Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of topsoil is claimed to be affecting production. It is said that we are overdrawing our resources, with more people going hungry. Paul Ehrlich and the late Stephen Schneider assure us that we are way past the tipping point, that widespread starvation is unavoidable.
Is this true? Is increasing hunger inevitable for our future? Are we really going downhill? Are climate changes (natural or anthropogenic) making things worse for the poorest of the poor? Are we running out of food? Is this what we have to face?
Figure 1. The apocalyptic future envisioned by climate alarmists. Image Source
Fortunately, we have real data regarding this question. The marvelous online resource, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics database called FAOSTAT, has data on the amount of food that people have to eat.
Per capita (average per person) food consumption is a good measure of the welfare of a group of people because it is a broad-based indicator. Some kinds of measurements can be greatly skewed by a few outliers. Per capita wealth is an example. Since one person can be a million times wealthier than another person, per capita wealth can be distorted by a few wealthy individuals.
But no one can eat a million breakfasts per day. If the per capita food consumption goes up, it must perforce represent a broad-based change in the food consumption of a majority of the population. This makes it a good measure for our purposes.
The FAOSTAT database gives values for total food consumption in calories per day, as well as for protein and fat consumption in grams per day. (Fat in excess is justly maligned in the Western diet, but it is a vital component of a balanced diet, and an important dietary indicator.) Here is the change over the last fifty years:
Figure 2. Consumption of calories, protein, and fat as a global average (thin lines), and for the “LDCs”, the Least Developed Countries (thick lines) . See Appendix 1 for a list of LDCs.
To me, that simple chart represents an amazing accomplishment. What makes it amazing is that from 1960 to 2000, the world population doubled. It went from three billion to six billion. Simply to stay even, we needed to double production of all foodstuffs. We did that, we doubled global production, and more. The population in the LDCs grew even faster, it has more than tripled since 1961. But their food consumption stayed at least even until the early 1990s. And since then, food consumption has improved across the board for the LDCs.
Here’s the bad news for the doomsayers. At this moment in history, humans are better fed than at any time in the past. Ever. The rich are better fed. The middle class is better fed. The poor, and even the poorest of the poor are better fed than ever in history.
Yes, there’s still a heap of work left to do. Yes, there remain lots of real issues out there.
But while we are fighting the good fight, let’s remember that we are better fed than we have ever been, and take credit for an amazing feat. We have doubled the population and more, and yet we are better fed than ever. And in the process, we have proven, once and for all, that Malthus, Ehrlich, and their ilk were and are wrong. A larger population doesn’t necessarily mean less to eat.
Of course despite being proven wrong for the nth time, it won’t be the last we hear of the ineluctable Señor Malthus. He’s like your basic horror film villain, incapable of being killed even with a stake through the heart at a crossroads at midnight … or the last we hear of Paul Ehrlich, for that matter. He’s never been right yet, so why should he snap his unbeaten string?
APPENDIX 1: Least Developed Countries
Africa (33 countries)
Angola
Benin
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Central African Republic
Chad
Comoros
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Gambia
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Lesotho
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mali
Mauritania
Mozambique
Niger
Rwanda
São Tomé and Príncipe
Senegal
Sierra Leone
Somalia
Sudan
Togo
Tanzania
Uganda
Zambia
Eurasia (10 countries)
Afghanistan
Bangladesh
Bhutan
Cambodia
East Timor
Laos
Maldives
Myanmar
Nepal
Yemen
Americas (1 country)
Haiti
Oceania (5 countries)
Kiribati
Samoa
Solomon Islands
Tuvalu
Vanuatu
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“Inovation that increases productivity – isn’t that what Willis is talking about?”
Can I refer back to one of my earlier comments:
Andrew W says:
September 9, 2010 at 6:13 pm
The future isn’t certain, if a decline in oil production is recognised well in advance, and if the decline is slow, there’s every likelihood that civilisation can adapt, develop other energy sources like nuclear (dispensing with the paranoia that exists around that energy source), if the decline in oil production is rapid and it’s total effects not recognised or anticipated, there’s the risk of hikes in the cost of fuel causing economic recession, which itself would cripple our ability to finance the development the necessary energy alternatives.
People with Willis’s perspective seem convinced that if that declining oil production gives us some trouble, well, no problem, we’ll tackle it at the time. I think realising you’ve just driven off the cliff as being a little late.
