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Gail Tverberg: This Is The Beginning Of The End For Oil Production
Submitted by Adam Taggart via Peak Prosperity,
With the recent collapse in the price of oil, Gail Tverberg, returns to discuss the likely impact on the US shale oil industry, as well as the global market for oil.
Gail is a professional actuary who applies classic risk assessment procedures to global resources: studying issues such as oil & natural gas depletion, water shortages, climate change, etc. These days, she writes at her website OurFiniteWorld.com.
While as an actuary, Gail is one to avoid hyperbole and the let the numbers speak, her analysis of the outlook for future oil production is nothing short of dire:
What we need is cheap energy. We need cheap, liquid oil. When it’s high-priced it really messes up the economy. We need oil to run our cars and to operate our trucks and such things, but it needs to be cheap. And it suddenly is today.
But, you have to be able to keep pulling it out at that same price. And the critical thing is, we can’t keep pulling it out at that price. What is going to happen, I’m afraid, is that once production goes down, we won’t be able to get it back up again.
There’s several reasons. One of them is that very low interest rates have been helping keep production up. Once you get your interest rates back up because there’s been a lot of failures, particularly in the shale industry, the costs will be higher. So, they can’t pump it out for the same price that they had it before. But, there’s also the issue that these old wells need to be produced continuously and they need continuous investment. If you cut that off, it’s going to be very hard to restart them. So, there will need to be an extra investment just to get it back online. Trying to do that becomes extremely difficult when the price is low. If it’s really an affordability issue, you've got a double hurdle then. Not only do you have to get the price up, but you have to get the price very high so you can get lots of investment dollars so you can kind of make up for lost time, besides everything else. As we know, it takes a long time to get new production online.I think, too, that it gets to be even worse than that, because financial institutions have sold derivatives based on the assumption that things can kind of go along as normal. So, you start seeing very strange motions in terms of the rise of the dollar, the fall of the dollar, and a variety of other things besides just these oil price changes. Over time, what you're going to get is a bunch of business failures. That’s going to come through these derivatives and it’s going to come through the financial system in a different way than just the oil price itself would. We have multiple impacts of these things, some of which are not obvious when you just first look at the story.Suppose you have a derivatives problem. If you have a derivatives problem and you have to go back against depositors, your depositors are things like companies that are making payroll payments. So, the big danger is that these payroll funds will be taken in this process of taking the money away to try to get enough money to fund the derivatives problem. Or, they might not be derivatives problems. They might be other kinds of problems that are putting banks under.
If you start taking the money from the oil companies that they were going to use to pay their employees or if you take the money from electricity companies that they were going to use to buy coal or that they were going to use to pay their employees, you have a very bad effect on the economy, which has nothing to do with the shape of the oil depletion curve.
As I said, the big issue I see is an affordability issue. I don't see oil prices bouncing back up again, or certainly not bouncing up very long, for very far. So, for oil production, this is basically the beginning of the end…what we're seeing is the beginning of Peak Oil, basically. The oil production will actually permanently turn down at this point because we will not be able to get it back up, and because of all the financial situations coming along.
Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Gail Tverberg (44m:20s)
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Listen, if people want to eat the oil will come out of the ground.
We are so far removed from the production of food few seem to realize that it is OIL since 1945 that has allowed the growth in population and the move to urban/suburban living and consumerism.
Oil = Food.
No oil = Billions starving.
Yes, it's that simple.
"once production goes down, it may never come back up"
Bullshit. many of these new shale plays are going to go bankrupt and shut down, causing a lot of pain. but all that oil will still be there, and eventually, once the price rises again, someone will go pump it out of the ground. personally, I will go long oil once it hits 25/barrel.
Cheap oil is the basis of American prosperity, let the good times roll.
the author is arguing, of course, for molten salt thorium reactors
Yup.
Oil production is at a high, oil prices are at a low due to the abundance of oil, and Zero Hedge features more peak oil nonsense.
Does Zero Hedge get paid to post this type of article?
Oh, I'm sure it's the end of the world this time ... undoubtedly ... has to be ... I mean ... the numbers and the other stuff ... and the planet is like, you know ... finite man ... so doom is upon us ... fer sure.
I can hear the big bass drums now........DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM......
Can we finally make a movie out of it...........oh, they already did and its called "The Never Ending Story".........ok........
DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DOOM......
I know this might sound odd ... but ... if you like the shit I post (for how many years now on ZH?) ... then please listen to gail. Go to HER site, book mark that shit, and start reading backwards.
ENERGY is the problem humanity has to solve. ECONOMICS are the forces by which humans will or will not produce energy. Come to grips with this and if you care for your (grand)children please get your head screwed on straight and plan ahead.
God bless.
Regards,
Cooter
P.S. If you don't like my posts, ignore my comment.
Cooter, see my main reply to ebworthen, that shows up way below, which also responds to your view.
Lies. Prices are down because USA/Saudi Arabia want to crush Putin. There is NO abundance of oil. Most of the easy-to-get oil has been pumped out long ago.
Here you go dumbass ... ease your pain a little.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-15/putin-destroyed-new-world-order...
Gail is just another "peak oil" bitter-ender.
The peak oil hoax has been exposed and the bitter reaction from the apologists is 'it's the end of the world'.
Nonsense. Like the Economist says "cheap oil is here to stay."
Gail sez: "We need oil to run our cars and to operate our trucks and such things."
This is a just a sample of her naive views.
The world is at the beginning a revolution in personal transportation: electric cars. In 10 years oil will no longer be a major factor in personal transportation anywhere in the world.
Finally, is the study of resource availability part of the course of study for actuaries?
Cheap oil is really bringing the yahoos out on ZH.
Look, you bet on oil and you lost.
Oil isn't going to rebound and save your bet.
And the attempts at schadenfreude are pathetic. The oil ship is going down by itself. The net effect for the main stream economy is positive.
Can't help but feel that the Tylers are on the losing side of this bet as well.
My question is why the word manipulation wasn't brought up once...Can you have a convesation with any asset class and not at least address that element?
Thorium tech is going to be owned by the Chinese due to their massive R&D investment in it. Their plan is no patents, competely open, with low cost clean energy for all. It's coming. This is one of the many long term structural reasons why oil and gas as energy based earners are doomed.
China will use thorium reactor to sythetically create oil and export them.
Well, with a power source it is posible to create hydrocarbons but a key question is what will this cost.
It can be done now but clearly the cost must be too high to be worthwhile even at $100+/barrel.
If thorium reactors can produce power cheaply enough then i guess it will work, but can they?
The Chinese expect to have their first test reactor in the 2020s, and by around 2035 their first ~100 Mw reactor. It will be 2050+ before there is a mass roll-out of Thorium/U-233 molten salt reactors reactors, if the first two stages are successful.
