This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.
It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico! [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…
I’m of the school that global oil production has peaked, or will peak within a few years. But I’m a peaknik, not a doomer. I foresee hardship in the transition, but I doubt society will collapse as energy gets scarcer. Communities are as likely to dissolve into lone-wolf survivalism, as whales are likely to revert to single-cell organisms. Indeed, there are so many advantages to community that if all social bonds were to suddenly break, people would immediately start self-organizing into new groups and tribes.
It seems Matt Simmons has updated his presentations list. Always worth a quick scan.
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The Times (London, not New York) had a nice little piece on a successful endeavour to genetically engineer bacteria to excrete oil, instead of the regular fatty acids they usually produce.
It’s nice stuff, but unfortunately won’t — can’t — be brought online fast enough to make up for supply shortfalls. They can make 1 barrel per week, per 1000 Litre process vessel.
In order to make 1,000 barrels a day (world demand is 85 million barrels) that would 7,000,000 Litres of process vessel volume. Scaling up to a million barrels would involve seven billion litres — probably all of it, freshwater.
That’s about two thousand Olympic sized swimming pools. Factoring in the need to bring the food to the bugs, and I have difficulty seeing this technology being readily scaleable, the way that wind and especially solar are.
All the same, very cool indeed…
John Robb of Global Guerrillas just wrote a piece for The Oil Drum, which serves as an excellent introduction to the themes he discusses in his blog.
Basically, because of peak oil, there’s little or no excess oil production capacity. Which means a supply disruption — any supply disruption — has worldwide effects. Which means that a very small group of militants / vandals / saboteurs can punch way above its weight, in geopolitical terms. In his words, super-empowerment.
Furthermore, since these groups often sell oil on the side (as a means of self-financing) disrupting oil supplies to raise prices is a matter of entrepreneurial self-interest. It drains the state of its oil revenues, while it increases the guerrilla group’s own earnings.
In a worst-case scenario, like an entrenched super-Mafia, the guerrilla group can maintain effective control over an area. The case of northern Mexico, pitting relatively-underfinanced government forces against richly-financed drug gangs, would be a close-to-home example.
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This suggests that peak oil is facilitating the erosion of the nation-state’s monopoly-of-authority — one of its two defining characteristics (along with territoriality) as per the Westphalian model.
I’m not sure what the full implications are, but it seems peak oil will accelerate the pace at which we find out…
I’ve been a near-daily reader (and nearly-never commenter) of The Oil Drum since 2005*. Simply put, it’s the premiere site for learning about energy issues, with a daily news round-up and many dedicated, thoughtful, and very-well-informed contributors, many of them from the fossil fuels industry.
One of the most important insights I’ve gained from the site is Jeffrey Brown’s Export Land Model, which posits that world oil exports will fall faster than overall world production. He first published it in January ‘06; I couldn’t find the original article, but these two links go over the issue nicely; the latter is quite timely, too.
To elaborate a little, as oil prices rise, economic expansion in oil-exporting countries means they’ll consume more of their own oil, leaving less for export. Even if demand from oil-importing countries merely stays steady, the same amount of money will be chasing a smaller amount of oil. Causing upward pressure on prices on the open market.
As an “early adopter” of the theory, it’s been nice to see the Export Land Model starting to get attention… and from the investor community, no less. See here and here.
So far, I don’t know of any celebrated newspaper opinionists penning / typing columns about it, so the ELM probably hasn’t yet hit the tipping point…
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Back then, before Katrina, when the price of oil was in the US$50 a barrel range, and The Oil Drum was still hosted by blogspot.
From The Independent, a report on how — by necessity — the city of Juneau, Alaska (pop 30,000) reduced its energy consumption 30% within a month.
The article also references the fact that in 2001, Brazil (population 180,000,000) cut its electric consumption 20% within two months.
This is why I part opinions with some peak oil pessimists about how society will revert to anarchic barbarism* in the (imminent) post-peak years. I think communities are a lot more adaptable to hardship than pessimists give them credit for.
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*incidentally, the term barbarian has a cool etymology; I learned it — wow, fifteen years ago — from a Classical Studies professor. In James Robinson’s latest book, he notes that the naming system of the Middle East could have played a role as well: bar is a patronym in Aramaic, and is sometimes used in Jewish names (though “ben” is more frequent). Thus in the Christian New Testament, one finds characters such as Bartimaeus or Barabbas. (More about Barabbas, another time…)
Robinson suggested that Greeks dealing with Aramaic peoples would’ve remarked at how often they said bar-this and bar-that during introductions and decided to call them “bar-bar-ians”. No word whether Aramaics called the Greeks “son-of-son-of-ians”. Regrettably, like a number of Robinson’s arguments in this particular volume, it seemed a bit weak. From this reasonably widely-read unaffiliated non-expert’s perspective, Goulder’s lectionary theory seems stronger, by virtue of its elegant simplicity.