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during this severe global recession, worldwide oil usage has dropped by a minuscule 2.7%. So, what will happen when the world comes out of this recession?

http://www.financialsense.com/editorial ... /0826.html

Vortex wrote:

during this severe global recession, worldwide oil usage has dropped by a minuscule 2.7%. So, what will happen when the world comes out of this recession?

http://www.financialsense.com/editorial ... /0826.html

I've already had words with this guy.
He discounts entirely the possibility of developed nations restraining demand. He discounts entirely any efficiency and conservation measures.

He claims the huge new fields in Brasil and additional capacity in Iraq would have no effect whatsoever on a proposed 4% decline rate.

He also discounts entirely the ability of much of the population to substitute out waste (such as commuting trips by car for commuting trips by the bus or train).

He also claims electrified transport is meaningless because (in his words) "electricity is an energy carrier not an energy source".
Discounting of course that most electricity is NOT made from oil and we have room to expand AND that electric transport is 4X as effective as oil based internal combustion engines (and rail even more so compared to trucks).

In short he has simply read from the dieoff bible and extrapolated from there.

I give the guy an F.

5th, I'm confused: you've legged it to some foreign land and yet you seem to discount the effects of PO.

Do you expect PO to be just one component of a major collapse?

Vortex wrote:5th, I'm confused: you've legged it to some foreign land and yet you seem to discount the effects of PO.

Do you expect PO to be just one component of a major collapse?

No mate, I expect PO's effects to be unevenly distributed.
I reckon the UK is in worse shape than several others and it will be for the forseeable future.
I reckon a recovery will have to come from the other places in better shape because the UK will be unable to do so on it's own.

Yep, spot on.

Many seem to think that PO is a global leveller ... but, no, some countries are more stuffed than others, for all sorts of reasons.

fifthcolumn wrote:I reckon a recovery will have to come from the other places in better shape because the UK will be unable to do so on it's own.

But what is a 'recovery' and do we really want one?

biffvernon wrote:

fifthcolumn wrote:I reckon a recovery will have to come from the other places in better shape because the UK will be unable to do so on it's own.

But what is a 'recovery' and do we really want one?

Is your "we" my "we" and does your "we" speak for everyone?

fifthcolumn wrote: Is your "we" my "we" ?

That depends if your "we" is really a "we" and not an "I".

biffvernon wrote:

fifthcolumn wrote: Is your "we" my "we" ?

That depends if your "we" is really a "we" and not an "I".

Right back at you.
The beliefs of the people on this site are anything but mainstream.
You *don't* speak for everyone.

fifthcolumn wrote: He claims the huge new fields in Brasil and additional capacity in Iraq would have no effect whatsoever on a proposed 4% decline rate.

I'd like to know where? The last I read all these "huge" fields are just puddles. Tupi - 8bbls. etc., etc. Do the maths - that's 3 months of global supply. They are also rapidly running into the territory of the fact that really huge deposits might be there but we are at the limit of the materials available to us to get at it. If we cannot physically produce the rigs capable of handling those depths and pressures it doesn't matter if there's 1000trillion barrels down there - might as well be on the moon.

fifthcolumn wrote: He also discounts entirely the ability of much of the population to substitute out waste (such as commuting trips by car for commuting trips by the bus or train).

Agree with you on that one. There is much that can be done to cut out waste.

fifthcolumn wrote: He also claims electrified transport is meaningless because (in his words) "electricity is an energy carrier not an energy source".
Discounting of course that most electricity is NOT made from oil and we have room to expand AND that electric transport is 4X as effective as oil based internal combustion engines (and rail even more so compared to trucks).

Ah yes but. All the stuff that mines the stuff and delivers it to where it produces electricity runs on? And all the stuff that makes the stuff that moves the stuff to make electricity runs on? And so on. I don't think we know nearly enough about the total embedded costs right across the board as far as the extent to which the input to ALL alternate energy sources is oil based.

Not having a go - just up for discussion

tubaplayer wrote:

fifthcolumn wrote: He claims the huge new fields in Brasil and additional capacity in Iraq would have no effect whatsoever on a proposed 4% decline rate.

I'd like to know where? The last I read all these "huge" fields are just puddles. Tupi - 8bbls. etc., etc.

People who actually work in the oil industry instead of play tubas have better information than you do. To wit:
There have been a series of other discoveries since Tupi – each lying at least 185 kilometres offshore under four kilometres of earth and salt. Estimates of the entire area's recoverable oil range between 50 billion and 100 billion barrels.

Ah yes but. All the stuff that mines the stuff and delivers it to where it produces electricity runs on?

Hmmm. Mining runs on.... electricity.
Natural gas is moved by pipelines that use.... electricity.
Factories with machine tools that make stuff run on ..... electricity.
Even bloody oil wells don't run on oil.

Not having a go - just up for discussion

Yeah well, it's incredibly boring educating newbies who have just read dieoff.org and they then consider themselves to be experts.

But go on believing what you like. I can sell you a plot of land in russia and some MREs if you want....

[quote="fifthcolumn"]

fifthcolum wrote

Yeah well, it's incredibly boring educating newbies who have just read dieoff.org and they then consider themselves to be experts.

Ouch mate! Claws away. It might be boring, but we all need it. We not all imformed to your higher level (or RGR's ) Furthermore, it is a rather self opinionated standpoint / approach IMHO. Chill.

FWIW I thought it mentioned some good points that could be debated / discussed rather than trashed out of hand. Quotes, figures etc. please on this one?

By the way, I hav'n't read die off - but might pop along there now. Sounds like deep fun. Thanks for the plug.

As an aside, as a newbie contributor to this forum... there seems to be a lot of infighting and much of it is semantics... I will count RGR and Fifthcolumn out of that though. Surely (stop calling me shirley) the title of the site states that we need to think of alternatives to oil ... or am I mistaken? Perhaps we should all rejoyce and accept that energy is abundant and that growth will continue unabated forever(ish)?

Perhaps I am just confused regarding a couple of contributors standpoints and takes on the situation. Debate is good, but saying 'Im right and your wrong' is what is really boring...much more so than a 'newbie' posting.

Fifth column - I can't quite get a handle on you - I read some of your early posts and you seemed paranoid anderoid. What happened to change your take on things? I tried reading lots of posts to see the turning point in your attitude, but after several hundred posts I gave up.

RGR you have all the answers mate. I hope to feck you are right.

The (sort of) logical conclusion I come to is that you are both located on the other side of the pond - and with that territory comes a different opinion regarding oil, supply, demand and cost. Honestly. Worlds apart springs to mind. Correct me if I am wrong. The thing is, as I stated to RGR already; I cant quite understand why you waste your time on a forum like this if you don't believe in energy alternatives, shortages, population issues et al. Perhaps you do and I have just joined the party too late.

I would like to continue to be a member of this forum...I enjoy trying to bring a bit of fun, sarcasm and light hearted relief to the proceedings... but I am starting to doubt the funtion of it. It seems that any conversation that carries any concern about peak oil, population growth or food security gets blasted to hell in a wave of pseudo-logic.

There are many educated people here, and I would like to think of myself as one of them. But we don't need expanded rhetoric or convoluted verbosity. And there is a lot of that pouring out. Talk plain. I'm an educator and 'plain' works fine. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of the verbage is not clear argument or debate but twisting of words and contexts to put ideas and people down... don't treat a newbie to this subject with contempt. If it bores you to explain... then just dont - leave it to someone else perhaps?

[quote="maudibe"]

maudibe wrote: Ouch mate! Claws away. It might be boring, but we all need it. We not all imformed to your higher level (or RGR's ) Furthermore, it is a rather self opinionated standpoint / approach IMHO. Chill.

My apologies. I have a bad habit of biting people's head off.

FWIW I thought it mentioned some good points that could be debated / discussed rather than trashed out of hand. Quotes, figures etc. please on this one?

To be brutally frank, it's a process of discovery over time. Most peak oilers are force fed the "common wisdom" of a particular group of people who have a particular worldview on the result of peak oil. That worldview is loosely based on "limits to growth" and "dieoff". A huge chunk of people swallow the story whole and never check beyond the party-line. They, instead are converted to the dieoff religion if you like.

By the way, I hav'n't read die off - but might pop along there now. Sounds like deep fun. Thanks for the plug.

My personal advice is that you don't. It's well written and unless you go check each individual detail against the reality (a painful and long process), you might find yourself in deep psychological shock.

As an aside, as a newbie contributor to this forum... there seems to be a lot of infighting and much of it is semantics... I will count RGR and Fifthcolumn out of that though. Surely (stop calling me shirley) the title of the site states that we need to think of alternatives to oil ... or am I mistaken? Perhaps we should all rejoyce and accept that energy is abundant and that growth will continue unabated forever(ish)?

I don't think that's the case. (That growth will last forever).
There are significant problems we are facing and even though in theory, growth is possible forever, it's quite clear that the environment is collapsing and there are significant side-effects to our massive economy and massive population.

