A Critique of Kunstler's Vision of Doom

Best-selling author James Kunstler appeared before the Green Mountain Global Forum last week to launch a broadside against American culture and taste, while noting gleefully that the American way of life is about to crash, due to the coming tsunami of peak oil, the point at which petroleum will grow ever more expensive and rare until it strangles our economy.

In a sense, Kunstler is right. We are addicted to oil, consuming ever greater amounts every year. We have foolishly built our communities so that cars are necessities, not luxuries. Outside of certain core urban areas, it is almost impossible to live without owning an automobile. Modern roads and highways open new lands to sprawl, which creates the need for more roads and then more sprawl and so on.

Read the rest: http://theopinionator.com/energy/kunslter_critique.html

What the fuck is "hyper-refined laser energy"?

http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/prop16apr99_1.htm

It's just 10-15 years in the future...and always will be. ;)

I think his basic message and thesis is correct. That is that our current lifestyle is not sustainable for a variety of reasons, one being that India and China are doing their very best to emulate us by making all the same stupid mistakes, all for unfettered and unplanned growth.

Too bad these two countries don't take a step back and say look at the horrendous mess that the U.S. has become, totally dependant on oil and cars, and then build a transportation and energy infrastructure that is technologically advanced.

The idea that the "liquid fuels crisis" can be averted by coal liquefaction and mining oil shales and sands is pretty frightening. I can't imagine a more ecologically destructive means of generating energy.

Wind and nuclear suffer the NIMBY syndrome. At some point need will overcome this but we probably need to suffer a bit first.

Kunstler is a bit of a doomsayer and our ability to muddle through makes him sound less than credible. But I believe there is a tipping point where the legs of our society will collapse from the strain of uncontrolled growth of sprawl, consumption, and debt. It is only logical.
Time will tell.

As I said in a similar thread some time ago, is that many such resource challanges have affected ancient societies, and usually led to a technological breakthrough. 11,000 years ago the Upper Dryas cold snap at the begining of our current interglacial decimated the stands of wild wheat in the Near East; this lead to the people in the area, whose diet depended on the wild wheat, to start actively cultivating the wheat instead of harvesting the dwindling wild stands, and agriculture was born. The desrtification of the middle east forced people to band together and build irrigation on a massive scale, creating the first civilization. Tin shortages in the Mediterranean 3000 years ago lead to the rapid spread of iron working technology since tin is needed to make bronze. In Ancient Greece the degradation of the farmland around Athens led to the city creating farming colonies, allowing the city to specialize in wine and olive oil. In 18th century Great Britain a shortage of wood led to the increased exploitation of coal, leading to the Industrial Revolution.

The Peak Oil Doomers are the equivalent of the Near-Eastern hunter gatherers who worried about impending doom because the wheat stands were dying.

in the literature on overshoot and collapse.

You might want to have a look at Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies- and maybe follow it up with the 30 year update on Limits to Growth for nice prospective balance.

The US in particular has almost every single marker of a soceity on the verge of a major collapse. I don't know if I agree with Deffeyes that "by 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age," but all of the credible material I've read on the issue suggests that a situation worse than the Great Depression is unavoidable at this point.

As far as the original piece is concerned- it's so simplistic and naive that it's even worth responding to-

If our ancestors didn't worry about those wheat stands dying, they would have just let them die. We, too, are worried about something that we may be able to avoid -- because we were intelligent enough to worry about it in the first place.

That's the whole point. Worry today, survive tomorrow.

--p!

He is Malthusian - and regards techno-geeks like me as "cornucopialists."

He has no credibility with this techie. I will stick with Lovins and Ovshinsky.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technogaianism

The doomers are clueless.

I loved "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" by Samuel C. Florman and have all of Amory B. Lovins' books and papers.

:toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast: :toast:

You're just citing the civilizations that managed to recover (and glossing over the famines and stavation deaths that happened in the interim). Many other civilizations crashed completely and NEVER recovered. South America, for one, is filled with the ruins of mighty empires brought down by a climate change or the stripping of local resources.

Eurasians were quite conected, technology spread easily back and forth, and crises were resonsible of the uptake of new technologies used to mititgate the crisis. The two centers of civilization in the Americas were isloated from the rest of the world and each other, they had no acess to outside technologies (such as iron working, horse domestication, plows, etc) that could be used react mitigate the effects of primitive farming methods.

I don't think so! Many Indian cultures had very intensive and efficient methods of production that supported large populations. Major climate changes disrupted that process, and horses and plows would not have provided any relief.

In some empires, the rulers' passions for temple-building -- which required wood for high-heat kilns -- devastated the local forests. Again, Western technology would be irrelevant to the demise since it was the EFFICIENCY of their wood harvesting that destroyed their environment.

