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Peak Oil and Climate Change: Between Too Soon and Not Soon Enough
We are going to burn all of the oil and coal we have, because their benefits as energy sources are concrete, immediate, and local, while their costs are gradual, delayed, and global.
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Posted by Loren Bergeson on 07/26 at 10:37 AM
Very good article. It's quite likely disruptions caused by energy shortages and climate change will begin to derail technological advances in the near future. All work on nanotechnology, bio-engineering, and other new areas should focus on solving the energy and climate crises first.
I think it unwise to assume new technology can overcome these problems, however. Personally, I think it is prudent to prepare for the worst by following the advice on http://www.postpeakliving.com
Posted by Steve Welsh on 07/26 at 04:02 PM
I agree with Loren - a very good brief rundown on the problems we face one way or another.
My preparations for the worst are going on here.
Of course, if runaway global warming kicks in we (and probably ninety nine percent of all other species) are all stuffed anyway.
Posted by Peter on 07/26 at 04:31 PM
one of the best articles on the subject. i firmly believe that our descendants will be living like our ancestors... cavemen
Posted by Cocoonist on 07/26 at 06:57 PM
Very alarmist, yet an inevitable scenario unless we increase energy availability with new technologies over the coming decades. It should also be taken into account that energy consumption drops to a fraction if one spends time in a virtual world, a trend that is likely to continue.
Posted by Ben Hyink on 07/26 at 08:00 PM
Brilliant thoughts on a deeply entrenched global catastrophic risk. Fantastic work, Marcelo.
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 07/27 at 05:17 AM
Nice to see these realities being acknowledged at IEET. Most groups who lean towards being politically correct don't acknowledge such things, because these facts mean that work towards e.g. Kyoto Protocol type of goals is rather hilarious, making no noticeable difference at all, even though so many people are politically heavily invested in them.
Ten years ago, global warming was the number one issue I personally campaigned on, but then I realized how unrealistic and dishonest the mainstream environmental organizations are in their strategies (though the people active in those ineffectual projects have been successful in increasing their personal prominence, which of course was the real goal), and that that battle has been lost already (assuming no surprising huge technological breakthroughs happen).
I'd add one clarification to what you said, though:
You indeed need to talk about Peak Carbon instead of Peak Oil. If we only talk about the latter, it's not such a big deal as many make it out to be, since e.g. coal can be converted into an oil-equivalent at around $40-$50 per barrel, and there is a *lot* more of coal left than of oil. The nazis already did coal-->oil conversion on a large scale during WWII, as they were cut off from major petroleum supplies, and South Africa even currently does it a lot.
Of course this doesn't affect your main points. This just means that Peak Carbon will come substantially later than the Peak Oil that isn't relevant in this sense.
Posted by laura on 07/27 at 07:11 AM
excellent piece, thanks - and to the point. i'am glad i set up this google alert on "peak oil", otherwise i may not have come across your work, Marcelo. but how to work with politicians, economists, scientists and planners (urban and rural, no virtual world, thanks) along with people, neighborhood by neighborhood, to embrace all this, as community, as systems, as culture, as individuals? i'am afraid the upcoming change will "embrace" us all (so to speak), before we know it. it has already done it to the most impoverished communities across the globe... do we think we are immune from this...? thanks to what? to the very western economies and life style that we developed and that is self-destructive in the long run? Oops, sorry, I do not mean to start with this. Yes, energy is the key. We ar running out of dense and easy to extract sources. Keep up the good work, Marcelo, keep thinking, please.
ah also, please give a look to this: www.communitysolution.org i'am not associated with this group. i just think they do very good work and good thinking too. Thanks again.
Posted by Thrifty on 07/28 at 11:12 AM
How much oil (and other non-renewables) goes directly into supporting the expansion of human biomass and how much goes into inessential things, basically luxuries? What is the majority of energy used for and by whom?
Any pointers?
Posted by H on 07/28 at 11:15 AM
Marcelo, of this week's crop of IEET blogs this one appealed to me most. Well said. An energy source more effective than hydrocarbons would be great. (Sorry, couldn't resist: We could codename it Mithril...) I also take Aleksei's Peak Carbon point above.
The sorts of research you suggest, both technical and political, would have my research dollar vote. And there is much that could be done socially - from distributing technical information about how to build and use human and environment powered electricity generators to the many communal ways humanity could reduce its dependence on energy, if we were only less power hungry and less susceptible to free-riding.
