We can bank on the fact that OPEC (at least the Saudis) know this very well, and do all that they can to keep the price of oil just below the point where petroleum alternatives are economically attractive.

And we (the West) are playing into their hands by building / constructing high-mpg cars, hybrid cars, implementing renewable fuel mandates, and pushing energy conservation (where it reduces oil consumption). Each of these moves has the effect of reducing the demand for oil, thus ensuring that OPEC does not have to keep producing more and more and more. We are prolonging the drama, and postponing the end date further into the future.

OPEC has control of the oil production, and can just as easily cut production as to increase it (probably much easier to reduce). Thus, even if (and that is a BIG IF) the West reduces oil demand by a considerable percentage (10, 20, even 30 percent), all OPEC will do is reduce output by a commensurate amount, and maintain the price of oil.

An even better strategy is for OPEC to do as you wrote, allow the price to increase (and increase their revenues), then periodically flood the market and crash the prices. This makes investors nervous about long-term prospects for their alternative energy projects – especially alternatives to oil. This allows OPEC to maintain a slightly higher long-term price for oil.

I describe some of this in my posts on The Grand Game. (see the middle of the post)

http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/07/peak-oil-and-unicorns-both-mythical.html

The limit case to this is hydroponic greenhouses. We can get at least a factor of 10 time more food production with already demonstrated technologies at modest added cost. See the “stuff” link above for details, it includes food. This is not a hypothetical. A large fraction of “store tomatoes” come from greenhouses and a large fraction of “specialty” lettuces come from hydroponic greenhouses. The extra control gives a better product and at lower costs compared with field grown (there are automated systems for floating the lettuces in styrofoam boards to the different stages including packaging…)

Yes organic farming will doom millions to starvation.

Um, I think you are wrong on this. Organic farming still uses tractors, irrigation, fertilizers, and yes, even pesticides; just very specific classes of them. It can be very energy intensive (the one I visited used a propane powered burner to do in weeds rather than a spray…) but the yields are not lower. In some cases they are actually higher.

Where it sucks is in the labor component. It takes about 10 times the labor, and that is why the costs are often higher. (Not all crops are higher in costs, but many).

Google “French Intensive Gardening” or “Marais System” for details on how to get much more food out of not so much dirt without a lot of energy inputs.

It is just faster and easier to do it with less labor and more petrochemicals. It is a labor cost issue, not a land productivity issue.

How ’bout those bio-fuels industries !? OOoops ! Energy input equals bio-fuels output; how crazy is that;

It isn’t a zero sum or negative sum game. Plants are, effectively, solar collectors. The energy gain can be as high as 8 times (for Brazilian sugar cane). That we do it stupidly (using only the corn grain and plowing under the stalks) is not cause to slam the whole approach. Brazil gets a large part of it’s energy this way and it does run closed loop. CZZ Cosan is a publicly traded company doing it in Brazil (and I own shares in them). They are not small. Their land holdings are about the size of the old West Germany IIRC.

The ‘problem’, IMHO, is that plants are not a very efficient solar collector. You can get 10x to 100x the energy per acre with mechanical solar collectors (thermal or photovoltaic). Their feature is that they produce fuel rather than electricity. As we move to electric and plug in hybrid vehicles, this ‘feature’ will fade and biofuels with it.

So you green weenies; why don’t you start running your bio-fuels projects off the energy that you get out of your project;

As noted above, they do exactly this in Brazil. There is also a site (who’s location I’ve forgotten) that is doing it with corn ( and maybe soy? it was a while ago that I read about them..). They co-located the major parts and run closed cycle. Plants harvested, cattle fed distillers grains and silage, bio-diesel from plant oils run the trucks and tractors, fermented cow poo runs the digesters and distillation, fermented corn makes alcohol that is sold. All with net energy gain. (They are smarter about using more of the energy in the plant, not just the corn kernels).

Just because a bunch of folks do it stupidly does not mean it can not be done right and smart.

But please don’t ask us to waste any of our precious energy reserves to subsidize your energy wasting schemes.

And this, I agree with completely. The “subsidy” part of it is entirely political and as with all political subsidy, causes stupid actions.

Oh, and algae yield about 10 times the energy per acre as other crops with far lower energy inputs. We could easily power the whole country on algae derived fuels, if we cared to do it, with very high net gains.

Why don’t we?

Because it costs about $80 / bbl of oil equivalent and OPEC sells oil for less than that. When the price gets high enough for folks to start building alternatives, Saudi pumps a bunch of oil and crashes the price until folks are out of business; then up it goes again…

It isn’t a technology problem, it is a political / market manipulation problem.

So there are different ways of being wrong.

And we ran out of natural gas in 1980 (!) per the Club folks. My answer to them is here:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/

FWIW, I’ve run into a couple of articles claiming the Club of Rome is behind the AGW “movement” as well.

So much money they have, and such tiny minds…

We need to keep in mind that almost every country that nationalized the oil like Mexico and Venezuela have failed to effectively manage their resources after nationalization. When I worked with Pemex decades ago the Mexican Engineers told me that findiing new oil ended when the Foreign Oil companies were kicked out. PEMEX is one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. A similar situation exists in Venezuela today and their oil output is declining.

A little bit of history. During WW2 the oil industry had a major impact on our sucess in winning the war. Under request from our military, they developed a new process that provided our air force with an ample supply of aviation fuel. Without the fuel, we would have never beat the Germans in the Air and Europe would now bw speaking German.

The government take over of our energy system with Cap and tax will destroy our economy and the free enterprise system that has served us so well.

