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The Club of Rome, peak oil, etc. are fantastic intellectual touch points to categorize people based on whether they believe in human ingenuity aided by economic
by ccamrobertson 5y ago
The Club of Rome, peak oil, etc. are fantastic intellectual touch points to categorize people based on whether they believe in human ingenuity aided by economic incentives or not.
The simplistic "resources" shown in the graphs does little to explain the methodology of the research, but seems incredibly questionable. For instance, we certainly passed peak oil production in the U.S. in the early 1970s, but thanks to innovations around tar, shale and deep sea extraction the U.S. surpassed this in 2018.
This isn't new; in the 19th century Malthus' ghost was apparent as it was predicted that the earth couldn't feed more than a billion people, but thanks to the Haber–Bosch process we can fix nitrogen for fertilizers and feed nearly 8x that number.
Certain resources will be completely extracted, but economic incentives will strongly encourage people to devise substitutes. Given how little of the Earth's mantle human activity has touched and the increasing likelihood that we will have technology solutions to manage externalities like excess C02, I'm super encouraged for our future prospects.
- billytetrud 5y agoYes, these kinds of reports are incredibly biased. I see very little evidence of any "model" in the papers other than extrapolation and number tweaking to produce different scenarios. For sure, pollution, habitat destruction / deforestation, soil depletion, are all problems. But these aren't inevitable problems. They all have technological solutions - which the report dismisses as futile for some reason...
- aylmao 5y ago> For instance, we certainly passed peak oil production in the U.S. in the early 1970s, but thanks to innovations around tar, shale and deep sea extraction the U.S. surpassed this in 2018. We might've delayed it, but I think we can all agree there will be a peak oil at some point. We all know oil is finite.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoIt is possible that we may never see peak oil because we transition from it and leave it in the ground. I would argue that a peak and reduction caused by regulation, taxation, or replacement via innovation don't count for the original "Peak oil" theroy. There are 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves remaining, which is more than humanity has used throughout history, and the known reserves are going up over time, not down. There are another 3 trillion barrels of unconventional oil reserves (e.g. oil sands)
- ccamrobertson 5y agoFossil fuels are certainly finite, but if perpetual demand existed for a hydrocarbon based fuel (“oil”) we could produce as much as we wanted by fixing carbon from some source and using thermal depolymerization — hence my whole point about ingenuity. Shale and oil sands are in a sense ‘unfair’ to the original notion of peak oil which was focused entirely on cheap to produce crude that literally bubbled out of the ground in some places. But then peak oil is semantic; yes, it happened for some flavors of crude in the U.S. but we did and will find ways to produce more (if needed). Pending some fantastically cost effective way to mitigate all the externalities of burning oil, I certainly hope we reduce our use of it.