What can transhumanism in particular bring to this problem?
What constraints might the threat of energy poverty place on morphological freedom, for example? How might we design energy resilience into those that will have to live through a major energy crunch? How might redesign of ourselves take advantage of the coming imbalance in energy? Could we, must we, become beings who need a warmer world?
Could "virtual worlds", of the sort we have now, be engineered to give us energy benefits without being detrimental to our ability to investigate and physically manipulate our planet and environment, also with minimal energy input, if we needed to?
Less drastically, there are many more people on earth than in the 17th century. That's a lot more ingenuity and, provided we ensure the lights going out doesn't immediately remove our access to it, also much more technological knowledge than in the 17th century. We need to make our information and skills as resilient as ourselves, and very widely distributed onto non-energy dependent media. (I've often found out about home-energy generation projects on the internet...).
Many of those extra people are already innovating to gain access to technology without an energy infrastructure. How can we encourage more of that behaviour from our innovators too?
Posted by CygnusX1 on 07/28 at 02:37 PM
There's a whole Sun's worth of energy out there.. Rather than capturing that energy from the ground (Earth's surface) up, perhaps we could reflect and focus high energy beams of light (not heat) to solar intake stations on the planet surface?
In any case we need to reduce our consumerism ASAP, and this includes all types of commodities and products, from food, meat and dairy, to all the subsidiaries involved with packaging and production. Its time to start weaning off our reliance upon Carbon fuels.
Posted by postfuturist on 07/28 at 03:28 PM
"The nazis already did coal-->oil conversion on a large scale during WWII, as they were cut off from major petroleum supplies, and South Africa even currently does it a lot."
Don't understand: if synthetic oil means fossil fuel based economies will be sustainable for-- depending on the amount of coal-- for perhaps well over a hundred years then what would the economic incentives be for oil oligarchs to change their behaviors?
Posted by postfuturist on 07/28 at 06:46 PM
"if synthetic oil means fossil fuel based economies will be sustainable for-- depending on the amount of coal-- perhaps well over a hundred years then what would the economic incentives be for oil oligarchs to change their behaviors?"
...that is to say "sustainable" merely in the economic sense. It is not only that petroleum is a quick & dirty way to obtain energy-- and materials such as plastics-- but there are how many trillions invested worldwide in fossil fuels?
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 07/28 at 07:54 PM
"Don't understand: if synthetic oil means fossil fuel based economies will be sustainable for-- depending on the amount of coal-- for perhaps well over a hundred years then what would the economic incentives be for oil oligarchs to change their behaviors?"
I don't claim that they're going to change their behaviours (and it's not just about oligarchs, but also about common people who don't want to return to the 17th century any sooner than they have to, even if that means more pain later -- though mostly for others, they hope). Indeed I very much agree with the politically incorrect acknowledgement that all of the easy hydrocarbon sources of energy will be burned out into the atmosphere anyway, regardless of how environmentally destructive it is shown to be. (With the caveat that if there are *surprisingly* huge technological breakthroughs, then this will not necessarily happen.)
Posted by mike3 on 07/28 at 09:25 PM
The best solution here, I think, is to get away from this "consumerist" mentality: the idea that you MUST get this and that and more and more and more and can never have enough, and the economic systems wherein people need to just keep "consuming" goods merely for it to keep working. In addition to this, we should really rebuild the local economies, which means really local, like right next to your town and even within it. Especially for the production of vital resources (food & water). We really should never have gotten rid of them anyway. When we got motor car technology, we abused it in the worst way possible and making ourselves dependent upon it for vital things like food and water. Now we have so many motor vehicles and are so dependent on them that we just can't use any fuel other than oil to fuel them all, to our detriment. Hydrogen and solar and all that are cool stuff, but they just don't have the oomph to sustain our horribly dependent system.
@Loren Bergeson: Technology alone is not the answer, no, but you can't just diss it either We need all we can get from all directions, technology included. This is one of the largest, if not THE largest, turning points in our history.
@Aleksei Riikonen: Then we should do as much as possible to try and stop that burning. Try and change as much "course" as possible in the time remaining. If the govs don't want to do it, then do as much as we can without them. Even if it's too late to obviate the crash entirely, we could at least soften it, cushion the blow to some extent. Doing nothing at all is the worst choice.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 07/30 at 08:04 AM
This article strikes me as misguided DOOM mongering. Climate crunch is a fantasy, constraing the use of fossil fuels significantly is not going to happen - and relative resource abundance seems likely to continue for a long time yet. We have barely scratched the planet's surface so far.
