Life After the Oil Crash

[Bolshevist]

From the site: (http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/)


Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected geologists, physicists, and investment bankers in the world. These are rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely terrified by a phenomenon known as global "Peak Oil."

Read on at the link and discuss.

[bunk]

peakoil.com

dieoff.org

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

They were saying that the oil was going to run out in the 30s as well. And in the 70s. Why should we believe these scaremongers now?

[which doctor]

There is still plety of oil left on earth, but we should still conserve it because one day it will run out. WHat we need to do now is invest more in alternative energy sources and lessen our dependance on oil.

[I Watch The Watchers]

OK, let’s get some background.

A “Peak” in oil production in a specific field means that from that point on it will be less efficient every year after that until it costs more to pump then you can get by selling it. If this happened to every oil field on earth it would mean that oil would cost more every year and then become to expensive even to pump.

In 1920’s it was thought that all the oil wells had been found and that once they “peaked” extraction would only get more difficult until it was eventually impossible to drill. Well that happened in the 30’s but they found a bunch more. Problem solved.

In the late sixties a guy named King did a real study on oil and said that at our current rate of increase in oil use the US would peak in 1970 and that people would NOTICE by 71. He was discredited in 1970, proven right in ’71 when people were waiting hours for gas but no one cared because new deals in the Middle East traded US military power for oil. Problem solved.

Before his death, King also predicted a global peak in 2000. He didn’t predict an economic recession in 1990. This threw off his numbers and postponed the peak by 5 to 10 years. That means oil should peak right about now. What was oil up to before Katrina hit? Like $60 a Barrel? This is a problem.

Every oil field in the world is being pumped for all it has. Exploration for new fields is taking up most of the revenues of oil sales but finding next to nothing. If we’re using all the fields that exist and not finding many new ones, that means we’re almost out. All the oil fields in the world are about to peak, if they haven’t already.

Effects of oil depletion will include:

Decreased output from farms since all farming requires huge amounts of petroleum for pesticides, herbicides, harvesting machinery, processing, and transportation. This means bad news for bio-fuel which is grown on farms which require oil to procuce.

Higher transportation costs increasing every year until no one can afford to travel.

Higher heating costs increasing every year until no one can afford to heat their homes.

Most importantly it means that we’ll be trying to build solar panels and windmills while people are starving and freezing around us. There will be resource wars, famines, rioting, sickness, power outages. We’ll just be running on two little energy while trying to create alternate energy sources which all require a lot of energy to get set up. This is a real problem.

With conservation, new alternatives, and a drastic shift away from expantionist thinking we can minimize these effects but we'll be living in a world gasping with every breath and still barely providing for us. Billions will die in every scinerio.

[I Watch The Watchers]

http://www.peakoil.net/
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
http://www.peakoil.org/
http://www.hubbertpeak.com/
http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/
http://blog.zmag.org/ttt/archives/000912.html (Chomsky)
http://www.peakoilaction.org/
http://www.drydipstick.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4077802.stm
http://peakoiloptimist.blogspot.com/
http://www.questionsquestions.net/docs04/peakoil1.html

[Bolshevist]

Originally posted by Fist of [email protected] 15 2005, 05:07 PM
There is still plety of oil left on earth, but we should still conserve it because one day it will run out. WHat we need to do now is invest more in alternative energy sources and lessen our dependance on oil.
The problem is that most of the green energy-resources is derivatives of oil...

[bunk]

Oil isn't going to run out soon but it will hit a peak that could shake up our entire lives.

[ComradeRed]

Why not use solar energy? I have read that with the applications of nanotechnology in solar cells, they increase effeciency by over 8 times(!) to nearly 100%!

Of course, I see no reason why this would come about until oil is completely gone; so the bourgeois can maximize profits.

[Bolshevist]

Construction and maintenance of solar cell panels all require oil.

[Xvall]

Not to mention that it's not as reliable, and takes up large amounts of space.

