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If We Dig Out All Our Fossil Fuels, Here’s How Hot We Can Expect It to Get

77 points by marcusgarvey 12y ago

cpeterso 12y ago
The cheap and easy energy of fossil fuels made the leap to modern civilization possible. Beyond the environmental and social impacts of continuing to use fossil fuels when alternatives exist, would (hypothetically) post-apocalyptic humanity be able to reboot civilization if all the easy fossil fuels have been mined?
- codeulike 12y ago
  Probably not. If we fuck this up, no beings around here are going to get another attempt at industrial civilization for millions of years - all the lower rungs on the ladder have been burnt away.
  - mooreds 12y ago
    Right. And that is the most terrifying piece of it all. Most of the people I know either don't think about it or think the magic of science and innovation will rescue us. But if we fall below a certain level of expertise, we will be gkbers. You can't make solar panels with charcoal fires. I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice. Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
    - codeulike 12y ago
      Things like the 'Global Village Construction Set' may help - its open-source designs for the 50 machines you'd need to reboot civilisation. http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
      - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
        How many of those machines need energy supplies at least similar to our current ones in order to function? Quite a few of them. Blueprints for how to make a tractor won't help if the blueprints assume gas or diesel fuel, and there's no oil any more...
        Turing_Machine 12y ago
        Engineers are actually pretty good at making new blueprints. In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc. There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake. It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        I've done some pretty serious 'rebooting' and I guarantee you that building any of those designs 'from scratch' is not going to work without decades of lead time to create the pre-requisites. I doubt there are shortcuts to go from nothing to diy truck that do not lead past many long years of grunt-work to get the basics in place that will allow you to make the next step. It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery. If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long. Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
        pharke 12y ago
        Absolutely agree, for many of those machines it would prove far more valuable to compile a history of early, working designs that are more easily produced with simple methods and tools and update them judiciously making use of current art but maintaining simplicity. Then create a roadmap of development leading from one catalogue of tools (and techniques) to the next. The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
    - msandford 12y ago
      In the US we've got "high" energy prices but nowhere near as high as in Europe, so we can probably tolerate another doubling or two of prices before it gets really, really unbearable. Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem. It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
      - sgt101 12y ago
        Energy costs in the US are differently distributed, more into the future perhaps, more incidentally on the community perhaps, but the market means that the costs are the same (give or take 10% for transport)
    - tjradcliffe 12y ago
      The world has always been about to end, and there have always been people ready to make money scaring people over it. This time is no different. In fact, we are better equipped to deal with our current problems than any generation of humanity has ever been.
      - Joeboy 12y ago
        Are you sure that's not just the Generalized Peter Principle talking?
    - jerf 12y ago
      "mice munching on grain from an overturned truck.... But is this time really different?" Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types. The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
      - mooreds 12y ago
        I appreciate your comment. Sometimes I feel I am too pessimistic, but either way you're correct that it's not a precise metaphor. I do feel like the majority of humans (including myself, most of the time) are more like the mice than not--from what I see it's a minority that are pushing the bounds of knowledge. Of course, a small percent of 7B people is a large absolute number. Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves... Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
      - ori_b 12y ago
        The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of power to drive. If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
    - qnaal 12y ago
      > gkbers What's this?
      - pingswept 12y ago
        I think it's a typo for "goners."
        mooreds 12y ago
        Yes, whoops!
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      What is a "gkber"?
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Nah. Methane Hydrate. Thorium. Not too hard to use; centuries of energy. Oil is just the VHS of energy - it came first and got market acceptance, but its not the best or even the only easily capitalized energy source.
    - marcosdumay 12y ago
      We don't really know how to use Methane Hydrate even today. And thorium is not easy to use by any reasonable account. If we lose just a bit of our knowledge, we'll be restricted to biomass.
      - gizmo686 12y ago
        We would still have wind and hydroelectic.
        yellowapple 12y ago
        We'd also (hopefully - i.e. assuming we don't fuck up Earth that badly) have geothermal.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        The Japanese have Methane Hydrate test wells, which are producing 400% of estimates. So that's soon to be solved.
