Peak Oil Debate: Scary Stuff

[NewChief]

I just read the entirety of this article last night. This is pretty nutty stuff.

http://outside.away.com/outside/feat...ler-oil-1.html
[quote]
James Howard Kunstler
Oil Spiel
President Bush says Americans guzzle too much petroleum, and James Howard Kunstler would certainly agree. But the flamethrowing author of The Long Emergency—a wickedly entertaining and terrifying look into a future without cheap fuel—thinks the world isn't doing nearly enough to get ready, and nobody is safe from his wrath.

By John Galvin

"You're not going to run Walt Disney World and the interstate highway system on ethanol or hemp! Or biodiesel! Or hydrogen! Or solar power, or all of them together," booms the man at the podium in the conservative khaki suit. "That isn't going to happen!" he continues in a staccato blast of invective. "We are going to have to make other ar-range-ments for how we live!"

James Howard Kunstler, a stout, bald 57-year-old author from Saratoga Springs, New York, is in the throes of his modern-day hydrocarbon jeremiad. He's pacing. He's yelling. He's livid. And just in case you missed his point, he's jabbing his fingers downward to show the direction of things to come.

America, Kunstler argues, is about to become one fantastically miserable place. Why? Because our entire standard of living is propped up by cheap oil, and the days of cheap oil are over. "No combination of alternative fuels is going The Peak Oil Debate
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to allow us to run the United States the way we've been used to running it," he tells the Dallas crowd. And though tonight he'll resist calls to pinpoint when the nightmare will begin, he's told the online environmental magazine Grist.org that "we're going to be feeling the pain" in as little as three years, and suburban collapse might start in ten.

Sounds preposterous, on the face of it. But Kunstler bases his predictions on a geoeconomic concept called "peak oil" that is gaining credibility even within the petroleum industry. The theory holds that humankind has nearly, if not already, tapped 50 percent of the world's fossil-fuel reserves—the half that's highest in quality and easiest to pump out of the ground. Once we hit "peak," as the halfway mark is called, the global supply will decline and extraction costs and gas prices will skyrocket ($7 per gallon by 2010 is one ballpark figure that gets thrown around) while demand continues its inexorable climb. This doomsday scenario—along with what Kunstler calls the American propensity for "sleepwalking into the future"—is the basis for his hot-selling 2005 book The Long Emergency, now in its tenth printing.

Kunstler, meanwhile, has been on what might be called an "eve of destruction" speaking tour. Tonight's stop is Dallas's Southern Methodist University for an event called "The Unfolding Energy Crisis and Its Impact on Development Patterns." Even with a stultifying title like that one, the auditorium is packed.

Hanging on Kunstler's every caustic word are students, enviros, urban planners, and fans like Jeffrey Brown, 49, a native Texan and concerned independent oil producer who helped organize this peak-oil talk.

A clutch of buttoned-up oil-biz men sit in the front rows, among them the legendary tycoon-turned-hedge-fund-manager T. Boone Pickens, who invests in oil and gas futures and alternative-energy firms. Nearby are some execs from Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy, which, like Pickens's firm, kicked in $5,000 to SMU to help pay for the event. The petro-professionals mainly showed up to hear the first speaker in this doubleheader, leading oil-industry investment banker Matthew Simmons, whose book Twilight in the Desert concludes that Saudi crude is running out. Stockbrokers, lawyers, traders, and Herbert Hunt, of the famous Texas oil clan, are all on hand. Although, at the moment, they probably wish they weren't.

"We are going to have tremendous problems!" Kunstler is shouting. The crowd sits erect, at attention, looking somewhat wan. Without cheap crude, Kunstler declares, the earth can't support six billion people, and so a lot of us aren't going to make it. Modern-day agriculture, with its gas-guzzling infrastructure and natural-gas-based fertilizers, will collapse and be replaced by enraged waves of citizens forced into hardscrabble lives of subsistence farming. "The long emergency is going to make a new, large group of losers," says Kunstler, holding his fingers up in the shape of a capital L. "And they will be very angry about that!"

Suburbs—which Kunstler believes have turned Americans into depressed, overweight blobs—will become ghost towns once exorbitant gas prices make commuting unaffordable. Wave goodbye to the swingin' big-city life, too, Kunstler says—we'll survive only in small towns where we can grow our own food. Wal-Mart? Big-box stores? Doomed. And say ciao to the U.S. as we know it: While the nation battles China (and others) for access to the remaining oil overseas, the states back home could likely Balkanize into fractious mini-regions.

Nuclear power can't help—nobody wants a plant near them, and even if they did, it takes too many years to get one running. Fuel cells, biomass, whatever techno-fix you favor—nothing, says Kunstler, is ever going to be as plentiful, practical, and scalable as oil, and no amount of positive thinking and good ol' Yankee ingenuity can save us.

"History is merciless," he says, sounding like a Yale philosophy prof while he reloads the flamethrower. "History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!"

The crowd starts clapping—resoundingly. As if to concur, Yes, most absolutely, we are screwed!

"We have created thousands and thousands of places in America that aren't worth caring about," Kunstler continues, "and when we have enough of them, we're going to have a country that's not worth defending."

And if the audience was applauding before, now they're really putting some muscle into it. Even the oilmen join in.
[quote]

That's the first page. Click the link to read the rest.

[Iowanian]

I'll just hire a couple of Illegal aliens from the parade to pull me around in a rickshaw.

[jiveturkey]

Originally Posted by NewChief

I'm considering getting some kind of Vespa-type scooter for commuting and intown use.

I thought about that as well.

I figured that I could trade in my cock and balls.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by jidar

Peak Oil is a reality. The question is just how much it will affect us.
Oil is not renewable, these people arguing that are crackpots.

