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Keep Your Eyes On The Prize: It's Always And Ever About Energy
Submitted by Chris Martenson via Peak Prosperity,
At the essential center of the framework of the Crash Course is the almost insultingly simple idea that endless growth on a finite planet is an impossibility.
It is so simple it could be worked out by a clever 4 year-old. And yet it must not be so simple because the main narrative of every economy in every corner of the globe rests on the idea of endless, infinite growth.
Various rationalizations and mental dodges are made in people’s minds to accommodate the principle of endless growth. Some avoid thinking of it all together. Some think that perhaps we will escape into space, and continue our growthful ways on some other yet-to-be named planet(s). Most simply assume that some new wondrous technology will arise that can allow us to avoid pesky limits.
Whatever the rationalization, none stand up well to simple math and cold logic.
At the very heart of endless growth lies the matter of energy. To grow forever requires infinite amounts of energy. Growth and energy are linked in a causal way.
If you want mountains to grow higher you need tectonic forces to push them there. If you want a child to grow taller, food energy is absolutely required. If you want more people building more houses, driving more cars, and wearing more clothes, you need energy, energy and more energy.
Perhaps because long-term thinking is not one of humanity’s greatest gifts, very few can appreciate just how we’ve fashioned an entire economy and related set of belief systems around fossil fuel energy that has only been with us for a scant few hundred years.
Even more importantly, because we are consuming a few percent more of it with every passing year, 75% of all fossil fuel energy has been consumed in just the past 50 years. And we’ve been burning coal and drilling for oil for well over 150 years…boy, those stadiums fill up quick towards the end, don’t they?
The mistake is to think that those past 50 years are just the new normal and the even bigger mistake is to overlook the central and essential role of fossil fuel energy in creating the world we see around us.
The Dissipating Organism
Forget everything we know about technology and oil and gas and coal and all the rest. Set that aside and step over into the role of being a dispassionate observer from another planet.
As you look upon all the life forms on earth and classify each according to it’s main role – predator, prey, scavenger, parasite, and so on – what role would you assign to humans?
To perform this classification you would observe, very carefully, the main activities of each species to see what they spent that majority of their time doing.
As you watch from a great height you’d notice humans moving about, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in a great flurry of activity. From a strictly biological and scientific perspective they seem to be doing one thing with the most focused and determined energy; they are taking concentrated forms of energy and naturally occurring elements and dispersing them at vastly less concentrated levels.
Humans may have other features and functions, but their primary one is 'dispersal agent.'
Oils and coal and natural gas are dispersed as waste heat. Silver is mined, refined further, and then lost atom by atom in various innumerable processes. Rich soils with thousands of years of carefully accumulated major and minor minerals are mined one crop at a time and then irrecoverably diluted into the seas.
Taken together, the main purpose of humans seems to be as dispersal agents as if Gaia and decided enough was enough and it needed a species to come along and widely scatter all these concentrated pockets of energy and minerals so that the process of concentration could begin anew.
As I view any of the hundreds of beautiful videos on Vimeo showing time-lapse traffic patterns from cities around the world, I cannot avoid seeing them as elegant expressions of a species seemingly intent on turning fossil fuels into waste heat an carbon dioxide as fast as they possibly can.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in every major city around the world, there are cars and trucks jamming the roads. There is no 'night-time' in this story when the world completely rests. One side takes a few hours off while the other side takes over.
Whether we call this progress or folly is merely an indication of which internal belief system we happen to have installed. Let’s pretend the value judgment is an irrelevant distraction to the main point. It doesn’t matter at all how we judge the situation.
The main point is that 80% of all human economic, political and cultural organization, specialization, and even collective biomass are simply expressions of energy consumption. Whether that’s folly or progress does not alter the fact that currently 7.2 billion humans exist in the arrangements they do because of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels provide 80% of all our current energy. That's a whopping high percentage and the hundreds of quadrillions of BTUs represented by that number will not be easily or cheaply replaced by any combination of alternative energies that we currently could deploy. In fact, there are exactly zero credible plans for completely replacing fossil fuels to be found anywhere in the world. Everybody has the same plan; continue obtaining the majority of their energy needs from fossil fuels while growing their economies.
That’s the plan and if it does not make you uncomfortable on some level, then I would gently suggest that some more time ought to be spent studying energy’s role in supporting life, and especially complex arrangements of life.
The Race
If there’s a dominant belief system installed across the developed world it is a faith in technology.
Some of that is very well placed faith. Technology has delivered incredible advances, efficiencies and understandings that just a few short decades ago would have been indistinguishable from magic.
We are making advances all the time, and for as long as we have a complex society that can support advanced technology we will continue making advances.
There are, however, a few keys to understanding how and when we have misplaced faith in technology.
One key point lost on many people is that technology cannot create energy. It can only transform it. Perhaps we’ll someday be surprised by a breakthrough in low energy nuclear reactions (LENR) or zero-point energy or some other fantastical breakthrough, but until then we have to go with what we know to be true.
Technology has not yet, ever, in the long history of humans, created energy. The laws of thermodynamics rule over us like gravity itself, always there exerting and imposing their all-encompassing embrace on every energy transaction.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed. Oil (concentrated) becomes waste heat (diffuse) + work (if harnessed).
So that’s the first limitation of technology….it cannot create the hundreds of quadrillions of BTUs of energy we currently extract and need from fossil fuels. It can help us use it more efficiently, find more of it, get it out more cheaply, and other fun things, but it does not create the energy.
The second key point is that technology is really only as useful as the culture is advanced. There are obvious signs that our cleverness with inventing technology exceeds our cultural maturity to use it wisely.
GPS is one of the greatest inventions ever, and I love it and use it constantly. I doubt I would visit twisty, uninuitively laid out Boston nearly as confidently or as often without GPS.
But it also allowed fishing trawlers to steam out 100 miles and drop their massive and destructive drag nets precisely 6 inches to the side of where they left off last week leaving no accidental hiding spots and fisheries were ruined.
That is, the technology allowed us to do things that we lacked the ability to self-regulate properly. It also has routinely had many more unanticipated consequences than we seemed to appreciate.
The first humans with concentrated radioactive substances were about as safe as monkeys with guns. We learned, but that came after the accidental deaths.
As I see it, nearly all of the difficulties we have with technology are due to the fact that we push technology into service before we really appreciate all of its pros and cons.
It has been said that most technology was designed to address the problems caused by prior technology, and there’s some truth to that.
I am often asked if I would be thrilled if humans did get their hands on unlimited clean energy, and I have to give an unequivocal ‘no’ at this point because it seems to me that we’d merely use it to continue on our present path of growth at any cost.
Maybe in the future once we have the cultural ability to self-regulate our seemingly insatiable desire for ‘more’ endless clean energy would be a fantastic thing. But right now we don’t even know how to slow down a fishery before it completely collapses, which is a trivial thing compared to managing to live in balance with entire ecosystems.
The race, then is between technological development, cultural advancement, and declining resources. Can we bring appropriate technologies on line fast enough to prevent the loss of the societal complexity required to support that same technology?
That is the question, and I’m not clear on the answer yet.
I do note that we have the capability to build light, high-mileage vehicles but we cling to the large, heavy and fuel inefficient vehicles in many parts of the world.
We have the capability to heat nearly all of our water using the sun but instead we typically use fossil fuels. Not because they are cheaper over any reasonable frame of time, but simply we don’t yet do it differently.
That is, we lack the cultural awareness and urgency that would mandate solar hot water heaters. We do this because we still have a narrative of technological prowess and the recent (and temporary) shale oil victory to comfort our core beliefs.
There are literally thousands of better technologies out there that make economic, energy and ecological sense but we don’t really use them except at the margins.
Faced with this observation the usual response is to say that ‘the market will take care of that’ implying both that the market is a rational place and that the market has enough time to work things out.
