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.
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.
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
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.
Petrochemical use is currently what, about 20% of total crude oil use? Yeah we'll probably need to start at least trying to tackle that soon even if the CO2 in the atmosphere thing is more urgent, but there's no pressing need to be a viable plan for 100% reduction now if we won't even think about using it for probably a decade at least. We've got the time to move forward one small step at a time and then verify each step so it isn't like plastic recycling ("Oh yeah we'll totally do it" *dumps in lower income country*) and measurable goals on shorter timeframes (say, 30% reduction by 2030) are much more achievable and effective than a vague long term goal of not using any more oil ever, not even a little bit. There's no shame in picking the low hanging fruit first.
Plastic is only cheap because it's a byproduct of oil. It'll stop being as cheap and plentiful if we stop producing oil and we'll naturally move to cheaper substitutes
Although I don't think oil use is going to end anytime soon
Gas, including ethylene from oil production, is used heavily in pharma, plastics and fertiliser production. If oil becomes uneconomic to produce, the supply of drugs, explosives, plastic and fertiliser is at risk, at the very least of price shocks.
Peak oil is not really just about untapped stocks, it's about the economics of supply and consumption. We won't "run out" of oil, it will stop being viable to produce it when gasoline ceases to be so economically important.
The feedstock uses of ethylene and lng are justified by the underlying consumption of petrol, diesel and heavy oils. It's profit from waste. If the gasoline isn't used the refineries shut down. If the entire cycle has to convert to fertiliser the economics of fertiliser change, and prices change.
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.
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…
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.
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.
At present rates we’re likely to end up with an order of magnitude more renewable capacity than nuclear capacity, with that availability showing up as an equivalent number in cost. Any novel industrial process that relies on using huge amounts of energy will use the cheapest source of energy if at all possible, meaning that it will be engineered to deal with cheap but intermittent power sources. Unless there is some fundamental physical reason that it can’t work that way.
Any chance you’re a Doomberg reader? I’ve followed his recent writing and interviews on peak oil and I also enjoyed this Peak Prosperity video [1] arguing in opposition, looking at the short lifetime of fracked oil fields and lack of big post-Permian deposit finds. Also, oil is necessary as feedstock and in manufacturing infrastructure for oil alternatives.
Still, it’s frustrating that there’s such a disagreement on basic facts between two quantitative and careful thinkers.
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
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.
I don’t see how fossil can be considered efficient when you have to consider digging it up, shipping it around, refining it, shipping it around again, burning it, piping the electricity for long distances. and if you want to argue that solar installations advantage the rich, surely you have to count the supply chain capital involved in fossil fuels! Solar plus battery is cheap and getting cheaper. “Inefficient” battery storage just means you need another panel. Every step of the fossil fuel supply chain is capital-intensive, land-intensive, and dirty
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?
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.
Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.
More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.
Almost no new wind or solar can be deployed at scale in Australia now without battery deployment. Both individuals and grid scale batteries are fine. They serve different parts of the supply chain.
FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.
Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.
Networks are, and always were a public utility function. Converting to bid models was a huge mistake.
> Base load is a social construct used by coal and nuclear to justify the economically viable bid model which suits them. You can target the duck curve by batteries, and by demand management. People are perfectly capable of moving significant load in time, as evidenced by time of use charge models and off peak pricing.
Nuclear can be made to be load following and is in France. Baseload is just the cheapest way to generate power because the plants are simpler (+ demand pricing only needs to shift a small amount of power to smooth out the peak and valley caused by surges in human activity patterns instead of completely shifting night time usage which is a whole other massive amount of energy - peak to trough is typically only a ~30% drop from what I’ve seen). I think you’re being overly optimistic about people time shifting their night time load more drastically to reduce the need of batteries as there may be countervailing patterns that are unavoidable (eg if you’re not rich and work somewhere where there’s free charging at work during the day, you might need to charge your car at night when solar is most expensive - and EVs haven’t even become part of the grid story yet so any data today is horribly misleading). Demand pricing can shift things a bit but you’re not going to have a 90-95% peek to trough reduction in terms of shifting your night time usage to the day. There’s also a huge amount of industry that runs 24/7 (also hospitals) and there’s no time shifting a lot of that load (certain industrial processes can maybe shift but it varies a lot from it’s ok to 0% - it’s also typically an expensive capability to retrofit and will make those good more expensive just to accommodate solar).
> More and more solar owners here in Australia deploy a battery when they can afford it and in Victoria the state government is funding solar and battery deployment for social housing.