    - r00fus 12y ago
      Does Thorium solve the irradiation problem? Tell me when we'll actually have nuclear-powered cars or planes. Petroleum isn't just a fuel source, its a highly portable fuel source. Clearly advanced battery tech will resolve most of that, but jets/rockets don't sound like they'll be using either batteries or nuclear as a fuel source anytime soon.
      - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
        Thorium does have some neutron radiation. If only it could be directed - say at the ground - then a car could fairly safely be Thorium-powered. Maybe not as dangerous to society as petrol fumes etc.
  - Gravityloss 12y ago
    It's worse than for a million years: it's likely that no significant fossil fuel amounts will ever be formed again on earth. At some point the fungi evolved to eat the dead trees. So they can not become coal, oil or gas anymore.
- deleted 12y ago
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- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Mostly yes. Many people follow an erroneous line of reasoning on this, though it's understandable because there's some subtlety and complexity involved. We have been exploiting natural resources like crazy, which has depleted and will deplete many reserves over time, but not all reserves. Most importantly, the reserves that get exploited change over time due to capacity, cost effectiveness, and so on. Which means that there are many instances where particular reserves stop being exploited before they've been depleted, usually because they are too small or not high enough quality or too expensive to be competitive on the market. Take coal, for example. There is still a huge amount of coal in easily mined locations all around the world that is not currently being used. If civilization had to "reboot" they could easily make use of those sources of coal. They aren't being used at present because they aren't competitive, they can't produce the volume of coal at the prices and of the quality that the market demands currently. But there's still tons of coal out there that you can basically just walk up to and dig out of the ground with a shovel. To some degree that same situation exists with a lot of other resources as well (such as iron ore). Petroleum is perhaps the most likely resource to be depleted in the future, but even in that case there are still lots of smaller reserves that are easy to exploit but are not because they're too small or too expensive. Realistically the early stages of an industrial revolution in a civilizational reboot wouldn't be significantly constrained, but later stages might be, though at that point they'd have options to work around it (for example, gasification of coal, earlier recycling, migration to non-fossil fuel power sources during early phases, and so on).
- Faint 12y ago
  And it's not just oil. It's all the minerals we've been mining since the dawn of civilization - take copper: before copper age one could find nuggets of pure copper metal [1], in ancient Egypt it was produced from ores with 10-12% copper [2]. 21st century copper ore has an average of 0.6% copper in it [3]. I doubt that ancient Egyptians could have done much anything with 0.6% ores. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Age_in_Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Ag... [2] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.htm http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques
  - timmaxw 12y ago
    But that copper hasn't been destroyed; it's just tied up in the form of pipes, power lines, etc. If civilization collapsed, our successors could "mine" pure copper from the ruins of our cities. If anything, pure copper would be more easily accessible post-collapse than in the Copper Age, because industrial civilization has already done the hard work of converting it from 0.6% ores to pure copper.
diafygi 12y ago
The three options in the article are accurate (tax, compete, or capture). I work in solar, and the consensus in the industry is that #2 is happening first (solar and wind are currently replacing coal). #1 will start to happen over the next few decades as the effects of climate change have more of an impact on society (e.g. the California drought). #3 won't likely happen since #1 will probably be cheaper. Anyway, I'm a chemical engineer from UT-Austin, so most of my graduating class went into oil. I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. Finally, I don't understand why more entrepreneurs don't do startups in energy. 87% of the world energy sources will have to change in the next 35 years. To most, that sounds scary. However, to an entrepreneur like me, that sounds like a huge ceiling.
- msandford 12y ago
  > I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to lose, though not because the industry is going to grow. It's going to shrink strictly based on out-of-the-ground production. But the oil companies aren't huge, they're gigantic. And they're not going to just roll over and die. If tomorrow someone gets a working LFTR going you can be sure that all the majors are going to spend a LOT of money trying to buy said company and scale it up. And the oil companies already own tremendous amounts of assets re: liquid fuels so they'd just start plopping reactors down in the middle of their plants and start producing DME (for diesel) or whatever the gas equivalent is out of various feedstocks. It'd take a decade or two to finally make the transition, but I really think that's where things are going. The oil companies regularly spend billions getting leases on land, drilling, production assets, etc. To spend $10b (or $100b even) on buying a 'safe nuclear' technology to avoid going out of business I suspect wouldn't generate too many waves. So they'll be sort-of reinvented, but still largely themselves. The majors aren't necessarily oil companies anymore, but energy companies. We're going to see them slowly change or die, but I suspect most will transition successfully just because they have so much money under "management" that it'll be hard to screw up too badly.
  - falsestprophet 12y ago
guscost 12y ago
> protecting the world from climate change requires the even more difficult task of disrupting today’s energy markets. Let's not mince words, the plan is and has been to manipulate the energy market through coercive authority. Calling this "disrupting" is the most cringe-worthy instance of that term I've ever seen in print (and there is a lot of competition).
- fit2rule 12y ago
  On the flipside, I've always considered 'disruption' in the modern sense to be precisely that: coercive authority. Its what programmers do.
  - guscost 12y ago
    Do you mean "hacking"?
    - fit2rule 12y ago
      No, I mean software development efforts which clearly disrupt the target industries of interest. It seems to me that programming is precisely the effort of executing authority over a subject using technology.
      - guscost 12y ago
        The object of "coerce" has to be a person or group of people, or maybe any entity that can be intimidated if you prefer. The dictionary isn't totally explicit about this but it's the meaning I'm going for.
        fit2rule 12y ago
        Well, look at all the Taxi drivers who are being coerced into becoming Uber drivers ..
    - waps 12y ago
      "Process automation" is much more coercive automation. Here's the webform, and it's the webform's way or the highway. Maybe even up to this point : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
nosuchthing 12y ago
"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem
rjsw 12y ago
I'm not sure this kind of headline is helpful. We should try to stop burning fossil fuels but that will mean that we can use them to produce petrochemicals for longer, the known reserves still have value.
- alphapapa 12y ago
  Who is "we"? Does that include people living in practically pre-industrial societies in places like parts of Africa?
T3RMINATED 12y ago
Fossil Fuels is endless supply - it just takes the core years and years to push the new fuels up so we can access it... American Schools lie to you... Welcome to the Truth from Germany.
lisa_henderson 12y ago
The title says "All Our Fossil Fuels" but they really mean something like "all the fossil fuels we are likely to dig up given reasonable economic assumptions." If they really meant "all" the fossil fuel, the results would be worse than they suggest. If you consider this: "The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Average temperatures were higher than today by about 18 degrees F (10 degrees C)." http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-warming/ http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-... Then this seems a bit odd: "an astonishing 16.2 degrees" That sounds accurate if they mean Celsius but this is the New York Times, which I believe uses Fahrenheit as a matter of style, and they write: "Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees" which confirms the use of Fahrenheit. It's frightening to consider the impact it would have if we really did dig up all the fossil fuel, including the stuff that we probably won't be able to reach. It's worth thinking about, since technological breakthroughs now allow us to reach a great deal of fossil fuel that was considered uneconomic 30 years ago and, likewise, 30 years from now we might be able to reach fossil fuel that we now consider unreachable. Assuming large concentrations of life, allowing the formation of fossil fuels, starts with the Cambrian, or a bit after, we can say that "all our fossil fuels" refers to the deposits that built up over the course of 500 million years. If we dug all of that up and burned all of it, then we should arrive at a temperature that is a bit hotter than anything that ever occurred before. If the Mesozoic saw average temperatures that were 10 degrees Celsius higher than today, then something like 16 degrees Celsius would be a reasonable guess. Or higher.
- pdonis 12y ago
  > The climate of the Cretaceous The Cretaceous isn't when the fossil fuels were formed; that was much earlier, during the Carboniferous. Global temperatures don't actually correlate very well over geologic time scales with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Fluctuations_during_the_remainder_of_the_Phanerozoic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Flu...
  - 12y ago
jack9 12y ago
We are going to have waste heat gather in our atmosphere, from whatever energy sources we attempt to capture, and use and store. This move toward renewables, doesn't solve the problem. We need a lever to offload waste heat and we aren't even looking at it in the proper perspective. Eventually, it looks like we'll be living underground, no matter what solutions we devise in this next 1000 year interim.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  At the moment, human energy utilization barely registers compared to the power of the sun. It's going to be an awful long time before our energy utilization shows up in the temperature of the atmosphere.
- alphapapa 12y ago
  Exercise in perspective: Compare all the heat generated by humanity to the heat received from the sun. Compare the age of the earth and the age of the human race.
tim333 12y ago
The calculation seems a bit dubious. They apparently assume a linear relationship between carbon emitted and temperature change. "Following the National Academy of Sciences (2011), we take 1.75°C per 1,000 GtC emitted as the central best estimate." However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2 absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere 100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest green house effect is from water vapour. There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-c...