Andrew W,
“if the decline in oil production is rapid and it’s total effects not recognised or anticipated, there’s the risk of hikes in the cost of fuel causing economic recession, which itself would cripple our ability to finance the development the necessary energy alternatives.”
Of course – no argument there.
“People with Willis’s perspective seem convinced that if that declining oil production gives us some trouble, well, no problem, we’ll tackle it at the time. I think realising you’ve just driven off the cliff as being a little late.”
I cannot speak for Willis, but some of the arguments against Willis thesis that have been put forward are important and worthy of discussion. But you have the situation where some individuals will come forward and stridently declare that this or that will happen – no amount of discussions about alternative outcomes matters to them. It’s all down to the laws of physics and overshoot apparantly. We have been told – commanded to believe, actually – that oil production will decline by 10m bpd by 2020 and 20m bpd by 2030. But instead of evidence we were given some cryptic comment that ‘As goes a countries oil, so goes that country.’
Well, these arguments are just as one sided as those of the unbounded optimists and they contain implicit assumptions within them. IMO, there are real problems that need solving; certainly the law of thermodynamics will ensure that all mineral resources ever mined will end up as drifting atoms – but this has nothing to do with the time scales that face us today – centuries rather than millions of years. And while some of these dire predictions are indeed possible, they are far from inevitable. The future has not yet been written.
>>Tenuc:
>>Here you go Ralph, the link to the 6.3% nuclear quote.
>>“Key World Energy Statistics 2007″ (PDF). International Energy
>>Agency. 2007.
>> http://www.iea.org/textbase/nppdf/free/2007/key_stats_2007.pdf
Sorry Tenuc, there has to be something wrong with that report.
On page 24 is says Nuclear is 15% of electricity. On page 28, it says electricity is 16% of total energy. That means that nuclear power represents just 2.4% of total energy supply. (Much as I said.)
And there is precious little nuclear power outside electrical generation.
That pie-chart on page 6 giving total energy supply must be wrong. Perhaps the error lies in the asterisk saying ‘not including heat trade;.
.
@ur momisugly Vince Causey
economics and scale is what stops you from using more energy like nuke plants to extract less energy from oil
Money and energy are basically one in the same economically which is also why the commonly used fallacy that rising prices make some hard to get sources of energy economical to extract, it doesn’t work that way. You can get away with it for a short time until the prices ripple thru the rest of an economy but eventually the energy return on energy invested ratio catches up and forces the prices in the rest of the economy to overwhelm the leverage making it once again untenable.
To answer another question, how do we know when and roughly by how much oil production is going to fall off? Once again this has already been answered above. Look up “oil megaprojects” @ur momisugly wikipedia or read the link to the swedish paper mentioned many posts above. It all boils down to basic oil field physics. The very nature of how mined resources are extracted and the physics involved forces them to have a distinctive production curve, and it forces production to taper off once roughly half of the recoverable resource has been extracted. We have more than 200 years of oil field history to look at and work with, it is a very mature process. Oil fields deplete, period. There is no bargaining with them or technological tricks to be played. The hubbert linearization method along with some basic oil fields stats allows us to predict the ultimately recoverable amount of oil from a field and its pretty accurate. When applied to all known projects and those coming up plus using all the known data it isn’t too hard to predict within a few years what the world peak production point will be, confirmation of such however comes after the fact, years after the fact.
As far as a gentle decline rate, not likely. As I pointed out earlier the world export market is what matters. Oil exporters satisfy their own domestic demand first, what is left gets exported. This means as their own production tapers off the amount of exports they have available falls off even faster. Thus they may have a decline rate of say 3% or so which is what the US has had for more than 30 years now while their own consumption climbs at say 3% per year, the net loss to the export market from them would be over 6%. Ultimately the world export market is likely looking at a decline rate north of 10% per year, that is damn steep, catastrophic in fact.
The side effects of cheap energy becoming uber expensive also has nasty side effects, like making converting to some other source much harder to do. When your primary sources of energy are declining it is so deflationary in some aspects while inflationary in others it makes it very very hard to ramp up investment because the payoff later becomes dubious at best. Our society and systems require a certain amount of leverage to run, net EROI’s under 4 or so and most of them basically cease to function.
“Oildrum is quite right, toroidal will never work, but by focussing on the mainstream they have not presented the complete picture. So far, Polywell fusion is progressing and ‘Wiffleball 8′ is being built. The outcome should be clear in a few years.”