[OleMarxco]

Life after the Oil Crash? ;)
Oh, that's not too hard to say. Well, let's see...We'll all be livin' pretty envirnomental! w00p w00t! A big victory for the Green's, I vision, in the Elections. And then, an "Anti-Green" alliance get's made - called'fer Red's, not based on Socialistic thought at all. Their banner is called for "More factories and industrialization/pollution"! Then they take to the street, and...

And yeah, you thought THEY were wannabe-prophet's. Hell no; Oil might not run out SO early, but it will sometime. And you'd better be prepared, that's no bullshit.

[Dimentio]

Actually, according to M. King Hubbert, the discoverer of the Peak Oil theory, our reserves of oil would never be completely exhausted, and neither would we suddenly face a complete dry-out in the wells.

What Peak Oil means is actually that 50% of the known reserves of raw oil are exploited. That would of course not mean anything if oil was just a renewable resource like for example forests, but oil is not renewable during our life-time.

Moreover, what we are left with are existing wells where the cost of exploitment would constantly increase and thus increase the prices on fuels, thus put an effective halt to globalisation, and on the other hand unexploited sources that are too unavailable or economically inefficient to exploit.

In the same time, the demand of oil is constantly increasing.

None of us would argue against the fact that oil is a key resource for the current, global, price system. For the process of globalization, Peak Oil is a lethal threat.

Read my article about the Oil peak, and the Post Oil Peak-world [the POP-world] in my blog at - http://www.technocracy.ca/index.php?module...e=detail&uid=95 (http://www.technocracy.ca/index.php?module=v4bJournal&func=journal_view&mode=detail&uid=95)

Or simply this comprehensible and informative site - http://peakoil.technocracy.org/

[Bannockburn]

The thing about humans is that we are resourceful creatures. Not as much as the cockroach, but nevertheless. End of civilization? I doubt it, in fact its just the next stage in our dialectical process. Our energy will come from hydrogen, air, stuff like that.

[Dimentio]

Most likely would'nt Peak Oil kill us all, but it's effects have the potential to stir up things on the globe. As I expressed in my POP-article, it would likely deepen the structural conflicts between different identities, and particulary between urbanised areas and countryside.

From a geostrategic perspective, the logics of Peak Oil will drive the US on a collision course with China, over the yet only fragmentarily exploited oil fields of Central Asia. Thus, we would risk a major regional crisis possibly involving medium- or large-scale warfare in the geographic heart of Eurasia.

Our destiny is not predestined. Without a sustainable community, a technate, the fate of Life is threatened by the fact that we are using a primitive and outdated economic system [monetary exchange system] in order to administrate a technology that has the potential of providing all of us with our share of the abundance.

http://www.technocracy.ca

[barret]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15 2005, 10:23 PM
The thing about humans is that we are resourceful creatures. Not as much as the cockroach, but nevertheless. End of civilization? I doubt it, in fact its just the next stage in our dialectical process. Our energy will come from hydrogen, air, stuff like that.
Once again, petroleum is needed. The most plausible solution is to create and use new technologies such as hydrogen, solar, bio-fuels, etc now and scrap our uses of petroleum, so that the only use of petroleum will be fore the production of the fuels that will be used by the main stream. Although, there have been some advancements in nuclear technology, such as plants that can use nuclear waste to produce energy, and use that waste for energy, thus recycling old uranium, but those are about 50+ years away.

[I Watch The Watchers]

Here's my way of looking at it: 4 billion people's lives are currently sustained by oil or the economies that oil keeps alive. Our entire consumer culture will collapse if oil becomes too expensive for the common person. The decline in consumer confidence alone could put half a billion sweat shop workers out of work. As businesses begin going under most of the service industry and the manufacture of consumer amenities will halt. Once this happens another two billion Jobs will be lost. Because most of those job losses are in the third world they will effect large areas all at once. Africa and China will be hit very hard and only their own internal, non-petroleum based infrastructure will help them. In Industrial and post-Industrial nations we will be able to maintain trade and oil based infrastructure a little longer. All manufacturing will have to be done on our own soil due to shipping costs. In the short run this will mean more jobs but they won't appear quickly enough to revive the dwindling economy. This would be the perfect time for revolution except that there won't be enough oil left for a change in policy to matter. The North can die as capitalists or die as anarco-communists, it won't make a difference. The only difference that can be made is IMEDIATE reduction of energy consumption on the part of everyone on earth and long term planning to switch to a renewable energy grid beginning in the next few years. We'll need thousands of solar, wind, hydro and geothermal plants (and a few tidal plants too) all completed before 2025. In the economic south there will need to be manufacture of these things (funded with Industrialized dollars) before they could become economically independent but they would be able to institute them at any time after we have ours up.


