and the fighting that could well break out during the attempt to make such a transition could disrupt the transition efforts too much for the transition to succeed before catastrophe becomes inevitable.
You're missing what I'm saying. I'm not talking about access to existing information... I'm talking about discovering as-yet unknown, but needed information. Market pressures and profit motives encourage, but do not guarantee, that research will produce desired answers or needed information to solve as-yet unsolved problems.
No one on this planet has "worked with new technologies long enough" to validly make any sweeping generalizations about the supposed inevitability of technology generating specific answers to specific problems.
Our known history is very brief, and our technological, especially technological/industrial history, is far briefer. Two hundred years of industrialization is merely enough to outline some basic trends, trends that haven't yet been tested against enough different situations to treat them like laws of physics.
You can't look at the growth of a child between birth and age 12 and validly conclude that the child will be 25 feet tall at age 60. We've reached greater levels of technology than ever before, but also unprecedented levels of dependence on technology. Nothing in the past parallels with our current situation closely enough to predict anything at all using such gross oversimplifications as "technology always finds a way".
Looking beyond our own brief history, and generalizing to other species, extinction is closer to the rule than the exception. Merely surviving repeated and massive population crashes counts as a great success. Human intelligence perhaps offers us a way out that other species haven't had before, but that same intelligence has also helped us get into the very perilous situation that we need to resolve.
One thing that history makes very clear is that, acting as a collective body, human intelligence en masse is a scary, unpredictable, and highly irrational thing. It produces both great good and great evil, great accomplishments and utter stupidity. I can hope, but have no unshakable faith, that our better natures and clearer minds will prevail in what will be an unprecedented crisis.
I know this is dredging up a long dead argument but shetline you mention AIDS as proof that technology wont prevail. AIDS is a virus and is not in the same catagory as developing a new cost effective source of energy. See, if we beat one virus it can mutate. A virus is a living thing (by some accounts) and as such defeating a virus is more akin to fighting a war than developing a new form of energy. We may never beat AIDS but we will develope a new source to fuel the planet.
Your war analogy is flawed also. A lot of medical and technological advancements are derivatives of the war industry. Sure war=death but saving gun shot victums is a direct result of the war industry. The airline industry is a result of the war industry. OnStar is a direct result of the war industry. War kills a lot of people and its tragic but the war industry also saves many people.
So to recap: AIDS is a virus--an organism-- like to mosquito. We can heal people who get malaria but we can't elliminate mosquitos completly. War kills, but a lot of technological advancements which save people are direct results of the war industry.
Move along folks. Nothing to see here.
Originally posted by faust9
This has nothing to do with peak oil. Shell simply lied about an asset to bolster stock prices. They have access to the oil but it was more cost effective to lie about how much they pulled out of the ground than to actually pull it out of the ground.
BZZZZT! Wrong!
Shell Exploration was under extreme pressure to report 100% replacement rate for exploited oil. When they could not -- that is, when they chose not to reveal that booked resources had peaked and are now in decline -- they chose to pretend they could.
This has EVERYTHING to do with peak oil, and the economic requirement that currently exists to ignore the plain evidence of our own eyes.
It has everything to do with Peak Oil. They grossly exaggerated their known reserves (albeit for financial / insider type reasons), but the implication is the same: they no longer have access to the amount of oil people have come to expect. The real reserve estimates are starting to dwindle.
Originally posted by faust9
I know this is dredging up a long dead argument but shetline you mention AIDS as proof that technology wont prevail.
I have demonstrated by example one case where technology has not prevailed soon enough to prevent great loss.
I do not need to, no would even want to, prove that technology won't prevail in all instances. Obviously there are many examples of technology succeeding in solving problems. It is sufficient for my point to demonstrate that wild technological optimism is not always warranted.
AIDS is a virus and is not in the same catagory as developing a new cost effective source of energy.
So, in what category is finding and implementing a timely energy alternative to oil? The special category of "don't worry, be happy?"?
See, if we beat one virus it can mutate. A virus is a living thing (by some accounts) and as such defeating a virus is more akin to fighting a war than developing a new form of energy. We may never beat AIDS but we will develope a new source to fuel the planet.
Uh, so, um... we will develop an alternative to oil because, uh... oil doesn't mutate! Hmmm... that's not it.
Hmmm... NURGY IS E-Z-AR THEN VIRUS! EN3RGY IS TEH WIN!!11!1!
Well, if I'm not getting this, I hope you will please explain the rule set by which one clearly distinguishes "don't worry" technological problems from the "do worry" ones, and how solving oil dependency so obviously falls into the former category.
Your war analogy is flawed also...
...War kills, but a lot of technological advancements which save people are direct results of the war industry.
Ah, so maybe the "Peak Oil" horrors will come true, and billions will die in famine and war. but when the few hundred million left of humanity rise from the ashes, we may have learned a few nifty things that'll save billions of other lives in the future... Wow! What was I thinking, worrying about this stuff?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3623675.stm
"Crucially, say analysts, the traditionally close relationship between demand and supply has partially broken down: for technical reasons, a number of the world's biggest producers, particularly outside Opec, have been unable to increase output significantly, leading to higher prices."
... which is exactly what the models predicted would happen.
Move along folks, nothing to see.
Oil price reaches record high:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3713281.stm
Yahoo:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...nergy_iea_dc_4
time to buy a solar panel
Originally posted by Scott
How many times in the pat has oil hit a "record high"?
that is irrelevant and you know it...