I hope you are right, and they may it work soon (I’d like a nice peaceful long retirement for myself and a stable modern future for my grandchildren). Humanity’s future is in those researcher’s hands, the entire future of this modern society rests on their shoulders. Would it not be more logical for governments to fund that instead of the billions on AGW? Typically government’s priorities are all screwed up and bassackwards.
“We have been told – commanded to believe, actually – that oil production will decline by 10m bpd by 2020 and 20m bpd by 2030. But instead of evidence we were given some cryptic comment that ‘As goes a countries oil, so goes that country.’ ”
Example, Cantarell. At the peak just over 7 years ago was producing 2.1 million barrels per day. All possible technology has been applied. Today it’s just 450,000 per day and falling at a rate of more than 15% per year, which is accelerating.
see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantarell_Field
Vince Causey says:
September 11, 2010 at 1:40 am
Richard Wakefield,
You have returned to the ERoEI scenario several times – that when this reaches breakeven, this will mark the end of that resource.
Here’s the problem I have with that line of reasoning. Suppose for sake of argument oil is absolutely essential to civilization – we need it for transporation fuel, fertlizers and other chemicals. Say at some point we are down to the dregs – low density oil sands and scattered, tiny oil reservoirs – ERoEI has fallen below break even. To my simple mind, we would build (or would have built previously, because this would not happen overnight) nuclear reactors to power the extraction of this low grade oil. We will be putting in more energy than we get out for sure, but we wouls have obtained the oil and leveraged another energy source in order to do so.
Please tell me why I am wrong.
——————-
You are not wrong, and in fact that scenario I expect will be followed. People do irrational desparate things when cornered. WWII Germany is a good model for this very point. Consume even more energy to get the vital energy we need. Which became for them a vicious negative feed back cycle into collapse. Such illogical actions will very likely happen (and have even been proposed, such as a 1000 nuke reactors to steam out the bitumen. How an utterly stupid consideration). Would it not be more logical to retool society to run on the actual nuke output than to waste it on trying to squeeze every last erg of oil energy in the ground? Of course. But as we now see with government policies, such logic doesn’t exist. They live in a fantasy world. And we will suffer because of that.
yep Cantarell is a good example as any
but what seems to be lacking here is those that have these questions also have ignored the history of the various oil fields and countries they are located in
many nations have tapped into oil fields and at first proclaimed they were endless and won’t ever run out only to be burned badly later, the US did that, Mexico did it, UK did it, Russia did it and so forth
a few however did not, Norway is a good example, they recognized what was going on and acted accordingly
Then there’s OPEC, especially the mid east OPEC nations………willful govt misrepresentation to themselves and the world about the nature of their oil production situations. After OPEC was formed they all shortly thereafter doubled their reserves at the stroke of a pen, no actual real data to back it up. They did this because OPEC quotas are reserve based. Saudi Arabia for example has claimed about 265Gb of oil reserves for more than 20 years despite pumping many billions of barrels, they likely in reality have less than 100Gb left !! BP’s initial estimates before Aramco took over all operations were probably pretty close.
Having said that, given the scale of world production and what would be needed to meet future projected demand should infinite growth continue the world is going to have to find several Saudi Arabia’s and do so very frequently. Unfortunately they do not exist. Talk about overshoot, gawd, wait till the world publicly realizes and finds out what the implications of Saudi Arabia going into like a 20% per year decline rate which is quite likely, they have used salt water injection extensively, when Ghawar crashes it is going to be huge. Before the economy and demand tanked they were pumping in excess of 12 million barrels per day of seawater to get like 3-4 million barrel per day or whatever they get out of Ghawar these days, anyone that knows how this works should be pretty alarmed. That is a huge watercut that belies what they actually say. There literally is no replacement for Saudi Arabia. Russia may be tied with them production wise for the moment but they too are looking at a terminal decline.
pedex,
“As far as a gentle decline rate, not likely. As I pointed out earlier the world export market is what matters. Oil exporters satisfy their own domestic demand first, what is left gets exported. This means as their own production tapers off the amount of exports they have available falls off even faster.”
This sounds reasonable in principle, but is it not the case that the only thing preventing the US from exploiting its own oil is politics and not geology? And if what you say will happen, happens, then the US will be forced to drill.
“When your primary sources of energy are declining it is so deflationary in some aspects while inflationary in others it makes it very very hard to ramp up investment because the payoff later becomes dubious at best.”