There was a very interesting paper (article) that reported on world food production versus world energy input; for all kinds of societies from the most primitive nomadic hunter gatherers, to the most sophosticated high tech green revolution intensive agriculturists.

For example they studied a typical Eskimo society that lived on seals etc, and examined how their food production increased with the increasing use of energy; such as energy in the form of explosive powder in the cartridges for the rifles they used to shoot seals, instyead of harpooning them with a whalebone tipped spear. Also the energy in the fuel for their snowmobiles they used instead of dog sled packs, so they could cover more territory faster and find more seals.

Well the final data presentation was a graph of food production output, versus energy input to the food system; for societies all over the world.

Virtually ALL of those data points fell on a single straight line. More energy input translates directly into more food production, and from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, the same relationship still holds.

There were two anomalous point on the graph; places where food production was abnormally high for the amount of energy input. Those two coutries were France and New Zealand, both of which were considerably more efficient, at converting energy into food.

No it wasn’t that they know something that others don’t (they do anyway); but it was that both of those countries enjoy unique agriculturally friendly weather patterns so they grow food very readily. In the case of NZ they just have the right climate, and plenty of mild weather and rain.

The problem of course for world food supplies, is that collectively NZ and France don’t amount to a hill of beans in terms of world food needs. Efficiency they have; but they don’t have production capacity to be a major impact on the world food needs.

So energy is the key to more food. Energy in the form of farm machinery, irrigations sytems; chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, or herbicides. Yes organic farming will doom millions to starvation.

Now this realization that energy input equals food output; is much more sinister than it looks at first glance.

How ’bout those bio-fuels industries !? OOoops ! Energy input equals bio-fuels output; how crazy is that; why not just use the energy you already have, instead of wasting resources to convert it into some less efficient form of energy; all of which raises the carbon footprint, and further lowers the world’s total proven energy reserves.

So you green weenies; why don’t you start running your bio-fuels projects off the energy that you get out of your project; before you even think about supplying bio-fuels for any other needs. Then if you have anything left over after your run your plant off yopur output, you can sell it an make a fortune; and even I will sing your praises.

But please don’t ask us to waste any of our precious energy reserves to subsidize your energy wasting schemes.

source: http://www.energystar.gov/ia/business/industry/industrial_LBNL-44314.pdf

This is from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 2000.

“Very interesting. Don’t forget that there was an effort by Greenpeace (and others) to ban chlorine.”

Thanks for writing this excellent article, and thanks to Anthony for posting it. Excellent reading.

Greenpeace’s position on chlorine is quite puzzling, and if implemented would have far-reaching and devastating results on the health of populations.

Here is another excellent summary of the benefits of chlorine:

http://www.waterandhealth.org/drinkingwater/greenpeace.html

It should be noted that chlorine production is very energy-intensive, consuming great quantities of electricity.

““Global warming dries out farmland…by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severely stressed.”

Computer model prophecy.

““…compounded by another problem. The higher-yielding, pest resistant seed varieties invented in the 1960’s were designed to thrive in stable climates. Old-fashioned (lower yielding) seeds are actually better at dealing with variable weather…”

Where did you get the idea that climate is or ever has been stable?

““In India the gains from the Green Revolution are already shrinking because of local pollution, global warming, and waning resistance to pests and disease.”

It is normal among alarmists to toss the phrase “global warming” into every list. At school, they used to have a list of things where the child was asked to show the “odd man out” or name the item that does not belong to the others.

Ok children, which of these does not belong in the sentence above?
1. local pollution,
2. global warming,
3. waning resistance to pests.

And if you want to win a gold star, please say why.
Answer: 1 and 3 have clear and specific cause and effect but 2 is made up by propagandists.

That’s why I found it distrurbing that the CSIRO (peak Australian research body) had jumped on the Club of Rome bandwagon with their review of the forecasts:

http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf

As they say in the conclusion we are all doomed because we are following the Club’s trajectory for “global collapse before the middle of the century.” Hope you guys haven’t got any plans after 2050 then…

Any respect I had for CSIRO has well and truly been flushed now that they have jumped on the populist “science” bandwagon.

I’m old. I remeber the Club of Rome’s ‘Limits to Growth.’ Certainly mercury was among the limiting 10. Maybe gold.

But, as was pointed out later: they neglected to mention oil. Which becomes topical now, wilth recurrent mentions of ‘Peak Oil.’

So there are different ways of being wrong.

Even if what you quote occurs (which I seriously doubt), all sorts of adaptation will have occurred. And if severe warming does occur, a huge amount of non-arable land will have become usable (which I also doubt).

(Bad politics is a – far – greater threat than even a serious climate shift.)

There were all sorts of countable reasons why the Club of Rome had to be right. But they were very, very wrong.

I quote other people’s conclusions to gain standing. If you doubt them let me count the ways. We’ll ignore the effects of rising sea levels on fertile river deltas.

“Global warming dries out farmland…by 2080 as much as a fifth of Africa’s farmland will be severely stressed.”

Mountainl snow melts relatively early in the summer. When the mountain glaciers are gone, there will be no more ice meltwater in the rivers in the latter part of the growing season.

“…compounded by another problem. The higher-yielding, pest resistant seed varieties invented in the 1960′s were designed to thrive in stable climates. Old-fashioned (lower yielding) seeds are actually better at dealing with variable weather…”

“In India the gains from the Green Revolution are already shrinking because of local pollution, global warming, and waning resistance to pests and disease.”
Economist, 17 September 2009

Very interesting. Don’t forget that there was an effort by Greenpeace (and others) to ban chlorine. See, e.g., Patrick Moore’s “Why I left Greenpeace” at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120882720657033391.html.