To my mind, neither assumption is correct.
The Looming Oil Crunch
The good news is that shale oil has bought us some time in the peak oil story, but the less good news is that it bought us no time in the Peak Cheap Oil story.
The best news for the Peak Oil story was an unprecedented decline in oil demand brought about by the twin conditions of too much debt and high oil prices. The loss of demand in Europe and the US handily outpaced the gains in US shale production and therefore was the larger contributor to balancing the supply/demand equation.
Again, we do not beat the allegedly dead horse of Peak Oil because we cannot let go of an idea, but because it remains just as vital today as when it was first described back in the 1990’s. Even more so because we have more data to work with and we are that many years closer to its eventual arrival. Adding to the urgency is the fact that no major government besides Sweden’s has even uttered the phrase ‘peak oil’ let alone begun to publicly plan for its eventual arrival.
There are a number of combining forces that will cause future oil price spikes.
The current price of oil at under $80 per barrel for Brent crude is insufficient to support any of the newest unconventional projects out there.
Ultra deepwater, tar sands and all but the very best sweet spots in the very best shale plays are uneconomic at current oil prices. The way we can detect that this is true is by the slashing of capital budgets in all the oil majors that are committed to these projects, something that began last February even when oil was some $30 per barrel higher.
With shale oil helping to contribute to today’s lower oil prices it has caused the cessation of development within countless other large and expensive oil projects.
While not immediate, the loss of these projects will certain constrain future oil supplies 2-3 years down the line.
For every single oil exporting country with the sole exception of Russia, what is also true is that their domestic demand is rising even as their production (in many cases) is falling.
Rising demand and falling production provide a double squeeze on exports which are, after all, the only thing that oil importing nations really care about. Who cares how much the world is producing? All that matters to an importer is how much is for sale, and at what price?
On the demand side, oil demand growth continues in the developing world and Asian countries. So much so that it’s possible to project a time in the future when China and India alone will import 100% of all available exported oil.
Obviously that won’t happen without some form of price war or shooting war, but it tells us something about the trajectory we are on. If it looks, feels and smells like there’s no serious planning for the future, then that’s probably the case.
Recently the International Energy Agency put these same sorts of dots together an issued a warning:
U.S. Shale Boom Masks Threats to World Oil Supply, IEA Says
Nov 1, 2014
The U.S. shale boom masks threats to global oil supply including Middle East turmoil, conflict in Ukraine and the difficulty of unconventional oil production beyond North America, the International Energy Agency said.
“The global energy system is in danger of falling short of the hopes and expectations placed upon it,” the IEA said today in its annual World Energy Outlook. “The short-term picture of a well-supplied oil market should not disguise the challenges that lie ahead as reliance grows on a relatively small number of producers.”
Global oil consumption will rise to 104 million barrels a day in 2040 from 90 million barrels a day in 2013, driven by demand for transport fuel and petrochemicals in developing countries, the report said.
To meet that growth and replace exhausted fields will require about $900 billion a year in investment by the 2030s as oil companies develop fields from Canada’s oil sands to the deep waters off Brazil, the IEA said.
(Source)
There’s a lot to unpack in those statements from the IEA, so let’s begin with the punchline...the IEA has only projected world demand for oil to grow from 90 million barrels per day (mbd) to 104 over the next 27 years.
That’s a rate of growth of just 0.5% per year!
Never in modern economic world history has there been a period of low oil growth of such length. Never. My prediction is that if we did only achieve that 0.5% rate of oil growth the world economy would be in a shambles long before 2040.
Economic growth requires energy, oil specifically and high net energy oil even more specifically.
This brings us to point number two. The IEA has projected that some $900 billion a year will be required to bring on enough incremental (expensive) oil to even achieve that paltry rate of 0.5% growth.
Let’s really look at that for a moment, shall we? If it’s going to take $900 billion to deliver what pencils out to an additional 483,000 barrels per day of oil growth, that means the yearly incremental new flow to the world will be 176 million barrels (= 365 * 483,000).
Hmmmm…but at $900 billion that means the world will effectively be investing $900 billion more but getting 176 million new barrels so those incremental barrels are costing some $5,100 each.
I know this is an odd way to look at it because in reality the $900 billion will be bringing vastly more oil to the table than the 176 M barrels, but existing oil is declining at the same time so the net oil to the world is going to cost a huge amount compared to historical efforts.
The bottom line here is that when the IEA casts about and looks at the reality of oil projects across the world they see that only a very heavy and sustained program of investment approaching one trillion dollars a year has any chance of (barely) offsetting existing declines.
And that new oil, excepting only whatever Iraq and Iran have left to bring to the party, is vastly more expensive than in times past.
Which brings us to the IEA's conclusion which is that shale oil is actually doing two things; driving the price of oil down below the price required for this massive investment program, and masking the supply issues by temporarily providing extra oil.
Emphasis on ‘temporary’ because the average shale field in the US peaks about ten years after the drilling begins in earnest and all US shale fields are currently projected to peak somewhere around 2020.
The risk the IEA sees is that shale oil, coupled to a generally weak global economy, could conspire to keep oil prices down below the new project threshold long enough to cause real trouble in the future.
My personal bottom line, though, is that the $900 billion yearly oil spent to achieve an underwhelming 0.5% yearly supply increase is not going to provide the necessary economic growth required to justify the mountains of debt already on the books, let alone expanding that pile robustly as the financial sector seems to need.
More subtly, but even more importantly, the new oil that $900 billion will bring is lower net energy oil, the sort that has far less surplus contained within it that the world can use to maintain its current complexity and order.
Think of current oil as having 100 arbitrary units of net energy stored within it that society can use however it wishes. Then imagine that the new oil only has 50 units of net energy in it. As we blend ever-increasing amounts of ‘50’ oil with ever-shrinking quantities of ‘100’ oil, the amount of net energy steadily sinks towards the ‘50’ mark.
One day people wake up and notice that they seem to be able to support less, accomplish less, and that fewer types of jobs that pay less are available. This is what we’d expect to see in a world of declining net energy.
Conclusion
If technology requires a complex society to build and maintain it, and our dreams and hopes are pinned on even more complex and useful technology in the future, but net energy from new oil plays is shrinking, then it might not be wise to pin all our hopes on technology. Perhaps there should be some other plans in the works too.
Given sufficient energy sources I am convinced that technology would simply continue to advance, and eventually our ability to live with and manage it would catch up to the technology.
But I imagine that process taking decades, centuries even, because cultures change slowly.
However, according to the best oil data available, we don’t have decades and centuries to fiddle about and hope.
The US shale plays are going to peak in 2020, give or take a year or two, and that’s practically tomorrow in the grand scheme of things. Other relentless declines in existing fields are continuing even as you read this.
24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And that process is speeding up, not slowing down, as the developed world joins the fray with stunning quickness.
A lot of things could go wrong with the IEA forecasts, and they’ll certainly get some things wrong. It’s the nature of the business.
Demand could be higher than 0.5% per year and so supplies will either fall short of investments or prices will need to go higher to support even higher spending on oil exploration and development. Future finds may be less robust than they imagine and therefore more expensive. Existing fields may decline faster or slower than they have modeled which will throw things off quite a bit.
But through all that uncertainty we can note the obvious trend; oil is getting harder to find and more expensive to produce.
And humans, being the dissipating agents we are, will continue to gobble up this magical substance with relentless focus every minute of every day until it is gone.
All of this is why I continue to regret the degree to which the western media has gone out of its way to portray the energy predicament as nothing more than a problem which can be easily addressed through a program of investment and being ever-more clever.
Instead I wish we could simply note that oil has no scalable substitutes, we support billions of people by growing food with it, and that every political, financial, portfolio, and institutional entity has the same underlying assumption; the next twenty years are going to be exactly like the past twenty years.