"Thorium tech is going to be owned by the Chinese due to their massive R&D investment in it"
Just like solar cell technology where they had massive R&D investments AND production capacity investments in it, right?
She's talking about a seneca cliff. The idea is, that as a particular resource gets harder and harder to extract, we have choices. We can either get by with less, or we can start pumping capital and resources into harvesting it. If we start pumping more capital and resources, we burn them up, and when there is no more capital, production plummets. She is saying that she thinks that there isn't enough capital left to restart production. $18 trillion in public debt and another ~$42 trillion in private debt says that she may be right.
I'm not buying it. There is more than one source of capital. i.e. what would stop a herd of Chinese billionaires from buying up some shale fields and extracting it?
That scenario is even more plausible if/when the dollar drops in value relative to other currencies due to the debt problem and the demented* "solution" that will be implemented to deal with that issue.
*registered trademark of .gov Inc.
I think you may be confusing printed money with capital. Those Chinese billions are printed money.
And, I might add, who is going to commit real capital at these interest rates?
At this point in the game, I wouldn't even lend YOUR money at anything less than 25%...plus some hefty collateral.
She leaves out technology, which makes it easier and cheaper to get out. Just 10 years ago shale oil was pure speculation. Some of the projects are definitely not profitable with oil under $50, but some are still profitable. With more knowledge and technology, the costs will be lower for the next oil boom. Until a cheaper, more viable source of energy comes along, we will continue to drill and mine for oil.
One thing many Zeroheads are, is totally ignorant when it comes to oil production, peak oil and energy issues. Wow. 10 years ago fracking was raging here in Colorado, though mostly for natural gas in western CO. Fracking's been around for decades. What wasn't around was any return on the investment required - sort of like right now. It's about diminishing returns, not just the oil in the ground, and those show up first in the financing of the sector.
One thing's for absolute certain, and that's this:
PEAK OILERS ARE DRIVEN MAD BY CHEAP OIL.
No, we're driven mad by head-in-the-sanders who loudly and ignorantly proclaim, "I told you so!"
Peak oil folks understand the reasons for "cheap" oil far more comprehensively than you do.
I have yet to hear a single peak oiler admit that oil use is driven by credit bubbles, and when the credit bubble finally pops, oil demand collapses right along with credit demand.
Wanna be my first?
I have yet to hear an explination as to why a lot of the frackers were issuing junk bonds when oil was $100/bbl that doesn't involve non-GAAP balance sheets. I also have yet to hear how they're going to roll that debt over now that yields from those junk bonds have more than doubled. I also have yet to hear how consumers can afford to pay a price that would justify that actual production.
thank you for very conscientiously and precisely illustrating my point. debt is demand brought forward in time. so credit bubbles are demand bubbles.
And since they had to go into debt to produce at $100/bbl, at sub $50/bbl, they will not be able to take on new debt to produce, meaning that oil production will go down. Kind of like it has peaked or something.
well done
...demand is credit-driven, as is the search for the ever-increasing quantities needed by a society WHICH IS DRIVEN BY DEMAND-BASED CREDIT. When the credit goes away, it takes demand with it.
I agree with you peak oilers, and even to some extent with the ever-present Malthusians among you, that exponential growth is not sustainable. But exponential growth itself is largely a by-product of the exponential nature of the interest-based fiat monetary system, which as we know requires constant exponential growth to stave off a collapse. Without exponential growth, there is no "money" available to pay off earlier debt. Martenson et al seem to ignore this, and focus on energy energy energy. EXPONENTIAL CREDIT GROWTH IS DRIVING EXPONENTIAL DEMAND FOR ENERGY.
Yes, we are consuming resources at an unsustainable exponentially-growing pace. But that pace itself is the thing I believe will, must, die with the popping of the credit bubble.
Will humans ever learn? No.
Coming from a peak oiler, you're right about demand, but you're missing the point. Demand and peak, although related (sort of) are two very different things. The very fact that we are fracking up a storm and drilling in the arctic where it is so difficult to do so, is because of peak oil. Peak oil isn't the end of oil, or even the decline of availability at the pump. It's when we can no longer pump more on a given day or year than we have been pumping at the pumping peak.
As far as your point about bubbles and demand, peak oilers have been talking about it at least since 2000, if not earlier. It's called 'bumping' and it is just that. Demand catches up with supply, or even exceeds it, then the economy tanks. Economy tanks, more oil is freed up. Rinse, lather, repeat.
not true at all, you really don't get it
Is technology free?
No? Then it adds to the cost.
If your statement was true, technology would never advance.
You are an idiot.
Dumbass, do you grasp what technology IS?
It is the enablement of the use of energy. Our technology has been the conversion of OIL joules into joules of other kinds...technology isn't magic that gives us something from nothing.
Your kind act like the oil age has meant less expenditure of energy because people don't have to carry shit. It's actually the opposite; we consume VASTLY more energy in this supposed "more efficient" and easier reality than we did when we lacked the technology that is supposed to be our savior from the very issues that technology has created.
STFU
Techology has already reduced cost of two year ago technology.
And this is the one ray of sunshine. It doesn't have to be oil.
I've been buying low on nuclear funds for a year or two now.
The identified shale reserves world wide are enoumous. Just look at Argentina, Israel, and Australia for a few examples.
We have experienced reasonable prosperity at $90 - $100.
Current surplus is less than 2,000,000 a day which will run off in maye 24 months. End of that oversupply will return to balanced market. that means that oil price will return to price necessary to produce the last barrell required. I don't know if that is $60 or $70 but it will be supplied from those shale reserves from somewhere.
The Saudi low cost producer can either try to control the price or the volumes. They cannot do both. The drilling response time is only a couple of months from rig on location to oil flowing into the pipeline. The US exploration companies exist to explore and produce. Those people will still be there to develop when the price is marginally high enough to make a profit.
The problem is that much of the world went into debt with $100 trying to live as if we had $20 oil. There has been little or no adjustment to higher priced oil. Just borrow more to make up the shortfalls.
To me, it doesn't matter why; whether the price of oil is up because the dollars are being hyperinflated away, or because it really costs five times as much to get the oil. All that matters is that the world does not seem to be adjusting to rising energy prices.
The world has lot's of oil ,Australia just found 1 trillion barrels , back in the mid 90's 1 trillion were capped in the Arctic , orinoco fields, Nireria (Boco haram do you really think the US corp give a fuck about a bunch of Africans getting killed by a psyco, no it's oil ) has huge amounts and so on , more than enough for the next hundred years at todays usage . This is all just bull shit.
No, it isn't bullshit. Australia has no trillion barrel reserves. There's enough to keep them happy off Papua NG, though its disputed territory, but its not a supergiant field. The last of those were found in the 1960's. Stop believing bullshit - time for that has passed.
