"I'd call it a clusterfuck."

[sabotabby]

I went to see this:

with Rob tonight, and you should all see it too. And you should show your friends, too. It's about one of my favourite obsessions: peak oil. I was surprised to see very few of the usual leftie suspects in the audience; there's very little talk in our circles about oil depletion given the proliferation of "No Blood for Oil" signs at anti-war rallies. There was a completely non-diverse panel of speakers afterward who nevertheless spanned the range from "abandon your ideological blinders; capitalism will survive but adapt" to "this economic system is unsustainable and can't be reformed. Period." Would have loved to stay and debate (particularly given my intention to write a novel about the subject) but alas, my futon and cat were calling me home.

Check out that site, by the way. It's got a really good links section. My views when it comes to oil depletion are similar to how I suspect a fundamentalist Christian must feel about the Rapture. On one hand, it is almost dizzyingly terrifying to contemplate what entails the destruction of our way of life. On the other...it's the chance to redeem ourselves as a species for past wrongs and emerge with ideas for a better and sustainable mode of living.

In the spirit of this:

What will you do when the cheap oil runs out? Who will you be with, and where do you want to be?

Comments

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

What will you do when the cheap oil runs out? Who will you be with, and where do you want to be?

Glibly (because it's late, I'm tired and have quaffed an ale too many - not to mention belling the bishop), I'll jest keep ridin' mah bahcicle, ma'am.

If the whole economy wouldn't fall apart, the end of the oil economy (forgive me the repitition - see the parenthetical remard in the paragraph above) wouldn't affect me much at all.

Or not so glibly: "Blame me, willya, ya ungreatful brats! Well, it was yer Ma what was burning that thar precious goSOline; me, I was a good'un, I jest rode my -

Oh Christ, never mind.

"It's cold. And there are wolves howling."

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Well, one thing that's certain, Europe is much better prepared for peak oil than North America is. Energy prices have always been expensive in Europe, gas taxes rather high and stuff, so people have been rather frugal in their energy use. One thing that Europe could do is reduce gas taxes when oil gets more expensive so that they can absorb the shock on a longer period of time while they accelerate transition. I mean they drive cars like the Mercedes-built Smart in Paris, it's pretty cool. Plus they like their bicycles already. Europe is a rather dense place. If you have Encarta, look up the Density Map in their atlas, you can see where people live on this planet. India and China and completely insane, but Europe is nicely dense as well. So they know about urban living and stuff. Plus, completely electric train network!

So, when you say "our" way of life, that's North America more than the whole Western World, although oil is more than transportation (plastics come to mind...)

I think we'll see lots more nuclear power plants being built to compensate for the loss of this energy source, as cars get electric and stuff. You'll see places like Québec, which has a single nuclear power station only so that it would be a nuclear "power" in the event of separation, actually start building nuclear plants out of need. They'll dam up every single river in the province before they get there though.

Also: China and India just signed 25 year deals with Iran for variably-fixed-priced supplies of natural gas with Iran. $100B for China, $40B for Iran.

Basically, I think that countries that move on Kyoto now will have a fortuitous chance of not keeling over from a 2-year peak oil shock. So that excludes the U.S., and the way Paul Martin talks, that'll exclude Canada as well.

The U.S. has endless supplies of coal. They'll pump that out. Their big problem is that GM and Ford are already missing the boat, they'll be swallowed up by Toyota and Honda big time in terms of market-share.

So anyway. Europe is where I want to be. Too bad Hydro-Québec never went forward with the electric car that its R&D dept. wanted to build...

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I have a zine (Show Me The Money) which has a few issues dedicated to this. One article in particular was demonstrating how much the agricultural "green revolution" depends on Oil, from machinery to fertilizers. That was quite interesting. It's kind funny because this could be an area where third world farmers could gain the upper hand on first world farmers.

[springheel-jack.livejournal.com]

I guess I'm a skeptic about this, but a weak sort of skeptic. I'm not convinced we really know how much oil there is left, and in any case it really depends on how quickly it runs out, how sudden the transition is. If it takes enough time we can shift over to other technologies - all of which are somewhat more expensive than oil but probably not ruinously so. Of course, the added cost imposed on the whole economy will create what is, in effect, a falling rate of profit crisis on the system, but I think it's unlikely that the people who will really suffer most are in the developed West. Certainly China is betting that salvation lies in development and not the reverse. Rather, I think that what will happen is that we'll fight harder over the oil that remains, and that significant chunks of the burgeoning world population will be locked out of economic development of any kind, condemned to a Hobbsian life.