I will concede on that point.
“Before the economy and demand tanked they were pumping in excess of 12 million barrels per day of seawater to get like 3-4 million barrel per day or whatever they get out of Ghawar these days, anyone that knows how this works should be pretty alarmed. ”
Sounds bad.
Richard Wakefield,
“I hope you are right, and they may it work soon (I’d like a nice peaceful long retirement for myself and a stable modern future for my grandchildren). ”
Amen to that.
“Would it not be more logical for governments to fund that instead of the billions on AGW? Typically government’s priorities are all screwed up and bassackwards.”
Couldn’t agree more.
Well, I guess this is the end of this thread. You’ve all given me plenty to think about. Have a good weekend.
@ur momisugly Vince
the US has been drilling, been drilling like mad for a hundred years plus
The US peak production of oil was reached back in the 70’s and it has nothing to do with politics, most of our oil is onshore. What is left offshore can’t offset the depletion rate. The US has been in irreversible terminal decline of oil since the 70’s. We already tapped the easy high quality high volume stuff long ago.
It gets more disturbing, coal is facing the same situation. We peaked as far as actual btu’s produced from coal back the late 90’s and reserves have been massively overstated. This where the politics has been so dangerous, not from stopping extraction of resources but from recognizing the situation and acted accordingly. Typical overshoot behavior.
I think pedex is right, the restrictions on the exploitation of some oil resources in the US has led to an unrealistic belief in how large they are. US production did peak in the 70’s, and the decline has been irreversible, despite subsequent development of fields in Alaska and the Gulf.
If you go to wiki you can find a graph of oil production forecasts by many players in the industry, the all see a decline in the not too distant future. It’s not if peak oil but when peak oil. One of the big differences between early peakers and late peakers is that the former are sceptical about the claimed reserves of many big OPEC produced, pedex covered this above, reserves growth is normal as a field is investigated, but much of the OPEC reserves growth had politics rather than geology stamped all over it.
The free market is the best we’ve got in terms of developing technology and allocating resources, but the players still rely on imperfect informations and can still fall victim to human irrationality, often when this happens the political response is to regulate the market, this is exactly Tainters concern (my link above), our response to a crises is too often to shackle the best economic system we have, in a situation of rapidly declining energy availability this could be disasterous.
One of the favourite political responses to peak oil would be protectionist strategies, restricting food or energy exports, (we saw moves against food exports during the food crises a couple of years ago) it is a fact that protectionism caused the Great Depression to be far worse that it would otherwise have been, with protectionism playing a big role international trade was cut to less than a third.
“This sounds reasonable in principle, but is it not the case that the only thing preventing the US from exploiting its own oil is politics and not geology? And if what you say will happen, happens, then the US will be forced to drill. ”
The US may have in ground yet to be proven some 30-50 billion barrels, most off shore. Assume a generous extraction of 30% one gets at best 15billion maybe 20billion barrels. The US consumes 7Billion per year. Do the math. Their Strategic Reserves is about 15billion barrels in old salt mines.
Of course all that won’t be sucked up in 2 years, because geology and ERoEI will restrict the flow rates. Thus the rate of extraction will be slow, likely less than the decline rate from other fields in th US, not include the inability of the US to out bid others for imports.
“Before the economy and demand tanked they were pumping in excess of 12 million barrels per day of seawater to get like 3-4 million barrel per day or whatever they get out of Ghawar these days, anyone that knows how this works should be pretty alarmed. ”
Sounds bad.
—————
Some Russian wells pull up more than 90% water.
An excellent book on understanding flow rates, geological restrictions, and specific flows from specific wells in Saudi Arabia is Twilight in the Desert. It openned my eyes to peak oil.
“The free market is the best we’ve got in terms of developing technology and allocating resources, ”
Problem is 80% of the world’s deposits are owned by state governments, explored by those governments, and extracted by those governments, not private corporations. Few of those governments are democracies. So much for a free market.
Andrew W says:
September 11, 2010 at 2:24 am
You misunderstand me, and you seem to think that oil is the first resource that we’ve run short of. In fact, there have been a number of these. We didn’t “realize we’d just driven off the cliff” with a single of those that I know of. The world, as I said, is a big place, and a decline in oil (or any other mineral resource) will be represented by higher and higher prices.
Unfortunately, you seem to think that somehow we can deal with this situation in advance. But UNTIL OIL PRICES GO UP, ALTERNATIVES ARE NOT COST EFFECTIVE, and thus it is useless to push them.