How much is recoverable and at what price/barrel?
EROEI is a bitch. Shale/fracking uses a lot of energy as well as a lot of capital. Without cheap financing, it's going to be a lot harder to justify it.
LOL Australia LOL, one thing shale oil production must have and that is WATER and oops Australia doesn't have any
Sounds like she's confusing the economics of oil production with her husband on her wedding night.
The core of your thesis:
"Once the price rises again."
You presume this is nothing more than the same old boom and bust cycle. She says you're wrong, and so do I.
She is wrong.
If you believe that commodity industries don't have boom and bust cycles you are as big a fool as she is.
if you think oil is just like any other commodity....
Have you noticed our military adventures in the last decade?
Or perhaps the history of the middle east in the last 100 years
or how buildings now fall into their footprint
and we invade countries that have literally nothing to do with it
You think the politicians or their banker overloards actually understand this? I don't. They're even further removed from their food supply than the average mook on the street.
LOL!!
Enjoying reading all the comments by ZH'ers as much as the article. Comments give this reason or that reason for disagreeing, but what I hear is terror and panic.
And always enjoy the links to other sources provided by the ZH community. Thanks!
so true
but people will starve as well because oil is not just behind food, it's behind everything
We have a nuclear navy.
They eat just fine.
Fill the combine up with E-85...thing will run just fine.
Societies WITH oil starve actually.
Haha...wow...sheepsnshills here too.. Who woulda thunk it? E-85 huh? How much E-85 does it take to make E-85? You might find yourself cold and hungry if you crunch the numbers.
Take a look at New York City's natural gas consumption you moron.
THATS JUST TO PRODUCE ELECTRCITY!
I can still grow a corn cob and eat it...screw this financial b.s..
Actually it doesn't take any if you go E-100 and just keep the customers from drinking it, you would be fine.
ASnd you'll make this E100 using ... what? Natural gas? LOL
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wood for starters, then the most efficient fuel for the area.
How about corn cobs and stalks? My granddad was making moonshine using dried out cobs and stalks 70 years ago. I'm pretty sure if that crazy hillbilly could figure it out, some of us here can too...
This place is filling up with stupid monkeys...
You going to plant and harvest corn by hand to make moonshine to power your truck?
If it takes 12 barrels of moonshine to produce 10 barrels of moonshine, how much farmland do you need to make a living making moonshine?
Oh man.
You can't be serious. You think the "nuclear Navy" can function without diesel tenders, destroyers, petroleum lubricants, jet fuel, gasoline, and on and on and on?
You are wrong about demand's relation to supply. We decoupled from the formula the minte we invited fiat money and frational reserve lending into the economy. There are many people who do want to eat and who do starve, yet their desire alone isn't able to produce abundance of resources. Oil is extracted and distributed by institutions who don't give a rat's ass about the needs of general population. They only care about what's in it for them, and if they happen to improve someone else's life along the way, it is a mere fluke. If they could feed themselves without having to supply energy to others, it'd be so.
Lack of oil does not mean starvation. We would've abolished poverty in 1904 if it did. No such thing happened. You can have starvation and abundant oil at the very same time. It's a matter of control and distribution.
No, poverty is a requirement for capitalism, it has nothing to do with energy.
Poverty will always exist in a capitalist based system. It must. If we build more houses than are needed, everyone has a good house, the value of houses will drop to nothing and the suppliers will stop building houses until poverty appears again. In fact, we'll go as far as to bulldoze perfectly habitable houses to make damned sure that there is poverty.
We've seen this exact dynamic in action less than 10 years ago. Again. Nothing to do with energy. Capitalism requires that demand is never satisfied.
Food, on the other hand absolutely is dependent on energy. My neighbour uses 3 tractors to plough his fields, he sprays herbicides and pesticides all of which are produced using energy and he puts down fertilisers which were produced using the Haber-Bosch process, lots of natural gas required. Harvested with a combine harvester.
No oil means no ploughing, means no *cides and no fertilisers, no harvester and all that means much much lower yields which means much less food.
"Capitalism requires that demand is never satisfied."
The human condition fulfills that requirement, much to the chagrin of the socialists.
I agree completely, and to help prove your point... The USSR had an awful lot of oil and natgas, and an awful lot of empty shelves at the grocery store...
@ebworthen Correct. The oil will continue to come out of the ground.
The only question is at what price.
Billions Starving. LMFAO....The fucking ag sector will now go about attempting to grow MORE BUSHELS of corn, soybeans, and wheat TO MAKE UP FOR COLLAPSING GRAIN PRICES WHICH ARE DOWN 50% since 2013. Hell yeah....that'll lead to starvation....NO, it will lead to a glut of shit that will be produced AT A FUCKING LOSS until we go belly up. We're all fucked.....but in the short term...ain't no one gonna be starving. Trust me.
They do that because of the subsidies. Without ag subsidies food production would be much lower, and would have boom and bust cycles. It has been gov policy for a long time to subsidize food production so production will always be at maximum.
GT is an idiot. We have had oil at over $100 for 3 years and the only impact it had was icnrease the word length of Gail's stupid essays.
We will have oil $100, we will have it at $200 and maybe even $300 someday. Hopefully we will not have her nonsense.
She fails to even take into account that energy is jmore than oil. It is the cost of oil, coal and natural gas. Which BTW never went over the 2008 high in any year. Natural gas is still 75% below the 2008 highy. Coal is 50% below and oil is 65% below and yet she keeps getting mentrual cramps on this issue every 28 days.
You have to wonder who's paying these people to write these articles.
Yep, I read her stupid articles at oil drum. They all fit the same mold. Spew a few stats, then make sweeping conclusions that do not follow from the facts. Without fail, those conclusions are always end of world doomsday shit.
Gail has no understanding of money and economics, and she doesn't want to know. She just wants to spew doomsday rubbish.
It certainly sounds like someone with a carbon tax/global warming political agenda. I wouldn't be surprised if a Soros fund or similar ilk is paying for these articles.
No, her views seem to be that there is a massive collapse coming and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it or prepare for the aftermath.
Do you think at $300 per barrel we will be consuming 300 million barrels per day or 50 million barrels per day?
ebworthen, I agree with your simple point, but tend towards the conclusion that, therefore, there will be "billions starving," especially when one adds to the overall picture that contemporary forms of agriculture are basically forms of strip-mining. There are awesome losses of soil, and the life in the soil, which makes it way more difficult to deal with any climate changes. Overall, the maximization of short-term profits, inside of fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems, have dominated food production.
To put that in perspective, consider that the single best plant source of oil and protein to feed animals is hemp seeds. However, all cannabis cultivation was completely criminalized for decades, due to huge lies about "marijuana being almost as bad as murder." Although not so important when considered in isolation, that the cultivation of the single best plant on the planet for people was completely criminalized through systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, is the single simplest symbol, and the most extreme particular example, of all the other points which I will repeat below.
When one applies basic general energy system concepts to human civilization's energy systems, the result is that we can better understand how and why civilization is controlled by organized crime:
The most labile components are the most dishonest and violent people. The path of least resistance is the path of least morality.
Control over oil was achieved through warfare, whose success was based on deceits, which then resulted in control over oil through fundamentally fraudulent financial accounting systems.
Gail Tverberg is quite worthwhile reading, but she continues to presume too much upon Hanlon's Razor, as does Chris Martenson. The great irony I find with people who focus upon energy is that they tend to NOT consistently do that through thinking the same ways about how human energy systems really work. The most important point is that, when it comes to human debates about these issues, the real world has been controlled by systems of lies backed by violence for so long that all the dominate natural languages, and the dominant philosophy of science, are almost totally bullshit-based, and as backwards as they could possibly be!
There are going to be LOTS of wild oscillations, and counter-intuitive consequences, because society will continue being controlled by systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, whose results will become, overall, more and more criminally insane.
Recall that both pot prohibition, and alcohol prohibition before that, were classic examples of systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, which wiped out the possible competition to petroleum based industries, back at crucial times when that mattered. Nothing about the industrial revolution developed in some sublimely overall rational way. Rather is was all directed by the successes of organized crime dominating the political processes.
In my view, people like Gail Tverberg and Chris Martenson pay way too little attention to overarching ways that human energy systems are controlled by systems of lies backed by violence, and therefore, follow paths which are the paths of least morality. Furthermore, those few who begin to consider that still continue to not embrace it, because doing so requires facing the basic facts that money is measurement backed by murder, and that the most important central controls to human energy systems are their death control systems. The problematic paradoxes are EXTREME that the established civilization operates through the maximum possible deceits and frauds.
Various goofy comments posted regarding the article above appear to be disjointed fragments of the overall situation that I am discussing. Contemporary civilization is quite incapable of fully comprehending itself, due the long history of Neolithic Civilizations being social pyramid systems based on backing up lies with violence. Progress in science and technology, which understood energy systems better and better, in all other areas of science, which enabled significant technological applications, has NOT happened in political science, because of the ways that the death controls controlled everything else, and those had been developed to be most successfully done to the maximum possible deceits and treacheries, which simultaneously resulted in almost all opposition to those thereby established systems being controlled to stay within the same overall frame of reference, of those biggest bullies' bullshit world view.
Attempting to be more realistic about human civilizations as entropic pumps of energy flows has almost totally FAILED in the public fora, because when one does that, it is revealed that human civilizations operate according to the principles and methods of organized crime, and furthermore, must necessarily do so. People like Gail Tverberg and Chris Martenson skip stones across those ponds in elegant ways, however, their analyses tend to never look deeper, below the surface of those events.
Running into the limits of diminishing returns from being able to strip-mine the planet Earth's natural resources at an exponentially accelerating rate will FORCE human beings to develop radically different human and industrial ecologies, which MUST come to better terms with the natural ecologies. However, that will surely happen through phases of Peak Insanities, because there is practically no political ways to have any more rational public debates regarding the intellectual integration of understanding natural and industrial energy systems with human energy systems, because doing so MUST be based on facing the facts regarding how and why human civilizations operate according to the principles of organized crime, wherein the debt controls are backed by the death controls.
It is practically impossible to exaggerate the degree to which our society is dominated by the biggest bullies' bullshit world view, and therefore, everything is thought about in the most backward ways possible. Not only are governments the biggest form of organized crime, controlled by the best organized gangs of criminals, but also, that must necessarily be the situation. Meanwhile, those paradoxical problems are building and building, that civilization continues to be controlled by lies backed by violence, which are CONSISTENT with the ways that human civilization actually operates as a general energy system, while the ways that the vast majority of people think about that are as inverted as possible, since they have been brainwashed to believe in bullshit for generation after generation, and so, mostly want to continue to believe in that kind of bullshit.
When we run into the actual, relatively objective, limits of diminishing returns from being able to make "money" out of nothing as debts, to "pay" for extracting and consuming all the petroleum resources as fast as possible, we are actually running into the problems of some sort of transformation of the basic assemblage of the ways that human, industrial and natural ecologies were evolving, through social systems based on the maximum possible enforced frauds, which are headed towards psychotic breakdowns, because virtually nobody is willing and able to understand human systems themselves as general energy systems, because that necessarily requires what I outlined above, namely, the death controls are central to everything else, while those were developed to be most successfully done within societies through the maximum possible deceits about themselves.
Of course, people like Chris Martenson and Gail Tverberg discuss these problems in intriguing ways, because they face the relatively objective facts far more than most. (After all, mostly our society operates through denial of any facts that it does not like, and so kudos to those who at least try to think about those facts!) Meanwhile, most of the critical comments above seem to me to be based upon some sort of silly, fragmented perceptions of the degree to which society is being controlled by frauds, and therefore, one can not completely trust the "facts" to be relatively objective. However, in my view, virtually none of those critical comments above put together a more systematic package regarding that overall problem.
I have read and listened to LOTS of material from Gail Tverberg and Chris Martenson. Nowhere did I find any appropriate focus placed upon the deceitful death controls, nor the significance of the murder systems in having made and maintained the systems that exist now, and which will, more than anything, direct which sorts of future systems develop. By and large, since out society has become criminally insane, I expect us to resolve the problems of running into the real limits of diminishing returns from being able to "pay" for strip-mining the planet, with "money" made out of nothing, in the most criminally insane ways possible.
We are rushing faster and faster towards times of Peak Insanities, as the real results of running into the real limits of diminishing returns in all of the various human activities, which used to be able to strip-mine the planet at an exponentially accelerating rate. Theoretically, we could develop better integrated systems of human, industrial and natural ecologies. However, that would only be possible through different death controls at the core of that.
Tragically, the actual kinds of different death controls we are most likely to develop will be those which manifest death insanities, provoked by the runaway debt insanities. Since our political economy is fundamentally based on enforced frauds, which deliberately resist better scientific analysis of themselves as much as possible, everything that I have outlined above may well be more or less correct, but is still, nevertheless, mostly irrelevant.
The ruling classes are making covert plans to cope with these kinds of problems, while the people that they rule over have become mostly incompetent political idiots, that tend to not be aware of, nor worry about the sorts of problems discussed by people like Chris Martenson or Gail Tverberg. It would take a series of political miracles, requiring enough people to go through enough intellectual scientific revolutions, in order that human systems could truly understand themselves better as general energy systems. However, it is practically impossible for our current kinds of social pyramid systems to be able to do that regarding themselves, because neither the ruling classes, nor those that they rule over, want to do that!
In my view, most of the critical comments made above tend to be nothing more than disjointed fragments based on some level of understanding that society is controlled by systems of lies backed by violence, which never become more satisfactorily integrated and balanced regarding the ways and degrees to which they were doing that. But nevertheless, I still think that those kinds of comments are useful to consider, despite their tendencies towards being scattered fragments of insights, which otherwise are mostly mistaken.
The great, paradoxical loops are to go through better understand of the ways that, as Cooter's reply summarized: "ENERGY is the problem humanity has to solve. ECONOMICS are the forces by which humans will or will not produce energy."
I have attempted to sketch above the more profound problems with respect to doing that, which arise when one considers how human systems ACTUALLY operate as manifestations of general energy systems. The most important point I repeat, that human systems necessarily operate according to the principles and methods of organized crime, and that any realistic resolutions of the problems arising from running into the limits of diminishing returns from being able to strip-mine the planet's natural resources are primarily going to work through those methods of organized crime, in which the death controls are central to the everything else.
A more scientific society would have to operate more scientific death control systems, but that can NOT be done by merely getting better at being dishonest and backing those lies up with violence. Rather, that is the same old path towards psychotic situations, wherein there will be drastic death insanities, provoked by the runaway debt insanities. There are no genuinely better resolutions of these problems which are possible without a series of profound intellectual scientific revolutions, which apply to political science in general, and the combined money/murder systems in particular.
That continues to be acutely difficult to comprehend, due to the established systems being based on backing up lies with violence, while most of the few who perceive that continue to only perceive some isolated fragments of that overall problem. I promote the notions that we need creative synthesis of ancient mysticism with post-modernizing science, in order to take some steps toward perceiving that ENERGY IS SPIRIT. We also have to take another significant step towards perceiving that the history of science developed in ways which inverted the meaning of entropy, by inserting an arbitrary minus sign into the entropy equations in thermodynamics and information theory.
At the present time, we are thinking about the problems vis-à-vis ENERGY, ECONOMICS & ENVIRONMENT with the same basically mistaken dualities, false fundamental dichotomies, and related impossible ideals. We should be taking the principle of the conservation of energy more seriously, which requires using more unitary mechanisms to understand those situations.
OK, back to unitary mechanisms. When the human energy system was relatively small it was in balance with natural ecologies and whatever we stole from the environment was pumped back in seamlessly. Therefore the main driver of human societies was to increase the size of those groups as much as possible. The increase was slow, held in check by other energy systems such as disease or really bad weather. But as the numbers grew so did the robberies and the whole was chopped up into smaller and smaller pieces. So it was about this time that we figured out that we could enlarge our piece of the whole by murdering other humans? As a consequence we also figured out that increasing the size of our clan improved the odds of success in that endeavor? Surely it was right about then that it became obvious that those who had more children would be able to dominate their clan which was busily wiping out other clans. Thereabout deceits and spies found there value?
So is this when we started to embrace the logic of having big families and encouraging others in our clan to have many children? Is this the origin of the War Kings? Is this why religion gave us the bullshit story of "go forth and multiply"?
And multiply we did! Fast forward to the industrial revolution when science and technology advanced relatively rapidly yet we failed to let go of the "go forth and multiply" ideology because we never imagined the human energy system could ever take too much from the other energy systems. Everybody wanted to take a piece, the bigger the better! And having many children was seen as a positive, not a negative.
I mentioned a few weeks ago to PT ,on that thread about what if we didn't cut carbon emissions, about a movie called 'Children Of Men" and I've been thinking about that in the context of death controls. The premise of the futuristic film is that no child has been born for 18 years. I don't recall there being an explanation as to how this came about but I can easily see that it could have been a drastic measure employing a weapon of mass destruction by making humans infertile. The chaos of the society was palpable; it's quite obvious that there was no compensation to citizens and that life was rapidly returning to being short, nasty, and brutish. It's also not difficult to see that in all likelyhood some families could very well still be procreating. I mention this because it reminded me of Unitary Mechanisms.
If population was to suddenly stop rising, could that be classified as a death control? Would the deflating of the human energy system reverse the continuous subtraction and put us on a course towards reunifying or rebalancing energy systems thereby making things whole again? If so then doesn't it follow that we would have to be militant (militarism being the supreme ideology) in our approach, either by deploying a WMD as I described the movie above or by renegotiating the social contract in such a way as to get people to buy into the idea of not having children? That of course would mean having to talk about more radical truths and desist with the backing up lies with violence. Would this put us on the road to a Translithic Civilization?
I remember hearing about the 'one child policy' in China and how that seemed horrible and cruel. What if one had to choose between a 'no child policy' and WWIII or worse, the 6th mass extinction? At least the 'no child policy' could be quickly replaced with a 'low child policy'...
After reading RMs comment I wondered the same thing, i.e. how about birth control instead of death control?
Your reply was much more eloquent.
Any mention of same tends to lead to shouts of "evil eugenics". But it makes good sense and seems so much kinder.
Want to live on the dole? Okay, but no babies for you. Require long term/permanent birth control to keep getting money loaded on that little plastic card. Throw in a required child rearing education program for those that already have children.
Much better plan than penalizing children of impoverished parents that are already here. They had no say in it.
It would be nearly impossible without (quickly) developing a more scientific society but what I want to consider is if this can be developed to satisfy the requirements to be considered a "unitary mechanism". I find it a difficult concept to grasp. Here's how RM described it:
"The main thing I mean by unitary mechanisms is to approach everything as energy systems. There are NO fundamental dichotomies from the perspective of energy, because either there is some energy on both sides of a dichotomy, in which case it is NOT fundamental, or there is no energy on one side, in which case, it NOT a dichotomy. As I have written before in many places, the most important radical critique of the current understanding of general energy systems is that when the concept of entropy was developed in thermodynamics, and then extrapolated into information theory, an ABRITRARY MINUS SIGN was inserted into those entropy equations, so that the measurements of power and information would end up resulting in positive numbers, instead of negative numbers."
I see energy on both sides of the "no child policy" because having all the energy on one side means either "evil eugenics" from the top down biggest bullies approach or no buying in from the sheeple. I would think the Chinese policy proves that such policies are very difficult to enforce and would fail if attempted on a global scale. Expecting people to voluntarily forgo having children without good reasons and incentives on a global scale would fail as well. Therefore success would only be attainable if both sides are equally militant about the policy. So does having energy (power) on both sides of this dichotomy fit the definition of unitary mechanism?
