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.