[PREV - INDUSTRIES_OF_THE_FUTURE] [TOP]
PEAKED
July 14, 2009
September 14, 2013
The "Peak Oil" idea (i.e "we're
running out of oil") is an idea that
comes and goes with rising gas prices. It does not actually matter
much to me whether we're at
I was around during the 70s "peak oil":
"energy crisis", and the
way it all played out is While a sudden crash
that we had a few years of in oil avaliablity
"oh my god, we're running would be a calamity,
out of oil" and a lot of a slow, steady decrease
people got hyped up about would be ok by me:
"alternate energy"-- and
then the oil prices came Peak oil != peak energy.
down, and everyone forgot
about it all. NUKES
To the peakies, that Provided we don't
"energy crisis" was a respond by
harbinger of things to burning more coal.
come, and the present
rise in oil prices is NOWHERE_OIL
the beginning of the
end when they begin to (And now, the current drop
climb out of sight. is just a temporary thing
borne of desperate, dirty
technologies like shale oil
and natural gas fracking.)
There's a type of environmentalist
that *always* believes that
resource depletion doom is right
around the corner-- Paul Ehrlich
is the famous case. And the fact I submit that betting
that the gang hasn't learned on Malthusian scarcity
anything from the bet he lost with has been a mugs game,
Julian Simon is par for the course. and will continue to
be a mugs game.
Every time they make a
prediction and get it
wrong, they shuffle away NEXT_TIME_FOR_SURE
from it and do a "but
*next* time for sure!".
And I submit that we are not
If you try to point out to them particularly an "oil burning"
that they don't seem to be learning people, really our forte
from their experience, they invariably is flexibility. We're a
come up with some form of the line people who shift technologies
"But we *must* run out it some time, over time, who react to
after all the supply is finite!" changes and do things
differently as needed.
So: any resource which is
finite cannot be relied on in No single practice we
perpetuity, and hence should engage in need be
not be relied on at all? "sustainable", it's the
juggling act that we
But it would seem that need to sustain.
magnitudes matter:
JUGGLING
If solar power is "sustainable"
and burning oil isn't, it's because
we expect the lifetime of the oil
supply to be much shorter than the
lifetime of the sun.
The Peak Oil doctrine
often seems to be
a case of wishful thinking--
the people who think Myself, I think they're
we're running out of oil inadvertantly supplying
are the people who would an excuse to Exxon and
really like to see us stop friends for years of
using it. record profits that
might otherwise look
They're groping after like war profiteering.
a static utopian
vision, perhaps The hope is that everyone
without entirely is going to react to an
realizing it. oil-depletion scare by
embracing your vision of a
(It appears that modest life of
James Howard Kunstler solar-powered conservation,
really *does* realize but really that's far less
it...) likely than the usual
outcome: they're going want
to start burning more coal.
HANDJOB Unless perhaps... we
can steer them toward
nuclear power.
NUKE
This is not to say that
I think it's a good
idea to be so dependant
on oil-burning. But
then, as far as
environmental impact
goes, coal-burning is
even worse --
I see Bill Weinberg
has also been arguing
against the "Peak Oil" WEINBERG
notion:
http://ww4report.com/node/7566
He, like me, makes the point that there are
large supplies of oil out there that are not
yet on-line, e.g. the Caspian sea area is Arguably, this is what
supposed to be another Middle-East. the Afghanistan war is
really about:
And there are more extreme pipe-line rights.
possibilities: Thomas Gold
may have been right about
the abiological source of
oil (i.e. it might *not* GOLD
be a fossil fuel).
--------
[NEXT - JUGGLING]