
What If We Never Run Out of Oil?  - aarghh
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/?single_page=true
======
DanielBMarkham
The best part of this rather traditionally long-winded article (not a jab,
just the truth) from The Atlantic was the observation that the availability of
energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with economic growth.

It makes me wonder if we are not completely misunderstanding the role of
energy, making it into some kind of threat or something to fear instead of a
huge enabler of human progress. Perhaps if we want flying cars and jet packs,
if we want burgeoning economies with more employment and GDP, we should be
doing anything physically possible to reduce the cost and increase the
availability of energy to the average person.

You're free to solve that in any way you want -- nuclear makes the most sense
to me -- but _if_ we have our heads on backwards, then we have a lot of well-
meaning people who are actively trying to destroy our future by preaching
conservation. Without knowing it.

Energy very well may be the 20th century's internet. The more everybody has
it, the better off we all are.

~~~
davi
_the availability of energy to the individual almost exactly correlates with
economic growth_

A corollary might be that the more energy available per capita, the greater
the environmental footprint of per capita. E.g. the McMansions of the
megasprawl: rolling hills of former farmland are graded and leveled off,
enormous balloon-like, energy inefficient stick frame houses pop up, and twice
a day their inhabitants wait in lines of SUVs on the clogged roads between the
exurbs and the suburban office parks. The entire enterprise is completely
dependent on vast quantities of energy being available to participants in the
system. People are comfortable in their SUVs and McMansions, and aspire to
this lifestyle. But the environmental footprint per capita is enormous.
Without some penalty for the external costs (which are long latency and hard
to measure), there is nothing to slow the spread of this pattern of economic
development.

In this light, when you say:

 _Energy very well may be the 20th century's internet. The more everybody has
it, the better off we all are._

I suspect it is more like an upside-down U-shaped curve. People are indeed
better off when we have sufficient energy per capita, but when we have a
massive superabundance of energy, we negatively affect our environment to the
point that real consequences start to kick in. Unfortunately, it is hard to
know where we are on that upside-down U, and it is hard (impossible?) to
distinguish overwrought hand-wringing about impending environmental doom from
the real thing, until the real thing has started to have obvious, severe, and
sustained effects.

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Derbasti
What if we never run out of oil? What if there is no global warming? What if
nuclear power plants never exploded?

I guess we are officially in denial now.

Jokes aside though, higher prices for fossil fuels are a reality and
regardless of the size of future reserves, we do have to deal with that at
least. The same goes for global warming. Regardless of whether we are the
cause of it or not, we have to deal with the consequences. The same goes for
nuclear energy. Regardless of whether more modern reactors are safe or not,
neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima are solved problems and they won't get solved
for another few thousand years.

Hence, my take is that we need to progress to a culture of perpetual
sustainability and independence of as many external variables as possible.

------
drcube
We never ran out of whale oil, but does anyone think we should go back to
using that as our main source of fuel?

It isn't about running out, it's about cost and sustainability. Oil is getting
more expensive and it isn't sustainable.

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ebbv
I get so tired of this totally incorrect narrative about the US being beholden
to Iran or Iraq or whatever for our oil supply. Everybody should know by now
that we only get 12.9% of our oil from the middle east TOTAL, let alone from
any one country.

See:

[http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-
america-g...](http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150444802/where-does-america-get-
oil-you-may-be-surprised)

------
h2s
From [http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-
tech/en...](http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/energy-
production/frozen-fuel4.htm):

"Many geologists suspect that gas hydrates play an important role in
stabilizing the seafloor. Drilling in these oceanic deposits could destabilize
the seabed, causing vast swaths of sediment to slide for miles down the
continental slope. Evidence suggests that such underwater landslides have
occurred in the past, with devastating consequences. The movement of so much
sediment would certainly trigger massive tsunamis similar to those seen in the
Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004."

Sounds dodgy to me :(

~~~
arethuza
Gas hydrates are possibly one of the mechanisms involved in the Storegga Slide
- which resulted in a large tsunami in the North Sea:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide>

------
Jonhoo
From reading these comments it seems most people only read the headline. Such
a shame, because it was a really well researched, thought through and written
article.

------
iSnow
>Brownouts will ripple across the landscape; control centers will call up big
companies and beg them to turn off the lights; managers of ultrasensitive
modern control centers will watch in horror as voltage drops lead to factory
shutdowns. (Germany, a leader in renewable-energy use, is already facing this
situation.

Kraut here. I have yet to experience this or read about it in the news, I
think the author is either exaggerating or misinformed.