So the lovely dreamy fantasy that somehow we can move in advance of the market to fix the situation simply won’t work. Oh, you can kinda fake it with subsidies, but that hasn’t worked at all in the past. Until oil prices rise, we won’t see the alternatives gain market share.
In other words, I do believe that when “declining oil production gives us some trouble, well, … , we’ll tackle it at the time.” However, I don’t say that by preference. I’d rather deal with it now. And I don’t say “no problem”, that’s your addition.
But we can’t fix it now, oil prices are still too low.
Because until the oil price rises, you’re just pissing upwind to try to replace oil, and I’ve spent far too much time as a sailor to think that will work.
It has been explained so many times, why do we have to go over it again?
The problem here is that it takes many decades and a lot of resources to develop new energy sources and rebuild the infrastructure (not to mention the small problem of the impossibility of powering the current civilization on renewables and the far less than 100% certain success of breeder reactors, fusion, and other exotics proposals) while the market only gives you prices signals on a time scale of months to a few years, i.e. far far too late. That’s exactly driving off the cliff and realizing you’ve done it in mid-air.
What this means is that the market isn’t working and we have to abandon the market as a guide for anything, not that we should just wait until it’s too late. Something fairly obvious to anyone whose religion isn’t free market capitalism.
Richard Wakefield says:
September 10, 2010 at 10:04 pm
“Yes i will. And you know how? I’m telling you. I’ll develop a plant that produces 1 barrel a day.
And then i’ll build it 86 million times.
———
Publish your business plan on how you intend to do that and I’ll mortgage my house and invest in your company because you will make a shit load of money. You would be come the next oil barron of the world. I want in on that on the ground floor.”
So you’re not even trying to argue anymore.
“Richard Wakefield says:
September 11, 2010 at 10:08 am
[…]very point. Consume even more energy to get the vital energy we need. Which became for them a vicious negative feed back cycle into collapse.
”
I think you don’t understand what a negative feedback is; maybe the typical warmist scientist shares the same misconception. A negative feedback is not a runaway positive feedback in the opposite direction.
If you want to learn more about it, don’t read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback
It’s **** – it talks about non-linearity and governors which are NOT your typical linear negative feedback.
But this one looks acceptable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_feedback_amplifier
HTH.
[Please watch the vulgarity. I have edited it out. .. bl57~mod]
DirkH says:
September 11, 2010 at 4:45 pm
[Please watch the vulgarity. I have edited it out. .. bl57~mod]
Thanks. No offense intended 😉
“Something fairly obvious to anyone whose religion isn’t free market capitalism.”
This is where GM and I disagree.
I see political interference and state control over parts of the economic system as having retarded the progress private industry would otherwise have made in areas of moving past our reliance on oil.
1. We don’t know with certainty how much OPEC governments have exaggerated reserves.
2. Progress in developing nuclear technology has been hampered by political considerations.
3. Nuclear cargo ships? Not politically acceptable.
4. Most of the road transport system is state or local government owned, and it’s the electrification of the road system (reticulation of highways rather than exclusive reliance on batteries is perhaps a better option given battery storage limitations) that could make a huge difference to oil consumption, but such a revolutionary change would need guts and an entrepreneurial spirit, not something you’ll find in government departments.
You forget about growth. The reason free markets are an ecological death sentence is that if you do not regulate things, growth is inevitable and with growth, overshoot and collapse become inevitable too. The desire to procreate and to consume as much as possible are deeply rooted in our most primal instincts; you can overcome it either with a lot (and I mean really a lot and from a very early age) of education, or with a very strong regulation from on top. In the situation we’re in right now educating the masses is impossible due to their sheer number and the influence that religion and decades and centuries of promises fro brighter future have on their thinking. Obviously, we should put a very heavy emphasis on that, but we need to first take care of the very urgent need to bring our numbers and consumption within the carrying capacity of the planet before we have collapsed, and this can only happen with very strong action from on top, simply because the ignorance momentum of the masses is so strong that it can not be overcome. Unfortunately, there seems to be no power in the world strong enough to do the job, and the people on top aren’t getting it either, so we’re pretty much doomed at this point.