The problem I see with making a lot of noise about things that matter little is that it risks distracting people from things that matter a lot.
Posted by Steve in Hungary on 07/30 at 04:42 PM
@mike3
Yes, absolutely right, which is why I am here and trying to do with less and less bought in stuff and more and more of what I can do myself + land + goats (at the moment).
@Tim Tyler
Troll! Just get on and do the things that you think matter. Good luck when crunch time arrives! Just exactly what are those things that matter a lot?
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 07/30 at 05:29 PM
What matters most are existential risks, scenarios that could wipe out all life on the planet, permanently. Running out of fossil fuels is not serious enough a thing on it's own to reach this category, as it is survivable (unlike some other risks having to do with certain technologies currently in the process of being developed).
Looking forward to Nick Bostrom's new book on existential risks, I am.
Posted by postfuturist on 07/30 at 10:58 PM
"The problem I see with making a lot of noise about things that matter
little is that it risks distracting people from things that matter a lot."
You mean there are those who would do such a thing?
Good news is, there's at this moment an entire think tank writing a book-- 'How Exactly To Save The World'-- that will provide all the answers; unfortunately the book isn't scheduled to be published until after the biosphere has been destroyed. But we have to take the good with the bad 
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 07/31 at 06:03 AM
postfuturist, there's certainly sufficient material currently available for people to form a good understanding of existential risks and start working on mitigating them, no need to wait.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risks
(even though I do think Bostrom's new book will significantly add to the ease with which new people can become familiar with the subject -- currently, it's a bit of a hassle finding all the best material and separating it from that that isn't so good)
Posted by Tim Tyler on 07/31 at 07:23 AM
Disruptions through rapid technological progress seem likely to be more significant than changes to the climate or resource shortages. Climate change in particular is fluff. A warmer planet would be significantly more friendly to life than what we witness in the current ice age interglacial.
Posted by mike3 on 07/31 at 01:55 PM
@Aleksei Riikonen:
However, you make it sound like it's an either-or thing. From what I've seen, these risks would not require the same level of expenditure, effort, and time to address them that is needed to break the fossil-fuel "habit", and the depletion is 100% inevitable as long as we stay with it. For example, technological problems (like "grey goo") would seem more a question of regulation and how research is approached. How would this cost more than, or even closely approach the cost of, what it would to restructure and deploy new systems at every level of our civilization -- which is what we need to overcome fossil fuel depletion? If the costs are significantly lower, there's no reason we couldn't do this along with working on the big long problem of fuel depletion. I.e. do both, not one before the other. See, there's other factors to consider than the amount risked, like the probability of occurrence, time of occurrence, the cost of mitigation, and the time required to mitigate.
That time factor is especially important for fossil-fuel depletion and global heating, as it means we should start now, to minimize the pain of the crunch.
@Tim Tyler:
Depends on how warm. If it gets too warm, you get mass extinction. The end of the Permian is a good example. We'd most likely go extinct in that scenario. Even without going that far (staying with what's more likely), it could reduce agricultural capacity by making less land fit for growing (and this is on top of the inevitable loss of petroleum-based agro due to fuel depletion, which then further reduces the amount of "good land" for agro, unless a substitute could be found that would have equal or superior yield -- researching this would be a part of solving the problem.).
Posted by mike3 on 07/31 at 01:59 PM
@Tim Tyler: And how does it matter just a "little" that oil is depleted? It could cause a large amount of the world's population to die, not to mention much misery for those that survived. It might not be a 100%-extinction scenario, but to say it matters "little" seems kind of silly.
Posted by Steve in Hungary on 07/31 at 03:45 PM
It seems to me that we are very near a tipping point. We will either try to continue Business As Usual to the point that, lemming-like, we hurtle ourselves into our own doom along with most other species on the planet or depletion will do the job for us and just remove a fair amount of Homo Sapiens.
Homo Sapiens - now there's a thing to play with. Homo Sapiens that continues to crap on his own doorstep to the extent that he can no longer leave the house.
@mike3
Once again I agree with you Mike. Don't feed the troll (Tim Tyler) 
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 07/31 at 05:59 PM
mike3 said: "However, you make it sound like it's an either-or thing. From what I've seen, these risks would not require the same level of expenditure, effort, and time to address them that is needed to break the fossil-fuel "habit""
What I (or you) spend my personal time, effort and other resources on indeed is an either-or thing (for each unit of each resource). Sure, the most serious existential risks *could* be fully tackled with less resources than these certain other things would require, but the fact of our current situation is that they *aren't* receiving the lesser amount of effort needed to fully tackle them.
I should put my personal effort into tackling the most serious risks that currently are under-addressed, before I move on to putting serious effort towards tackling significantly less serious categories of threats.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 07/31 at 08:15 PM
Warming doesn't "reduce agricultural capacity" It increases global precipitation, greens the world's deserts (deserts are an ice age phenomenon) and extends the world's fertile lands to the north and the south (inculding into the large landmasses of Russia and Canada). Plus CO2 is what plants breathe. A greenhouse is a fine place to perform agriculture - whereas icy wastelands are not. If someone tells you otherwise, they are probably selling something.
Posted by Mike Treder on 07/31 at 10:43 PM
Tim, I'm sure your glib dismissals of climate chaos will be very reassuring to the millions in China, India, and Bangladesh whose water supplies will run dry, whose crops will fail, or whose low-lying villages will be swamped.
Posted by Environ1st on 08/01 at 12:12 AM
I'd like to see Mr. Tyler provide some support for his plausible-sounding yet nearly universally rejected ideas, so the issue can be settled. (Veiled) ad hominems accomplish so very little.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 08/01 at 05:17 AM
I am not attempting to reassure those people. Climate change will make things worse for some. Most changes benefit some at the expense of others.
However, with a planet-scale issue, one should look at the overall picture - and a warmer planet seems as though it will be overwhelmingly positive overall - when compared to the current ice age climate. Living systems seem set to expand and thrive in the moist warmth with the assistance of all the nutrients we are digging out of the ground and putting into action.
Climate risk mostly comes from the possibility of reglaciation. That *really* would be bad. IMO, we should be gently steering the planet in the opposite direction - away from that.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 08/01 at 05:45 AM
Re: "how does it matter just a "little" that oil is depleted?"
You can make oil from coal. The planet has *vastly* more coal reserves than it does oil. The world's oil supplies are still large - but if they ever do run out, it will make *relatively* little difference - and in particular, there won't be big energy price hikes. Indeed, rather the opposite. The "energy future" looks bright - due to the effect of technological progress.
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 08/01 at 07:27 AM
Tim Tyler,
You're neglecting that there isn't currently a particular shortage of arable land. Technologically, our civilization is currently perfectly capable of e.g. feeding everyone, and it's just a matter of politics (and also pure incompetence) that we don't do it.
So a warmer planet wouldn't provide any benefits that we'd really need, just increase some resources that we already have an abundance of. Meanwhile, it would force us to relocate/rebuild all infrastructure that is built on low-lying shorelines, including practically all of the biggest cities, and the costs associated with this would be HUGE.
Especially in terms of human suffering, the costs would be huge within the current political system where we don't really care for the disadvantaged people but leave them on their own. There's no similar positive flipside of the coin, where large currently suffering populations would no longer suffer just because Canada and Russia got more of something that they already have plenty of.
Posted by Steve in Hungary on 08/01 at 09:41 AM
@Tim Tyler
"You can make oil from coal."
Yes - have you actually bothered to look at the statistics? All the coal to oil plants in the world operate in the thousands of barrels a day range. World consumption of oil? 85MB/day-ish. US of A consumption the last time I looked topside of 18MB/day.
Three questions:
1. Where do you get the coal in addition to what is already mined and committed to use elsewhere?
2. Where do you get the water? Heinberg says the Chinese have a goal of 225 kb/d by 2020 - at a cost of 2.5 mb/d of water!
3. What do you think the timescale is to a) ramp up coal production sufficient to supply these now non-existent CTL plants and b) to actually build and commission the plants?
And question 3 completely ignores the consequences of question 2.
@Aleksei (post 08/01 at 07:27 AM)
Yes, good post Alexsei. I'm afraid Tim Tyler ignores such stuff.
Posted by mike3 on 08/01 at 01:16 PM
@Aleksei Riikonen: How do you "feed everyone" without oil? "Modern" high-tech agro methods usually involve lots of oil (fertilizers, pesticides, machine fuels, etc.). When that oil is gone, then what? The precise "carrying capacity" of the planet *without oil* is debated, but many agree it is less than what we are at now.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 08/01 at 04:38 PM
People *always* complain about the short-term costs - when they will spread over tens of thousands of years - and while the ecological benefits of a more habitable planet with a bigger carrying capacity are enormous - and will last far beyond that. This is tremendously short-sighted of them.
We *have* to take steps to heat up the planet. If we don't, then we are likely to get reglaciated on schedule, with high probability. Once the ice sets in we have little idea of how to stop it. Reglaciation represents a runaway positive feedback cycle on an *enormous* scale.
A stable climate is good - but you simply don't get that in an ice age. Instead you get catastrophic glaciation swings. If you *want* a stable climate - and stable shorelines - there is no choice except to try and put an end to the current ice age.
The issue is surely not *whether* to do it, but how quickly it is best to move civilisation away from the edge. Fortunately civilisation is already moving in the right direction.
Posted by CygnusX1 on 08/01 at 06:37 PM
"Mission: To promote the implementation of anhydrous ammonia as an affordable, sustainable, carbon-free fuel for transportation and stationary power applications, thereby enhancing economic security, reducing fossil-fuel dependence, and helping save the environment."
"Anhydrous ammonia is an ultra-clean, energy-dense alternative liquid fuel. Ammonia is the only fuel other than hydrogen that produces no greenhouse gases (GHG) on combustion. Ammonia will power diesel and spark-ignited internal combustion engines, direct ammonia fuel cells, and even combustion turbines. And, ammonia can be manufactured from simply water and air using clean renewable energy."
>> http://www.ammoniafuelnetwork.org/
Posted by Aleksei Riikonen on 08/01 at 06:40 PM
@mike3: I don't claim that we can feed everyone when we run out of fossil fuels (unless there are huge technological developments before then, which is not impossible, especially since Peak Carbon will happen later than many claim). I fully admit that if we run out of fossil fuels while not being more advanced technologically than we currently are, then it's essentially back to the 17th century for most people who survive the famines that'd happen.
However, *currently* we could feed everyone, since we still have fossil fuels. In these circumstances more arable land through climate change is not something we need.
If you want to make the argument, that *because of* Peak Oil, we need to warm the planet to get more arable land, well, that's an argument I haven't argued against so far. My comments regarding whether we really need more arable land were made against Tim Tyler, and as I understand it, his position includes the presupposition that Peak Carbon won't be a problem.
@Tim Tyler: How soon do you expect reglaciation to start, and how quickly do you expect it to progress? It seems obvious to me, that this is not an immediate threat, and we can well afford to not seriously think about it for, say, a hundred years (until then, we should focus on more immediate threats, especially existential risks from fast technological development). Currently, the planet seems to be getting warmer, or at least not getting significantly cooler.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 08/02 at 02:23 AM
Re: "we should focus on more immediate threats, especially existential risks from fast technological development"
That's exactly what I said, further up the thread. However, global warming is far too mild, slow and positive to present much large-scale risk to humans in the near term. It's role is as a distraction from the real issues. If is was a good cause (which it isn't) it would be a weak cause - and those are bad too - since they bleed minds and resources from things that really matter.
Posted by mike3 on 08/02 at 01:36 PM
@Tim Tyler:
"People *always* complain about the short-term costs - when they will spread over tens of thousands of years - and while the ecological benefits of a more habitable planet with a bigger carrying capacity are enormous - and will last far beyond that. This is tremendously short-sighted of them."
This bit doesn't quite make sense. What's bad about thinking about costs that extend over tens of thousands of years?
@Aleksei Riikonen:
"until then, we should focus on more immediate threats, especially existential risks from fast technological development"
And peak carbon, since though not "existential" it could deal a very crippling blow to everything, and it will require vast amounts of expenditure to mitigate.
Posted by Khannea Suntzu on 08/05 at 05:39 AM
Heyy marcelo
Interesting article, and damn yes I have precisely the same views here.
Cya in Milan
Posted by CygnusX1 on 08/09 at 05:38 AM
"We must invest in energy innovation" .. Bill Gates
>> http://www.thegatesnotes.com/Thinking/article.aspx?ID=130
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