
Is global collapse imminent? (2014) [pdf] - shoo
http://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf
======
3327
"The end of easy oil, and subsequent global collapse"

The paper might not be right on all points or might be completely wrong
entirely. But it is right on one thing.

If you have have ever taken care of plants, what happens with a plant before
it dies is something very odd - nothing.

It will look a little weak, but then it will suddenly completely die - almost
overnight, shedding all leaves and going dry.

~~~
zaroth
The most interesting thing about the market is how everything you think you
know can be wrong. Like how bad news is good news right before a Fed meeting,
or how suddenly cheap oil is now bad because it's reducing investment in new
pipelines and rigs. I think these quirky inversions are reliable signals of
something, I just haven't figured out quite what.

One thing's for sure, these predictions are exactly like a broken clock.

~~~
enupten
Isn't the cheap oil the result of the Saudis arm-twisting the Russians and
Iranians ?

P.S: Shell is starting an exploration of oil in the Arctic, after Obama's
executive order. I don't think the bit about investment in new rigs is well-
founded.

~~~
vixen99
Maybe in your neck of the woods the expression has a different meaning but I
thought 'arm-twisting' meant getting someone to do something they initially
didn't want to do. Hardly the case with the Russians and the price of oil.

~~~
nl
The implication is that the Saudis are a US proxy, and the arm twisting is
that they should change their policy on Ukraine.

In the case of Iran it's more just to try to hurt their economy.

------
anton_tarasenko
The author is missing the point that technology R&D responds to oil prices.
Strictly speaking, if oil becomes scarce and expensive, alternative energy
develops more rapidly. It's the cheap oil that creates developmental risks.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, but there's only so much power in research -- humans can _find_ and
_exploit_ existing entropic gradients. We cannot create them.

And people have been looking at the exhaustion of fossil fuels since the late
18th century. Yes, 18th, not 19th, with the first questions arising over how
long Britain's coal would last.

In that time, the three big developments have been accessing petroleum (1859),
commercial electricity generation (1870s), and nuclear fission (1935).

Petroleum replaced one fossil fuel with another (albeit a vastly more useful
one). Electricity allowed for energy generation and use to be decoupled by
thousands of miles, if necessary (transmission losses for long-distance
electricity are quite low). And nuclear fission offered one possible out,
though it's been a highly problematic option.

Wind and water power have been utilized by humans for centuries, if not
longer. Solar power _has_ progressed hugely in recent decades, but it's far
more fundamentally limited than many people realize. Raw availability at
Earth's surface is ~8,000x present human energy consumption. Factor in land
area (30% of total), population and per-capita energy growth (roughly doubling
energy demand even at a small fraction of present US energy use levels), total
conversion efficiencies (you're left with about 1% of the available incident
energy after PV conversion, capacity factor, spacing factors, and inverters),
and we're down to a 20x surplus of solar energy as available capacity _if you
pave over the entire Earth 's landmass_.

You start rapidly arriving at the conclusion that either we're 1) not going to
see levels of resource consumption comparable to those of the advanced world,
or 2) not for projected populations, or both.

You can hypothesize alternatives, but most are assuming tremendous advances
which have been exceptionally non-forthcoming.

~~~
kazagistar
Nuclear being "problematic" is vastly overblown. That's why I think the answer
to the title is a resounding no: we still have a lenthy nuclear buffer before
a proper energetic collapse, so at the very least it is not imminent.

~~~
dredmorbius
I've discussed the specifics of why nuclear's problematic at more length here:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2awjj2/thought...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2awjj2/thoughts_on_nuclear_energy/)

The issues are multiple, many are _not_ technical in nature (which means that
the solutions are also not technical in nature).

Among them: risk, particularly systemic risk (not strictly limited to fallout
or acute plant operational scenarios -- think Japan stressing its grid and
industrial capacity following Fukushima), scale (Derek Abbott, "Is Nuclear
Power Globally Scalable", IEEE), Proliferation, the 10,000 year perspective
(language, cultures, institutions...), credibility.

The near-term prospects are also not great. For once-through conventional
plants, there's about an 80 year fuel reserve, 6 if we go all-out nuclear.
Advanced thorium designs aren't proven and are likely 20-25+ years from
deployment (those are ambitious Chinese estimates). Controlled energy-positive
fusion strikes me as a "never going to happen" option, and quite likely with
even greater systemic risks than fission (fission reactions aren't that hard
to make happen, fusion is _very_ hard). I'm aware of claims that uranium can
be extracted from seawater -- that strikes me as _possibly_ but not hugely
credible.

And nuclear fails (of and by itself) to address numerous other concerns,
notably a liquid fuels replacement, or scarce minerals availability -- humans
are running short of numerous resources, not just energy.

It's also worth noting that one of nuclear's harshest critics was one of its
most effective engineers: US Navy Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, father of the
nuclear navy.

~~~
maxerickson
What do documents like this one do to your estimates of credibility?

[http://www-pub.iaea.org/iaeameetings/cn216pn/Thursday/Sessio...](http://www-
pub.iaea.org/iaeameetings/cn216pn/Thursday/Session13/181-Kung.pdf)

~~~
dredmorbius
Lessee:

Pro: Cost data are provided (but without comparison to existing uranium mining
costs). Quick check suggests that recent prices are on the order of $83/kg,
vs, > $1,000/kg given in the study.