As for isolation, we're reaching the "one island" limit ourselves. The entire Earth has become Easter Island as we strip it of resources on a global scale. There are no other Earths nearby so that we can spoil our little area, then move on to new territory. We've done that for basically the last time.

Explains the effect of a technologically advanced cosmopolitan (riddled with pathogens) society meeting a society that doesn't have guns, germs, and steel.

I know other Amerindian societies used more advanced farming methods. That pre-Incan Peruvian civilization (can't rember the name) went into decline because of climate change, IIRC. The Aztec's farming methods were still working fine when the Spanish came. The complex societies of the Amazonians (the ones that were skilled at using the natural fertilizer terra preta) and the Mound Builders were distroyed by Eurasian diseases.

like the Easter islanders? :D

and digging up coal and oil shales will simply add to the burden of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Kunstler is right. America should be reduced to a population size and a lifestyle that fits within realistic renewable resources. We can do it the easy way by voting for policies towards these goals or the hard way in a series of Katrina style disasters.

The road we have been riding on will come to an abrupt stop very soon either way.

And how do you suggest we "reduce" our numbers? Are you advocating that we stand by, no, encourage, the horrible death by famine of billions of people?

As moral human beings we have no alternative than to struggle to survive and that means looking for solutions.

But people would literally prefer to starve than consider that option, as has been proved over and over again by DUers who get enraged at the very notion.

and you're walking in dangerous territory.

:hi:

the author make the same mistake most people are making about oil depletion and technology!! They are two different subjects!!! No amount of technology will put more oil in depleted oil fields!! There is currenly no VIALBE alternative to oil thus Kunsler is very correct in predicting his future world..

"There is currently no VIABLE alternative to oil thus Kuntsler is very correct in predicting his future world.." which is only correct if rewritten as "There is currently no ECONOMICALLY VIABLE alternative to oil ..." and commend to your attention Samuel Florman's book "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering"

Half of the test of viability is ECONOMIC. For example, (for my driving habits and credit rating) a Prius was not viable with gasoline at only $2.25 a gallon but became an obvious no-brainer at $3.25 a gallon (again, for my driving habits and credit rating). Similarly, with crude at $35/bbl FT coal to gasoline is not ECONOMICAL, but at $70/bbl, it is a profitable business.

And, this forum is replete with 200 post-long threads of the ECONOMIC VIABILITY (even with commissioning costs, Price-Anderson, fuel storage, etc.) of nuclear. (I am pro nuke - my first job was at Bettis National Lab).

There is no viable set of high density/high EROEI replacements and conservation measures to make up for the loss cheap oil that will allow American industrial society to keep running its wasteful suburban "service economy," all its infrastructure and its interstate highway systems. I don't know how many articles I've read attempting to do the math that actually take into account the massive SCALE involved.

Ain't gonna happen.The economic principle of substitutability on this level is simply a fallacy.

And of course, there are also other fish to fry- like the decreasing carrying capacity of our ecosystems. Bottom line is:

Thermodynamics DOESN'T CARE about economics- and while I enjoy Lovin's work (Natural Capitalism and the Oil Endgame) and think many of his principles have merit (maybe their most merit goes to trying to bust the "psychology of prior investment") -when he starts spouting off about his hypercar, that's when you realize that he's largely living in a cornucopian dream world.

Sorry, but endless growth (some like Herman Daly would call it a cult of growth) is an artifact of the growing energy sources of the 20th Century.

Systems - economic or otherwise cannot grow without increasing energy inputs or making comperable gains in efficiency. That's a general systems rule- and it applies to all systems. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Neoclassical economist by training) figured that out as far back as 1971 and discusses it at length in his famous work The Entropy Law and the Economic Process.

and it can be substituted by other forms.

There can be growth in the economy (increased rate of wealth creation, increased wealth per capita, and improved distribution of wealth) with a decrease in fossil fuel inputs.

The economy is not a thermodynamic system, but to use the analogy:

Our current economic system, through taxes, places 'friction' on the conversion of leisure to Labor, on the converson of Labor and Land into Capital, and on the conversion of Land and Capital into Wealth.

Because the supply of Labor and Capital are elastic, placing taxes on them reduces their availability (Supply) which increases their price. The returns to the owners of Labor and Capital, Wages and Interest, are required to induce the owners to supply them.

Conversely, the supply of Land is fixed, and placing taxes on them does not raise the price. However, the price of Land, in all it's forms, is still set by the confluence of Supply and Demand, and the owner gets to collect this price. However, the owner is not responsible for the supply of Land, he merely collects the Rent for doing so. Should the public decide to socialize this Rent, rather than socializing Wages and Interest, as usually done today, more than enough public money could be raised to provide public goods while removing friction from the flow of Labor and Capital (as well as removing sales taxes - friction on commerce).