Somehow, magically, more oil will be there, it will be affordable, and nobody will have to make any adjustments to their main habits of spending more than they have, and consuming more next year than this year. We can just keep borrowing more than we earn forever, and therefore current stock and bond markets are reasonably priced.
To a scientist like myself, the energy story is everything. If you get that, you are armed with the information you need to understand the general direction of things.
The only thing we don’t know is what our respective cultures will choose to preserve as we are forced to jettison various unproductive habits and livelihoods.
As I wrote in a recent comment on the thread on millennials being broke:
As we slip down the energy cliff, we cannot know exactly what each culture will decide to jettison as 'unnecessary' activities. Some decided to cut down trees and erect giant stones right to the end. A different culture would have chosen some other activity.
The question to ask is, what are our equivalents of giant stones? What will *not* disappear as the green area shrinks?
My best guess is that we'll cling to technology as the last things to erect before we succumb to reality. Maybe that's just talking my own book, as they say on Wall Street, because that would imply the internet will be salvaged/preserved at any and every cost.
So that’s the question before us, what are our ‘giant stones?’ Answer that and you’ll know which jobs, investments, and products will be relatively secure and which won’t.
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They lied! Bush's wars for oil, Obama's wars for peace, and United Nations humanitarian help
http://investmentwatchblog.com/they-lied-bushs-wars-for-oil-obamas-wars-for-peace-and-united-nations-humanitairan-help/Bush has no stones, only rocks in his skull.
This is all pure bullshit anyway.
Check these out for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occurrence_of_thorium
Should last a lot longer than oil, and that's an understatement. Build some in Russia, it has the real estate for this. Get your ass to Mars. Expand human civilization far and beyond.
Thorium is a great idea but it's going to come far too late to be of any use in offsetting declines in oil production. They will be very lucky to have a 10MW thorium reactor up and running within 10 years, and probably more like 20.
True and I have 2 questions:
1st What is energy by definition?
2nd Are the other forms of energy behaving in the same ways as heat (thermo in thermodynamic means heat)?
The 1st question can't be answered by the mainstream science. Although the scientist will bring up a lot examples and if you press him/her the answer will be "you wouldn't be able understand the answer". The ugly truth is, the mainstream scientist don't know the answer either.
The "yes" answer on the 2nd question is an assumption from the mainstream scientists?
Well my answers on these questions are:
1st The energy is the difference between 2 aggregate states of the matter and we choosed one of them as our etalon. If you look closer to the definitions this definition fits perfectly.
2nd Is a strict no.
Well, they aren't in a hurry for some reason, that's for sure. It shouldn't take 10 years, a kid can build one:
http://www.ted.com/talks/taylor_wilson_yup_i_built_a_nuclear_fusion_reac...
It's of similar design as an LFTR.
We also know that the Bush family interests are buying water rights:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-new-water-barons-wall-street-mega-banks...
Oil is finite. Thank you Captain Obvious.
How much is there relative to the world's needs? The fact is you don't know.
"If there’s a dominant belief system installed across the developed world it is a faith in technology."
Technology took the west from 1815 to 2015. Technology is a good thing to believe in.
Peak oil freaks did not see natural gas, shale oil, efficient renewables or electric cars coming.
Why?
They are paid to argue for the status quo in a world where it's "advance or die."
In the meantime I'm going to go burn some $30 / barrel oil while you wring your wrists.
What entity wastes more, destroys more, and impedes more, while mistakenly considered to be above reproach? Government.
I would estimate that 30-50% of the world's economy, and the attendant fuel used, is consumed by government, while contributing little or nothing of positive value.
So where's the diatribe about endless growth of government?
You want academics to argue against big government (or big corporations)?
LOL.
well they do like to give the appearance of being unbiased and truthful, yes?
This article is spot on.
CERA can suhck it.
Why they keep coming to zerohedge, when all peak oil websites are dying or are already dead?
Ah...the old websites metric as baromoter of truth... love that one. By your truncated view nothing is more important than the Kardashians and nothing less important than peak oil.
It's a seemingly unassailable and foolproof method you have there.
Emphasis on fool, of course.
/science... how does it work?
Shales, tar sands... They are simply panic and desperation.
World oil production peaked in 2005. We're already on the downhill side. Recommend you pay attention.
It would be nice if he would skip the pedantic re-explanation of first year thermodynamics man. Also, a properly labelled graph you can actually read is a plus.
It's the best you can get from an MBA who calls himself a scientist.
Humans are not algae, asphyxiating in a pond after multiplying uncontrollably. Individuals are creative. Every individual has the ability to produce more than he consumes. If peaceful individuals were allowed to live and trade freely, rather than being coerced by the 1% of sociopaths, everyone could be wealthy on this planet. So-called "natural resources" were abundant during the stone age, yet humans were barely able to maintain themselves. Natural resources mean nothing without the creative mind of individual producers.
yet never a discussion about too many humans. 7.2 b and counting...
Population.. Milestones
You're wrong in that people cannot create more oil than they consume. And when that oil runs out, the physical energy required to turn creative ideas into real-world artifacts also goes. And then it's going to be back to pack animals and human labour to get things done.
"everyone could be wealthy"
Just about everyone in developed nations is wealthy, you twit. Give a person a low wage or a government stipend and they can afford most things in a supermarket or small grocery store.
Think of it a different way. If you can afford to feed yourself 3 meals a day and can spend the rest of the day as you will (working or bludging) you are wealthy.
Ok. So you are saying that it is perfectly normal to sell "expensive" oil (because it is harder to extract) below their breakeven price. Methinks that the demand is low because the net energy has decreased during these last years and is not creating sufficient economic activity to pay for it afterwards. We are just starting to see a downward spiral from here.
What would you think if you see someone selling caviar at 1 USD per kilo? You would think that this person is on the verge of bankruptcy. Unfortunately this is what is actually happening with marginal oil players. The only problem is that we don't need caviar to power our society, but we need desperately oil. But why would you rescue the fracking industry, if they are producing an oil so costly that you will never be able to pay for it? Why are you going to invest in an enterprise that is deemed to fail?
We will never drill the artic, because our society could not afford to pay for it. Oil will cost less in 2015 than in 2014. And it will also cost less in 2016 than in 2015. If you don't see the profound implications of this fact, I suggest you continuing watching the MSM media. Oil is not anymore elastic, because there is almost no cheap oil out there to add to the oil market. Suppliers will be unable to bring new production into the market after their coming default, because the price will never go up.
Bad news after the NFL playoffs please. Oh wait, after Valentine's Day. No wait.....
What bad news? Mother Earth will not miss humanity one bit after we, the pestilence and leaches have extinguished ourselves. Nature and Nature's God's universe will continue, miraculously well.
Our ego-maniacal self-centered meme of growth is fundamentally flawed.
The taxation upon Mother Earth is at it's very center, is too bloody many people.
As Carlin put it:
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/251836-we-re-so-self-important-everybody-s-going-to-save-something-now-save
One of the funniest reads ever ... Thanks
Here's another way of looking at it.
Can you name someone famous or powerful from 1 year ago? Easy.
" 10 years ago. Also easy.
" 100 years ago. No problem.
" 1,000 years ago. Legends and myths. There are some names of people and nations but we don't know very much about them for sure.
" 10,000 years ago. NOTHING. We don't even know what their nations called themselves.
In 10,000 years, everything you see around you will be gone. Everything. Not even the names of the nations will remain. It's worth taking a look at your place in that 10,000 years.
10k ? you too much gentle, we are not able to date egyptians pyramid but we can target a millions km away planet and land stuff on it....
go figure..
i stopped trying to undersand how from bad to marvelous humans can be, especially when you look at ferguson... somehow evolution stopped for some.