77 points by marcusgarvey 12y ago

The cheap and easy energy of fossil fuels made the leap to modern civilization possible. Beyond the environmental and social impacts of continuing to use fossil fuels when alternatives exist, would (hypothetically) post-apocalyptic humanity be able to reboot civilization if all the easy fossil fuels have been mined?

codeulike 12y ago
Probably not. If we fuck this up, no beings around here are going to get another attempt at industrial civilization for millions of years - all the lower rungs on the ladder have been burnt away.
- mooreds 12y ago
  Right. And that is the most terrifying piece of it all. Most of the people I know either don't think about it or think the magic of science and innovation will rescue us. But if we fall below a certain level of expertise, we will be gkbers. You can't make solar panels with charcoal fires. I keep thinking of us as mice munching on grain from an overturned truck. Life is great (and the population explodes) until the grain is gone. Then woe to the mice. Of course, people point to other great challenges we have overcome as a species. But is this time really different?
  - codeulike 12y ago
    Things like the 'Global Village Construction Set' may help - its open-source designs for the 50 machines you'd need to reboot civilisation. http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ http://opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
    - AnimalMuppet 12y ago
      How many of those machines need energy supplies at least similar to our current ones in order to function? Quite a few of them. Blueprints for how to make a tractor won't help if the blueprints assume gas or diesel fuel, and there's no oil any more...
      - Turing_Machine 12y ago
        Engineers are actually pretty good at making new blueprints. In fact, they already did it once. Coal-fired steam engines powered civilization once, and could easily do it again. Probably better, using modern techniques such as fluidized beds, pelletizing, etc. There's this perception that oil will some day "run out" suddenly, like the last sip at the bottom of a milkshake. It doesn't work that way. If it happens, oil will gradually become more expensive, until the point where it becomes more economic to use coal (or fission, or fusion, or whatever). At that point, the amount of oil remaining becomes moot.
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      I've done some pretty serious 'rebooting' and I guarantee you that building any of those designs 'from scratch' is not going to work without decades of lead time to create the pre-requisites. I doubt there are shortcuts to go from nothing to diy truck that do not lead past many long years of grunt-work to get the basics in place that will allow you to make the next step. It would be a lot more impressive if that list worked its way up from having nothing but hand-tools that use no energy to basic generating capacity, smaller power tools, larger power tools, actual machinery. If you don't have a plan like that in place this will lead absolutely nowhere, try making a hydraulic piston without a really good lathe, a supply of oil, a good seal, a pump and so on. The list of pre-requisites for something as simple as a hydraulic piston is very long. Metal fabrication is just like software building layer upon layer of capabilities.
      - pharke 12y ago
        Absolutely agree, for many of those machines it would prove far more valuable to compile a history of early, working designs that are more easily produced with simple methods and tools and update them judiciously making use of current art but maintaining simplicity. Then create a roadmap of development leading from one catalogue of tools (and techniques) to the next. The whole project should not be undertaken as "what would I design if I wanted to restart civilization tomorrow" but as "what would I design if I were to be transported to 1500 with nothing but this catalogue".
  - msandford 12y ago
    In the US we've got "high" energy prices but nowhere near as high as in Europe, so we can probably tolerate another doubling or two of prices before it gets really, really unbearable. Until that happens there won't be any substantial pressure to get a LFTR program going, which will definitely solve the problem. It sometimes really gets to me that we're all suffering a lot because a few politicians won't be adults and do their job and fix the energy situation. But there are a lot more campaign contributions from existing big business than theoretical new big businesses.
    - sgt101 12y ago
      Energy costs in the US are differently distributed, more into the future perhaps, more incidentally on the community perhaps, but the market means that the costs are the same (give or take 10% for transport)
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    The world has always been about to end, and there have always been people ready to make money scaring people over it. This time is no different. In fact, we are better equipped to deal with our current problems than any generation of humanity has ever been.
    - Joeboy 12y ago
      Are you sure that's not just the Generalized Peter Principle talking?
  - jerf 12y ago
    "mice munching on grain from an overturned truck.... But is this time really different?" Your metaphor misleads you. It is inaccurate to characterize humanity as passively consuming a single pre-existing resource that it is utterly incapable of recreating. We are generating knowledge as well, and knowledge really is power, and from that we generate yet more resources of other types. The question of whether we can outrun our own consumption is an interesting question that is not a guaranteed "yes", but the built-in hopelessness of your metaphor isn't part of the answer. It is inaccurate to the point of being anti-knowledge. The universe is awash in negentropy, and the true, physics-based boundaries of our growth are still inconceivably larger than we are right now.
    - mooreds 12y ago