As I said, this is the most expensive way to build solar and batteries. Just because someone is doing it doesn’t change the reality that it’s a bad idea. What happens when energy usage grows over time? Think of the maintenance costs involved in upgrading a bunch of panels and batteries all over the place vs centrally installed ones in the grid. It’s a myopic short term plan. Easy to sell politically because who doesn’t love free government money. Also expect their utilities to start having serious problems operating and needing bailouts, to raise prices drastically, or risk going bankrupt as load disappears from their grid in favor of local generation. There’s a reason CPUC changed the pricing rules around selling solar back to the grid to remove the implicit subsidy homeowners were receiving from the grid (dropping rates from retail to wholesale). Even that was extremely unpopular and a political battle and doesn’t cover the fact that grid pricing isn’t broken down correctly because historically no one cared - the grid maintenance fee isn’t a mandatory tax for a dwelling and even when you pay it it’s underpriced vs how much it actually costs to maintain the grid because the electricity pricing would cover the rest.
> Base load is a debating point. It's the load we can't currently supply from renewables. When we can, coal, oil, gas and nuclear may become uneconomical stranded assets. Nuclear would presumably last the longest because of the sunk cost of public money.
Nuclear would last the longest because it remains the cheapest installed capacity (eg the amount to keep the California plant going still is cheaper than any new construction of solar/wind per watt). It’s still also cheaper per watt for new construction (even including absurd cost overruns that primarily come from a crazy regulatory environment and sustained deinvestment in nuclear which are both fixable issues) than the offshore wind projects that are starting to become popular and cheaper than solar if you start to include the required storage (which no one ever does when claiming that solar is cheaper than nuclear).
> FCAS can be supplied by batteries and reactive loads by condensers.
FCAS does not solve the problem of night time energy use. It’s horribly misleading to claim that this presents grid scale energy. It does not. It’s purely an arbitrage play because they can respond to changing market conditions faster than peaker plants. That’s fine and helps stabilize the grid, but it doesn’t represent sufficient capacity to power the grid at night (+ wear and tear in this usage is drastically different than charging and discharging every day).
For grid power, nuclear and hydro beat oil by significant margins. For shipping we’d need to deploy nuclear reactors that could be safe to operate on the seas. For cars and trains, electrified tied to a fossil free grid is enough and is happening however slowly. For planes and land shipping trucks that’s trickier and not sure what the answer there would be. But if we cut shipping, grid and automotive fossil fuels we’d be reducing global emissions to almost 0. It’s not enough at this point due to unlocked runaway effects meaning the 1.5C warming is long in our rearview in terms of being an unavoidable result and it’ll take us a long time to transition based on the current political approaches which means I suspect 3C or even worse is highly likely within the next 50 years.
Beyond arresting the worsening conditions (which we’re failing at spectacularly) I’m not sure how to unwind the damage. Technology is unlikely to save us unless we get insanely lucky somehow (like fusion reactors that are trivial to scale and trivial to make cheaply and then shoving all that energy into carbon recapture at a scale we don’t know how to do because even at current levels it’s diffuse enough that it takes a long time to capture a small amount of carbon).
Ultimately we’re going to need to get lucky on grid decarbonization (recent solar PV and wind bulldouts, particularly in China, are an incredibly welcome sign that this is happening.) And I’m afraid we might also need to do some kind of geoengineering. I’m much more nervous about the second part, because the first seems to be on an economic glide path that might make it self-fulfilling. But the second relies on a lot of coordination that might not happen.
Nuclear is like 2,000,000 times more dense than oil and it's perfectly safe with proper engineering. Far more people have died harvesting oil, nevermind the geopolitical problems with it, and far more people have died from coal mining than nuclear power plant disasters.
Nuclear alone is enough to sustain civilization nearly infinitely.
Meanwhile, natural gas is plentiful, geothermal is plentiful, solar and wind is plentiful and all of these contribute to energy availability.
Oil still has its uses, it's not going to go away, but I suspect consumption will be reduced by 90% or more in the next 2 decades.
I am hoping that the modern world is not one single system that can crash all at once, but is rather many systems, such that a crash leaves room for new things to grow bigger
It's both. That's the nature of systems. You can loose a lot of muscle mass and survive, but very little brain tissue. Civilization could survive large chunks collapsing but would likely hit a wall if key cities and people were to be eliminated at once.
Yes, the connecting thread is the USD hegemony. Hyperinflation and eventual collapse is not only possible but has been inevitable ever since QE started.
The stock market is now a farce and price is dictated by market makers, not "discovered". The housing market is nonsensical and has priced a generation out of home ownership. The US military is evil incarnate and our civil court system is based on whoever has the most money and is willing to lie wins. I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system and I'm sure there are many more like me.
The USD and therefore the world is on a count down timer to total collapse, problem is no one knows how long we have left.
