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It's also just like any 4x strategy game. You can harvest resources and build and build but once those resources are depleted they deplete very fast because you

It's also just like any 4x strategy game. You can harvest resources and build and build but once those resources are depleted they deplete very fast because you have grown capacity for intake. I'm glad we aren't worried about peak oil anymore but the climate and food scarity is going to be the next pitfall to avoid.

anonporridge 3y ago
When I look at this chart, I'm still pretty worried about peak fossil fuel happening too soon. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
- vpribish 3y ago
  peak oil will happen, hopefully soon. but not because we run out of oil - it is nearly goddamn endless - but because we choose to stop burning it for all the reasons we are so familiar with.
- jeffvader 3y ago
  "we'll found more soon"
Loughla 3y ago
Wait, when did we stop being concerned about peak oil and why?
- jes5199 3y ago
  combination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.
    - adrianN 3y ago
      Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…
        shiftpgdn 3y ago
        Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Right but talk to most people and they’ve bought into this myth that renewables will help get us off fossil fuels while failing to consider the problem systemically. It’s like talking to a wall. We need to build an insane amount of nuclear reactors to get rid of fossil fuels from grid production but also to power secondary things like plastics manufacturing, carbon recapture etc. We need to be soaking up excess nuclear capacity. Excess solar is a joke because ultimately it has to recharge expensive batteries first whereas nuclear has a lot of excess night time and day time energy.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Because there's hundreds of years of known supply even at current consumption and we already have viable alternatives.
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Really? Name one that is safe to handle, easy to convert, and has even 1/2 the energy density.
    - jes5199 3y ago
      I’m convinced that “density” is not a helpful metric here. There’s plenty of diffuse energy, and it’s advantageous to collect it near where it’s used, rather than make big pipes and ship it around
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a greedy “rich get richer” solution that also doesn’t actually solve the carbon problem because other people need electricity too.
        ggm 3y ago
        Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install. As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build. But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power. Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.
davidw 3y ago
The author's wikipedia page shows he wrote some books about Peak Oil...

anonporridge 3y ago

When I look at this chart, I'm still pretty worried about peak fossil fuel happening too soon. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...

vpribish 3y ago
peak oil will happen, hopefully soon. but not because we run out of oil - it is nearly goddamn endless - but because we choose to stop burning it for all the reasons we are so familiar with.
jeffvader 3y ago
"we'll found more soon"

Loughla 3y ago

Wait, when did we stop being concerned about peak oil and why?

jes5199 3y ago
combination of two things; first, we came up with new ways to get oil out of the ground, so it extended the deadline considerably. second, economic growth and oil burning decoupled, so instead of needing more and more oil we hit a steady number. hopefully, we transition off it soon. but we’re no longer thought likely to run out, even if we don’t
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I don’t see a viable plan to transition for plastics, so I suspect that oil consumption will remain substantial until plastics get enough expensive that we find viable alternatives. Conversely I don’t think we’re actually in danger of transitioning off of oil consumption in any real way in the next 20 years.
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Plastic can be made from hydrogen and carbon. Plastic is a minuscule fraction of our oil consumption. Maybe the oil-free synthesis path becomes economically attractive once we stop burning oil for energy and plastic feedstock is no longer a mostly free byproduct of that.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-worldwide/#topicOverview https://www.statista.com/topics/8418/petrochemical-industry-... 16% of world oil consumption is not nothing. AFAIK we don’t have good replacements and cost isn’t the only reason. And even if it is, think about how pervasive petrchochemical plastics are - it seems unlikely we’d go back so even if we switched to more expensive replacements, that means the price of a lot of stuff is going to go up by a lot…
      - shiftpgdn 3y ago
        Nuclear reactors and thermal depolymerization seems promising. We could probably mine every landfill site in America for a century before needing to think about something else.
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Right but talk to most people and they’ve bought into this myth that renewables will help get us off fossil fuels while failing to consider the problem systemically. It’s like talking to a wall. We need to build an insane amount of nuclear reactors to get rid of fossil fuels from grid production but also to power secondary things like plastics manufacturing, carbon recapture etc. We need to be soaking up excess nuclear capacity. Excess solar is a joke because ultimately it has to recharge expensive batteries first whereas nuclear has a lot of excess night time and day time energy.
chrisco255 3y ago
Because there's hundreds of years of known supply even at current consumption and we already have viable alternatives.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  Really? Name one that is safe to handle, easy to convert, and has even 1/2 the energy density.
  - jes5199 3y ago
    I’m convinced that “density” is not a helpful metric here. There’s plenty of diffuse energy, and it’s advantageous to collect it near where it’s used, rather than make big pipes and ship it around
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Disagree. Solar doesn’t work at night and it’s horribly inefficient to have a bunch of local batteries everywhere compared with centralized power generation with relatively cheap wiring distributing the centrally generated energy. Local generation is a greedy solution (I got mine) that has a shared cost (centrally generated power for those who can’t generate their own spikes massively in price). It’s basically a greedy “rich get richer” solution that also doesn’t actually solve the carbon problem because other people need electricity too.
      - ggm 3y ago
        Always this "horribly inefficient" claim. Yet, several advanced economies are doing it. You think you're smarter than the power industry economists who say batteries are OK? Basically, have you tried considering you might be .. wrong?
        vlovich123 3y ago
        Source? Also, I think you may be replying to something I didn’t say. What I said was that installing batteries on each house is going to be less efficient than installing grid-scale batteries because you will end up over installing the amount of capacity you need initially so that you never go dark on the off chance you pull more power. Or you use a grid hookup as a backup in which case you end up kinda of parasitic where you don’t pay for the grid but rely on it being there to offload the responsibility of providing differential power when your home solution isn’t meeting your needs (this is expensive because the grid has non trivial maintenance costs that you’re not contributing to). Households will inevitably anlso under provision in the long term due to unaccounted for energy growth (eg EV vehicles). It’s also going to be more expensive because people who don’t have the capital to install their own batteries will be stuck paying the bill for grid scale batteries and maintenance anyway while richer households get to avoid that cost due to their own solar install. As for grid scale batteries, they do remain prohibitively expensive - even nuclear with massive cost overruns handily beats solar + batteries. There’s also legitimate questions about whether we can actually manufacture enough batteries to have solar run as baseload power, especially with people adding an insane number of EVs in the coming decades to charge overnight. Remember - you have to recharge the batteries themselves which means you need a bunch of extra solar just to charge the night time batteries which means ~30% more capacity than is rated to handle daytime power otherwise. So 30% larger solar install than we’re building today + more battery capacity than we’ve ever demonstrated the ability to build. But anyway. You can continue to believe in grid scale batteries as a way to make solar work for baseload but that has nothing to do with what I said about using solar+batteries for individual homes instead of grid scale power. Have you considered that renewables don’t actually have a track record of replacing baseload power except for wind in some very specific and extremely unique geographic areas? And renewables also have a very poor track record in terms of having any reduction in fossil fuel consumption from the grid? Might be something to try on rather than making appeals to authority and claiming any skeptics are wrong.

davidw 3y ago

The author's wikipedia page shows he wrote some books about Peak Oil...