      I appreciate your comment. Sometimes I feel I am too pessimistic, but either way you're correct that it's not a precise metaphor. I do feel like the majority of humans (including myself, most of the time) are more like the mice than not--from what I see it's a minority that are pushing the bounds of knowledge. Of course, a small percent of 7B people is a large absolute number. Whenever I get too pessimistic, I think of the gobs and gobs of money to be made solving this issue (while still maintaining or improving our current standard of living). That said, I think many market optimists (not that I'm calling you one) don't really get EROEI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves... Finally, if someone invents a 10x battery at an affordable price, the whole game changes.
    - ori_b 12y ago
      The knowledge is increasingly being stored on relatively ephemeral media -- Spinning, naonstructured platters of rust don't last very long, and take a lot of power to drive. If things really go to hell, I'm willing to bet that huge amounts of knowledge -- possibly even the vast majority of human knowledge -- will end up getting lost gradually, either as it becomes too expensive to keep the servers that store it running, or as the drives fail and it becomes an inefficient use of resources to replace them.
  - qnaal 12y ago
    > gkbers What's this?
    - pingswept 12y ago
      I think it's a typo for "goners."
      - mooreds 12y ago
        Yes, whoops!
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    What is a "gkber"?
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Nah. Methane Hydrate. Thorium. Not too hard to use; centuries of energy. Oil is just the VHS of energy - it came first and got market acceptance, but its not the best or even the only easily capitalized energy source.
  - marcosdumay 12y ago
    We don't really know how to use Methane Hydrate even today. And thorium is not easy to use by any reasonable account. If we lose just a bit of our knowledge, we'll be restricted to biomass.
    - gizmo686 12y ago
      We would still have wind and hydroelectic.
      - yellowapple 12y ago
        We'd also (hopefully - i.e. assuming we don't fuck up Earth that badly) have geothermal.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      The Japanese have Methane Hydrate test wells, which are producing 400% of estimates. So that's soon to be solved.
  - r00fus 12y ago
    Does Thorium solve the irradiation problem? Tell me when we'll actually have nuclear-powered cars or planes. Petroleum isn't just a fuel source, its a highly portable fuel source. Clearly advanced battery tech will resolve most of that, but jets/rockets don't sound like they'll be using either batteries or nuclear as a fuel source anytime soon.
    - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
      Thorium does have some neutron radiation. If only it could be directed - say at the ground - then a car could fairly safely be Thorium-powered. Maybe not as dangerous to society as petrol fumes etc.
- Gravityloss 12y ago
  It's worse than for a million years: it's likely that no significant fossil fuel amounts will ever be formed again on earth. At some point the fungi evolved to eat the dead trees. So they can not become coal, oil or gas anymore.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Mostly yes. Many people follow an erroneous line of reasoning on this, though it's understandable because there's some subtlety and complexity involved. We have been exploiting natural resources like crazy, which has depleted and will deplete many reserves over time, but not all reserves. Most importantly, the reserves that get exploited change over time due to capacity, cost effectiveness, and so on. Which means that there are many instances where particular reserves stop being exploited before they've been depleted, usually because they are too small or not high enough quality or too expensive to be competitive on the market. Take coal, for example. There is still a huge amount of coal in easily mined locations all around the world that is not currently being used. If civilization had to "reboot" they could easily make use of those sources of coal. They aren't being used at present because they aren't competitive, they can't produce the volume of coal at the prices and of the quality that the market demands currently. But there's still tons of coal out there that you can basically just walk up to and dig out of the ground with a shovel. To some degree that same situation exists with a lot of other resources as well (such as iron ore). Petroleum is perhaps the most likely resource to be depleted in the future, but even in that case there are still lots of smaller reserves that are easy to exploit but are not because they're too small or too expensive. Realistically the early stages of an industrial revolution in a civilizational reboot wouldn't be significantly constrained, but later stages might be, though at that point they'd have options to work around it (for example, gasification of coal, earlier recycling, migration to non-fossil fuel power sources during early phases, and so on).
Faint 12y ago
And it's not just oil. It's all the minerals we've been mining since the dawn of civilization - take copper: before copper age one could find nuggets of pure copper metal [1], in ancient Egypt it was produced from ores with 10-12% copper [2]. 21st century copper ore has an average of 0.6% copper in it [3]. I doubt that ancient Egyptians could have done much anything with 0.6% ores. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Age_in_Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_during_the_Copper_Ag... [2] http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.htm http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/mining.... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper_extraction_techniques
- timmaxw 12y ago
  But that copper hasn't been destroyed; it's just tied up in the form of pipes, power lines, etc. If civilization collapsed, our successors could "mine" pure copper from the ruins of our cities. If anything, pure copper would be more easily accessible post-collapse than in the Copper Age, because industrial civilization has already done the hard work of converting it from 0.6% ores to pure copper.