There are so many more systems than the USD. There's many more systems than money itself! There are industrial systems, food systems, logistical systems, educational systems, ethical systems, religious systems, political systems.
It's naive to think all those systems are subservient to some other "master" system, or that the fragility of those systems is multiplicative instead of offering complementary strengths. It's naive because none of those systems developed dependent on the other systems, nor were they independent; they've all been developing together for thousands of years. It's like an ecosystem of systems; if one fails (such as currency) then there's a dozen or more others that are ready to pick up the pieces. And it's myopic to think currency is even one of the more important systems, as though it's somehow more important than the other foundations of human experience that led us here.
Every complex adaptive systems exists teetering on the edge of collapse. Doomsayers are not insightful, they are just near sighted.
And accelerationism is an incredibly pretentious stance. People actually think they have understood perfectly what civilization is and what it ought to become. That is a colossal claim.
>I'm doing everything I can to speed the collapse of a broken system and I'm sure there are many more like me.
You and the people you care about will, of course, be totally unaffected and simply observe the suffering of Those Other People Who Don't Matter from a distance, then step out of your bunker into the newly rejuvenated world and begin enjoying life?
Wake up! YOU ARE ALSO INSIDE THIS MACHINE, ALONG WITH EVERYONE YOU KNOW AND LOVE.
Accelerationists and preppers are merely engaging in self soothing behavior to mitigate their discomfort stemming from a lack of understanding and control over the world.
Fair enough, I was thinking about people reaching such positions under the impression that they are correct, not those appropriating a convenient narrative to serve their goals.
There is a model of nested dynamic systems called 'panarchy'.
> Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring [which sometimes is a collapse], and renewal. These transformational cycles take place at scales ranging from a drop of water to the biosphere, over periods from days to geologic epochs.
I thought this was talked about in high school biology...
S-curves for populations that settle. Sometimes a population goes above the carrying capacity and it crashed and oscillates until it stabilizes. Humans are in an exponential J-curve that seems to keep going, but it's just because our culture and technology continually raise the carrying capacity on an S-curve.
But if we "break" either culture or tech, then the carrying capacity immediately becomes lower. And then it crashes more and becomes even lower. Etc until society rescues itself from crash in carrying capacity. So the crash is potentially harrrrrd. I recall it being referred to a J-curve crash.
But maybe my high school teacher was just riffing a bit, and this isn't established understanding... When I search, I don't find this talked about online in the ways I recall from 2002 biology class haha :)
This sounds a lot like something I read not that long ago (it was on acoup, of course[1]) about post-Roman population density, how the carrying capacity of the Roman Empire was high because of the increased efficiency allowed by having a good transportation - classic economic specialization. But once the Empire collapsed, the specializations it enabled couldn't come back, and it took a thousand years or more for former Roman provinces to return to their Imperial population levels.
Thanks, hadn't come across this one before, and I feel there is some truth to this - that when the inner processes slow down or atrophy, collapse begins.
However, I think the rapid collapse probably refers to what is observable on the outside
The Seneca Effect is really just a cascade fault. Not every system collapses due to a cascade fault. Death by a thousand cuts is likely just as common a fate.
parts of this seems like rehashed Taleb black swan.
The collapse of the Dow Jones industrial index during the 2008 financial crisis. A
Seneca Collapse if ever there was one (data from Dow Jones)
from pg 68.
This was not the case in 2000-2003 or 2021 -2022 in which the stock market fell in a gradual/orderly pattern. People who made tail-hedged volatility bets lost money due to the failure of volatility to spike. The gradual nature of the selling meant that the out-of-money puts did not profit as many assumed or hoped. Many bought into the Talab hype and lost money with this.
Does this shed any more light on whether it's valid for the author to name 2008 as a flash crisis?
The taleb comparison survives on the idea that talebs thesis (long tail events are underestimated) is the same as negative long tail events happen quickly. So I don't think that sheds much light.
On the financial side, those look like two arbitrarily long term periods where you couldn't 100x in O(weeks) by a long tail bet on the negative side - but alas, arbitrary. ex. stonks traded sideways in 2021 but I made an absolute fantastic amount of money in about 3 weeks in Feb/March 2020, as an accident, buying puts to poke fun at this new silly mistaken trend of thinking options were for retail investors (ah, I was so young and innocent)
First, they were not predictions, they were comparative scenario runs. Second, empirical data has tracked the business-as-usual scenarios for decades and has been independently verified multiple times by peer review. Third, they study a dynamic system that includes population and are not trying to "predict" population growth in any way. Before you call someone's work "silly", you might want to make sure you understand it at a basic level. Otherwise, it's clear who looks silly here.
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.