Don't confuse peak of conventional oil production with the ongoing slight increments from non conventional. The crossover date was 2005 and now we have oil that is over $100 and getting more expensive by the year. If you don't think this is a problem for a world where everything is made and moved by oil you really haven't thought it through.
it's always been getting more expensive to produce. fuck me don't you nut jobs have even the slightest handle on mineral economics?
I am the love child of Tony Abbott and Pauline Hanson
Don't confuse peak of conventional oil production with the ongoing slight increments from non conventional. The crossover date was 2005 and now we have oil that is over $100 and getting more expensive by the year. If you don't think this is a problem for a world where everything is made and moved by oil you really haven't thought it through.
Don't confuse hydrocarbons with a non renewable resource.
Our civilization has become dependent on 3-5% economic growth per annum. But such rapid economic growth also depends on a steadily increasing energy supply. Even cornucopians must admit you can't keep increasing fossil fuel production forever, and since there's no equivalent new energy source on the horizon it looks like our civilization cannot be sustained long term in its current form. The only question is whether this would produce immediate collapse or slow decline. Slow decline it is from the look of things, with growth apparently stalling in America and Europe. As China matures it will probably follow the same pattern. But really as much as most people, even myself, would prefer 3%+ economic growth to continue forever, the sad reality is this is impossible on a finite planet.
When Syria lights up expect, Oil price UP Food prices UP Property prices DOWN
Syria, or another trigger. There is actually enough oil for many centuries if the demand can be reduced greatly. The cornicopian suburb dweller believes this will happen and that they will transition into an electric car and eat foods not dependent on (non-renewable) hydrocarbon inputs. The reality is that the average suburbanite will be walking or riding a pushbike and eating whatever they can grow in their tiny backyards. I imagine all the thousands of natives on Easter Island thought like modern suburbanites as the last of their trees were cut down. They would never have guessed that within a hundred years they would be living on rats and canabilism. The average person lives in denial to protect their ego. When they mass together and take their advice off the television set they get stupider still.
EIA: world petroleum use sets record high in 2012 despite declines in North America and Europe
27 August 2013
The world’s consumption of gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, heating oil, and other petroleum products reached a record high of 88.9 million barrels per day (bbl/d) in 2012, as declining consumption in North America and Europe was more than outpaced by growth in Asia and other regions, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). http://www.newfuelist.com/link/~8t4g
• Asia. In 2009, Asia surpassed North America as the world’s largest petroleum-consuming region as consumption rebounded from its 2008 decline. Between 2008 and 2012, Asia’s consumption increased by 4.4 million bbl/d. The rapidly industrializing economies of China and India fueled much of Asia’s demand increase, growing 2.8 million bbl/d and 800,000 bbl/d, respectively. If China’s use of petroleum continues to grow as projected, it is expected to replace the United States as the world’s largest net oil importer this fall.
• North America. Petroleum use in North America, which is dominated by consumption in the United States, has declined since 2005. Declines in petroleum consumption in the United States in 2008 and 2009 occurred during the economic downturn. Increased consumption in 2010 reflected improving economic conditions. In 2011 and 2012, higher oil prices and increased fuel efficiency of light-duty vehicles contributed to reduced US consumption.
Motor gasoline consumption, which makes up almost half of total US liquids fuel consumption, fell by 290,000 bbl/d between 2010 and 2012 as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards led to improvements in vehicle fuel economy that outpaced highway travel growth.
• Europe. Petroleum use in Europe has declined in every year since 2006. Part of this decline was related to a reduction in overall energy intensity and government policies that encourage energy efficiency. Europe’s weak economic performance has also affected its petroleum use, with declines of 780,000 bbl/d in 2009 and 570,000 bbl/d in 2012 occurring at a time of slow growth and/or recessions in many European countries.
To begin with, of course, a great deal of money is being made off the current fracking boom by assorted Wall Street office fauna, and their efforts to keep the gravy train rolling for their benefit doubtless have quite a bit to do with the remarkable disregard for mere geological reality to be found in so much pro-fracking propaganda these days.
That sort of strained relationship with fact is a sufficiently standard feature of speculative bubbles that it ought to be high up there on the checklist of any connoisseur of financial lunacy. Those of my readers who recall the details of the late housing bubble will doubtless think of the enthusiasm shown then for what were called NINJA loans—that is, loans given to borrowers who had no income and no jobs or assets, but who would one and all, so bankers insisted with straight faces, pay back those loans religiously out of the money they were sure to make flipping properties. The same logic doubtless governs the equally earnest insistence that the ferocious depletion rates that afflict fracked wells simply don’t matter, that kerogen shales like the Green River formation that have resisted every previous attempt to get oil out of them have suddenly transformed themselves into nice extractable oil shales for our benefit, and that the results of wells drilled in the best possible “sweet spots” in each formation must inevitably be repeated by every available wellsite in the region.
Here, as with the countless other examples that might be put on display by some Dickensian Spirit of Speculative Bubbles Past, the understandable desire to make a fast buck off other people’s cluelessness might seem to offer an adequate explanation for the bumper crop of fatuous twaddle that’s being pushed by the pundits and splashed around so freely by the media these days. Still, I’ve come to think that there’s more going on here than the passion for emptying the pockets of chumps that sets the cold sick heart of Wall Street throbbing, and indeed that there’s even more at work than our culture’s touching habit, discussed over the last two weeks, of reenacting the traditional morality plays of the civil religion of progress in order to console the faithful in difficult times.
Plunge into the heart of the fracking storm, rather, and you’ll find yourself face to face with a foredoomed attempt to maintain one of the core beliefs of the civil religion of progress in the teeth of all the evidence. The stakes here go far beyond making a bunch of financiers their umpteenth million, or providing believers in the myth of progress with a familiar ritual drama to bolster their faith; they cut straight to the heart of that faith, and thus to some of the most fundamental presuppositions that are guiding today’s industrial societies along their road to history’s scrapheap.
Since the days of Sir Francis Bacon, whose writings served as the first draft of the modern mythology of progress, one of the central themes of that mythology has been the conquest of Nature by humanity—or rather, in the more revealing language of an earlier day, by Man. You aren’t Man, in case you were wondering, and neither am I; neither is Sir Francis Bacon, for that matter, nor is anyone else who’s ever lived or will ever live. This person called Man, rather, is a mythical hero who gives the civil religion of progress its central figure. Just as devout Christians participate vicariously in the life of Christ through the celebration of the sacraments and the seasons of the liturgical year, believers in progress are supposed to participate vicariously in Man’s heroic journey from the caves to the stars by purchasing hot new products, and oohing and aahing appreciatively whenever the latest shiny technological trinket is unveiled by Man’s lab-coated priesthood.
Man’s destiny is to conquer Nature. That’s his one and only job, according to the myth, and when Man’s not doing that, he’s not doing anything worthwhile at all. Read any of the standard histories of Man written by true believers in the civil religion of progress, and you’ll see that societies and eras that devoted their energies to art, music, religion, literature, or anything else you care to name other than extending Man’s dominion over Nature are dismissed as irrelevant to Man’s history, when they’re not critiqued outright for falling down on the job.
You may be thinking by this point, dear reader, that a belief system that likes to portray humanity as a tyrant and conqueror rightfully entitled to view the entire cosmos as its own private lebensraum may not be particularly sensible, or for that matter particularly sane. You may well be right, too, but I’d like to focus on a somewhat more restricted point: according to this way of looking at things, Nature is not supposed to put up more than a pro forma struggle or a passive resistance. Above all, once any part of Nature is conquered, it’s supposed to stay conquered—and of course that’s where the trouble creeps in, because a great many of the things we habitually lump together as Nature are refusing to go along with the script.
Examples come to mind by the dozens, but one of the most significant and frightening just now is the collapse of the most important health revolution of modern times, the conquest (that word again) of bacterial disease by antibiotics. I’m not sure how many of my readers realize what an immense change in human life followed Alexander Fleming’s 1928 discovery that a substance excreted by bread mold killed most bacteria without harming human cells. A century ago, dysentery and bacterial pneumonia were leading causes of death in most industrial countries, killing far more people than heart disease or cancer, and the odds of living from birth to age five had an uncomfortable resemblance to a throw of the dice even in wealthy countries. Penicillin and the antibiotics that followed it changed that decisively, enabling doctors to stop bacterial diseases in their tracks. It’s because of antibiotics that I’m here to write this blog; the scarlet fever that had me flat on my back for weeks when I was seven years old would almost certainly have killed me if antibiotics hadn’t been available.
Outside the public health and infectious disease fields, most people remain serenely convinced that the relative freedom from bacterial disease that’s characterized the recent past in the industrial world is destined to remain fixed in place for the rest of time. Within those fields, by contrast, that comfortable conviction finds few takers. Penicillin, the antibiotic that saved my life in 1969, won’t even slow down most microbes now. Diseases that used to yield readily to an injection or two now have to be treated with complex cocktails of increasingly toxic antibiotics, and every year more pathogens turn up that are resistant to some, most, or all available antibiotics.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, at least for those who want to play the blame game. It’s been common since the 1950s for physicians to prescribe antibiotics for conditions antibiotic therapy can’t treat—for example, the common cold. It’s been equally common since the 1950s for livestock farms to give their animals daily doses of antibiotics, since (for complex biochemical reasons) this causes the animals to gain weight more quickly, and thus be worth more money at slaughtering time. Both these bad habits helped give bacteria the widest possible range of opportunities to develop resistance. Still, these and other contributing factors simply help feed the main issue, which is that bacterial evolution didn’t come to a sudden stop when Fleming started paying attention to bread mold.
I’ve commented several times in this blog that understanding evolution is crucial for making sense of the predicament of the industrial world, and the approaching end of the antibiotic era offers a solid example of the reasons why. Evolution through natural selection is the process by which living things adapt themselves to environmental changes; it works through individual organisms, but its effects are not limited to the individual scale. In the case of the spread of antibiotic resistance among microbes, there are at least three patterns at work. First, microbes are being selected for their resistance to individual antibiotics. Second, as new antibiotics are brought out to replace old ones, microbes are being selected for their ability to develop resistance to one antibiotic after another as quickly as possible. Finally, the pressure exerted on the entire microbial biosphere by the pervasive presence of antibiotics in the modern environment is giving a huge selective advantage to species that have the ability to exchange genes for resistance with other species.
The results are being documented in increasingly worried articles in public health journals. A large and growing number of pathogenic microbes these days are already resistant to the antibiotics that used to treat them; new antibiotics brought onto the market start running into problems with resistant bacteria in a fraction of the time that was once necessary for resistance to emerge; and the transfer of antibiotic resistance from one species to another is becoming an increasingly troubling problem. The possibility of a return to pre-1928 conditions, when a simple bacterial infection could readily turn into a death sentence and most families buried at least one child before the age of five, is seeing serious discussion in the professional literature.
As already mentioned, though, such worries are falling on deaf ears outside the public health and infectious-disease fields. There’s a mordant irony in the reason why, though I suspect it’s not often relished outside of the peak oil scene and a few other places where the same logic appears. Faced with the prospect of the end of the antibiotic era and the return of bacterial illnesses as major threats to public health, most politicians, like the people they’re supposed to serve, respond with an overfamiliar sentence: “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of something.” The increasingly frantic efforts of researchers to find new antibiotics and stay ahead of the remorselessly rising tide of microbial resistance get no more attention than the equally frantic efforts, say, of drilling companies to find petroleum deposits to make up for the increasingly rapid depletion of existing oil fields.
In both cases, and in any number of others, the myth of progress is the most important barrier in the way of a meaningful response to our predicament. According to the myth, we can’t go backwards to any condition encountered in the past; what Man conquers is supposed to stay conquered, so he can continue his ever-victorious journey from the caves to the stars. It’s unthinkable, in terms of the myth, that the supposed conquest of some part of nature—say, bacterial disease—might represent nothing more than a temporary advantage that the pressures of natural selection will soon erase. Thus when this latter turns out to be the case, those believers in the religion of progress who aren’t forced to confront such awkward realities in their work or their daily lives simply repeat the sacred words “Oh, I’m sure they’ll think of something,” to invoke the blessing of the great god Progress on His only begotten son, Man, and then proceed to act as though nothing could possibly go wrong.
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