diafygi 12y ago

The three options in the article are accurate (tax, compete, or capture). I work in solar, and the consensus in the industry is that #2 is happening first (solar and wind are currently replacing coal). #1 will start to happen over the next few decades as the effects of climate change have more of an impact on society (e.g. the California drought). #3 won't likely happen since #1 will probably be cheaper. Anyway, I'm a chemical engineer from UT-Austin, so most of my graduating class went into oil. I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. Finally, I don't understand why more entrepreneurs don't do startups in energy. 87% of the world energy sources will have to change in the next 35 years. To most, that sounds scary. However, to an entrepreneur like me, that sounds like a huge ceiling.

msandford 12y ago
> I have a standing $100 bet with two of them that they will not retire in the oil industry. I'm also in oil & gas right now and I suspect that you're going to lose, though not because the industry is going to grow. It's going to shrink strictly based on out-of-the-ground production. But the oil companies aren't huge, they're gigantic. And they're not going to just roll over and die. If tomorrow someone gets a working LFTR going you can be sure that all the majors are going to spend a LOT of money trying to buy said company and scale it up. And the oil companies already own tremendous amounts of assets re: liquid fuels so they'd just start plopping reactors down in the middle of their plants and start producing DME (for diesel) or whatever the gas equivalent is out of various feedstocks. It'd take a decade or two to finally make the transition, but I really think that's where things are going. The oil companies regularly spend billions getting leases on land, drilling, production assets, etc. To spend $10b (or $100b even) on buying a 'safe nuclear' technology to avoid going out of business I suspect wouldn't generate too many waves. So they'll be sort-of reinvented, but still largely themselves. The majors aren't necessarily oil companies anymore, but energy companies. We're going to see them slowly change or die, but I suspect most will transition successfully just because they have so much money under "management" that it'll be hard to screw up too badly.
- falsestprophet 12y ago

guscost 12y ago

> protecting the world from climate change requires the even more difficult task of disrupting today’s energy markets. Let's not mince words, the plan is and has been to manipulate the energy market through coercive authority. Calling this "disrupting" is the most cringe-worthy instance of that term I've ever seen in print (and there is a lot of competition).

fit2rule 12y ago
On the flipside, I've always considered 'disruption' in the modern sense to be precisely that: coercive authority. Its what programmers do.
- guscost 12y ago
  Do you mean "hacking"?
  - fit2rule 12y ago
    No, I mean software development efforts which clearly disrupt the target industries of interest. It seems to me that programming is precisely the effort of executing authority over a subject using technology.
    - guscost 12y ago
      The object of "coerce" has to be a person or group of people, or maybe any entity that can be intimidated if you prefer. The dictionary isn't totally explicit about this but it's the meaning I'm going for.
      - fit2rule 12y ago
        Well, look at all the Taxi drivers who are being coerced into becoming Uber drivers ..
  - waps 12y ago
    "Process automation" is much more coercive automation. Here's the webform, and it's the webform's way or the highway. Maybe even up to this point : http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

nosuchthing 12y ago

"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Problem

rjsw 12y ago

I'm not sure this kind of headline is helpful. We should try to stop burning fossil fuels but that will mean that we can use them to produce petrochemicals for longer, the known reserves still have value.

alphapapa 12y ago
Who is "we"? Does that include people living in practically pre-industrial societies in places like parts of Africa?