The film 'Children Of Men' really makes you wonder. It could have been the result of an evil eugenics plan- the ones at the top of the social pyramid were terrified that overpopulation would lead to total destruction; it could have been the result of some unknown accidental environmental damage; but suppose for a moment that it came about because the people themselves became collectively terrified of having children. That's when one starts to really think about why we have children in the first place, obviously given that we now know what causes babies! Suppose the meme rapidly spread like a virus, where people abandoned their beliefs about bringing children into the world because they clearly understood their children would not have the kind of life we all want for our children today. Look at the chaotic world in the film.
The trick is to come up with a policy that gets everyone, rich and poor, to buy in to it. The policy could be The Mars Project that is missing when discussing The Venus Project?
Imagine
We agree on a lot here; especially the diminishing returns of modern human activity, strip-mining the planet, and the sociopaths (psychopaths) behind a lot of it. Cannabis is a sadly maligned plant.
The reason unitary systems won't happen is that the more "civilized" or educated are not having children anymore, and the great glut of hungry humanity will not likely adopt more enlightened thinking nor unitary systems.
When dealing with humanity one must always remember: "Monkey want banana".
Indeed, "Monkey want banana." However, now those monkeys are using electronic "money" to buy bananas!
I must agree that its seems VERY unlikely that "the great glut of hungry humanity will not likely adopt more enlightened thinking nor unitary systems."
The more probable outcomes are those which the ruling classes have been promoting more and more, which could be gleaned from this document:
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 …)
Both the replies of MEAN BUSINESS and plain jain above raised similar points, which tended to point in the same direction as your reply did ebworthen.
I agreed with both of their presentations of the nature of the problems, and therefore, why those problems appear so intractable, as well as why any superior resolutions seem to be practically impossible, because the default to death insanities is way easier ... since that merely requires more of the same attempts to continue "business as usual."
MEAN BUSINESS asked: "If population was to suddenly stop rising, could that be classified as a death control?"
Of course, by definition, the answer is "yes."
At ANY stage in the life cycle, different factors can kill, which factors are, by definition, "death controls."
plain jain asked: "How about birth control instead of death control?"
I point out that almost everything that we call "birth controls" are actually death controls. The language that use tends to make little biological sense, but rather, have very misleading and confusing "common sense." Preventing conceptions, or abortions, etc., "control birth." However, those are actually do that through forms of death controls, which are not properly perceived in the overall systems of artificial selection, for a wide variety of reasons.
As you pointed out, ebworthen, "birth control" technologies, overall tend to have resulted that that the richer and more educated people are thereby tending towards committing suicide, (by overall reproducing at less than replacement rates) while the poorer and less educated people are still reproducing at exponential rates, which is compounding our problems to make then even worse. Using overall averages are very misleading, compared to what happens if one looks at the demographic statistics more carefully.
Overall, the rich are reproducing at rates which are like collectively committing suicide, while the poor are reproducing at rates which effectively are declaring war on the rich. (While the richest of the rich are preparing to mass murder most of the world's human population, as their kinds of "solutions" to those problems.)
THE BASIC PROBLEM IS THAT NATURAL SELECTION ALWAYS EXISTED, AND DROVE THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN SYSTEMS OF ARTIFICIAL SELECTION, HOWEVER, THOSE DEVELOPED THROUGH THE HISTORY OF WARFARE AND ECONOMICS TO BE OPERATED THROUGH THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE DECEITS AND FRAUDS.
One might use the language that true birth controls are to select for what will be reproduced. In other words, to say "yes," and to back that up. While, real death controls are to say "no" and back that up, so that something dies, which things can be anything from eggs and sperm, to a fetus, on throughout every other phase in the life cycle. For instance, if pollution causes sterility, then that is a kind of death control. Or, if pollution causes things like the rates of autism diseases to continue to drastically increase, then that is another form of death controls ... There are a practically infinite number of different ways of perceiving and labeling these phenomena.
My basic point is that THEORETICALLY, we should attempt to understand human beings and human civilizations in as scientific of ways as possible, which requires profound paradigm shifts in everything, from the common sense ways that we think about time and space, to the common sense language that we use to talk about "birth controls," in ways which deny or deliberately ignore that most of those are actually death controls, when looked at from the perspective of biological science.
Ideally, we SHOULD develop better integrated human, industrial and natural ecologies. However, IN FACT, the real world is controlled by systems of lies, backed by violence, which are being amplified by science and technological to astronomical SIZES, in ways which are becoming criminally insane! After the development of weapons of mass destruction, we OUGHT to change our basic paradigms regarding militarism, which requires changing the ways that we think about the death control systems. However, the actual path we are on NOW is for the runaway debt insanities to provoke death insanities, because our civilization is dominated by the biggest bullies' bullshit social stories, in ways which make in practically impossible for most people to think about their real problems in any more realistic ways.
The biggest bullies' bullshit world view is practically overwhelming throughout the realms of the dominate natural languages, and dominate philosophy of science. Thus, the GREAT PARADOX that progress in physical and biological sciences continues to have nothing like that in political science, because of what sufficient paradigm shifts in political science would require, namely, understanding how and why civilizations operate according to the principles and methods of organized crime, in ways whereby the actual death controls got most successfully done through the maximum possible deceits.
I like to hope that as the death insanities manifest more and more in the foreseeable future, that then will force more people to think about that more deeply, and so, then, they will become more ready to go through paradigm shifts regarding their ideas and ideals about what death controls are, or should be. I like to day dream that I MIGHT be assisting with that transformation. However, there is practically no political reality to that WISH, since the actual politics continues to be almost totally dominated by the bullshit of various old-fashioned religions and ideologies, which tend to be most promoted by the people who are the most fanatical about that.
THEORETICALLY, after the develop of weapons of mass destruction we OUGHT to have negotiated better death control systems to be implemented. However, obviously, that has NOT happened. Instead, overall, civilization got more and more criminally insane!
"Monkey (still) want banana." Even though that has become electronic monkey money, buying bananas shipped from thousands of miles away, through globalized economic systems, whose established structured are ultimately backed up by apes with atomic bombs!
In that context, it is obviously mostly a waste of time to attempt to try to communicate political ideas to the vast majority of people, since "the great glut of hungry humanity will not likely adopt more enlightened thinking."
WE ARE STUCK INSIDE THE GROWING PARADOXES THAT PROGRESS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY HAS NOT STOPPED CIVILIZATION FROM BEING CONTROLLED BY BACKING UP LIES WITH VIOLENCE, BUT RATHER, MOSTLY MADE THAT EVEN WORSE!
One of the most typical features of the world today is awesome special effects, primarily employed to retell the same old stupid stories. For instance, the grand canyon chasm between television as a technological achievement, versus the typical content on television, illustrates the same point everywhere else! We DO have globalized electronic money, backed by atomic bombs, while at the same time, our politics is still mostly dominated by atavistic religions and ideologies!