What is true is that renewables already are putting a lot of strain on the net
and there are plans to invest in a lot of new power lines and switches to
better stabilize the grid, but the tone of the article is just ridiculous.

------
nazka
We already are able to create artificial oil by ourself.[1] And the chemical
formula is even better than turning lead into gold because it is turning CO2
into high quality oil!

It is fun to see how this is not talk in the media...

[1] <http://www.biopetroleo.com/english/>

------
DennisP
> [Natural gas] has already reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to their
> lowest levels since Newt Gingrich’s heyday.

That's true if you just look at CO2, but if you take methane leakage into
account things aren't so pretty. Several studies have claimed that the overall
greenhouse effect of fracked methane is as bad as coal's.

The gas companies dispute that, saying the data is poor. They're right about
that, and the reason is that those same companies refuse to install monitoring
equipment.

------
codeulike
The opening paragraphs about Churchill are fascinating

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fvox13
I've always sort of envisioned that oil would become "motorcycle / classic car
fuel" and whatever ugly cars normal people end up buying in the next 20 years
would run on electricity generated by a combination of some sort of next-gen
nuclear, wind, and solar. There's enough petrolheads that will gladly pay
$20/gallon to take their Camaro to the track on weekends.

~~~
drbawb
I'm waiting to see what the used market is going to look like for EVs.

I could easily squeak by w/ current electric car tech. I only need 40 miles a
day to cover my routine.

The problem is that I can afford $500-$5000 used cars -- I can't justify
spending $20,000+ on a new car.

That being said: I'd like an EV as soon as I can fit it in my budget -- I'm a
petrolhead, and I need to do my part to ensure there's fuel left for my
hobbyist vehicles and all the supercars I know and love.

------
amac
Excellent article - 'Energy 101' - and confirmation that Technology and Energy
are the worlds two most important industries.

------
saejox
Middle east stabilizes.

------
michaelochurch
_Running out of oil_ is not what should scare us. It's very easy to make the
stuff, and we have tons of it, even now. What we're losing is the _cheap
energy_ that came with the easy-to-exploit stuff that's dwindling. (Making
oil, as any physicist would intuit as per entropy, will generally cost more
than it's worth.) The energy ROI on Pennsylvania surface-level oil was 30:1
and up. That stuff's gone.

So-called "peak oil" (which we are probably at) isn't about "running out".
It's a _behavioral_ effect (peak production) insofar as we have some choice
(as a collective) in how much we produce. The Hubbert model says that "peak"
occurs at the 50-percent point. Based on what I've read, I'd guess that (a) we
are at peak production and will be at-or-near this plateau of 80-85Mb/day for
~20 years, but (b) decline will be slow and some of that will be the good kind
(alternatives), and (c) we've used less than 50% of the world supply (meaning
the symmetry of the Hubbert model _isn't_ the case).

Either way, we need to start working on alternatives. Global warming is a lot
scarier than "peak oil". Markets work, and the bad case of "peak oil" that I
consider credible is that our standard-of-living becomes like that of Eastern
Europe (say, Hungary) for ~20 years. I've been there. It's not that bad. You
have to hang-dry your clothes; you get used to that stuff. Climate change
could kill off the species. That's much scarier.

Personally, I'm a fan of modern nuclear technologies, as a bridge until we're
all-green. Most of the anti-nuclear prejudice in the US comes from known
design flaws in plants that are over 30 years old that were built before
people knew what they were doing. Modern, passive-safety nuclear plants just
don't have those TMI/Fukushima/Chernobyl risks. There are dangers (perfectly
safe energy production does not exist) but they're much less severe.

~~~
wowoc
I live in Eastern Europe. How else do dry your clothes apart from hanging
them?

~~~
Luc
Not sure if you're joking or not (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothes_dryer> )... A couple of years ago I was
sat on a train passing through Flanders (one of the richer regions in Western
Europe), next to a Texan family. The husband noticed a clothes rack full of
towels on a terrace, and exclaimed 'Look at that! Did you see that?! They
don't have a clothes dryer! Those poor people, we should thank God we were
born in Texas!'. Which was followed by much commiseration about how hard it
was to find a proper church on holidays.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
Living on the Texas Gulf coast, we line-dry clothes in the summer, when it
isn't too humid. Our nosey old blue-haired neighbor had to comment to another
neighbor about how unfortunate it was for us that our clothes-dryer had
obviously broken, and we must not be able to afford a new one. What's really
funny is that we have a privacy fence around three sides of our fairly large
back yard. Due to the part of the yard where the clothes are hung, the view of
the clothes is very limited from the street.