I'll finish by saying that these are just my numbers that I think make sense based on the material I've read. In effect, this is a plan that I would be happy with and I would be very happy to debate it if you have another view point.

Also, I know this is all from a Euro-centric perspective so I’m sorry if I overlook anyone. I’m just writing from this perspective cause I live here and it’s what I know.

And I sort of define China as a pre-industrial society, which is arguable but I think they will both suffer greatly and be a major player on the world scene so I don’t know where that puts them.

[Dimentio]

North Sea Oil is dwindling, and I do not know how the status of the oil fields in the Caribbean Gulf are looking. Moreover, those fields can never sustain the demand of our civilization. Even Bush himself said after "Katrina" that the American consumers must learn how to save energy in a more efficient way.

[KC]

Why can't alternative forms of energy be created by alternative forms of energy? It sounds like people here think that this is impossible.

[Dimentio]

Actually, it is not impossible. We have a facility in Sweden which makes ethanol, and it is driven by ethanol as well. But what we are lacking are an infrastructure that sustains these new alternative fuels. It was rather easy to establish the engine high culture, because the demands were quite low and it secured growth, but it will be hard to establish an alternative infrastructure duuring recession.

But Peak Oil will not mean the end of civilization, but maybe an end to a stage in the history of price systems.

[barret]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16 2005, 11:25 AM
Why can't alternative forms of energy be created by alternative forms of energy? It sounds like people here think that this is impossible.
The problem is that most alternative fuels require petroleum products to be produced. Hydrogen forinstance is produced using Propane, which burns hot enough to separate the Hydrogen from other molecules such as oxygen. Bio fuels rely on crops, and crops recieve nitrogen through propane based fertilizers.

[I Watch The Watchers]

Originally posted by [email protected] 16 2005, 03:25 PM
Why can't alternative forms of energy be created by alternative forms of energy? It sounds like people here think that this is impossible.
It's possible but stupid since oil still has a much, much higher energy return on investment. In the long run we'll need all infrastructure to be based on alternative energy, but that's not in place yet. Oil is still essential in all production of energy and will be for a long time. Even if every city were on a power grid driven exclusively by alternatives we would still need petroleum for plastics, and the production and maintenance of equipment in these power plants and in countless facets of our daily lives. Think medicine, think computer technology. Think circuitry and wiring.

And I have NO idea what we're really going to do about transportation. Who'll be able to afford gas once it triples and quintuples and increases exponentially in price annually until it's unattainable to all ordinary people. And no, biofuel is not just as good. Oil is integral in almost all modern forms of agricultural growth. Burning biofuel that was grown and harvested and processed with oil is less efficient than burning the oil. Then there's hydro, which is just inefficient storage of energy produced by some other source (usually petroleum). IF we get an alternative energy system in place we could produce some biofuel and hydro batteries but only on a much smaller scale then what oil is accounting for right now. Cars and plains are out, I think.
So really I don't know what we'll do. There is no specific point in the future that I think I can look to and say "After that we won't need petroleum" but I can start to see a point where we won't have any to use.

In my opinion there will be no easy answers at all. We'll all just have a lot less of everything and the people who have a lot less now will be the first to feel it.

[Dimentio]

I think it should be time to analyze the technocratic alternative.

[I Watch The Watchers]

What do you mean?

[Dimentio]

That we should begin to balance consumption and production in a sustainable way and stop accumulating financial growth, i.e, create an energy accounting system.