With all the gloom and doom being pushed today, the title of this book is one of certain optimism. WUWT reader may recognize the author, Indur M. Goklany, a frequent WUWT contributor. I highly recommend his book, both for the positive outlook and for the factual discourse. – Anthony
Many people believe that globalization and its key components have made matters worse for humanity and the environment. Indur M. Goklany exposes this as a complete myth and challenges people to consider how much worse the world would be without them. Goklany confronts foes of globalization and demonstrates that economic growth, technological change and free trade helped to power a cycle of progress that in the last two centuries enabled unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being.
His analysis is accompanied by an extensive range of charts, historical data, and statistics. The Improving State of the World represents an important contribution to the environment versus development debate and collects in one volume for the first time the long-term trends in a broad array of the most significant indicators of human and environmental well-being, and their dependence on economic development and technological change.
While noting that the record is more complicated on the environmental front, the author shows how innovation, increased affluence and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation. The author notes that the early stages of development can indeed cause environmental problems, but additional development creates greater wealth allowing societies to create and afford cleaner technologies.
Development becomes the solution rather than the problem. He maintains that restricting globalization would therefore hamper further progress in improving human and environmental well-being, and surmounting future environmental or natural resource limits to growth. **Key points from the book** * The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China’s food supply had gone up 80%, and India’s increased by 50%.
Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37 to 17%, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations. * Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000. * Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over. * Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent. * Much of the improvements in the United States for the air and water quality indicators preceded the enactment of stringent national environmental laws as the Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. * Between 1897-1902 and 1992-1994, the U.S. retail prices of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to per capita income, dropped by 92, 85, and 82 percent respectively. And, the real global price of food commodities has declined 75% since 1950.
From the Back Cover
“This optimistic view of the impact of economic growth and technological change on human welfare is an antidote to the prophecies of an imminent age of gloom and doom.”
-Robert W. Fogel, Nobel Laureate in Economics
“Provocative, illuminating, sharp, and fact filled. Do you think that economic growth is a problem for the environment? Goklany will make you think again. Whether or not you’re convinced by his arguments, you’ll learn a ton from them.”
-Cass R. Sunstein, University of Chicago, author of Laws of Fear
“Goklany does an excellent job of refuting the global pessimists by documenting the dramatic improvements experienced in recent times by humankind, not only in the developed world, but worldwide. Goklany addresses a vast array of issues from the improving state of humanity’s life expectancy to his examination of the promise and peril of bioengineered crops. The vast breadth of Goklany’s inquiry is impressive, as is his exhaustive documentation.”
– Roger A. Sedjo, Resources for the Future
“A remarkable compendium of information at odds with the present fashionable pessimism, Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, published by the Cato Institute, reveals that, contrary to popular belief, it is the poorest who are enjoying the most dramatic rise in living standards. Refuting a central premise of the modern green movement, it also demonstrates that as countries become richer, they also become cleaner, healthier and more environmentally conscious. the full review
“In a book to be published next month entitled The Improving State of the World, Indur Goklany, of the Cato Institute, argues that the world’s state is, well, improving. He produces figures to demonstrate that chronic undernourishment has gone down in the past 50 years, we are living longer, we are healthier, the basic necessities of life are cheaper, literacy has gone up and so has educational attainment, economic freedom has increased and a larger proportion of mankind than ever enjoys political freedom. the full article
“Goklany’s essential message in his book, The Improving State of the World, is that the world over, more people are already, or are fast becoming, more blessed than they’ve ever been by a considerable margin. article
“What Goklany concludes is that massive progress has been made in so many areas as a result of the positive impact of economic growth, technological progress and more liberal trade. It’s clear that never have more people had access to education, health care, food, clean water and an improving environment.”
-Michael Campbell, Vancouver Sun
GM says:
Still beating that “The End Is Neigh!” drum I see. Don’t suppose you bothered to read any of the dozens of pages and links posted to show you where you are in error. I’m not going to repeat it here (folks who want it can find it). But you really do need to read a bit more broadly.
… reality of Peak Oil, or the existence of any limits to growth in general. And those aren’t untested theories, quite the opposite, they have been tested time and time again in history, and they are 100% true.
Um, no. World population continues to rise. We’ve never hit a peak. Yes, it’s not straight line, and yes, from time to time some whacko comes along, starts a war, and kills off a lot of folks, but rarely is ‘carrying capacity’ of some location the issue (and when it is, it is often a collapse from a higher stable level to a lower stable level after some political failure. The Maya collapse comes to mind. Started having too many wars and let their agriculture go. Similarly, the population collapse in Europe circa 1930-50 where tens of millions were slaughtered by stupid political behaviours that damaged the crop production capacity in the process).