T3RMINATED 12y ago

Fossil Fuels is endless supply - it just takes the core years and years to push the new fuels up so we can access it... American Schools lie to you... Welcome to the Truth from Germany.

lisa_henderson 12y ago

The title says "All Our Fossil Fuels" but they really mean something like "all the fossil fuels we are likely to dig up given reasonable economic assumptions." If they really meant "all" the fossil fuel, the results would be worse than they suggest. If you consider this: "The climate of the Cretaceous is less certain and more widely disputed. Average temperatures were higher than today by about 18 degrees F (10 degrees C)." http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-warming/ http://what-when-how.com/global-warming/mesozoic-era-global-... Then this seems a bit odd: "an astonishing 16.2 degrees" That sounds accurate if they mean Celsius but this is the New York Times, which I believe uses Fahrenheit as a matter of style, and they write: "Scientists predict global disaster at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit over pre-industrial temperatures; there is enough fossil fuel extracted and within reach to raise temperatures 16.2 degrees" which confirms the use of Fahrenheit. It's frightening to consider the impact it would have if we really did dig up all the fossil fuel, including the stuff that we probably won't be able to reach. It's worth thinking about, since technological breakthroughs now allow us to reach a great deal of fossil fuel that was considered uneconomic 30 years ago and, likewise, 30 years from now we might be able to reach fossil fuel that we now consider unreachable. Assuming large concentrations of life, allowing the formation of fossil fuels, starts with the Cambrian, or a bit after, we can say that "all our fossil fuels" refers to the deposits that built up over the course of 500 million years. If we dug all of that up and burned all of it, then we should arrive at a temperature that is a bit hotter than anything that ever occurred before. If the Mesozoic saw average temperatures that were 10 degrees Celsius higher than today, then something like 16 degrees Celsius would be a reasonable guess. Or higher.

pdonis 12y ago
> The climate of the Cretaceous The Cretaceous isn't when the fossil fuels were formed; that was much earlier, during the Carboniferous. Global temperatures don't actually correlate very well over geologic time scales with the amount of carbon sequestered in fossil fuels: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Fluctuations_during_the_remainder_of_the_Phanerozoic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#Flu...
- 12y ago

jack9 12y ago

We are going to have waste heat gather in our atmosphere, from whatever energy sources we attempt to capture, and use and store. This move toward renewables, doesn't solve the problem. We need a lever to offload waste heat and we aren't even looking at it in the proper perspective. Eventually, it looks like we'll be living underground, no matter what solutions we devise in this next 1000 year interim.

maxerickson 12y ago
At the moment, human energy utilization barely registers compared to the power of the sun. It's going to be an awful long time before our energy utilization shows up in the temperature of the atmosphere.
alphapapa 12y ago
Exercise in perspective: Compare all the heat generated by humanity to the heat received from the sun. Compare the age of the earth and the age of the human race.

tim333 12y ago

The calculation seems a bit dubious. They apparently assume a linear relationship between carbon emitted and temperature change. "Following the National Academy of Sciences (2011), we take 1.75°C per 1,000 GtC emitted as the central best estimate." However doubling CO2 does not double the amount of radiation it absorbs. CO2 absorbs at certain particular wavelengths and even if you make the atmosphere 100% CO2 it can only absorb all the light at those wavelengths and remain clear at others. In fact replacing everything in the atmosphere, including water vapour with CO2 would probably make the Earth cooler as the biggest green house effect is from water vapour. There's some discussion here, admittedly from a skeptical source without full citations suggesting far lower warming from increases in CO2. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-co2-as-a-greenhouse-gas-becomes-ever-more-marginal-with-greater-concentration/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-effectiveness-of-c...