Oil prices may very well go to the moon. I expect price volatility in oil once things start to break, and I expect it to wreak havoc on our economy.
With the economy deflating, prices don't have to go to the moon. If wages or the purchasing power of currency hit the floor, the effect will be exactly the same. We have both.
We've seen this script before. It happened with whale oil. What you saw was huge price spikes followed by demand destruction and a following price slump. The next cycle was another spike, a bit lower and further demand destruction as the part of the economy dependent on the whale oil was crushed by the price.
Problem with oil is everything is dependent on oil. Not everything was dependent on whale oil.
Whale population declined.
Identified shale oil and gas reserves have increased.
Why bother with whale oil? We've seen many boom/bust cylces in oil oil. In the 80s saudis did the same thing -- pumped out a glut in order to destroy the competion. Look at a price chart. Prices stayed low for a decade.
"it gets to be even worse than that, because financial institutions have sold derivatives based on the assumption that things can kind of go along as normal"
I wish it was just derivatives
Yep. That's what the Peak Oil deniers don't understand, it is not about how much oil is in the ground, it is about EROEI
I am familiar with Peak Oil what is EROEI.
Has it got something to do with Old McDonald - EIEIO?
Energy Returned On Energy Invested
You can start with the sun, he's free.
Solar panels and land are not. Have you ever priced a domestic photovoltaic or solar thermal system? A commercial one?
No, I would never consider making electricity from it, just heat your house and water with a smartly designed house or neighborhood and use the energy you would have used for better purposes.
passive solar (and great insulation) are indeed the best move. As most of the scientists point out, the age of oil was just a spec of time in human existence and we will soon leave the fantasy world of banked solar and return to current solar because...that's just how the world works
EROEI = every rich overlord earns ire
The problem with the whole arguement about Peak Oil is that it centers around how much oil does or does not exist and what can or cannot be produced. It should be about how much it costs to recover. Yes, there is alot out there, and there will be more if you can wait a long, long time...The key is to understand Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) Historicaly, Saudi Oil costs from $1-$2 per barrel to produce light, sweet crude, the most desireable and least costly oil to process, whereas Shale Oil comes in at about $100 per barrel including capital costs for heavy sour crude, which is very expensive to process. And don't forget the 1-5 barrels of fresh water needed for each barrel produced.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
"...the whole arguement about Peak Oil is that it centers around how much oil does or does not exist"
That can only be among people who don't understand what Peak Oil means. It's not about how much oil exists but about the cost of producing it. As you say, EROEI is key to that.
It is baffling how people don't get that concept. It's like saying "gold should be $10/oz because there's billions of tons of it in the asteroid belts."
All I remember clearly is that Fuckwad Jimmy Carter and the "shortage" in the 70's...you know, when we all starte dumping the big tailfinned beasts for those llittle fuckmobiles from Japan. lmao....Fuck Jimmy Carter....
And the lack of understanding doesn't only apply to oil EROEI. I've seen people peddling other sources of energy - so-called green energy - where the EROEI is negative. And there's the folks who claim that Peak Oil means "we're running out of oil". And finally there's the folks who think that P/O amounts to going up one side of Hubbert's Curve and down the other, whereas P/O is actually a bumpy plateau which we traverse before going down the other side. How long it takes to get to the other side depends on demand.
Where do you get your cost of production numbers? I am doubtful any Saudi well costs $1-2 to produce, more like $10 - $20 and shale depeding on where it is might be as low as $30 - 40. Cost of production includes total oil recovered and the more recovered, the lower the cost of production. However, not all wells produce oil as quickly as the shale wells. Stripper wells are probably still producing oil at $30-40/bbl all in but they keep pumping.
What does this statement mean?
sweet crude, the most desireable and least costly oil to process, whereas Shale Oil comes in at about $100 per barrel including capital costs for heavy sour crude, which is very expensive to process.
So are you suggesting that shale oil is heavy and sour? See, you clearly don't know what you are talking about. The shale oil from the Wolfcamp and Eagleford is over 50 API which is very light and it's generally very sweet as well. The Saudi oil is mostly heavy sour crude because their light sweet has been produced for years and is depleted substantially.
The peak oilers don't understand technological advances. Back in 1920, the first wave of peak oilers were claiming the world would run out of oil in 20 years. Here we are 90 years later producing more oil than ever before. Things like shale oil, oilsands, and deep sea drilling weren't even being dreamed about back then.
Technology is not a substitute for energy
technology can find new sources of energy and also improve both EI/EO ratio and Recoverable/potential ratio of fossil finds.
But its a finite world of fossil and we need to move to electromagnetic energy capture, storage and flux.
No, human ingenuity, teamwork and capital investment can find new sources of energy and improve efficiency. Technology is just more electronic doodads.
Its a question of scale and energy density, and so far, technology is a big fail. Not to say that a breakthrough can't happen, but so far, its a big jump from a beaker full of stuff in a lab to actual large scale production...
Give up. The techno-worshippers will never understand that technology is an energy sink and that without it, they have weird sculpture.
Technology has faciliated warfare too. You will never get a techno-worshipper admit that perhaps all of the death and misery spread through instruments of technology is so bad that iDoodads and gizmos are perhaps not worth it.
Wars can happen without technology. I haven't heard of wars for technology, or wars because of technology.
I can use technology materials to insulate or use more energy to make up for the loss.
That is substitution.
non-sequitur
Those all require much more investment to get less back.
Thorium.
Probably after I'm dead.
If you like your cheap oil, you can keep your cheap oil.
.
But, you have to be able to keep pulling it out at that same price. And the critical thing is, we can’t keep pulling it out at that price. What is going to happen, I’m afraid, is that once production goes down, we won’t be able to get it back up again.
that's what Michelle Obama said
A gallon of gas can do the work of one humans physical labor in a month. If you want to test this, put a gallon of gas in your car and drive straight away from your house. When you run out of gas push it home. At $500/gal there will still be buyers for gas.
But not you, or me.
While it is a good demonstration of the energy in gasoline, it also illustrates the immense waste. You move a ton-and-a-half of steel and plastic in order to move yourself. When the car runs out of gas, you find you made it 40 miles in 40 minutes. You ride a bicycle back and find it takes you 2 hours. So the total benefit that gallon of gas provided is that you were able to travel at triple speed on highway, and maybe double speed at best in a city, and you had the convenience of not having to sweat.
Basically what she is saying is that the financial economy which runs the world (think the ATMs that allow us to withdraw cash every day and to use our debit cards) will collapse without high priced assets and CRUDE...WHEREAS the real economy requires the oil to be CHEAP.
Impossible equation. Either the financial world collapses and our banking system and our salaries and pensions etc. get totally deflated or the real world is strangulated by the impossiblity of pricing real physical energy at costs which are too low for financial economy OR too high for real economy.
Energy conundrum killed the financial world. QED.
And the music on the TITanic has begun according to Gail T !
You have to build out an energy MATRIX...and NOT "an oil based economy."
Number one on that list is HYDROPOWER because water is the most valuable energy source there is. (Keeps things cool...has COOLANT properties.)
Next up is feedstock...that is natural gas and NOT oil. If I need to bring Dr Bunson Honeydew's "burner" to a boil...I need the natty. That allows me to "separate" or "crack" the compound into its constuent elements both safely and effectively. Third I'm going to need piping and "towers"...this allows me to produce very valuable product (kerosene, propane, lipids) in bulk.
And that's just for starters.
The oil matters, yes. But not nearly to the extent to which the refinery matters.
So oil tops out at well over a hundred bucks a barrel in DOLLARS while the natty collapses to TWO and people wonder why equities soar?
Don't even get me started on coal and nuclear power...
Gail does not talk about what SHOULD be but about what IS.
Oil and gas are linked and follow the same trend today as controlled by the same actors/protagonists who are at loggerheads.
We are where we are. I don't doubt we have to move to a new paradigm.
You preach to the choir.
Not to worry, the HNIC in the oval office has the Natural Gas conundrum nailed:
1) Open up the export spigot - the regulations are starting to come off already
2) Remove coal from the equation and replace with 'clean" natural gas
We'll see NG at $10+ within the decade.
How about $60-80 oil with gas prices around $2-3/gal? Efficient producers can make money and people can live with it. OPEC and other oil dependent countries will have to tighten their belts, but that's not our problem. Cheap oil is only required for an infinitely growing economy. The wrold's population is nearing peak and as a larger percentage of people are older, they will consume less energy.
How about 5% interest on a 6 month CD?
How about 25% on a 6 month payday loan?
That's 25% per month, right?
Seriosuly, I knew people that had a rolling $900 payday loan (they would pay it off and re-borrow every two weeks). Every two weeks they had to pay $1050 for that $900.
Wouldn't mind shagging that chick in the car though.
I could EASILY live without extravagant financialisation and a smart phone. I used a paper 'bank book' when a kid, I can report that it worked perfectly. So did everything else. About the only thing I can think of that was a major advance was indoor toilets, fridges and the automatic washing mashine.
I'd hardly call the collapse of all the rest of the disposable techno-crap the end of the world.
Damn, just finished mucking out the barn. Two Donkeys and 9 Alpacas can shit a storm, i kid u not! Id like to have 1000 gal storage of diesal for my tractor....maybe this summer....but the shit is free, consistant fetilizer, that keeps on coming. Crap! I grew cantelope in my plastic greenhouse ...and i live in north central Nova scotia.
Forget about oil...learn to feed yourself.
Can refine alcohol of course...
Temporary animal shelters. Lift, move 3 metres left, fix back down with ground anchors on a weekly basis. Only use the barn for storms and the like.
http://www.portablegaragedepot.com/index.cfm?catid=70
No mucking out. Put the fertliser exactly where you want it immediately.
What does Alpaca taste like?
If you ever smelled alpaca, the last thing on your mind would be how it tastes!
This leads me to believe you haven't met an alpaca in real life. They don't smell bad at all, a bit musty. Nothing like horses or pigs, and their crap doesn't smell at all, unless you let it pile for up for weeks and ferment.
You don't eat them though. They're cute, unlike sheep, intelligent, unlike sheep, and the fibre they produce is too valuable. Far superior to sheep wool.
At ~2000 dollars each you probably won't find out.
Actually they don't taste too good, they do eat alpaca in south america but there's a reason we eat lamb, beef, chicken and pork instead.
I have eaten alpaca in South America, it tastes like veal.
Very nice.
Oh shit, this ISN"T the preppars site??!!
You need to mosey on over to the Doom Stead Dinner and listen to one of RE Rants from Frost Bit Falls.....
His latest on the "Swissie Capituation!" was extremely entertaining....
http://www.doomsteaddiner.net/blog/2015/01/18/swissie-capitulation/
Not yet. Not by a long shot.
Obvious really....the 'preppars' don't bitch and complain as much as i noticed here .....and you'd hardly know there were jews running the world if you only looked at the P sites. I use ZH for the news (sic), but theres a lot of infantile shit to dig thru oftimes.
Look, there is a financial system sitting on top of the real economy. The real economy is a proven reality that has evolved over time. The financial system is a flash in the pan....it will fail because it was built on greed and sand. I DON"T CARE WHO IS BEHIND IT ALL, IT WON'T MATTER.
GRAB YOUR SOCKS AND BOHICA.
Farms of the 20th century are already being outmodded the same way non-mechanized farms were at the end of the 19th. Smaller, regional, drastically more efficient Aqua/Ponic farms are the future of agriculture. While they will still need oil for some fabricated components (plastics), they do not need massive sums of fuel, fertilizer, pesticide, or transport. The nice thing is that they are also difficult to scale, so besides the local component, we should expect much greater decentralization of the food supply. Agriculture is actually one area where I am optimstic for humanity--peak oil or otherwise.
Too Much Magic....... high probability of a high population decline before that works...
I'm not so sure about this Gail Tverberg:
1) AGW kolaid drinker
2) Over on oilprice.com she had an article where she claimed that peak oil = low prices.
Perhaps at some point that will be true, but not anytime in the near future. For peak oil = lowprices, there would have to be global depopulation on a massive scale first OR a massive reduction in standards of living.
"...she claimed that peak oil = low prices."
Anyone who says that doesn't understand Peak Oil.
P/O is the point at which maximum output (bpd) of cheap, easy oil is reached. After that oil becomes progressively more expensive until it eventually runs out.
So, do you expect oil production to INCREASE at these prices? Who is going to drill new wells if supply is 1 million barrels per day greater than demand?
That's right.
At these low prices, there are two downsides: (a) oil companies won't be investing much in new drilling and (b) consumption is encouraged to increase. Neither are good for medium term oil supplies and will simply speed up the moment when the world goes into decline of easy oil.
[I'm not an oil geologist but - apart from the politics - one other possible explanation why the Saudis may not be cutting production to match demand is because they can't. An oil well that's already peaked (eg: Ghawar?) has to be kept flowing to prevent damage to it and possible collapse. Other OPEC members won't reduce their share of the market by cutting production so we have them all bizarrely continuing to pump flat out into a market where demand is falling]
Sure, in the short term oil production can stay up or even rise. What about a year from now? Two years? Once enough people go bankrupt, production will fall and those remaining will make more money per barrel.