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I remember all the peak oil claims in the early 2000s, then all of a sudden shale oil, gas, and fracking made all the people sounding the alarm look very silly.

I remember all the peak oil claims in the early 2000s, then all of a sudden shale oil, gas, and fracking made all the people sounding the alarm look very silly. Resource scarcity isn't a new phenomenon. It's why markets exist. Prices allocate resources. There is no emergency here. Sure, fossil fuels are finite - can you give me a number for how finite? Everyone who tried in 2008 was wrong. Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased. Everyone seems so utterly confident in predicting so many problems in the future, yet things keep getting better generation after generation. We need to stop pretending we can predict and solve all of society's future problems right now.

defrost 3y ago
> Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased. But no actual new resources were created, as I said it's a limited resource and now we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy .. and when we do use these tail end supplies we continue to add to increasing C02 load in the troposphere. > We need to stop pretending we can predict [...] society's future problems right now. Bit general, but we can at least specifically predict how much additional energy is trapped by increasing insulation in the troposhere .. that's thermodynamics and a spherical spreadsheet. Easy enough to think of a 100+ years ago, back of the envelope in the 1970s, and model indetail today.
- SamPatt 3y ago
  >we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy This is exactly what was said before, and was premature, that was my point. It's technically correct that no new resources were created, but practically speaking, the new technology revealed resources we didn't know existed (or couldn't retrieve). The point is that we don't know how far this extends in the future. Reality has a way of making fools of anyone who naively extends trend lines.

defrost 3y ago

> Prices increased, we got more exploration, the tech improved, and all of a sudden our fossil fuel supply massively increased. But no actual new resources were created, as I said it's a limited resource and now we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy .. and when we do use these tail end supplies we continue to add to increasing C02 load in the troposphere. > We need to stop pretending we can predict [...] society's future problems right now. Bit general, but we can at least specifically predict how much additional energy is trapped by increasing insulation in the troposhere .. that's thermodynamics and a spherical spreadsheet. Easy enough to think of a 100+ years ago, back of the envelope in the 1970s, and model indetail today.

SamPatt 3y ago
>we've passed a point where further access to what's left require greater cost, greater effort, greater energy This is exactly what was said before, and was premature, that was my point. It's technically correct that no new resources were created, but practically speaking, the new technology revealed resources we didn't know existed (or couldn't retrieve). The point is that we don't know how far this extends in the future. Reality has a way of making fools of anyone who naively extends trend lines.