Such an effect would have a net effect of enforcing the judicious, efficient, and economical use of Land - which is the only FIXED factor of production. Environmental Economists recognize the use of the atmosphere as a carbon sink as using Land without paying for it.

The question remains whether or not the loss of high density/high EROEI fuels will outweigh the loss of economic friction. I believe that most of economic benefit of such fuels accrue to the owners of such sources. Furthermore, in the equation of production, work not done by dino power must be done by other sources. Counting fossil fuel as a form of Land, the production of Wealth will depend more on Labor and Capital. It's also important to note that depending on Capital (when Capital is separated from Land) raises the demand for Labor as well.

-human capital (in the form of labor, intelligence, culture and organization)

-Financial capital (in the form of cash, investments and monetary instruments)

-Manufactured capital (in the form of machines, tools, factories and things like that).

They all flow from- and rely on natural capital (which in turn relies on energy). You can substitute the three above for one another readily enough in the equations and/or the equilibria but things get trickier when you deal with natural capital (or as I think you're putting it- Ricardian Land).

Natural capital is much more than any of the three above- it's something entirely different. Joseph Schumpeter coined a term that Herman Daly uses to describe why it's pointless to argue about production functions and such in Neoclassical terms. Unless you change "your pre-analytic vision" a lot of this is sophistry. We could argue the Neoclassical angles all day and in the end- we'd be left with thermodynamic absurdities.

Environmental economists attempt to do what I think I see you saying- internalize the costs of externalities- carbon sinks being one of the tragedy of the commons types of things.

Ecological economists on the other hand recognize that ecosystem services (sources and sinks) have values that are sometimes hard to quantify with output measures.

The question you framed I liked a lot though:

"whether or not the loss of high density/high EROEI fuels will outweigh the loss of economic friction."

That's really something to think about- thanks very much for that- and also for your thoughtful riposte.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_GDP_to_carbon_dioxide_emissions

If the US were as efficient with it's Carbon emissions as Switzerland, GDP per Capita would jump from $42,000 to $187,000.

If the World were as efficient with it's Carbon emissions as Switzerland, GWP per Capita would jump from $6795 to $34,940.

Alternatively, if the US were as efficient with it's Carbon emissions as Switzerland, current standard of living could be maintained with a 78% decrease in carbon emissions.

Switzerland, with it's banking, is of course a special case, but the idea is sound.

The world economy isn't as simple as energy in => wealth out. In fact the widespread availability of cheap fuel means that production and transport processes can be relatively inefficient. Efficiency requires more labor - tighter tolerances, more complex machinery, more skilled operators. Instead of paying for this to skilled and educated labor across all industries, we've been paying a relatively few oil & fuel owners.

Thermodynamic Absurdities? Sophistry? I know thermodynamics a lot better than I know economics. The US 'heat engine' converts each ton of Carbon Dioxide (a useful proxy for fossil fuel) to $2118. The Swiss 'heat engine' converts each ton of Carbon Dioxide to $9415. To improve the efficiency of converting Land inputs (like atmospheric emissions) to Wealth, we need better Labor (and human capital) and Better Capital (manufactured capital), which, in turn are going to require higher wages.

and other natural laws don't apply and constrain the economic subsystems- then you're making an argument for a perpetual motion machine.

The Cobb Douglas production function, for example yields ridiculous results-

A production function is a recipe- Real recipes in real life begin with a list of ingrediants. They don't say just take the labor of the ciook and the capital equipment in the kitchen and make cherries jubilie!

Captial and labor may to some extent be substitutable- but resources to a great degree are not. And yet the production functions tell you that if we can make one factor larger than you decrease the other two.

That's like saying if we set out to make a 5-pound cake, then with no extra ingredients- just by stirring harder and baking longer in a bigger oven, we can make a 1,000 pound cake. The first law of thermodynamics is completely ignored.

That's not how things work in real life- especially with a resource like oil- as the Neoclassical economists of the world are going to soon find out.

As the solar advocates love to point out, more solar energy falls on the earth each day than the entire world population uses in 2-3 decades. There's also plenty of radiactive decay heat in the core of the planet, working it's way to the surface.

Much of this energy is not currently useful to mankind, but as time passes, and more Labor and Capital is dedicated to the problem, this energy will become useful.

To use a cake analogy, to grow the grain, sugar, eggs, and fuel, and to mill the flour, mix the ingredients and bake the cake would require many more hours of labor and probably several more square feet 500 years ago than they would today.

Current governments tend to tax Labor more than Capital more than Land. This has led world wealth production to become Labor efficient rather than Land efficient.

Shifting taxes off of Labor and onto Land would make wealth production become more Land efficient.

Land includes all those things in the universe that people didn't make, including oil.

It falls like a fine mist everywhere and has to somehow be concentrated or used in passive ways.

Fossil fuels did that really well- store up solar energy- and photosynthesis does a decent job. All the labor and capital in the world aren't going to increase what we can reap from solar energy to the scale required to run our industrial society.

As we move towrd the 22nd Century- we'll be moving back toward an early 18th Century energy budget- and economies as well as populations will contract accordingly. In fact they MUST contract, due to decreased petroleum inputs and degradations to our carrying capacity. That I think would be probably be true even in the event of a new energy subsidy like fusion.

"Current governments tend to tax Labor more than Capital more than Land. This has led world wealth production to become Labor efficient rather than Land efficient.

Shifting taxes off of Labor and onto Land would make wealth production become more Land efficient."

This is absolutely right, and that'll start to happen (hopefully) through enlightened policies- but it'll be far too little far too late. Unfortunately- most of our laws and the proposals that you see tend to manage for individual outputs- not for productive systems- which from an ecological perspective makes them innefficient and in any event togther they run into Arrow's impossibility theorem. You can see that in the conflict between timber, fisheries and widlife.

If you manage "land" in the context as systems it gives you many other "ecological services" back that end up worth much more together than the sum of any set of resources apart. But that brings up a whole can of systems science worms that would take way too long to lay out.

Allen & Tainter discuss the weaknesses in traditional economics and management approachs in their book Supply Side Sustainability

http://forestpolicy.typepad.com/ecoecon/2006/03/supplyside_sust.html

was wrong

"As we move towrd the 22nd Century- we'll be moving back toward an early 18th Century energy budget- and economies as well as populations will contract accordingly. In fact they MUST contract, due to decreased petroleum inputs and degradations to our carrying capacity. That I think would be probably be true even in the event of a new energy subsidy like fusion."

Petroleum/Coal/Gas energy can and will be replaced. We may spend relatively more Labor/Capital/Land on generating energy - the cost of energy will and should rise. As it rises, lower energy alternatives to production will take over.

As I tried to point out in the last post, the things people NEED to survive and reproduce can be generated with lower energy inputs.

Doomers like to scream about carrying capacity, and point to food shortages. Food shortages are an economic problem, not a thermodynamic problem. They are an economic problem because the resources allocated by nature and the laws of physics to humanity are more than sufficient to produce the food neccessary to sustain the current and any forseeable future population:
* Per the UN, there are about 5 Billion Ha of agricultural land in the world.
* Per Ecology Action, biointensive organic gardening, with scarce water, can produce enough food for one person on less than 5000 s.f. of growing area, using nothing but hand tools and recycled garden material. This can be done with marginal soils, no chemicals, and no irrigation if 20" of rain falls during the growing season. It is possible to grow food with no rainfall during the growing season if the soils are good enough, and the crop is grown immediately after the rainy season.
* multiplying these two gives food for more than 100 Billion people.
* current population is 6.5 Billion
* ergo, food production globally isn't limited by natural resources

(Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process).

We are very definitely reaching sustainability limits on energy input/per capita. This is exactly what drives our foreign non-policy (see., e.g., William Engdahl, "A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order" and Michael Klare, "Blood and Oil" and "Resource Wars"). I am very definitely a geopolitical/petro-political cynic - we are in Iraq and eying Iran for two reasons - Bush's deep seated psychological issues and OIL.

I disagree with Kunstler on his "return to a kinder, gentler, simpler America of the rural 1920's" and tend to go along with Lovins on his model of increasing GDP per unit of energy input (even on things as simple as replacing incandescent lights with fluorescent lights and LEDs; replacing Hummers H-1's with "shoe leather express" and bicycles and transit; replacing CRT's with flat panel displays; replacing exurban McMansions with much higher density housing closer to economic activity).

You are unable to name a single compound in oil that is not obtainable by other means. I have asked you several times to do this, but you simply repeat the "we are doomed" mantra about peak oil.

No matter how many times you repeat this crap about oil being irreplaceable, you cannot make it true.

I have pointed out many times that oil has been replaced at various times in various places, depending on the situation. The question is not whether it can be done, but whether it should be done.

I note that nitrogen fixation was not invented to exploit oil reserves, nor natural gas reserves. The original fuel for nitrogen fixation was coal generated hydrogen. It is not necessary to use coal today, nor oil, nor gas. This is because we live in the golden age of chemistry.

Oil is an unacceptably dangerous fuel. Rational people applaud the impetus to be done with it. The fact that it is used at all has everything to do with ignoring its external cost which is enormous, even ignoring incredible crap like the war in Iraq. It should be replaced by one or many of the several options that exist for discarding it. Personally I think that all fossil fuels should be outlawed. In fact, I regard the depletion of the oil fields as a wonderful opportunity for humanity to finally get things right.

The reason for stopping the use of oil has nothing to do with the possibility that oil is running out but everything to do with the fact that it is a dangerous and morally disgusting fuel.

You, and Mr. Kunstler, seem to think that the evolution of the human being was coincident with the discovery of oil. It was not. The human being evolved many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Oil was first commercialized in the middle of the 19th century. The bizarre obsession with the use (and economics) of oil - a historical and geological blink - has done considerable damage to the earth and to humanity's ultimate prospects for survival - since it has artificially allowed the extension of the human population beyond sustainable equilibrium quantities. However it happens that without this damage, which expresses itself as climatic disruption, the world could have easily survived if oil had never been discovered. In fact we might still have things like a habitat for tigers, and rhinoceroses, and the animals that once inhabited the Amazon basin. We might, in short, be better off. The evidence for this contention of mine is the existence of history. Shakespeare never wrote the comedies "The Merchant of Exxon," or "Two Refiners of Verona." Julius Ceasar did not invade Gaul and Britain to secure oil supplies. Columbus did not risk his life and the lives of his crew mates to secure the idea oil trade routes. Marco Polo didn't stop in Arabia, and Sam Houston did not rebel against Mexico to secure the Texas oil fields.

Mr. Kunstler - who is a writer whose raison d'etre is primarily to sell books and not to dictate some oracular version of the nature of reality - has been useful to some extent because he has helped dramatize the situation and made people aware of the extent to which oil is involved with their daily lives. But on reading his book, I immediately recognized that he, like most journalists has an incomplete understanding of science and of technology. To the extent that he makes people hysterical - and his work is written in hysterical terms - he is not helpful.

Humanity is, of course, facing a crisis. It is likely that many people will have to die as a result of the upheavals, but it is not necessary that this is the case. The technology for avoiding this outcome is known, and known with sufficient insight as to grant us some chance of making a better world than that in which we now live. It is merely a matter of acting instead of panicking. It is the panic which will be fatal, not the nature of the problem.

We should not overlook the very serious risks we face both from the greenhouse gases emitted during the petroleum age and by the junkie-like withdrawal we are about to suffer. But we are only doomed if we fail to face the future and start working on alternatives.

This is often the case-

The trouble the US is in right now is what Kunstler calls "sleepwalking into the future." You can look at lead times discussed in the Hirsh report- and in the event the early toppers prove right (and the recent production figures seem to bear that out) then even as the gap between rising demand and steady and/or falling supply increases- and alternatives become economic (in the free market sense) it won't be not possible to get them into production fast enough to fill the growing gap.

That's the rate of conversion problem- and it'll be made worse by the economic damage done - both by rising oil prices and the inevitable macroeconomic contraction- which will very like involve stagflation, institutional and individual defaults and devaluation of the dollar. Even if the technologies were avaliable how are we supposed to mount such a HUGE industrial effort and restructuring then?

Somewhere down the line there'll be a tipping point (more likely a set of tipping points) where the traders figure out that the house of cards may go- and then all the fancy derivatives and other "financial products" will get put to their test. History tells us when that happens, panic will indeed ensue. That's not a prospect I like to think about.

PS: I disagree with your assessment about replacing oil. You're a chemist, but I have a feeling you lack sufficient appreciation for sociological scale when you say that oil is replaceable. It's simply not- though you're right- considering climate change and other matters, in itself this is not a bad thing at all.

...is that no-one seems to be trying that hard. You know as well as I do the huge amount of primary production that's handled by oil at the moment - something close to 50EJ for the US alone - and all we've got by way of replacement is wind and nuclear no-one wants, solar no-one can afford, and hydro with nowhere to put it. And maybe some ethanol. At our current lighning rate of development, it's going to take 50 years just to stop using fossil fuel for electricity, and God knows how long to replace to the transport and manufacturing processes.

We need to be going batshit crazy to get the get the oil replaced, and we've cooked up a Tahoe Hybrid at ~24 mpg. Woo hoo.

And we've got what, 10 years before the enviroment closes over our heads? Maybe the same before oil becomes too expensive to use for everyday purposes. It won't be the end of humanity, but I think we could take some pointers from the end of the Roman empire: a "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold" moment - and I hate to think about the effects on food production.

I think we missed the boat: We had enough of a warning in the '70s that we were getting too dependant on oil, and ignored it. 30 years later it's finally sinking in, but we don't have the time to get the replacements in before reality smacks us upside the head.

We're all doomed! Doomed, I say! :)

However people act faster when their backs are to the wall.

Glenn Seaborg made the first atoms of plutonium in 1940. Within four years the process for making it had already been industrialized and involved the efforts of many tens of thousands of people working in secret. Within twenty years the element was readily available on a scale of many hundreds of metric tons, and within 40 years, on a scale of thousands of metric tons.

The world built close to 400 nuclear reactors in a decade and a half, and it really wasn't trying all that hard, since it was doing so in a time of a surfeit of energy sources, and in a time when the environmental consequences of fossil fuels were barely appreciated.

Nobody is particularly fond of the Nazis, but the fact is that Fischer-Tropsch chemistry there (of which I do not approve) went from bench top to industrial in about two years, and this during a period when Germany was being massively bombed. (It is true that slave laborers were involved - but still...)

I honestly believe that if Jimmy Carter had been re-elected, Fischer-Tropsch chemistry could have gone industrial in the United States before the completion of his second term. This of course, would not have been a good thing, and the failure to industrialize Fischer-Tropsch chemistry here is a silver lining on the otherwise disastrous defeat of Mr. Carter. In fact there was nothing about that chemistry that was particularly new. Largely it was a matter of blowing the dust off some old volumes. These volumes still exist, and in fact large scale plants for these types of processes already exist. One of them is in Tennessee, where it is owned by the Eastman Chemical Company. (It's used to make acrylates.)

In the space of a few years people started bringing into their homes, first as toys, machines that could do sophisticated computer modelling on a scale that once would have required millions of dollars of investment. This industry sprang almost from no where in the space of a single decade.

There are many similar examples. In fact, the emergence of oil itself is just such a case. In 1900, the world was coal driven. By 1920, oil had largely stripped coal of much of its central importance and everybody was buying oil.

The peak oil conceit is that the oil is going to instantaneously vanish. However, the curve is distinctly gaussian. It is a decline, not a cut off. Personally, the faster oil declines the happier I will be. Oil sucks. It is bad for us. One hopes that its disappearance will encourage people to get off their fat asses and return to work, to face reality, and to put a value on things. Such a transformation will of course involve some face slapping, but it's a case of "that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger..."

We in the West think that no one is trying hard because we are fat and lazy here. However hungrier people, notably the Chinese and the Indians, and smart people - the Japanese - are well acquainted with oil replacement technology. They are acting fairly decisively - they have pilots already operating and they have sketched out in broad terms exactly what must be done. That in itself is more than half the battle.

I have no doubt that the switch from oil will involve some pain, probably, worse than pain. I do not question that there is likely to be serious tragedy. I also concede it is possible, even probable, that we will ultimately fail. But I must emphasize that none of this has to be this way. The essence of liberalism is to me is optimism that there are better ways that should be approached and tried. I'm ready.

I am not fond of the Kennedy's, who I regard, as a family, as grandiloquent, specious, distracted and somewhat vicious and vacuous sybarites, a sort of less obvious version of the Bush family. The grandiloquence, however, did in fact move some people to attempt to do the right thing. One of the Kennedys, I forget which, or one of their speech writers, said something along the lines of, "Some people look at things as they are and ask 'why?' I look at things that have never been and say 'why not?'"

I think we need a little more of that kind of attitude, and I still believe that at the core, something of that attitude survives somewhere in the human race. There is no question that the replacement of oil is not only possible, but desirable. It largely comes down to a matter of will and a matter of action and a matter of investment. To be sure, we will not accomplish any of this in the United States as long as we are ruled by dogmatists of the type represented by the primitive beast that has managed to insert himself in our White House. But either we can keep the faith that this too, shall pass, or we can all simply fall on our swords right now.

People like Kunstler insist that oil is necessary because they cannot imagine change. (In Kunstler's case he is also trying to sell books.) However the insistence that change is either impossible or undesirable has a name. It's called "conservatism." A conservative is a person who believes that nothing should be attempted for the first time.

I'm very very concerned about the state of affairs, but I'm not convinced that there is no way out. I know that many of my ideas, which I have held for a long time, were once considered outlandish. In fact they were considered outlandish relatively recently. Today they are far less so. I also know that people who are much smarter than I am are working actively on the problem of getting rid of oil. It can be done. Good riddance.

Or, conversely, that which doesn't make you stronger...

I hope you're right. I thought our backs were already against the wall (and we're half through the last cigarette, and there's a guy holding out a blindfold with an apologetic grin), but then I admit to being a pessimist.

It'll be interesting, either way. :)

Thus Iraq.

There are failures of imagination of many sorts -- that of Kunstler and Bush are similar.

and so far you've not been able to prove I'm wrong.. As even the US army reports clearly stated:

“the Army must insulate itself from the economic and logistical energy-related problems coming in the near to mid future. This requires a transition to modern, secure, and efficient energy systems, and to building technologies that are safe and environmental friendly.” The best energy options they conclude are “energy efficiency and renewable sources.” However, "currently, there is no viable substitute for petroleum."

They do not expect that any transition will be easy: “energy consumption is indispensable to our standard of living and a necessity for the Army to carry out its mission. However, current trends are not sustainable. The impact of excessive, unsustainable energy consumption may undermine the very culture and activities it supports. There is no perfect energy source; all are used at a cost.”

You are unable to name a single compound in oil that is not obtainable by other means

I would correct your statement and point out that you're not thinking of SCALE when you made it. Thus you should claim "single compound in oil that is not obtainable by other means to the SCALE needed to replace oil?? Can you name one?? Of course not!! Thus your arguement is moot I'd say..

The technology for avoiding this outcome is known, and known with sufficient insight as to grant us some chance of making a better world than that in which we now live. It is merely a matter of acting instead of panicking. It is the panic which will be fatal, not the nature of the problem.

Again you have a poor arguement as this is not a technology issue. Perhaps Salivar says it best here:

Many politicians and economists insist that there are alternatives to oil and that we can "invent our way out of this."

Physicists and geologists tell us an entirely different story.

The politicians and economists are selling us 30-year old economic and political fantasies, while the physicists and geologists are telling us scientific and mathematical truth. Rather than accept the high-tech myths proposed by the politicians and economists, its time for you to start asking critical questions about the so called "alternatives to oil" and facing some hard truths about energy.

While there are many technologically viable alternatives to oil, there are none (or combination thereof) that can supply us with anywhere near the amount of net-energy required by our modern monetary system and industrial infrastructure.

People tend to think of alternatives to oil as somehow independent from oil. In reality, the alternatives to oil are more accurately described as "derivatives of oil." It takes massive amounts of oil and other scarce resources to locate and mine the raw materials (silver, copper, platinum, uranium, etc.) necessary to build solar panels, windmills, and nuclear power plants. It takes more oil to construct these alternatives and even more oil to distribute them, maintain them, and adapt current infrastructure to run on them.

Each of the alternatives is besieged by numerous fundamental physical shortcomings that have, thus far, received little attention:

http://lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/SecondPage.html#anchor_83

And lets not forget the Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy found at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052703_9_questions.html. Let see if any so called alternative you have in mind passes the test..

Thus I concluded its not a technology issue but rather a oil depletion issue and when the world face a future with less oil, and it will come, its going to be a much different world than one you or I can imagine..

Your links refer nebulously to "physicists and geologists" like all links of these types, but they are not first hand literature by any stretch.

They are nonsense.

I read the primary scientific literature and that is a very different game. There's no wild eyed panic there, or dire scenarios put together by journalists. There's something very different, data and analysis.

As for scale, I suspect you are ignoring that I played a role in bring the word exajoule into the forum as common parlance.

Recently you told me that when I said "nuclear energy," I "lost" you. I got this very, very, very, very dubious comment:



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=115&topic_id=52726#52941

Your attitude, which is more of the same conservative claptrap that "nothing can be changed" and "things must always be as they are now or everyone must die," can be summed up succinctly like this, as I see it:

1. We're all going to die when we run out of natural gas and oil!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2. Nuclear power is too dangerous.

This is complete and total nonsense.

The world needs 400 to 500 exajoules of energy per year at least until its population is reduced to sustainable levels. There are many ways of achieving this, including the tried and true conservation, renewables (which can provide some coverage) and most importantly, where issues of scale are concerned, nuclear power. I note that 5000 nuclear reactors could provide all of the world's energy in a much cleaner, safer and more efficient manner than is now used while idiots spew oil and gas into our atmosphere with no regard for the future. This technology has been operating on an exajoule scale for decades and it is readily scalable.

Even your hero Kunstler writes admiringly of France where he notes the lights will stay on while (he claims) the West Coast of the United States is raided by Chinese pirates. (He writes a good science fiction yarn.

Here is one scenario, drawn up by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory scientists not journalists showing one possible energy flow for the United States:



This is just one such flow chart offered by the LLL team, but its fun because it shows the oil about which you are so hysterical has producing fewer exajoules than wind, solar, nuclear.

I think it is realistic, and of course the people who have composed this chart are primary scientists, not journalists and writers.

In fact, the business of energy prediction as practiced by the IPCC and by groups like LLL do not produce predictions but instead produce scenarios which act as guidance, not soothsaying.

The LLL team has comprised 12 scenarios for the (dubious) "hydrogen economy" which are linked here:

http://eed.llnl.gov/flow/pdf/ucrlTR204891.pdf

I don't like any scenario which has any fossil fuels in it. In the flow chart I have linked here, I would replace all of the coal immediately with nuclear power.

This has been done is some places, notably France, where they use no coal except to make steel. This is how it should be.

I have already demonstrated that 120 nuclear reactors could fuel (easily) 100M cars, if we want cars, which we probably don't.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x47795

You are filled with panic, but it's the worst kind of panic, panic based on nonsense. Like most panic filled people you are relying wholly on a series of circular references from people who agree with your argument (and panic) and you are notably devoid of a sense of what is contained in the primary literature.

Here are some titles from the current issue of the primary scientific journal Energy and Fuels, in which I have edited out all titles that have any thing to do with oil, but have included some about the Fischer-Tropsch chemistry. (I do this with my usual caveat that I object to Fischer-Tropsch chemistry when the starting material is coal). I read this journal constantly, which is why I know so much more than you do. I'm sure, reading your posts, that you have never cracked these pages Here are some titles, and this for just one month's of reports:

Promotional Effects of Al2O3 Addition to Co/SiO2 Catalysts for Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis


Hydrogen Production by Gasification of Cellulose over Ni Catalysts Supported on Zeolites

Distillate Production by Oligomerization of Fischer-Tropsch Olefins over Solid Phosphoric Acid

Product Identification and Distribution from Hydrothermal Conversion of Walnut Shells

A New Catalyst System for High-Temperature Solar Reforming of Methane

Performance and Emissions of Direct Injection Diesel Engine Fueled with Diesel Fuel Containing Dissolved Methane

Experimental Investigation of Ash Deposit Shedding in a Straw-Fired Boiler

The Fate of Trace Elements during the Co-Combustion of Wood-Bark with Waste

Prediction of the Autoignition Delay Time of Producer Gas from Biomass Gasification

Combustion Characteristics of a Direct-Injection Engine Fueled with Natural Gas-Hydrogen Mixtures

Experimental Study of NOReduction through Reburning of Biogas

Partition of Heavy and Alkali Metals during Sewage Sludge Incineration

An Investigation of the Reactivity of Chars Formed in Fluidized-Bed Gasifiers: Equipment Development and Initial Tests

Material Balance and Energy Consumption for CO2 Recovery from Moist Flue Gas Employing K2CO3-on-Activated Carbon and Its Evaluation for Practical Adaptation

A Three-Dimensional, Multicomponent, Two-Phase Model for a Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell with Straight Channels

Production of COx-Free Hydrogen from Biomass and NaOH Mixture: Effect of Catalysts

Swelling of Nitrile Rubber by Selected Aromatics Blended in a Synthetic Jet Fuel

Removal of C2H4 from a CO2 Stream by Adsorption: A Study in Combination of ab Initio Calculation and Experimental Approach

Comparison of the Fluorescence Behavior of a Biocrude Oil and Crude Petroleum Oils
A. K. Sarma and A. G. Ryder
pp 783 - 785; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef050294f

Abstract Full: HTML / PDF (230K)


Evaluation of the Influence of Stainless Steel and Copper on the Aging Process of Bio-Oil
M. Garcìa-Pèrez, A. Chaala, H. Pakdel, D. Kretschmer, D. Rodrigue, and C. Roy
pp 786 - 795; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef050344g

Abstract Full: HTML / PDF (621K)


The Effects of Ca-Based Sorbents on Sulfur Retention in Bottom Ash from Grate-Fired Annual Biomass
Todd Lang, Peter Arendt Jensen, and Jacob Nygaard Knudsen
pp 796 - 806; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef050243i

Abstract Full: HTML / PDF (453K)


Effects of Crystallinity on Dilute Acid Hydrolysis of Cellulose by Cellulose Ball-Milling Study
Haibo Zhao, Ja Hun Kwak, Yong Wang, James A. Franz, John M. White, and Johnathan E. Holladay
pp 807 - 811; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef050319a

Abstract Full: HTML / PDF (108K)


Continuous Production of Biodiesel via Transesterification from Vegetable Oils in Supercritical Methanol
Kunchana Bunyakiat, Sukunya Makmee, Ruengwit Sawangkeaw, and Somkiat Ngamprasertsith
pp 812 - 817; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef050329b

Abstract Full: HTML / PDF (140K)


Bed Agglomeration Characteristics of Wood-Derived Fuels in FBC
Maria Zevenhoven-Onderwater, Marcus Öhman, Bengt-Johan Skrifvars, Rainer Backman, Anders Nordin, and Mikko Hupa
pp 818 - 824; (Article) DOI: 10.1021/ef05034

I submit that you don't know what you are talking about.

This is just one such flow chart offered by the LLL team, but its fun because it shows the oil about which you are so hysterical has producing fewer exajoules than wind, solar, nuclear.

Oil produces only about 9% of our total electrical power now so you model is moot in my opinion..

and its nice you included a bunch of "studies" yet no real world applications on the scale I am talking about..

Which lead me right back to there's no viable alternative to oil for what we use it today for.. Not even nuclear...

This is consistent with your understanding of energy.

:yourock:

:crazy:

Oil's not much used for electric generation. It's suitable for peak load generation, but not as cheap as natural gas. However Oil is used for more than 16% of our total energy, not surprisingly in the transportation sector. For comparison, we receive 32% from coal, 31% from natural gas, 12% from nuclear, 3.9% from hydro, 4% from burning trash and things, 0.5% from geothermal, 0.01% from solar, 0.2% from wind.