That's the big risk - if a huge energy crisis hits when world population is topping out, it will be very very bad. Peak population is going to strain everything as it is, and if something pops open at the seams rather suddenly, there won't be a soft landing.

[erinlin.livejournal.com]

I think my first step would be to invest in a llama. Animal transportation- it's the wave of the future!

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

I could have sworn I had a debate about this with douglain about six months ago, but I can't find it in his archive. My general attitude is that it's significance is overplayed. There have been significant advances in the productivity of oil production. These are likely to continue. Ultimately they will run up against the barrier of the finite quantity of extractable oil, but it's not going to happen in such a fashion that suddenly all the wells run dry. Instead, the price of oil will rise in fits and starts due to a steady increase in its value, resulting from the increasing amount of labor necessary to find it, extract it and refine it. Initially that will mean a profit bonanza for the oil companies, but, assuming that capitalist rule has not been significantly challenged, it will also make it more economical to turn to other sources of power. Those other sources will not necessarily be ecologically clean; we could very well see a resurgence of coal-burning power plants. Will there be declines in living standards? Yes, but the shift from oil will not be the cause but the alibi. The underlying cause will be capital's tendential crisis of profitability, which has already been in effect for several decades.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

To comment further on what other people said, I don't think anyone is predicting a sudden oil shock like 1978, but we've seen how fast the prices have increased in the last 2 years. Of course that's due to geopolitical factors that can be solved, but then again other producing countries might face political crisies of their own along the way to peak oil.

(Say, a coup in Saudi Arabia, for example. Saudi Arabia has been the one country to increase production to reduce the shock of other oil producers dropping out of the map, like Iraq, Venezuela and Norway this year, so a temporary loss of Saudi Arabia would drive oil prices high real quick. But that's higher speculation.)

As for better extraction technology, yes, that's a factor, but there are very few large new banks of available oil. The Al-Berta tar sands are one, but even that is problematic: they need to heat up the tar sands real hot to separate the components. What will they use to heat this up? Natural gas. Some critics (in the oil industry, no less) say that it's irresponsible to use up a fossil fuel from a "clean" source to extract oil from a "dirty" source.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

As for better extraction technology, yes, that's a factor, but there are very few large new banks of available oil.

True, but there are some new developments in the pipeline in exploration as well (which for laziness' sake I lumped in with abstraction). For example, gravitometers which can detect variations in the gravitational constant with more than nine degrees of freedom, a level of precision necessary for the discovery of deeper undersea reserves. Is that an environmentally sound method of energy production? Of course not--I'd sooner take solar, wind or even nuclear any day. But it is an eminently capitalist approach.

[sabotabby]

They talked about it in the movie, too. One problem I see, though, is that the "green revolution" has at least partially ravaged the agricultual industries in Latin America and India, destroying the soil and native plants. So they may actually be as fucked there.

I certainly think that Europe, at least, will be better off than we will be, if what I saw in Germany is any indication.

It's interesting, though, that one of the links on the page (Life After the Oil Crash, which I read some time ago), suggests that the Third World will be more fucked than we will be. I can't remember why, though, so I will have to go back and read it when I'm more alert.

[sabotabby]

We don't know, of course, but it is finite, and as I understand it, the problem is not that the oil will run out. It's what will happen when global production of oil can no longer increase. (And obviously, increasing demands brought about by peak population will just compound things.)

[sabotabby]

Hee. Talk to my (biological) father about that.

I will be breeding giant radioactive cats; not because they are terribly practical, but because I would look good riding one.

[sabotabby]

The more efficient we get at extraction, the sooner we use it up.

[dobrovolets.livejournal.com]

Over the long term, of course. But the immediate effect is to increase the effective reserve. And that is all that markets, short-sighted systems of resource allocation that they are, care about.

[sabotabby]

Which is exactly the problem. Hardly anyone is thinking long-term. Not that it doesn't suit my purposes fine, when those purposes are complete collapse of the capitalist economic system, but still.

[dorightpapa.livejournal.com]

They say whore is the oldest profession, but I'd bet doomsayer outdates it by a fair piece. I don't think anybody even knows when they are facing hard facts, or just caving to their instictive need to feel outraged and alarmed. Either way, all anybody really knows is: our eventual doom is a foregone conclusion; the time and method of our demise is anybody's guess, and people have been guessing wrong since the beginning of humanity. But, for the betting pool, my money is the sun slowly cooking the atmosphere off the planet until it becomes unable to support life.

[sabotabby]

This isn't doom, so to speak. Merely massive change. I'm not so arrogant as to think that I can predict the end of the world.

But one can be a whorish doomsayer...