Oh they are? Gee that was said about people who said the earth was round too.
Dr Semmelweis who said washing hands prevented childbed fever was ridculed by his colleagues. Yet 100 years later was accepted practice. Meanwhile thousands more women died.

Think about...aren't fossils being continously created? The earth continues to age, crunching down more organic matter. It makes sense.

My best friends husband is a former oil industry exec from Australia. He is in this camp. That being said, he also claims that there is lot of oil in this earth to last for a very long tim...like more than 100 years.

[NewChief]

Originally Posted by Brock

Personally, living where you live, I'd go ahead and spend just a little more and get an enduro-type motorcycle. Street legal, yet good for getting out to the boonies.

Yeah, that would be cool. There are a ton of good places to ride around here as well.

[Eleazar]

I don't think anyone here is qualified to make a judgement on the state of the world's supply of oil, but I definitely don't think this oil price thing is all bad.

For one thing, it has helped adjust our bloated tastes as consumers. For the first time ever, people are thinking seriously about fuel economy. I know more and more people with 'work cars'. More of my friends are sharing rides when they are going to the same place. More of them are rethinking their SUVs.

I know that personally, my shortlist of next car possibilities won't contain anything like that.

It's not all bad. We needed something to correct the out of control waste. I don't like paying $15 more a tank than I was before, but it's not like we shouldn't have seen it coming.

[ROYC75]

The worlds oils supply is disappearing at an alarming rate, has for years.

We all need to do our parts to do what we can for our kids sake......

[el borracho]

This isn't new information:

http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/

[RealSNR]

No problem. I'll just join an amish colony

[jidar]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Oh they are? Gee that was said about people who said the earth was round too.
Dr Semmelweis who said washing hands prevented childbed fever was ridculed by his colleagues. Yet 100 years later was accepted practice. Meanwhile thousands more women died.

Think about...aren't fossils being continously created? The earth continues to age, crunching down more organic matter. It makes sense.

My best friends husband is a former oil industry exec from Australia. He is in this camp. That being said, he also claims that there is lot of oil in this earth to last for a very long tim...like more than 100 years.

Of course oil is being renewed. Very very slowly.

A little common sense is going to go a long way here.
The whole world is drilling for oil, there are thousands of oil fields. There are fields damned near everywhere, and many of these fields have been prospected for well over a century. Most of the ones that were in the continental US (yes we used to produce a lot of oil here, then we used it all up) are now dry. If the oil were renewing in any meaningful way, it would be common knowledge.
Now that's not to say there aren't places where it might be renewing very quickly, like say decades instead of millennia, after all we can make oil ourselves in machines using organic matter in a matter of weeks, but the keyword here is "meaningful". If it were refilling fast enough to matter on a large enough scale, everybody would already know it.

As it stands now we have a few fields out of thousands that seem to slowly replenish themselves, but at a much slower rate than they are pumped. Maybe oil is being made by an accelerated process in those fields, or maybe it's just some side pocket slowly filling in. Either way, there is very little reason to think oil is replenishing on a global scale.

[el borracho]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

I'm not sure I hang my hat on the Peak Oil theory anymore.
There is a recent book book out that says it's renewable as new fossils get created continuously. Nevertheless, when prices get too high....someone somewhere will create something that fulfills a need in the market. The rest is history. Don't forget there wasn't enough sperm whale oil to satisfy the 19th century, hence we go oil.

Are you high? There is a very specific set of geological circumstances and sequential events required for natural oil production which occurs very infrequently. Additionally,even when all of these circumstances and events occur, it takes virtually forever for the earth to produce oil naturally.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by BucEyedPea

Oh they are? Gee that was said about people who said the earth was round too.
Dr Semmelweis who said washing hands prevented childbed fever was ridculed by his colleagues. Yet 100 years later was accepted practice. Meanwhile thousands more women died.

Think about...aren't fossils being continously created? The earth continues to age, crunching down more organic matter. It makes sense.

My best friends husband is a former oil industry exec from Australia. He is in this camp. That being said, he also claims that there is lot of oil in this earth to last for a very long tim...like more than 100 years.

I haven't done much reading about the emerging school of thought about renewable oil so my question might be naive, but even if the earth continually produces the stuff by "crunching down more organic matter" can it possibly keep up with the rate at which we consume it? Maybe so, but that's an issue to consider.

On your last topic, I think it's likely that there is still a lot of oil to be discovered and exploited. I don't think anyone knows enough to say for sure, but OTOH, I don't think they know enough to know we are running out either.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by Cochise

For the first time ever, people are thinking seriously about fuel economy.

Or at least for the first time in 30 years, newbie.

[BucEyedPea]

Originally Posted by el borracho

Are you high? There is a very specific set of geological circumstances and sequential events required for natural oil production which occurs very infrequently. Additionally,even when all of these circumstances and events occur, it takes virtually forever for the earth to produce oil naturally.

No I'm not. But please note exactly what I said: "I am not sure....". What part of that sentence did you not understand?

I didn't say it was fact. But that theory is out there.I think you should google the idea, and locate the author for questioning.

Demand, as patteeu points out, may very likely far outstrip it.

Demand that cannot meet our needs, will simply be reflected in the price, which will lead to some cheaper alternative. No one can predict exactly how that will come to be...but I have faith in markets and believe it will. That's how we improve.

[Simplex3]

This reminds me about an article I read from a New York newspaper from the mid-1800s I believe. They were bemoaning the end of the world in NY City because in 100 years there was no way they'd be able to deal with all the horse poo. Looks like we found a solution to that one.

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by patteeu

Or at least for the first time in 30 years, newbie.

Alright, sorry, I'm not old enough to have been buying cars in the 1970s, gramps