[http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=uranium](http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=uranium)

If I'm reading that correctly they're delivering 1 kg of natural (non-
enriched) uranium for about $1,000. The energy value delivered by that (at
$0.09/kWh) is around 1,000x greater, which is a good thing.

Con:

This appears to be largely theoretical, there are no large-scale deployments,
and questions of viability, durability, maintenance, recovery (of both
filtration material and uranium from it), etc., isn't given. This is _very_
immature technology (See: [http://redd.it/24sdvf](http://redd.it/24sdvf)).

For building out infrastructures we'll be needing likely within a few decades,
if not earlier, that's not much lead time.

I'd really like to see some field-trial data and comprehensive cost and
durablility discussion. Marine environments are harsh.

~~~
maxerickson
I was mostly lampooning the way you reduced an idea that is taken seriously
enough to be a DOE research project to _I 'm aware of claims that uranium can
be extracted from seawater_.

I haven't tried to figure it out very carefully, but I imagine the cost
estimates include production, deployment and collection of the harvester
material, and that the degradation of the material is factored in (it wouldn't
be all that surprising if the estimates treated it as disposable after 1 or
few uses, because that is an easy way to make a conservative estimate).

~~~
dredmorbius
I was simply noting that I am in fact aware of the proposal. It's not possible
to discuss all elements of the situation -- time, space, and understanding all
impose limits.

Assume good faith.

As with risks, there are issues in how costs are computed in that for much of
the present economy they're predicated on underpriced fossil fuels. Another
longer discussion I don't have time for here, but it's something Charles A.F.
Hall discusses in his analysis of the Cobb-Douglas production function.

------
currentoor
They don't even have a conclusion/tl;dr section...

------
tinym
One hopes Betteridge's law is in effect

~~~
tome
tome's law strikes again!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549)

------
nickbauman
Societies do not collapse. They're merely abandoned.

~~~
faizshah
This is incorrect, societies have collapsed regularly throughout history. A
collapse doesn't have to be a total destruction of the society, it's most
often a fast transition to a lower level of social complexity.

One of my favorite books (and a book referenced by the link above) is "The
Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph A Tainter, he gives a great study on
the nature of collapse with lots of examples (note, some of the examples are a
little dated and dubious like the Ik). He also gave a few presentations on
this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0R09YzyuCI)

~~~
restalis
I've watched this presentation. Unfortunately, I can't say I've found all of
it enlightening or at least useful. For one thing, there were important
omissions, like inventions/development in agriculture or communication
technology that caused an explosion in resources/means available (which were
to stay), whereas Mr. Tainter assumes resources to be limited and declining.
Other than the omissions there are just wrong assumptions or metrics. The best
example in this regard is US patents that he takes as an indicator of research
and development and points that the costs got higher because patents are
submitted by (costly) groups. Nowadays not only patents are submitted in
groups, but also paperworks, and this is partly political (i.e. an artificial
induced phenomenon). And patents become hardly a metric of invention or
development, as a lot of us may acknowledge (reference to patent trolling),
but for some reason in Mr. Tainter's dissemination this is again overlooked.

I'm not saying Mr. Tainter's work is worthless, it's just that I see it not
that solid to consider it as a foundation to build upon.

~~~
faizshah
I found the book thought provoking and compelling. I wouldn't take what Dr.
Tainter says as fact, like one would for a Math textbook, it's an argument (an
opinion) which he defends in his book. His book is mainly about the first half
of his presentation, not the second half that relates to the modern world. I
would suggest you read the book if you liked the first half of the
presentation.

~~~
restalis
Thanks for suggestion. Although I (clearly) have my retentions about his
theories, I've already (book)marked both the presentation for future reference
and his other related works for future reading.

------
jqm
This seems something like the (constantly failing) climate prediction models.
There are the lot of interrelated factors, many of which are not well
understood and any number of possible unforeseen events arising.

~~~
Daishiman
Constantly failing? Have you _actually_ read the literature in climate
science? The models have been predicting pretty much everything that's been
happening in the past 20 year.

Collapse of Antarctic ice shelves? Predicted. Ice cover of the Arctic?
Surprisingly well predicted. Atmospheric CO2 ppm? Same thing.

~~~
jqm
Atmospheric CO2 ppm a prediction?

Ok. You don't know what you are talking about do you?

~~~
Daishiman
Yup. Do you?

~~~
jqm
I'm thinking that if you did know then you would be aware of how many (often
quite prestigious and well funded) models have failed to predict global
climate change outcomes, especially in timing...

That's my point about models. For such a complex system they are very
difficult to make with any accuracy, and there are any number of factors that
can throw them off. I see this same lack of dimensionality in this article.
Has nothing to do with man affecting the climate which most reasonable people
agree is likely occurring.

