Sustainable Future - Peak Oil

I'm an occasional reader of the small blog called "Sustainable Future". However, the owner of the blog appears to ignore comments by me. Consequently, any discussion on that blog is fairly muted. I may post comments here that I make about other blog articles, from time to time, regardless of whether they have been accepted or not.

The owner of the Sustainable Future blog has an avowed aim to see science provide the technologies to enable sustainability. I think this clouds his judgement somewhat, rendering him unable, at the moment, to contemplate any kind of society that doesn't involve what he might see as technological progress. This kind of preconception of how one wants the world to look can close the mind to any other outcome, however more probable that outcome might be. It also makes one, perhaps unconsciously, cherry pick data and stories in order to continue convincing oneself that the desired outcome is not only possible, but likely.

[I should point out that I agree with much that is written on the Sustainable Future blog.]

However, this was meant to be a post of two recent comments I made to an article on the Sustainable Future blog about Peak Oil, which was mostly fine.

I don't have a record of the first comment but it was primarily to point out that the peak of conventional oil production, in terms of yearly production, was in 2005, so that may already be clearly in the past. Conventional oil is the easiest to obtain, usually on shore or in shallow waters, with little need for complex technologies to produce it. Conventional oil has the highest net yield, when the energy needed to produce it is taken into account. Most other oil production is of lower net value but is increasingly what we need to rely on. IEA (International Energy Agency) estimates of all liquids now include biofuels, which relies on an oil based infrastructure to obtain. It's a kind of double counting of production (the oil needed to produce the biofuels is counted, along with the biofuels), though offset, of course, by higher consumption. In this light, it is quite plausible that the oil energy peak has already occurred (in 2008) but is being masked by a severe recession.

The other post is reproduced here:

The peak oil story is illustrative of the finite nature of our world. I think the message to take away from peak oil is that we rely on finite resources at our peril. Oil consumption is actually an example of using a renewable resource beyond its renewal rate, as it's renewal rate is tiny. We also consume non-renewable resources, of course. Consuming any resource beyond its renewal rate, or in a way that damages our habitat, is unsustainable. As some resources become scarce, some substitution can occur but, at some point, we have, will, or are using the best resource for the job, or the resource that can be produced at the right rates for our consumption. After that, substitution becomes a game of diminishing returns.

There's a train of thought that says oil prices will never reach the levels that this article suggests. The spike in oil prices could well have been a factor in the recession being experienced by much of the world. It seems likely that a prolonged period of very high oil prices could trigger another recession. So a recovery will increase demand and production will eventually find it hard, or impossible, to keep up, causing prices to rise (and possibly shortages) triggering another downturn where prices fall again as demand decreases.

As has been pointed out, predictions of how the future will go, after peak, vary widely. It seems likely, then, that some will get pretty close to accuracy. My take, though, is that peak is just a sign of a deeper malaise, where the economy, exemplified by our consumptive lifestyles, is perceived as a superset of the earth and that any problem can be solved by clever humans.

I had no "preconceived notions" about the flaws in human cultures but Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, is a very powerful statement of how we've got it so wrong. I used to be a child of capitalism, but no longer.

Homesteading is useful. I don't know if it will be enough, though. No one does.

What is Sustainability?

Just to be clear, I think I need to define sustainability. Fortunately, Richard Heinberg has pretty much nailed it with his collecting together definitions from a number of sources and distilling them into five axioms. They can be accessed from this link:

http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/articles/851

However, a summary is, I think, useful. To be sustainable, a society needs to consume resources only at or below the renewal rates for those resources. Clearly, consumption of a resource beyond its renewal rate will eventually result in depletion of that resource or, at best, an inability to maintain the rate of consumption. A corollary to that is that consumption of resources must not adversely affect that societies ability to sustain itself; in other words, our behaviour must not damage our habitat.

Of course, it may be possible to override the sustainability axioms for short periods of time, but only with a view to becoming sustainable. For example, if the society recognizes that, over the long term, any finite resource consumption must end, and plans for that, then short term use of finite resources, consumed with some sustainable target in mind, then the society may remain sustainable, since unsustainable consumption is not intended to continue. There are many other discussions that can be had about the details of the axioms but I think they are very good general guidelines.

The implications of the axioms are sometimes difficult to accept but they include zero ecnomic growth and zero population growth (or an active plan for zero growth in both areas). Economic growth must, over the long term, result in increased consumption, even if short term efficiency drives have some success. Indeed, a society that even consumes non-renewable resources, at all (never mind increasing), cannot be sustained in that behaviour. Again there are discussions to be had about some resources but there is no escaping the general rule.

It can be seen that a sustainable society cannot be anything like societies that the develop world has, or that the developing world aspires to. This is a difficult notion to grasp.

Lastly, it must also be stated that, as far as consumption of resources is concerned, societies could attempt to go it alone, in terms of sustainability. However, global cooperation is probably needed to ensure that our habitat is not adversely damaged by unsustainable societies.