Fifth column - I can't quite get a handle on you - I read some of your early posts and you seemed paranoid anderoid. What happened to change your take on things? I tried reading lots of posts to see the turning point in your attitude, but after several hundred posts I gave up.

I'll tell you: I discovered peak oil about 12 years ago in a scientific american article, but it said peak was around 2030. There was no "dieoff" associated with it. About 2001 I searched for hubbert out of idle internet browsing boredom and found dieoff.org. I read through it and at the time had no answers to each of the tenets (and in any event, he was right at the time - there were no viable substitutes) and I was floored. About a year later, Iraq was invaded. I was convinced it was due to peak oil.
I became gradually more and more depressed as things went along until I decided: feck it, I can't live like this (2007 or thereabouts) and went and worked for one of the oil supermajors in Oslo. While there, I could see with my own eyes that several of the tenets of dieoff were provably false. I then moved over to the other side of the pond and with all the space they have here and the vast amounts of resources combined with all the discoveries of bucketloads of natural gas, combined with the ten years worth of technical breakthroughs in batteries and the huge, huge installations of new renewable plants I started to favour a new picture: Uneven effects. Dieoff effectively says that there are no substitutes to oil, we are out of time to do any replacements and that we will crash back to the stone age globally. I say on the contrary. Right now more than half the population are barely subsisting. They will end up growing in population and will be subsisting even more precariously. I expect that the competition in the rich world will intensify and some formerly rich world countries who do not adapt quickly enough by substituting oil based transport for electric transport will suffer economic collapse down to the level of latin american countries. I suspect this is the fate of the UK.
I think that the transition period will be at least ten years long.
Unlike the extreme doomers, however, I think there is more than enough natural gas and new oil discoveries to maintain either a plateau or a very small decline rate at least till the 2020s. By that time, the battery tech will have reached the necessary requirements to be an effective replacement for fossil fuel powered transport and similarly I think the same will be true of renewables.
Any country that collapses will do so because of poor leadership.

The (sort of) logical conclusion I come to is that you are both located on the other side of the pond - and with that territory comes a different opinion regarding oil, supply, demand and cost. Honestly. Worlds apart springs to mind. Correct me if I am wrong.

I have lived my whole life in the UK mate. I have a very UK centric view of things. It's just that going on holiday to other places doesn't quite give you the perspective that going to live or work in other places does.
I can state quite categorically that Scandinavia is in far better shape than the UK, as is France. Germany is a bit better in terms of they have more to sell and should be able to buy oil. Similarly for Holland. The UK is more or less in the same basket as Spain and Italy. The difference is Spain and Italy have the Euro and the UK doesn't. I expect hyperinflation in the future for the UK unless the government implements a sensible plan forthwith. That plan in my opinion is the rapid eletrification of all railways in the UK, building of shitloads more nuke plants, coal plants, windmills.
Compulsory insulation and best efforts attempts to make most of the housing stock passive. The bus fleets and taxi fleets should be converted to electric. The logistics fleets likewise. If that is done, the UK has a chance of making it through the next twenty years as still being in the rich world. There's no way in hell the UK can maintain it's private fleet of cars and they quite simply cannot all be converted to electric before the UK hits big problems. In short, the UK is in poor shape relatively speaking and so I bailed.
I am glad I did. Though North America is significantly MORE dependent on fossil fuel based transport, there is so much natural gas that unless things fall off a cliff next wednesday I think they can adapt much better. Certainly we here on the Canadian prairies are going to have no problems whatsoever. In fact, the higher oil prices go, the better off we are. Our bonuses will offset any potential price increases for gasoline or diesel and we can still switch down to smaller cars also.

I would like to continue to be a member of this forum...I enjoy trying to bring a bit of fun, sarcasm and light hearted relief to the proceedings... but I am starting to doubt the funtion of it. It seems that any conversation that carries any concern about peak oil, population growth or food security gets blasted to hell in a wave of pseudo-logic.

The problem with being on a public forum is there is a spectrum of opinion and political beliefs. The knowledge out there is also patchy. Opinions are coloured by politics. etc etc.

There are many educated people here, and I would like to think of myself as one of them. But we don't need expanded rhetoric or convoluted verbosity.

Unfortunately that's what you're going to get. Every so often a newbie comes on here with an opinion and the whole cycle repeats itself. Those who slag do their slagging and nobody really changes their mind much.
All the oldies are pretty much hardcore in their beliefs. Some even have their beliefs written on the signatures.

Why do people come back? I think it's a sort of virtual pub more or less.
"The Winchester" if you like.