4 ms·

Why is peak oil not believable? There might be more of than we thought, but we're pretty sure there's not infinitely much. It has to happen eventually.

merpnderp 11y ago
When I say peak oil isn't believable, I mean in the sense that over the last 15 years, especially before shale oil, the west was bombarded by "experts" saying peak oil had already occurred, and oil would be unafforadable in just a few years as prices skyrocketed. Any argument that involved technological progress in reducing the cost of mining hard to get oil was mocked and lambasted as hopelessly naive. I of course don't believe that there's an infinite supply of oil. Only that we haven't exhausted the millions of years of dead trees, which before the the emergence of white fungus with the ability to eat them, covered the Earth a hundred meters deep in some places.
- crpatino 11y ago
  It is a fact that conventional oil has already peaked, sometime in the last 5-10 years. Shale oil, tar sands and the like are picking up part of the slack, though their EROI is lower (though still a little better than renewables) and have a bunch of other technical and environmental issues. At some point we'll have to bite that bullet. The problem with your remark was caused by the doomers who took the flag of Peak Oil (TM) to claim that everything was going to crash and burn when the peak reached. Then when reality turned out to be more nuanced than that, the general public just went on to laugh the whole thing off and keep ignoring the real issues. In an ideal world, we should be in the middle of a crahs program to retool the whole industry to work with renewables and mitigate the effects of other related issues like climate change/global weirding... but instead, we are doing too little and too late.
  - merpnderp 11y ago
    You say doomers took the flag to claim everything is going to crash, but then say we should be in a crash course to change off of oil. Yet we have several decades of known oil reserves, maybe dozens, with room to grow usage. And given the rapid pace of EV cars, the market is going to solve the oil problem far faster than any mandated crash problem, well within the dozens of years of oil reserves we have left are exhausted.
    - crpatino 11y ago
      It takes decades to retool the whole industry. Inventing new forms of energy is just the begining, you have to make those available in wide scale. Whole new industries have to be born and old industries have to be let fade and die. It is not that the house is on fire right now. It is that we live in a house with no fire alarm and not up to code, but everybody is dragging their feet to fix that because "it has never happened before". And since you mention EV cars... where do you think the electricity to power them is comming today? What percentage comes from non-reneweable sources? And what percentage of the car market lives near the bigger sources of reneweable sources?

merpnderp 11y ago

When I say peak oil isn't believable, I mean in the sense that over the last 15 years, especially before shale oil, the west was bombarded by "experts" saying peak oil had already occurred, and oil would be unafforadable in just a few years as prices skyrocketed. Any argument that involved technological progress in reducing the cost of mining hard to get oil was mocked and lambasted as hopelessly naive. I of course don't believe that there's an infinite supply of oil. Only that we haven't exhausted the millions of years of dead trees, which before the the emergence of white fungus with the ability to eat them, covered the Earth a hundred meters deep in some places.

crpatino 11y ago
It is a fact that conventional oil has already peaked, sometime in the last 5-10 years. Shale oil, tar sands and the like are picking up part of the slack, though their EROI is lower (though still a little better than renewables) and have a bunch of other technical and environmental issues. At some point we'll have to bite that bullet. The problem with your remark was caused by the doomers who took the flag of Peak Oil (TM) to claim that everything was going to crash and burn when the peak reached. Then when reality turned out to be more nuanced than that, the general public just went on to laugh the whole thing off and keep ignoring the real issues. In an ideal world, we should be in the middle of a crahs program to retool the whole industry to work with renewables and mitigate the effects of other related issues like climate change/global weirding... but instead, we are doing too little and too late.
- merpnderp 11y ago
  You say doomers took the flag to claim everything is going to crash, but then say we should be in a crash course to change off of oil. Yet we have several decades of known oil reserves, maybe dozens, with room to grow usage. And given the rapid pace of EV cars, the market is going to solve the oil problem far faster than any mandated crash problem, well within the dozens of years of oil reserves we have left are exhausted.
  - crpatino 11y ago
    It takes decades to retool the whole industry. Inventing new forms of energy is just the begining, you have to make those available in wide scale. Whole new industries have to be born and old industries have to be let fade and die. It is not that the house is on fire right now. It is that we live in a house with no fire alarm and not up to code, but everybody is dragging their feet to fix that because "it has never happened before". And since you mention EV cars... where do you think the electricity to power them is comming today? What percentage comes from non-reneweable sources? And what percentage of the car market lives near the bigger sources of reneweable sources?