But any viable program for the long term survival of the species will have the following as vital components:
1. Every human being on the planet will have to beecologically literate (as well as literate, numerate and well educated in general in the classical sense)
2. The above will allow us to exercise strict but voluntary population control.
3. It will also allow us to invest the resources and human capital we are so tragically misallocating now into the R&D we need to be doing
4. Religion will have to be eradicated completely (it is absolutely amazing how much of our destructive behavior is rooted in or enabled and justified by it).
5. Free markets and capitalism as we know them today will have to go and if we decide to keep it as a token for energy, money will have to be very tightly coupled to energy so that the cost of things actually reflects the real net energy and entropic cost of things.
Of course, none of those things is likely to happen, but it is useful to remind people how far off the conversion is from reality most of the time (that’s for those who may be scared by those suggestions and for those who like to call environmentalists “watermelons” – the distance between the left and the right is negligibly small compared to the distance between either of those and reality).
GM says:
September 10, 2010 at 7:15 am
Democracy only works if the people in it have achieved a certain level of intellectual development, education and possess sufficient information to be able to take adequate decisions. Those conditions aren’t met anywhere in the world right now, it’s better in some places, worse in others, but in general it is either sliding into complete chaos or towards idiocracy.
And I wonder why people are getting dumber? There has been a deliberate effort by the social engineers to make/keep the vast majority of the population stupid. It is the education system that churns out these idiots, moronic television and media keeps them stupid. Democracy has been undermined on purpose. It’s not cool to read books, it’s not cool to question everything we’re told, and it’s definitely not cool to be concerned with politics and exactly what it is the politicians are doing.
@ur momisugly TWE:
Conspiracy theory is not needed when mere incompetence suffices. That’s the case with the media and the idiocracy that seems to be the social system in this country (and the world in general) right now.
I am not saying that there has been no deliberate attempts to swing things in certain directions, but if you let things develop on their own, this is what you are going to get anyway. The masses have never been educated and have never really understood what happens around them, it is only very recently that widespread access to knowledge have become available to them. What has changed for the worse is the respect for knowledge and expertise (ironically, this blog is a prime example of the nature of that change) – anti-intellectualism has always been around, but it has never been as bad as it has become in the US, where it is almost impossible to be elected to any position if you do not carefully disguise how smart you are (which is quite hard to do so more and more people who don’t have to disguise anything are in positions of power).
It would be nice (for the sake of the species) if there was some secret group of very powerful people with an escape plan at hand who pulls the strings, but I highly doubt it
“The world, as I said, is a big place, and a decline in oil (or any other mineral resource) will be represented by higher and higher prices.”
Not neccessarily. Price of energy is in everything. As that price increases, the proportion of the energy component of all items increases, which increases inflation. But that just makes some items unafordable, and a recession hits, demand drops and oil prices on the open market drop (as just happened).
So as the depletion starts, prices increase, and a recession drops demand below that lower production rate, which continues to drop regardless of the lower demand. Then prices start to rise again while in recession, triggering a deeper recession, and demand drops below that level. But the depletion continues to occur and prices start to rise again, throwing in more recessionary effects. And so on down the depletion slop.
The price never rises above a threashold level that triggers monitary recession, killing demand, and so on for 30 to 50 years. Subsequent recessions just kill demand through demand distruction due to depletion. Demand never recovers because ever more sectors of the economy disappear. During which depletion continues to occur. So there is never enough money to build those expensive alternatives.
But that is just in the Western World. China sits back and continues its expansion for a while because it physically owns oil fields it’s currently buying, so no need to worry about market pricing. But eventually they will hit the depletion curve too at some point.
(as a side note, I read a recent USDE report wanting 20% power from wind, 230GW, by 2030. That would mean the contruction of 7.7 MILLION 1.5mW turbines and cost $23 TRILLION to build. It would require a construction growth rate of 16% per year, which means in the last year the daily constuction would have to be 3000 turbines up and running PER DAY!)
Consume even more energy to get the vital energy we need. Which became for them a vicious negative feed back cycle into collapse.
”
I think you don’t understand what a negative feedback is; maybe the typical warmist scientist shares the same misconception. A negative feedback is not a runaway positive feedback in the opposite direction.
———–
Ok, how about an accelerating catch 22 feedback loop? You need more energy to get energy, but you need more energy to get that more energy, but you need even more energy to get that…
GM, I think your ideal world wouldn’t work, for any social system for humans to work it must first accommodate the realities of human nature, you idealist world fails to do this on so many levels.
TWE: “And I wonder why people are getting dumber?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect