Let's get something straight that is really easy to understand: Everything...Ev-er-y-thing...

that now exists and everything that you have ever known, even your own existance, was and is dependent upon the readily growing production of crude oil.

However, crude oil production has been flat for the past six years:



Nearly all of the global economic strife experienced over the past couple of years is the DIRECT RESULT of crude oil production having stalled beginning in 2004. It caused the housing bubble to burst. It caused ponzi schemes to come crashing down. It caused millions of lost jobs. As long as oil production was increasing and energy was cheap and readily available, bubbles and financial charades were able to continue. Once oil prices began to substantially increase, the shattering of the fragile facade began. Economic growth, for the civilization in which we currently live, cannot occur without the steadily increasing production of crude oil. As soon as oil production leveled off, what is known as the "bumpy plateau" where production/price becomes erratic before going into decline, the global economy began to go off the rails. And now, after six years of flat oil production, the economy continues crumbling to pieces, leaving millions of newly destitute people among the rubble.

Until production grows again, the economy and our civilization will continue to disintegrate and collapse. And considering the price-per-barrel of oil needed by producers and investers to increase production just happens to be the same pricer-per-barrel that hobbles the economy, we're in a trap we won't be able to easily free ourselves from - if we can free ouselves from it at all.

The time for dealing with this problem on a societal level is long past. President Carter made an effort to kick-start the process at the precise time it needed to be done. But Carter's initiatives were tossed out with the very next president. And the rest is history. It is now up to each of us to deal with a less energy intensive future on a personal and individual basis. The best way to do that is to arrange our lives in such a way that we can continue to live now, while there's still lots of oil, but then we can easily adapt when oil becomes too scarce and too expensive. If you live in the suburbs, perhaps it's time to think about moving into town or closer to your job. Perhaps you'd prefer to buy a plot of land and begin preparing it for sustaining yourself and your family. In the meantime, conserving as much energy as you can will help to slow the inevitable arrival of crude oil production decline.

The issue with crude oil is the MOST IMPORTANT problem facing Americans today. More important and more immediate even than climate change. If we continue to ignore it, our entire civilization will fly right off the cliff like Thelma and Louise.

Ponzi schemes collapsed because they always do, that is the whole reason that they are Ponzi schemes. The housing bubble burst because it was unsustainable, too many houses being built for too much money that people were borrowing. Jobs were lost because after people lost confidence in the economy, they shut their wallets and were in a wait-and-see mood. And it didn't help that the credit people were living on dried up. Just call me Thelma.

was not a the heart of the economic collapse?

There are probably thousands of graphs of thousands of factors that we could look at that would lead us to the same conclusion, but that doesn't make it so. This collapse was a cluster fuck of several problems that had to ruin the economy sooner or later.

have been working on the changes now for about 7 years. Unfortunately we still own and drive cars.

Thanks for posting! :hi:

Such an obviously ridiculous claim puts your whole post in question.

resets had nothing to do with helping to push people's living expenses over the edge?

Ok.

I don't think oil prices had much of an effect, at all.

...that I can't seem to bridge. A temporary glitch in supply helped to contribute to a slowdown in demand, but there were other factors in the economic slowdown.

economic troubles. There were also, in the case of housing, interest rate resets on mortgages happening concurrent with the oil spike of 2008. And there were other shenanigans and other factors.

Adjusted for inflation looks good and all but where is the corresponding inflation in take home pay, which is after all where the money to pay for gas comes from?

I thought we were talking about gasoline prices?

Cheap energy is required to spur economic growth. Where did you get the idea that energy has to come from crude oil? :shrug:

is the mysterious energy source that can take over EV-ER-Y-THING oil does?

Try again.

90%, 80%, 95%

They are the only reasonable stepping stones to start the transfer from oil. It is unreasonable to disregard them simply because they won't be a 100% substitute for oil.

They don't power vehicles and they don't make plastic or fertilize the oil-intensive plains.

Buildings can be insulated but achieving the greatest energy efficiencies requires massive infrastructural changes, above all to the transport system. The conversion is an energy-intensive process.

The solutions probably exist but implementation requires an investment on the scale of... oh, if we're lucky it won't be greater than the insane amounts of wealth and creative energy wasted during the last 20 years on the invasions of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, plus the drug war, and the maintenance of a completely useless world-wide military terror empire that does not defend but in fact creates threats to the United States. ("Thank you for your service!")

In other words, this has to be treated like a lot more important than the vanity wars of the imperial executives and feeding the maw of the military-industrial complex. Which is a great deal to overcome in a climate that seems to think the pittance finally given over to railway projects in the stimulus was a big fucking deal.

Therefore "nonsense" is a very sad and nonsensical answer to subdivisions' concerns.

They never will be usable until we actually make them usable. Yes, that will cost money and require effort. Money which could easily be made available if we stopped acting like a foolish empire.

Hemp OIL can do everything that petroleum does and it is cleaner and better for the environment and sustainable/renewable...

(I can look up some more refs if you need them... )but I am a california hippie and think that hemp is one of the saving graces, unfortunately it's seen as no better than it's THC-inclusive cousin....

http://hemporganic.com/whyhemp.html

http://www.globalhemp.com/Archives/FAQ/industrial_hemp_facts.html

ETA:links

It's illegal.

Does it look like we have the time and resources to pass by an obvious aid to our oil problem?

When choosing between legality and fighting physics, the choice is clear as day.

but nuclear and renewable energy will radically alter the face of power generation and shipping, and electricity will do the same for land-based transportation.

Air travel will require oil; plastics will require oil (although increased recycling and alternative packaging will largely obviate the need for it); some chemicals. And nothing could replace this:

The housing bubble was a result of many other complex factors. The ponzi nature of global finance was at already unsustainable levels.

The graph you selected is less than perfect. The global production variable starts at 65 which will amplify changes. The year variable starts at 2002, making determining the previous trend more difficult. If you consider mid 2005 as the year beginning the plateau then there is a downward trend as opposed to a plateau.

is actually trending downward. But I'm allowing for some margin of error to the good side.

The idea that crude oil prices are at the core of the current financial crisis is a consensus among many of the most prolific oil watchers in the world, including the oil experts at The Oil Drum and economists like Jeff Rubin, Chief Economist at CIBC World Markets in his report found http://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/soct08.pdf">HERE. I'm simply repeating what the experst have said.

as enforced by the Military that consumes the most of the very thing we want to preserve.............it's crazy!

Homer's Iliad? (If he wrote by light, it was an olive-oil lamp)

Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20? ( My fave, but I assume it was written by candlelight--probably beef tallow).

An Arshile Gorky painting? (I believe the pigment for oil paint is suspended in linseed oil).


I get what you're saying about the urgency of the oil crisis. But you're being hyperbolic.

crude oil to be created but your experiencing them probably did. THe paper mills, printing presses and book stores that are responsible for Homer being available to be read en masse are certainly dependant on oil. Same goes for Mozart's Concerto.

The museum that houses that Arshile Gorky painting was built with technology that uses oil. Even if you rode your bike to the museum, the technology to mass produce that bicycle was dependant on oil.

This argument, taken to its logical conclusion, suggests we should all wrap ourselves up in a wool blanket we have weaved ourselves on a handmade loom from wool shorn from baby goats we have raised by primitive methods. Then we should stare into space--no books, no music, no candles even at night. No bicycles. No shoes for walking (we can wrap ourselves in some homegrown flax threads).

We divest ourselves of our oil consumption over time, ourselves, and through committed efforts to transition from the old oil-based economy through collective efforts of government. Not by turning the world upside down and rejecting its entire contents overnight. My bet is I do as much if not more than you in reducing my share of the energy consumption of this country. It doesn't mean I have to become hysterical or idiotic.

Where in my post did I say anything about returning to some primitive way of life or rejecting our complex way of life? Like it or not we are dependant on oil. We have to change and it will take time.

If pointing out the obvious makes me hysterical or idiotic in your opinion then go for it. And be careful about the bets you make about my energy consumption. You know very little about me and what I do or do not do.

Okay, so subdivisions boiled a lot of different central concepts relating to modern life (energy and material realities without which industrialism and the current population levels would be impossible) into a single word, "everything," which taken literally includes many other things in addition.

I think he's hyperbolic in the word choice, and also ignoring the reality of what capitalism would do regardless of peak oil, among other things, but that's no reason for a dismissive response to a serious post.

Maybe you can catch him misspelling something?

oil is the foundation of our current civilization. And it doesn't change the fact that production is flat and will soon go into decline.

Homer's civilization was not based on crude oil. Neither was Mozart's. But the one in which we live is based on oil. The next one will not be based on oil.

You sound very convinced of this "fact". No one else will be, until you provide more support for your opinion than a skimpy graph.

Is flat oil production also the reason the stock market is higher now than it was in 2004? :crazy:

It's at the low end of the 2004 range (DJIA 10K-10.8K), before adjusting for inflation. This is true of DJIA and S&P 500. (It's lower if we measure against gold, slightly higher by euros after the latest bond-market attacks on Europe.) And the stock market is a casino that has been wrong about long-term trends as often as it's been right. It's volatile like almost never before, and the big guys play the moves.

If you want to pick nits, you miss the point entirely: anyone can draw arbitrary conclusions from a chart.

The Sun was and is dependent upon crude oil?

Time was and is dependent upon crude oil?

Every Quark was and is dependent upon crude oil?

Obviously wrong statements are always the best way to begin a thread.

that happens to be energy dense, easily transportable and returns a LOT more on the energy (and money) invested in it than any other fuels.

This quite in addition to petrochemicals and role as a building blocks for an astonish number of "things" people take for granted in modern societies.

Petroleum has a tiny fraction of the energy stored in uranium. Tiny.

And the amount of petroleum that goes into making "things" is tiny compared to that which is burned irresponsibly and dangerously as fuel.

can come from uranium.

http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/index

As more nuke plants come online and battery capacity is expanded, nearly all of it will.

Happy motoring everyone! :bounce:

try not talking down to your audience, and substitute reasoning (with references) for diatribe.

know about it (with references), then all they have to do is Google it themselves. When I made my OP, it was my interpretation of everything I've learned about the situation. I don't need to include references that are readily available all over the Internet.

But, since I'm now convinced there isn't a problem, I say we should just carry on with things the way they've always been - pedal to the metal, baby!

and that's finite resource, too- expensive and environmentally hazardous to acquire and dispense with.

pumping sunshine into our fuel tanks? Will that be able to power the big rigs carrying all our shit around?

When is that quark energy gonna be available down to the corner store?

that now exists and everything that you have ever known, even your own existance, was and is dependent upon the readily growing production of crude oil."

You created that qualifier, not me.

used to mine for coal? Which fuel is used to power the machinery that digs out mine ore with which to make wind turbine towers? Which fuel is required to manufacture and transport all the constituent parts of any alternative energy solution, including nuclear power plants?

Which substance is needed to create some 4000 products we use from plastic forks to intubation tubes?

Look around your home and tell me something you see that would be there even if oil had never been discovered.

:rofl:

Somehow mankind survived for 200,000 years without oil. You must be joking.

does indeed make up a big part of our lives that it has to, that mankind will disappear without petroleum.

Nothing could be further from the truth. When oil is scarce, the will to survive will still be with us, and alternatives for virtually everything that oil provides will be cheaper and more plentiful.

I wonder if Bronze Age man worried about Peak Bronze? :silly:

peak oil production and its inevitable decline, and preparing for such an eventuality.

Are we Bronze Age man? Or are we "Petroleum Man"?

going to bring our culture/living conditions to a halt unless by then communities are

prepared to get going with local food supplies -- less petroleum based fertilizers thrown

all over them -- local energy production -- mass transportation.

What would really be nice is if peak oil brought the MIC to a halt!!

Also, we've learned that when we extract oil from the earth 40% of it is methane gas which

creates Global Warming!! So WTF have we been doing this for -- and when are we going to stop??

Obama is passing $36 BILLION in loans on to the nuclear power industry!!

Seems rather backwards from where we should be headed --

imagine what that money could do for alternative energy --

and even just a small bit of it for our homeless!!

I find it funny that these types claim to understand that Peak Oil doesn't mean oil is suddenly gonna run out, they act like they do in their rhetoric.

along with a couple of other concepts like scale, marginal returns and substitutability.

run out? I'm talking about PRODUCTION! Not oil running out. Of course there will still be lots of oil. But will it be economical to extract it? Will it be profitable? Will it be in deep water Gulf of Mexico instead of up on dry land?

Once we ween ourselves off using oil to fuel our cars the remaining oil will last a long time, far longer than would be needed to eventually figure out economical alternatives and build the needed infrastructure.

The PTB may be greedy, but they are not stupid, the fall of civilization will mean the end of THEM, so they have every reason to get us off oil.

my intentionally hyperbolic FIRST FUCKING SENTENCE! That is the LEAST important part of my OP! "EVERYTHING" is an obvious exaggeration. Of course trees, for example, would exist without oil! Look around you at any manufactured thing and try to claim that it is not either oil-based or required oil-based products to move it to market and then to where you see it now. You can't because there is nothing. ALL of it required oil in some form. Wind turbines and solar panels require oil to be brought to fruition.

Show me oil production data that disputes what I said in my OP! Either the EIA/IEA data supports my statement that oil production has been flat for the past six years or you have conflicting data that shows otherwise. So, let's see it!

I was criticizing the "WE'RE SCREWED" interpretation of it.

The thing that people seem to not get about oil (and I regard coal as inferior oil) is that it was the storage of millions of years worth of sunlight, that we blew through extremely rapidly.

Nuclear energy and geothermal energy have also been stored in the past. All other forms - solar, wind (which is solar), bio-anything, hydroelectricity, batteries - require that we generate or acquire NEW energy and store or use it.

Unfortunately, neither nuclear nor geothermal energy are portable, or highly efficient. Both produce heat pollution, more so than useful energy. Nuclear power doesn't have to be polluting otherwise, but we have utterly failed, from mining to waste disposal, to do any of it well, and it may take a nonexistent technical utopia to do it well.

And neither form is suited for transportation, so in addition to not having the huge bank account of oil energy to spend, we have to waste even more energy producing and charging batteries or producing combustible fuels.

Oil depends on existence.

before we learned to use it?

Obviously Obama & Congress weren't listening and now we're screwed. :argh: