Black Gold - What happens when it's gone?

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#41

But resources are not diminishing in the way the scare mongers would have you believe. How many of the doomsday predictions of this, that is, or the other resource running out by such and such a date have been even close? None of them.

It is pointless to cripple ourselves on the basis of a nonproblem (or something that may become a problem in hundreds of years time) just because it makes us " feel good" about doing something for “the children”. The cure is often worse than the supposed disease – for instance, DDT was banned on the basis of some extremely wonky research, and millions unnecessarily died from malaria as a result. It is now being reintroduced, but are those responsible for the damage caused by banning it being held responsible? No. Are they even being made to say sorry? No.

#42

Unless they’re being replaced at a rate equivalent to or greater than the rate we’re using them, they’re being diminished.

Oil and coal can’t be produced naturally in a fraction of the period we’ve converted our lives to depend upon extracting them from the ground.

They have to be diminishing.

Forests are being destroyed all over the world, notably in places like South America and South East Asia, with giant fires that pollute the atmosphere, to the extent that it’s a major issue between Indonesia and Malaysia. It’s the planetary equivalent of smoking cigarettes flat out and chopping out alveoli in our lungs every second of the day.

Whatever the reason, the polar ice caps are melting.

Nobody thinks they can live on a creek and throw their garbage and pour their sewage into and it’ll still be okay downstream, but those who assure us that there is nothing wrong with the planet assume that we can do the same to the planet on an immensely larger scale and none of the shit will ever clog up the planet’s systems.

I don’t think one needs a Ph. D. in anything to work out that every system gets overloaded if crap is constantly pumped into it. It’s just a question of whether one wants to accept that, say, the river has had a fatal dose of crap because dead fish are floating on the surface; no fish are caught there any more; the algal bloom kills things in the water and people who drink it because deforestation or irrigation diversion etc upstream has destroyed natural flows to flush the river; or it’s just an aberration that will pass when the missing El Nino pattern restores itself.

How many of the doomsday predictions of this, that is, or the other resource running out by such and such a date have been even close? None of them.

It is pointless to cripple ourselves on the basis of a nonproblem (or something that may become a problem in hundreds of years time) just because it makes us " feel good" about doing something for “the children”. The cure is often worse than the supposed disease – for instance, DDT was banned on the basis of some extremely wonky research, and millions unnecessarily died from malaria as a result. It is now being reintroduced, but are those responsible for the damage caused by banning it being held responsible? No. Are they even being made to say sorry? No.

I share your scepticism, but without the scienctific knowledge to evaluate the risk. Which puts me in the same camp as about 95+% of science educated people. And the other 5% can’t agree.

I remember the Club of Rome in the 1970’s predicting disaster not too far off. And sundry books about impending catastrophe, some written by scientists.

I’m not convinced that global warming is even an unusual event. We’ve only had records for less than the blink of an eye in human occupation of the planet, which isn’t even the blink of an eye in the planet’s history. The current experience may just be part of large scale normal processes over geological time unrelated to human activity.

It might also be a consequence of human activity, and common sense suggests that human activity has at least contributed to it.

So I think we’d be stupid to continue as if there’s no risk.

We can’t do any harm by taking a risk-reduction approach, except on an economic basis.

Which comes back to my consistent point that economics, money, whatever people want to call it, ain’t the be all and end all of existence. Although if we don’t wake up to ourselves it might be the end all of existence.

#43

Point of order: Antarctica is not melting. The temperature trend for the Antarctic as a whole is -0.07 degrees per decade (according to the satellite data) the tip of the Antarctic peninsular (which is not within the Antarctic Circle) is getting warmer, and this seems to be all we hear about. the net ice balance is currently positive. this Antarctic winter has just seen the largest recorded sea ice extent (which has been conveniently ignored by the mainstream media who would prefer to bleat about the opposite situation in the Arctic summer this year caused by wind and current patterns).

Anyhow , back at the plot. yes, of course resources are being depleted. But the question is over what timescale are we talking before this becomes any serious issue? Frankly, I could not give a damn about timescales larger than several hundred years (which is really what we are talking about), because if the human race cannot adapt and develop alternatives within hundreds of years, then it does not deserve the name Homo Sapiens.

Look how we have developed technologically since 1800. Technological progress is happening now faster than it ever has in the past, So where will we be in 2200? Of course, nobody knows (but if you throw a few million at me I will make you a computer model which draws you a nice line and tells you what you want to know, complete with flying cars powered by alien space technology) but it is safe to assume that the difference in technology will be at least as great.

#44

[i]We can’t do any harm by taking a risk-reduction approach, except on an economic basis.

Which comes back to my consistent point that economics, money, whatever people want to call it, ain’t the be all and end all of existence. Although if we don’t wake up to ourselves it might be the end all of existence.[/i]

But don’t you see, economy is everything, all these nice things you enjoy in life, the clean air you breathe, your electricity and running water are all a consequence of a strong economy. so is your health.

What you are suggesting is that we should DEFINITELY sacrifice EVERYTHING now because of something which MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be a minor problem at an indeterminate time in the future.

#45

You could give them financial aid for that. Btw. you will never find solutions to any big scale problem by argumenting on a personal level, you will always have someone who is screwed and doesn’t deserve it.

You are comparing oranges and hmm salty rocks. You cannot compare 1900 to today, there were even still white marks on the maps by that time. There is a fixed amount of fossil energy ressources on this planet, this is an unalterable fact and our society already taps every single one of them on a huge scale, coal, gas, oil, uranium, whatever. I don’t know with certainty how much there is or was, but we can assume, that we have already found quite a percentage of the total amount.
Where metals for example can be recycled, these sources cannot, once they’re gone they’re gone. And of course this “gone” won’t happen overnight and is possibly still far away, but what we’ll see with certainty is a decline of amount available at every given point in time compared to the amount needed. And there is also a limit in the “technology advances” theory and it’s not a financial one, it’s an energetic. When you need to put more energy into aquiring something than you get out of it, you’re done with that ressource as an energy source. Oil will probably still be used for various things in millenia, but not as our primary energy source (should mankind still be around by that time).
Limiting our consumption buys time, nothing more, nothing less. But sooner or later we will have to find something completely different and given that the rate of consumption rises constantly I would assume rather sooner than later.
And a personal comment:
That “don’t owe anything to those not yet born” is most likely the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard and that guy pretty much disqualified himself for membership in the human race. The dead men from the past were so nice, or maybe they just didn’t have the opportunity to screw us like we do future generations now.

You’re funny, and where do you expect the electricity to come from? The energy carrier is not really an issue, the source is, and today we’re running on an oil battery, which is stored solar energy from the past. And it behaves much like a battery in a flashlight, too. The current will get weaker to the point where the lights go out, even if there is still plenty of energy inside.

#46

You could give them financial aid for that.
who pays? “The taxpayer”. That bottomless pit of money. And when the economy declines such that an enormous number of people require this financial aid, when that runs out, I’m sure there’s the magic money tree.

Your next paragraph is imbued with the arrogance which afflicts most generations, in that everything worthwhile has been discovered. It was mooted around 1900 that almost everything that could be invented had been invented, so the US patent office could be wound down. We don’t come close to knowing how much resources we have and where they are, we are just a bit less ignorant than those who came before.

On your personal comment, we have no more ability to screw future generations now than we ever had in the past.

You’re funny, and where do you expect the electricity…

Nu-cu-lur

#47

Interesting. I’ll have to look into that.

You realise that you’re challenging my faith in an independent and reliable press. :smiley:

Anyhow , back at the plot. yes, of course resources are being depleted. But the question is over what timescale are we talking before this becomes any serious issue? Frankly, I could not give a damn about timescales larger than several hundred years (which is really what we are talking about), because if the human race cannot adapt and develop alternatives within hundreds of years, then it does not deserve the name Homo Sapiens.

How do you accommodate the enormous appetite for resources and energy of the developing economies, notably India and China, which I don’t think use them that well?

As a simple example, China is flooding the world with incredibly cheap power tools of minimal and inconsistent quality, at least until it revalues its currency and frightens the Christ out of the rest of the world.

These tools use about the same quantity of materials, such as copper, mercury, aluminium and so on and cost exactly the same to transport as a good quality tool.

But they last maybe 10%, 20% if you’re lucky, as long as a half way decent tool that used to be made in Western countries or Japan. Or even in the Philippines or Thailand for Western countries or Japan.

Sure, they’re often between a third and two thirds of the price of a decent tool, but in X years we’re going to have five to ten times the quantity of resources, including embedded energy and resources, dumped because these cheap tools don’t last even anywhere near the proportionate third to half of the time of a decent tool.

Look how we have developed technologically since 1800.

Look how we haven’t developed since 1960. Then I knew a lot of people who ran chooks in their suburban back yards and grew their own vegies and fruit trees. Now the chooks come frozen in freezer trucks from half a continent away, and the fruit and some of the vegies in refrigerated containers from half a planet away. None of that energy was required when we went into the back yard to get our meal.

I think we’ve lost the plot, big time, with globalisation etc. It serves the corporations who are buggering the planet for profit, but not the people who live on it.

#48

To reinforce the point about the economy being everything, you need look no further than examples in the past (and indeed present) where economy was sacrificed for ideology: the communist states. Whole populations reduced to effective serfdom, with shortages in even the most basic needs.

It wasn’t totalitarianism that did this, it was economic policy in force by said totalitarianism.

#49

The privatised electricity and water companies here have nothing to do with any free market or rational economic activity but enjoy monopolies granted to them by governments, which bailed out to make their budgets look better. The privatised companies’ charges don’t relate to market issues and they don’t invest in infrastucture like the previous government services did, which is why it takes longer to get problems fixed.

They are in fact the antithesis of any rational economic system, where farmers have to pay for irrigation water they don’t receive in drought years as if they had actually received the allocation they’re charged for when the water company can’t deliver the water to grow the crops for the farmers to pay their water bills because they haven’t received the water they’re forced to pay for.

My health is not a consequence of a strong economy. It is a consequence of being lucky enough to avoid an ailing hospital system run by the same state that charges farmers for water they don’t get, and which runs hospitals by appointing accountants to manage hospitals by bullshit numbers which reward hospitals for people not dying there, which is why they go on ambulance bypass to send the critically ill and injured to the next hospital. If they do this for a year, the hospital managers get big bonuses. Meanwhile the same managers fund their bonuses by getting rid of things like cleaners, which is why our hospitals are infection palaces.

As far as our economy delivering water, electricity and health, it’s all bullshit.

#50

Well, then they’ll just have to freeze.

There is a significant difference between “everything invented” and “everything of a certain type found in a fixed amount of space” and if you don’t see it, I can’t help you.

We do have, even if you wouldn’t count technology, by sheer numbers.

Same dead end. Very limited supply. We buy more time with it, though, but it’s no solution.

#51

I’d dispute that, in part.

Most of the major communist societies assumed power over pre-existing serfdoms anyway.

Revolutions were, and are, run by doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc. Precisely the bourgeois elements they’re committed to removing.

So, the first thing they do when they get into power is get rid of the other doctors, lawyers, teachers etc, and anyone else they think might be a risk because they have some influence in society, such as the kulaks.

It’s more about removing threats to political power than an economic issue, although the targets have economic significance and there are economic consequences of getting rid of them.

#52

RS, the experience up this end of the privatised electricity and water companies is that they are infinitely superior to the nationalised companies they replaced. Sorry it didn’t go your way. In any case, it doesn’t matter whether the economy is public or private, that is irrelevant to the point at hand. as is the failure of socialised medicine, we’ve got the same problems in the UK, and since it was more or less privatised in the Netherlands we don’t have it so bad here.

The point at hand is that the economy (whether public or private) has provided you with a water supply – paid for by wealth generated by you and others operating within the economy. Otherwise, where did it come from? where did the money to pay for it come from? The economy as a whole. Likewise electricity. likewise pharmaceuticals/medication that you can self medicate with to keep yourself away from hospitals. A strong economy enabled people to have enough money to pay for the research and infrastructure to provide for it, produce it, transport it to where you can buy it, and enabled you to buy it. don’t believe me? try buying paracetamol in Cuba (outside of a hard currency shop for foreigners and party bods.

The economy is something which permeates every aspect of your life (unless you live in a cave and never interact with another soul) and it is something that we in the West take for granted and no longer appreciate. Tell a Zimbabwean that economy is not everything when comrade Bob has wrecked it so that people can no longer buy basic foodstuffs, let alone guarantee that they can turn a tap and get running water.

Drake, your first point seems to me like you would happily let people die to possibly mitigate something which may or may not be a problem in the future. Nice.

Second point: they have not discovered everything of a certain type found in a fixed amount of space, do you really think the entire earth’s surface has been prospective using modern prospecting techniques for all known minerals /oil/ etc? It hasn’t. There is much still to be found, otherwise prospectors wouldn’t be doing such a roaring trade.

Nuclear: thousands of years worth of supply. Are you really worried about what happens thousands of years into the future? And if they ever finally manage to get fusion online (it’s been 10 years away for the last 30 years), then it’s practically unlimited.

#53

This may be the case for Russia, but this was not the case of any of their East European satellite states, nor Cuba.

This is getting off topic, but Marxist economic policy is based on a false understanding of how economies work, and how people interact within them. This is why communist countries universally have weak economies. they of course like to blame it on counter revolutionaries, spies, wreckers, or whatever, because Marxist economic dogma is an article of faith in such a government.

The relatively few non Marxist authoritarian/totalitarian economies did not suffer in the same way (Pinochet’s Chile, Nazi Germany, nationalist Spain, modern Singapore, prewar Japan, Fascist Italy, Batista’s Cuba), since they had much more realistic economic policies.

#54

Never said anything about dying, just freezing. And they will freeze eventually anyway, energy prices will rise, if only for increased demand by china and india.
Of course they have not discovered everything (though a lot already), but there won’t be and haven’t been that many significant findings to compensate for the drop of production from already long established sources (a factor which can be calculated). And I can only repeat about the “we get better extraction technology” part: The more difficult it gets to get it, the less net energy + we get. So even if we managed to uphold the current extraction, if we need to put 2 or 3 times the energy into getting it, we already have significantly less energy elsewere.

Nuclear, uhm no, not that much, U235 is actually pretty rare.
Should we get hot fusion to work on industrial scale we’re the winners, no argument about that. My experimental physics professor on the university was actually a capacity on that area and he was quite optimistic about it, but he also colourfully described the enormous theoretical and practical difficulties involved. Judging them by the “will work in 10 years for the last 30” is actually a bit unfair, as they have to fight pretty hard for funding, which explains a lot. No one can say with any certainty when we’ll really have figured it out.

#55

If you go for fast breeder reactors instead of plain old reactors, there is thousands of years worth of fuel.

As for funding, given the numbers of billions of public money which are thrown at various “research projects” because they happen to have a few key trigger words in their grant proposals, it is absolutely shocking if fusion research is strapped for cash!

#56

Sure fast breeders increase fuel efficiency 60 times. But still won’t be thousands of years.

#57

Nicky, compare the very occasional mild smogs of today in the US with those of even 20 years ago which were frequent, and thick.

On this side of the pond the last notable smog was over 50 years ago.

MOS, I lived in Buffalo, New York most of my life. An industrial city now in America’s rust belt that rarely ever had “smog alerts” when I was child. When I left there two summers ago, “smog advisories” were a common summer occurrence on humid days over when it reached over about 29C - largely the result of US coal fired power plants in the Midwestern United States. So yes, smog is still a very significant problem. You may attribute some of that to more vigorous reporting and air quality standards. I don’t know, but smog continues not only to be a problem in the US despite the decrease in industrial base, largely because of the greater demand for power. The reduction in smog in some US cities has as much to do with tightened emissions standards for automobiles as it does with coal or oil fired power plants…

Energy taxes: if the whole world they did it would just affect the whole world economy. Make energy more expensive to any large degree and in the colder countries you are going to get a hell of a lot of less well off people dying in the winter because they can’t afford basic heating. it’s already a significant problem amongst pensioners in the UK, for instance.

A large proportion of the worlds population may soon be dying, or at least displaced, from problems resulting from global warming such as rising sea levels and incremental increases in temperature make certain areas less sustainable…This has an economic impact all its own.

#58

Wind power is a great, almost ideal, option; unfortunately, there is a huge “not-in-my-backyard” aspect that makes people reject the construction of huge wind combines in their communities…

There was talk of creating an ocean “wind-farm” in US territorial waters off the Massachusetts (MA) coast not to far from in the MA island of Martha’s Vineyard. But the wealthy owners of summer cottages and vacation homes there have blocked it thus far.

Even in a depressed farming community East of Buffalo, NY (about 650km from New York City), the wind-farms (which would bring cheap electricity and money to an area that needs it) generated much controversy and infighting between the residents who are afraid of the noise and the large, protruding field of wind mills churning in the distance ruining their bucolic paradise of shit smelling dairy farms.

#59

Nuclear energy is the best short term option.

#60

Wind, tidal and solar energy will definatly play it’s part, so will geothermal.
Problem with wind specifically is, that it’s so unsteady. You need to store the energy, if get it when you don’t need it and you need backup plants if you need it and can’t get it, so such a grid is pretty complicated. As particularly the US east coast had to discover, a glitch in the power in a small part of a grid can lay waste on a normal, if not somewhat old power grid on a huge scale.
And what I also don’t like about wind (besides the look) is that they are not as environmentally friendly as it seems. They kill birds and not just a few, mostly the big ones who already have enough difficulties like falcons and eagles. And as we should have realized by now, we shouldn’t fiddle around to much in the food chain, we always get diminishing returns. I wouldn’t be too surprised about a sudden rat and mice infestation on the fields in a high windmill density area.