"somehow evolution stopped for some."
It just doesn't move at the same rate for all.
A while back I speculated that the genes and epigenetics needed to recreate most of our hominin ancestors were dispersed among the 'human' population of earth, waiting for genetic archaeologists to find them.
Tarzan. Tarzan was bigger than Jesus back then.
Spot on George...
Mother Earth doesn't give a rats ass either way ... It's just a ball of cooling iron, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, and nickel and last I heard they don't care.
Dumb matter don't care.
The only question is how much time is left for most of our civilization?
Just like the delusional belief in unlimited growth, we struggle to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom - all in vain. Back to the basics sheeple!
Peak cheap oil can be easily fixed too, by 50 million unemployed who are desperate for a pay cheque. You used to get $200,000 you say? We'll pay you $20,000 and you'll kiss our hand for it.
Prior to the crisis, there was a tension for investments in clean energy. For example, European Union set some goals for 2020, concerning the increasing penetration of renewable energy systems inside the energy mixture of the EU, combined with specific targets for the restriction of carbon emissions. Even Obama made some statements, that forms of clean energy could bring growth and jobs as a solution to the destruction by the crisis. All these things now appear to be left behind because the goal is only one: Unlimited growth at any cost.
Horseshit. This article may yet be the most concentrated form of it I have yet seen...
I read a number of comments on the Peak Prosperity Blog from this post and there was a variety of disagreement about the post's points. Your 'HS' comment seems to be the most passionate. Do you have arguments to support your position. I am very interested in pursuing a spirited dialog since I do believe that energy will drive most future geopolitics ... and that will shape almost everything that happens in the world.
A more in depth reply would be easier if I were at home, not on holiday and on my mobile. I do not disagree with the main sentiment of the article. Energy has and will continue to shape geopolitics for a long time to come.
Where I disagree with the author is that he firmly believes that technology, and our ability to manage it, will not keep pace with energy needs. We already have the technology to overcome the problems outlined in the article, and we refine them every day. What we lack is the will to implement them. Could it all end badly? Sure. But I tend to believe that as needs go unmet in the Western world there will be a large impetus placed on us to implement them. There will be hard times as we rush to cover the shortfall in what fossil fuels once covered , but we will, ultimately, prevail.
For posperity's sake Google pebble bed reactors... Recent advances in design make them 100% safe, hell, one design does away with the need for cooling entirely...
Here's one I bet the MSM hasn't shown you;
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/156393-cold-fusion-reactor-independen...
It is up and running, has been for two years now...
As I said, we do not lack the technology, we lack the will.
Too bad you'll need a $500 a month permit to own and run it for your own private residence.
The 'technology will save us from peak oil' meme ignores the fact that technology and energy are not the same thing. Technology typically can transform or release energy, but it costs energy to do so, it does not create it. Perhaps we could build millions of working pebble bed reactors: it is as technically possible (but also as practically unlikely) as moving fuel efficiency standards to 40mpg.
Rossi's work has been hammered pretty badly by some other folks that simply assert he's full of crap and the "independent" test was done by 3 researchers that he worked closely with for years, so not exactly independent. Its been a while....where's the product?
It sounded good on paper to me too.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/10/cold-fusion-science-which-is-not-scien...
you sound bullish..about electromagnetic waves, once we know how to harness them.
I have a dream and its all about converting the UV of photon to fluxable/stockable bubble gum energy running horse and buggies. Imagine the horse drops and recreates the top soil with its organic droppings and the cart pops a bubble of eletromagnetic gum to energise the robot-horse with a true bum full of goo.
Best of all worlds !
Getting more food per acre is now a problem and its not GMO that does it but pure renewal of top soil without the toxic oil, belching fracking crapolia. Think eco system efficient all based on UV convertible to gooey. Pure electro-organic cycle of which we be part as photosynthesis sensitive and UV guzzling homo sapiens in the nude.
There are plenty of acres for food - if USG would stop subsizidzing ethanol production.
and monsanto producing OGMs in South America.
THey are publishing Oil and Gas Magazines for South America?
Way to serve the shareholders!
Gardening and canning starting to look like a better vocation every day...
1 - Einstein showed that E = MC2, so mass is convertable to energy.
2 - Besides solar water heaters, solar electricity is coming dramatically down in price. Mass storage is also being developed (newer generation batteries, flywheel, and even a project I worked on as a supplier to pump air into a bladder under water and use the air to run a turbine.
3 - There have been dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency for vehicles over the last decades.
I don't want to come across as "Pollyanna-ish", but technology and the world has adapted and continues to adapt to increasing energy prices. Sure, the subarban sprawl created by very cheap energy is inefficient, but it is also on the decline. Gen Ys and Zs are showing a trend to preferring to live in urban centres, often without cars (or using car sharing).
That is not to say the increase in consumption of energy may not outpace the development of new sources, nor that the price of alternative sources will decline rapidly enough to match cheap(er) oil, but it certainly is not as gloomy as this article projects.
is that why we are droning and invading every "oily" terrorist
I forget the name but this outlook has already gained a couple of labels in the global energy debate. Batteries are only storage devices. We still need to generate one hell of a lot of energy to supplant oil and carbon based fuel. Unfortuately, we have waited way too long for a smooth transition with lots of sidetracks in lies, wars, paper terrorists, paper values and false flags . The behavior of most of the world's power shows us we will, as usual, be stupid, self detructive, and slow to correct things
hey, big dick, when you have from 50% to 90% WORLDWIDE POPULATION Living in cities like boemian lifestyle happy to eat slick baby ass apples shining in dark, where you find the energy to plant vegetables and bring em to vendors ?
cities = mass movement over needing = virus behavior = killing earth.
must purge, share land, grow veggies, all in LOCAL, no export.
you live in sand ? FUCK YOUUUUUU
Dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency???? Not on this planet.
Solar, wind and mass storage has much lower net energy output and not as easy to use as oil. It solves nothing.
The world is currently adapting by eroding the western middle classes. Massive loss of complexity is already in progress and this is occuring with still rising oil production!
Maybe not next year, but surely within a few decades (very likely much earlier) oil production will start to decline. That will result in mass complexity loss (widespread poverty).
1 - Einstein showed that E = MC2, so mass is convertable to energy.
2 - Besides solar water heaters, solar electricity is coming dramatically down in price. Mass storage is also being developed (newer generation batteries, flywheel, and even a project I worked on as a supplier to pump air into a bladder under water and use the air to run a turbine.
3 - There have been dramatic improvements in fuel efficiency for vehicles over the last decades.
I don't want to come across as "Pollyanna-ish", but technology and the world has adapted and continues to adapt to increasing energy prices. Sure, the subarban sprawl created by very cheap energy is inefficient, but it is also on the decline. Gen Ys and Zs are showing a trend to preferring to live in urban centres, often without cars (or using car sharing).
That is not to say the increase in consumption of energy may not outpace the development of new sources, nor that the price of alternative sources will decline rapidly enough to match cheap(er) oil, but it certainly is not as gloomy as this article projects.
Sustainability may rely on far more basic necessities such as top soil for food production and potable water. That is, if we do not blow ourselves up by war as world stress becomes unbearable to many.
I buy this line of thinking.
Finite fossils, EO/EI nose diving, eco imprint spiking.
Yes its the true conundrum more so than the financial one which is a bubble of frivolities that has led us to this deep hole.
As of 1979 we knew that peak fossil was looming and I stand by that personal belief. (Of course the oil majors can always play their games fabulating statistics, by playing between potential and recoverable reserves. We know what that did to Shell in 2005 : they lost their CEO for lying!)
Long hampster wheels.
Check this out:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-b...
Now whether TPTB let it fly is the real question.
Thorium. There may be a thousand years of nuclear fuel in the coal of Appalaichia, and it is abundantly available from other sources...
In New Jersey they don't know what to do with the thorium they have lying around after being removed by various industries and have actually resorted to mixing it in with cement and hiding this highly concentrated fuel source in highway construction projects!
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/next-generation/the-truth...
http://energyfromthorium.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium
"An added advantage 233U and 239Pu enjoy over all other fissile nuclei (except the naturally occurring 235U) is that they can be bred from the naturally-occurring quantity isotopes 232Th and 238U.[67][68][o]Additionally, 233U is easily detected, can be mixed with 238U to prevent direct use in nuclear weapons and limit nuclear proliferation, and has a higher neutron yield than 239Pu. Thorium fuels also result in a safer and better-performing reactor core[31] because thoria has a higher melting point, higher thermal conductivity, and lower coefficient of thermal expansion than the now-common fuel uranium dioxide (UO2): thoria also exhibits greater chemical stability and, unlike uranium dioxide, does not further oxidize.[69]
Transmutation in the thorium fuel cycle 230Th ? 231Th ? 232Th ? 233Th (White actinides: t½<27d) ? ? 231Pa ? 232Pa ? 233Pa ? 234Pa (Colored : t½>68y) ? ? ? ? 231U ? 232U ? 233U ? 234U ? 235U ? 236U ? 237U ? ? ? ? (Fission products with t½<90y or t½>200ky) 237NpA single neutron capture by 238U would produce transuranic waste, along with it fissile 239Pu, whereas six captures are generally necessary to do so from 232Th. 98–99% of thorium-cycle fuel nuclei would fission at either 233U or 235U, so fewer long-lived transuranics are produced. Because of this, thorium is a potentially attractive alternative to uranium in mixed oxide (MOX) fuels to minimize the generation of transuranics and maximize the destruction of plutonium.[70] The disadvantages of the thorium fuel cycle include the need to neutron irradiate and process natural 232Th before these advantages become real, and this requires more advanced technology than the presently used fuels based on uranium and plutonium; nevertheless, advances are being made in this technology. "
Sure - a reactor on every corner using up precious water and contaminating the earth with radiation. Sounds like my kind of world - not.
LFTR + FT and off we go.
'
'
'
Dude! I must have misplaced my Nuclear diploma.
You're a little over everyone's head here… But I got this.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
--------------------------------------------------
# Fuel Uranium fuel rods
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 250 tons raw uranium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
# Coolant Water
# Proliferation potential Medium
# Footprint 200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a low-density population zone
# Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor
-----------------------------------------------
# Fuel Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
# Fuel input per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
# Annual fuel cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
# Coolant Self-regulating
# Proliferation potential None
# Footprint 2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer zone
# Spent Uranium can be re-burned and rendered inert in a Thorium reactor.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘
‘
‘
‘
Thorium: Cheap, safe, clean power, forever. We’d be self-sufficient, ending our dependence on not only other’s oil but ours as well as virtually zero impact on the environment, stopping global warming, et cetera.
Watch this: (11 Minutes. Just do it. It'll change your view on energy.)
Car Runs For 100 Years Without Refueling - The Thorium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6wQP2qaaEk
2 Hours-Cheap,abundant & very safe nuclear power.....Thorium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLk46BZfEMs
Read to go, right now. The Chinese and Indians are way ahead of us.
Read up on it, and write yer congressman.
http://thorium1.com/thorium101/10-commandments.html
http://thorium1.com/thorium101/fuel-characteristics.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/04/liquid-fluoride-thorium-power-pros-c...
http://energyfromthorium.com/2012/12/30/energy-from-thorium-top-10-attri...
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/
http://energyfromthorium.com/
•?•
V-V
I stopped reading at "technology cannot create energy". Sure, captain obvious. The problem is not a lack of energy per se. It is a lack of cheap and convenient energy where oil serves as the best proxy. It is still more profitable to wage war and all kinds of economic and political pressure on oil producing coutries trying to keep the price low compared to switching and starting to use other forms of energy. Once this stops making economic sense we will switch to nuclear / wind / whatever. The options are out there. They just happen to be more expensive and cumbersome at the moment compared to oil.
no, idiot dumbass, you NOT CREATE ENERGY..... you convert it.
Yes - that was my point. We will adapt if and when we have to. But we should not bury our heads in the sand (!) in the mean time - and research is still continuing into alternative energy sources.
Energy is abundant. In lightning. In stars. In matter. In empty space. It's ONLY about technology unleashing it for practical use.
The further from the point of origin in distance and time the greater grows the complexity and any sense of control vanishes. It is the loss of that sense of control that brings up fear.
Keep it simple stupid. Don't concern yourself with others, future or past circumstances and concentrate on the only thing that you can change. YOU.
"Keep Your Eyes On The Prize: It's Always And Ever About Energy"
or perfecting its generation, again. So as Paul Harvey would say, "And now you know the rest of the story" of Noah's Arc
Genesis 6:9
And let’s not forget that at current prices, the cheapest and most profitable wells are spitting it all out at maximum speed and the more expensive once are slowing down.
And the cheaper once are the oldest once and will just deplete faster if this price is kept so low.
So the longer the price is low, the higher it will go in the future and the more brutal the spike will be.
And a 0,5% rise per year? How does that 15% increase per year on the Chinese side alone will fit in?
And India should not be put in the samd list with China, they mostly import LNG
"always and ever"
way more true and important than most people could ever imagine
and by the way .. the keystone pipeline is not about local, domestic, U.S. energy independence .. it is about cheap labor in chinese factories
unbelievable how far off the masses can be guided by the idiots and con-artists
r
https://enronnext101.wordpress.com/
I can buy solar cells for less than $1 a watt.
Of course, if I use one of the local "Solar" companies, they will want $20 a watt to install them. Except, I know what a screwdriver is.
Anglo ZIO back up weapon... United Nations Agenda 21....
The Planned Global Control of all Land, Assets, Resources and ‘Life’. Sustainability= to limit / kill off.
“Sustainable Madness”?
But but but ... Abiogenic oil !!! /sarc (for those who need it)
Not one word about the monopolies? I like how technologies are dismissed out of hand too.
We are standing on the shoulders of giants.
There is too much hubris.
The author is an idiot.
Deal with it.
"Giant stones" ......lol, I give this article five stars just for that remark. Putin has em. what about Obama ? There's gonna be some stones being erected . This article is phallic in tone.
Some day (in the not too distant future), currency will be indexed to Energy.
That would be Joules (energy) and Watts (power) for most of the planet.
Unless you're American. In which case you're still using the Imperial units of your former British masters: units like kCal, BTU or Horsepower. Units, which they themselves have dropped for the SI system of units.
BTW, these units won't change in the US until one of two key industries make the switch: the Aerospace or the Automotive industry. Probably the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_sKmTkNtZ8
Just so ya know. This could have been done twenty years ago.
Chris - there's no such thing as fossil fuels. For your credibility's sake you need to do some research on the origins of oil.
For those who think thorium, or solar, or wind, or cow farts are going to save us there is this road block:
Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/23/google-gives-up-on-green-tech-investment-initiative-rec/
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO2 emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren't guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or "technology" of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
More http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
its rather a moot issue because CO2 doesnt do exactly what climate "scientists" say it does anyhow.
We own the carbon cycle.
A lottery.
Biofuel made from the losers.
win/win.
They got lots of fatties in DC. Just sayin.
Energy is made out to be the center of civilization/growth and there goes a long spin. You can choose any concept like fiat money and go on a trip.
What is critical for the 99% is the next meal. All infrastructures and systems undergirding SURVIVAL are collapsing. What remains is the WILL to demolish the Preys and/or run far away from them. There lies the only chance to survive even if it means back to caves and rivers.
Assuming that existing infrastructures and systems can be mended for dreams to tackle the many lesser priorities like energy are fallacies.
"If it looks, feels and smells like there’s no serious planning for the future, then that’s probably the case."
In my opinion, there is plenty of planning for the future, however, those plans involve mass murdering the majority of the human population. After all, what have the ruling classes actually DONE during the 21st Century?
The spectacular kick-off was the inside job, false flag attack on 9/11/2001, in order to start the "War on Terror," as a self-fulfilling prophesy. That was done in order to have excuses for a series of genocidal wars abroad, as well as prepare to impose democidal martial law at home. Furthermore, 9/11 events became the excuses to justify the events that led to the 2008 financial crises, which were another inside job, which again succeeded in doing what those were covertly designed to do.
OF COURSE, there is plenty of human creativity. However, the primary applications of that are to get better at being dishonest and backing that up with violence. Those systems of organized lies operating robberies enable those who do that to constantly become even more wealthy, and so more political powerful, so that they can continue to succeed at doing that even more than before.
There are plenty of creative alternatives, which could be theoretically integrated into alternative systems. However, none of those can actually work without the death controls being the keystone to any such system of alternatives. BY DEFINITION, LIMITS TO GROWTH MEAN MORE INTENSIFIED DEATH CONTROLS. The actually established death controls operate through the maximum possible deceits, such as specatularly symbolized by 9/11.
There are infinite tunnels of deceits, which makes resolving any of the facts difficult, while coming up with any practical solutions practically impossible. That is demonstrated on Zero Hedge by the kinds of obnoxious and idiotic comments that articles like the one above provoke. On a superficial level, there is no doubt that contempory civilization is extremely dependent upon natural resources which were being strip-mined as fast as possible. As those natural resources were high-graded to hell, they were turning into garbage and pollution as fast as possible. The ways that happened were that the people who were the best at being dishonest, and backing that up with violence, were able to dominate civilization, and direct what was actually done. Everything that our civilization does is based on it being controlled by systems of organized lies operating robberies, or legalized lies, backed by legalized violence. THAT IS THE BASIC PATTERN FOUND EVERYWHERE ONE LOOKS!
In the 20th Centry, for instance, the single best plant on the planet for people, hemp for food, fiber, fun and medicine was completely criminalized on the basis of nothing but absurd huge lies, and those lies were backed up with violence for decade after decade. Thus, one of the potentially more sustainable industries was competely put out of business. Similarly, if one looks deeper into the history of alcohol prohibition, a similar pattern is present. Bullshit based arguments criminalized alcohol (enabled by ulterior motives of the rulings classes), and now bullshit based arguments are subsidizing alcohol. THE ONLY THING THAT IS CONSTANT IS THE CONTROL OF CIVILIZATION BY SYSTEMS OF LIES BACKED BY VIOLENCE, WHICH ENABLE THOSE DOING THAT TO BECOME MORE WEALTHY AND POWERFUL, AND SO, EVEN MORE ABLE TO DO MORE OF THAT!
The industrial revolution did not happen in any overall rationally objective way. It happened as driven by the history of deceitful warfare, and fraudulent finances that were supported by that deceitful war. Those are what is going to continue to happen as we reach the limits to growth on planet Earth. As we approach the problems of diminishing returns from being able to exponentially strip-mine the planet's natural resources, those problems will publically continue to mostly be deliberately denied and ignored. Covertly, the plans are being made to resolve those problems by driving conditions towards situations which will result in the majority of the human population being mass murdered.
The only genuinely possible better solutions would require better death controls, as the lynch pin holding together possible trains of integrated alternatives. Most of the lower levels of alternatives appear to be practically possible. However, none of the higher level alternative death controls appear to be remotely possible. Instead, the runaway systems based on society being criminal insane are the most likley actual ways that these problems will end up being resolved.
I repeat this quote:
http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/silent_weapons_quiet_wars.htm
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars
"… Energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of the sources and control of natural energy, and social science, theoretically expressed as economics, is the study of the sources and control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems: mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science. And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping. … In this structure, credit, presented as a pure element called “currency,” has the appearance of capital, but is in effect negative capital. Hence, it has the appearance of service, but is in fact, indebtedness or debt. … if balanced in no other way, will be balanced by the negation of population (war, genocide)… They must eventually resort to war to balance the account, because war ultimately is merely the act of destroying the creditor … War is therefore the balancing of the system by killing the true creditors (the public …)"
All of Chris Marterson's presentations that I am aware of have a grossly superficial view of the deeper levels of the ways that human civilizations operate as general energy system entropic pumps. The most important points are that the most labile components that control those sysetms are the people who are the best at being deceitful and backing that up with destruction. Therefore, the real path of least resistance for human civilization is the path of least morality. Hence, the future of the human species will probably continue to be controlled by the combinations of the matching bookends of the criminal insanities of the ruling classes, as well as the people that they rule over. What actually happens will be the result of that being controlled by systems of enforced frauds, that cause civilization to continue follow the path of least morality.
IN THAT CONTEXT, THERE ARE PLENTY OF PLANS FOR THE FUTURE, HOWEVER, MOST OF THOSE PREPARATIONS ARE FOR WAYS TO MASS MURDER THE MAJORITY OF THE HUMAN POPULATION.
MOREOVER, IF ONE IS SERIOUS OF THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM THAT ENDLESS EXPONENTIAL GROWTH IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE, THEN IT CONTINUES TO BE THAT THE DEATH CONTROLS MUST BE THE REAL RESOLUTIONS OF THAT SITUATION.
The deeper levels of our dilemmas are that our society is controlled by professional liars and immaculate hypocrites, operating the real death and debt controls through the maximum possible deceits and frauds, and that includes that all the publicly significant opposition groups operate inside of the same fundamentally fraudulent bullshit frame of reference. Therefore, an article like the one above correctly list the basic facts about the problems that we are facing. However, that article does not have the slightest shred of realistic attitudes towards the solutions, because it does not have any realistic view of how that situation really developed. Similarly, I find most of the comments upon that kind of article equally obnoxious, and rather, often more so!
I agreed with Martenson's statement that:
"I am often asked if I would be thrilled if humans did get their hands on unlimited clean energy, and I have to give an unequivocal ‘no’ at this point because it seems to me that we’d merely use it to continue on our present path of growth at any cost."
The underlying problem is that human civilization DO operate according to the laws of thermodynamics and information theory, however, those manifest through human beings as the principles and methods of organized crime. From a purely engineering point of view, any technologically miraculous energy generation, that could be scaled up, would still have the problem of waste heat, which would still make endless exponential growth impossible, because being able to get rid of waste is just as much of a problem as being able to access energy to entropically pump through.
Moreover, when one thinks more about general energy entropic pumping, it makes good sense that governments are the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals. Furthermore, on a deeper level it was always necessary that there had to be some death control systems. Those were selected by the history of warfare to become most successfully done through the maximum possible deceitfulness and treacheries. That then become the foundation for political economy controlled by the maximum possible financial frauds.
The essential problems are the same now, as they always were. However, those problems have been growing at an exponential rate, while the ability of that to continue to double and double is obviously reaching real limits on planet Earth. Therefore, the only genuinely better resolutions to our real problems are better death controls. Any theoretical possibilities of expanding through the solar system or beyond do NOT escape the basic problems, but rather, their artificial environments would intensify the need for better artificial selection systems. MOREOVER, the most serious obstacle in the way is that the actual death controls are being done through the maximum possible deceits, while includes BOTH the established systems, AND their controlled opposition.
The only ways that "we" have prepared for the limits to growth are that the ruling classes have covertly prepared to mass murder the majority of the population, while the people that they ruled over have adapted by developing attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards all the social facts that prove that is the case. The vast majority of the population has become Zombie Sheeple, who were being fleeced to exhaustion, while they were being set up to be slaughtered. Between the deceitful death controls, and the controlled opposition's utter bullshit that there should not be any death controls, the upshot continues to be that we are going to resolve our problems through Peak Insanities, as the most important expression of Peak Everything Else.
We are inside of the banksters' systems which have been making the puiblic "money" supply out of nothing as debts, in order to "pay" for strip-mining the planet's natural resources, in ways which were high-grading ourselves on an express trip to hell. As we reach the limits of diminishing returns from being able to continue to strip-mine the planet at an exponentially accelerating rate, the places that will show up first and foremost are in the fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems. Those systems of debt slavery have already generated numbers which have become debt insanities. Those are going to provoke death insanities.
The ruling classes made and maintained the systems of legalized lies backed by legalized violence that controlled the lives of the people that they ruled over. Together, they operated systems of lies backed by violence, enabling there to be ignorance and fear, and combined attitudes of evil deliberate ignorance towards everything that was not inside of those established systems of enforced frauds. Overall, ignorance is the source of suffering, and evil deliberate ignorance is going to be the greatest source of suffering. Therefore, the single most important feature of human civilization is that it operates according to the methods and principles of organized crime, which have driven that society as a whole to become criminally insane.
Currently, I do not believe that there is anything that can stop that from continuing to automatically get worse, faster. The only ways that the real situations could be improved is if and only if the basic systems of death controls that back up the debt controls could be changed in ways which would enable better integrated systems of alternatives. However, no such systems of alternatives are practically possible unless they have their alternative death controls at their central core, controlling everything else. Tragically, that achievement complelely contradicts thousands of years of human history based on the most successful death controls being done through the maximum possible deceits, which simultaneously included the development of controlled opposition groups that also operated within the same basic bullshit frame of reference.
Human beings' competitions with each other for natural resources has driven "us" overall to develop the most criminally insane madnesses possible. There are no good grounds to doubt that the ways we are actually going to deal with the limits to growth are by overshooting those wildly, and then collapsing into crazy chaos. That is especially the case because of the tango between the ruling classes specializing in being dishonest and violent, while those they rule over have adapted by becoming ignorant and afraid. The feedback roles of money through the political processes makes any better political resolutions of those problems practically impossible.
Combined, the real resolutions of the problems outlined by Martenson are going to be the mass murder of the majority of the human population. That will probably not be due to "Nature." nor to "God," but due to what some human beings do to other human beings. I REPEAT, THE ONLY REALISTICALLY POSSIBLE BETTER RESOLUTIONS REQUIRE BETTER DEATH CONTROLS. WITHOUT THOSE, THEN DEATH INSANITIES WILL BE THE WAYS THAT THE PROBLEMS OF DEBT INSANITIES ARE ACTUALLY DEALT WITH.
The basic problems behind the runaway debt insanities are that we operate fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems. Those did not happen by accident, but rather were deliberately made and maintained by the persistent application of the principles and methods of organized crime. IF there are going to be any better solutions, then those must be the manifestation of better organized crime. However, in my view the ruling classes have lost control over the systems that they originally made and maintained. I doubt that they will be finally able to success with their overall agenda, although I have little doubt that they will surely continue to implement that.
The basic mistake that Martenson, and most of the stupid comments posted above, made is to NOT appreciate deeper understandings of how and why human beings and human civilizations DO operate as energy system entropic pumps. Most of the comments perceive fragments of the ways that society is dominated by absurd lies, but then overgeneralize that to dismiss all the science as fraudulent, rather than more selectively perceiving which of the social stories were partially biased by fraudulent science. The reasons for that are that one has to flip around almost everything that one was taught regarding society, on level after level, while flying through the almost infinite tunnels of deceits that are the systems that actually control what civilization has really done, and is now doing, which is extremely difficult to do. It is easy to get hopelessly lost in the maze of lies, which are different at every level. Furthermore, different people tend to get lost in different ways, and so, go off on different tangents,
Since sufficient kinds of better understanding are practically impossible to imagine ever being embraced by enough people, in time to make any difference, we continue to rush towards the limits with attitudes of madness, where the criminally insane solutions are the most probable ones, namely, the mass murder of the majority of the human populations. INDEED, MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVE SERIOUSLY STUDIED THESE PROBLEMS FOR DECADES HAVE COME TO SOME SORTS OF SIMILAR CONCLUSIONS THAT IT IS ALREADY TOO LATE TO PREVENT THAT.
Personally, I continue to indulge in the irrational hopes that politics might be able to develop better death controls, rather than the runaway death insanities that we appear to be rushing towards at an exponentially accelerating rate. After all, I do not believe there are any fundamental dichotomies, but rather continue to regard militarism as the supreme ideology. Therefore, the primary questions in the foreseeable future, as the previous exponential growth overshoots, and collapses into chaos, are how to operate the murder systems that will emerge then ... I recommend that be done through greater use of information, enabling higher consciousness. However, what I expect will actually happen are much more tragicomic criminal insanities. Unfortunately, reading relatively naive articles by Martenson, and many of the obnoxious comments upon those articles, tends to confirm my view that we are headed towards debt insanities provoking death insanities, rather than any other more idealistic and optimistic scenarios.
an essential, fundamental perspective, without traction among the sociopaths, the distracted masses, and the superficial, controlled oppostions.
dup
Yea I know. Still we should try. Ideas can be very hard to stop.The solutions are out there. Its simply the will thats missing.
Then there is this:
THE PERFECT STORM (see p. 59 onwards)
The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel. http://ftalphaville.ft.com/files/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
If you read the full article you will see a very comprehensive explanation of how QE and Zirp and other policies are the tools being used to fight the impact of expensive oil.
The end of cheaply extractable oil is the disease ----- the financial crisis is the symptom --- QE ZIRP are the medicines (which will kill the patient)
My view is fiat and the games played with it are what drove oil prices so high. F T fuels could have fixed fuel costs across the field at around 60 per barrel. Also reducing trade imbalances. In short fiat and energies are economic WMDs. These monopolies control relative values of just about everything.
The petrodollar scam was set up to work in this way. If I am correct we will see the actual buying power of the usd tank in the next few months. Time will tell.
It's not completely correct, that "no major government [...] has even uttered the phrase ‘peak oil’ let alone begun to publicly plan for its eventual arrival." The Bundeswehr has not only uttered the phrase, but also plans for its arrival. You must excuse the fact, that I couldn't find an english version - I guess there ought to be one ... but hey, just use babelfish or something ...
http://peak-oil.com/download/Peak%20Oil.%20Sicherheitspolitische%20Impli...
(It's a pdf download)
We can't create energy?
E = mc2
Watch a video of an H-bomb explosion.
E=mc2 in action and here m (mass) is pretty small.
Luckily c = 3x10power8
c(squared) = 9x10power16
This is how stars work.
But on the downside, harnessing this energy with current technology is impossible.
That is still a TRANSFORMATION of energy, which is something like 10 billion times BIGGER than chemical energy.
I agree that the technologies of nuclear physics provide some theoretical alternatives which could be awesome. However, so far, none of the existing ones have been proven possible to scale up without there still being massive subsidization from oil to prop that up. Furthermore, the actual applications of atomic energy that were harnessed were always done in ways which were secondary to enabling the ruling classes from building more weapons.
I agree in abstract theory that the potential of atomic energy is ASTRONOMICAL. However, in practice, as a I detailed in my comment above, so far, since human societies are controlled by lies backed by violence, atomic energy has mainly made that system of deceits backed by destruction become 10 billion times more criminally insane. After one adds all of the other advances made in other sciences to that social situation, our problems are now trillions of times worse, headed towards becoming quadrillions of times worse, because all of that science and technology is applied through social pyramid systems based on backing up lies with violence.
The ONLY way that science and technology could actually assist overall, rather than drive society to become more and more criminally insane, is IF there could be enough progress made in political science so that we could operate the human death control systems better. So far, proposing that is laughable, since what actually exists is the MAD Money As Debt systems, backed up by the MAD Mutual Assured Destruction systems.
EVERY POSSIBLE ADVANCE IN ENERGY GENERATION HAS APPLICATIONS AS WEAPONS.
UNLESS "WE" DEVELOPED BETTER HUMAN MURDER SYSTEMS, THEN EVERY OTHER KIND OF ADVANCE, LIKE HARNESSING ATOMIC ENERGY, PRIMARILY MANIFESTS AS HUMAN CIVILIZATIONS BECOMING MORE CRIMINALLY INSANE.
To not be so criminally insane, "we" would have to be able to operate death controls in ways which were not most successful by being done through the maximum possible deceits. However, at the present time, the established systems are based on doing their death controls through the maximum possible deceits, while all their controlled opposition groups also stay within that same basically bullshit frame of reference.
At the present time, since it is practically impossible to have any rational public debates about the existing death controls, and so, how to operate those better, we are rushing towards the actual death controls becoming death insanities, in which context every kind of possible progress in science and technology finally ends up manifesting as even more amplified manifestations of criminal insanities. The current political realities, where the ruling classes use the methods of organized crime to control civilization, inside of which systems most of the people ruled over have adapted by accepting that kind of bullshit, there can not possibly be any saner resolutions of our problems.
In that context, further advancements in nuclear physics, to develop new energy transformation technologies, are surely possible, but would more certainly finally end up driving civilization as a whole to thereby become even more criminally insane. The only way to overcome that would be IF human beings could operate saner death controls. However, at the present time, that appears practically impossible, and therefore, MAD Mutual Assured Destruction is the only standing policy at the present time, which is being driven by the MAD Money As Debt systems towards self-destruction, since its dynamic equilibria are becoming more unstable everyday ...
Meanwhile China can't believe its luck.
Thank for the cheap gold, silver and oil.
bitxhes.
There's a thing in Nature called maximum information, the fastest speed you can perform a process, governed by the speed of information – a photon itself follows this rule and represents the best you can do at maximum information (transfer).
I’ll quickly explain the forces of information transfer, which you can ridicule, disprove or accept as you wish...
Information transfer of all strings passes to an information dimension – the information field (one or more hidden dimensions residing alongside our visible dimensions.) The information transfer creates an opposite force reaction with a direction and magnitude that depends on the moving string’s energy, momentum or mass, what other strings are influencing it nearby and the rate of change of information going on (heating, velocity, acceleration etc). It limits a free space photon to the speed of light, as the vector points at its destination, equal to the photon’s momentum (energy), therefore resisting any further increase above the speed of light. A string cannot therefore move faster, than the transfer of its necessary information to the information dimension. We feel this force each day as gravity, as our strings tell the Earth’s, what we are doing, via a vector opposite to the Earth’s centre of gravity. All the forces of nature can be explained by information transfer from quantum sizes to interstellar bodies – including acceleration, inertia and relativity theory. I would be interested to hear any counter-proofs of this theory. Please keep time and temperature arguments out, as these are both perceptive quantities and not real in Nature.
I'll now give you a few examples to explain maximum information...
A modern bullet is the best you can do in a small space, to create an explosive chemical reaction, because at string level, the interactions are working towards the speed of information. You might improve the chemistry a bit over the next 100 years, but only by a few percentage points - an example of maximum information.
The Sun is a hydrogen fusion reaction, burning at 2 million degrees C (perception only) and you won't find a hotter real temperature in nature – remember temperature and time are misnomers, but I won't go into these here. The Sun is an even better example than a bullet, using a fusion reaction running at just under the speed of light – a true example of maximum information for this process, working with molecular hydrogen, which is alot heavier than the so called massless photon.
Our bio-electrical brains are the best you can do in Nature, forget humanoid AI and Moore's law, the first is pure science fiction and always will be; the second was invalidated some years ago. Our brains process solutions at the fastest you can go. Good luck trying to improve it with electronics or even bio-electronics, you won't be able to. Nature designed our neural nets to evolve, to learn, be as fast and efficient as possible, and process continuous solutions, without overheating. There is also a theory that our brains are connected to the information dimension (the one described above), with some people better connected than others, giving us many ready-made ideas, experiences and thoughts – think of it as Nature’s database that everything is talking to and sometimes getting stuff from. Believe that or not, we are pretty much as good as intelligence gets in Nature, we will not meet alien life much more advanced, maybe a few percent better technologically, but they should have some better designs (of existing technology) than us.
So we are at or very close to, maximum technology – purely because Nature has limits everywhere, not just maximum information. With only a few, small percentage improvements possible, any 'new discoveries' will have been hidden years ago for military use, and revealed as 'technological breakthroughs', due to commercial necessity or opportunity. Pretty much everything worthy has already been invented, but there might be a very few bright spots, over the next decade or two.
That leaves us with design only as the major driver of technical progress, using established technology in different ways. Thankfully design is in theory a relatively endless process but still, only variations on a theme. I noticed however, that the jet engine and propeller designs are now reaching their design limits, so design also has a end date, particularly if commerically exploited for 50 years.
In summary, technology will not take us much further, but clever and thoughtful design can go on for a while yet, if there is the will to invest in solutions that benefit life and our planet.
Interesting comment, Rasputin.
I agreed with most of that, but not all. In particular, I was not so sure about "forget humanoid AI and Moore's law, the first is pure science fiction and always will be."
But nevertheless, I agreed with your conclusions that "clever and thoughtful design can go on for a while yet."
HOWEVER, I repeat my main point, made in my comments above, that the biggest problems for design science are better death control systems.
We have weapons which are trillions of times more powerful, but nothing has overcome those weapons being used through the maximum possible deceits, driving the purposes implemented by those weapons to always become more criminally insane.
Some of the deeper layers were how natural selection enabled the development of that to be internalized as human intelligence, which then enabled systems of human artificial selection. Better design science would require those systems of artificial selection to more adequately substitute and sufficiently replace the previous systems of natural selection, still respecting that those always operate within the context of natural selection pressures which are infinitely bigger.
The greatest problems with human artificial selection systems are that the history of warfare developed those to be done through the maximum possible deceits, upon which basis was constructed a political economy based on systems of enforced frauds. All of that was consistent with natural laws, but that was as deliberately denied and ignored within human cultures as was possible to do.
The corrections due to the accumulating errors that social success was based on deceits and frauds, which depended upon deliberately ignoring more radical truths, has run us out into the worst kind of evolutionary dead end, as far as human design science is concerned. Only radical paradigm shifts in militarism, to redesign the basic death control systems, is enough to cope with technologies becoming orders of magnitude more powerful. So far, nothing like that has come remotely close to happen. Instead, all of design science so far has ended up only being employed in order that some people could become better at being dishonest and violent towards other people.
Those social pyramid systems based on lies and violence WITHIN human civilizations no longer fit into the planetary scale, after science and technology has progressed as far as it already has, not to mention how much more those could progress, IF civilization continued to survive. The human limits which are due to society being controlled by lies backed by violence are the worst of all our problems, which make any other sufficient solutions practically impossible. Design science would have to develop better death controls, inside an overall better system of artificial selection, before any other progress in science and technology did not actually continue to default to making civilization overall even more criminally insane, and madly self-destructive.
It's time for today's game of SPOT THE FALLACY! See if you can spot the fallacy in this syllogism:
1. Economic growth requires energy.
2. Energy comes only from burnable carbon.
3. Burnable carbon is finite.
4. THEREFORE, economic growth is limited.
Extra points if you can remember the ancient Latin term for this fallacy.
yrbmergr:
Your over-simplified presentation is called a straw man argument.