Places like Sudan have plenty of food, just not allowed to distribute it as the Muslim north does not like the idea of feeding the Christian south. China had a collapse due to communist ideology, not absolute capacity (as evidence: their prosperity today as they move away from communism). Right on down the line. Religion, Politics, wars, etc. Hardly “carrying capacity”.
Then there are the plague collapses. FWIW, the “Superbug” multiple antibiotic resistant strains of several diseases showing up in the USA from India are, IMHO, the most likely cause of a ‘collapse’ now. Again, not any ‘carrying capacity’ issue. Just as the Amerindians had a great collapse when European diseases were introduced… Not at all a ‘carrying capacity’ issue.
I could go down the list of the means of our demise, but it’s not very interesting. Human stupidity (like over prescribing antibiotics when we knew it was going to lead to resistance. We put it in cattle feed by the ton, fer crying out loud…). All not ‘carrying capacity’. So yes, we have sporadic population collapses in history, and no it’s not because we’ve over run the ability of the planet to support us. The simple proof? There are more of us now, by a very large margin, than there were then.
Hubbert predicted a peak for the lower 48 in 1970, in 1970 it happened,
Yup. But we also shut in both coasts and made it less than economical to drill here. Basically, not a very good test. Also, the recent finds at great depth tell us there is a heck of a lot more oil to ‘find’ here. Technological change. We can ‘find’ about 20-25% more oil in ‘deleted’ fields now. APA Apache Oil is great at that game… So even in the poster child for Hubbert, there are issues.
We won’t mention the 3 Trillion bbls of shale oil that “don’t exist” at the present price but are still here and available to use if we wanted to do so…
Well, Peak Oil has been tested, you still refuse to accept it.
Yup. Because we keep producing more oil, as needed. PBR Petrobras is cranking out new oil so fast it makes your head spin. Saudi is camped on a load of oil they just won’t drill yet as they don’t want glut. Not following the Hubbert mode at all. And then there are all the heavier oil alternatives detailed above.
And then we have the Russion Abiotic Oil thesis. Trouble is, they have been finding oil using it. Loads of oil. So much that they are what, #2 producer in the world now? And if that is the correct model, we run out of oil when the planet stops having vulcanism. Subducted carbonate rock turns to oil. We’ve done it in the lab… and that would explain why there is so much oil at subduction zones like California (where we can’t go get it just off shore at the subduction zone), Saudi, Indonesia, etc.
Exactly the same thing with the limits to growth
Please realize that The Limits To Growth by Medows et.al. is terribly flawed. According to their original predictions (er, pardon, computer projections) we’ve run out of all natural gas in 1980, whales are gone, most metals and other minerals too.
Look “Limits to Growth” is just broken. It’s wrong and demonstrably so. There is no limit on what is a ‘resource’ so we can never run out of ‘resources’. (And don’t trot out the tired ‘exponential’ meme. Growth is S shaped, not exponential. Another lethal flaw in “Limits”.) There are hundreds of pounds of copper and related metals on the ocean floor in manganese nodules. I have no use for my several hundred pounds. We don’t mine it due to excess taxes imposed in the sea mining treaty by the UN and lower cost land sources.
See the pattern? It’s not physical limits that matter, it’s human STUPIDITY and political greed and graft.
Curiously, those people who deny AGW, who deny Peak Oil, and who deny the existence of limits to growth
Curiously “Limits to Growth” and AGW have both been tied to The Club Of Rome (one via thanks in the book by the authors…) and a peculiar centralized control cabal…
, all share a very strong adherence to generally right wing,
“right wing” and “left wing” are a broken meme for describing America. It comes out of “revolutionary” France and was a choice between a Dictator/ King model and a communist model. Left out is the “free people” model. So you have “Right Wing Fascist Dictators” practicing National Socialism contrasted with “Left Wing Communist” dictators. Neither of those correctly describe America with a free people calling the tune. (Though we are being drug kicking and screaming toward those two choices…)
free market ideology,
Well, lets see. Communist Russia moves toward capitalism and thrives. Communist China moves toward capitalism and thrives to the point of dominating world commerce in many areas. Argentina and Chile leave the Dictator thing behind (and Brazil briefly played with both Dictators and Socialism) and when they left them behind for capitalism, they all thrived. When they clung to the other forms, they suffered in poverty and ruin. Cuba sticks with Socialism a long time, and withers, and now Castro the Younger is doing market approaches….
Call me crazy, but it looks like markets work best. (We won’t mention Maggie Thatcher pulling the UK back from the Socialist kiss of death as Britain seems bent on entering the deadly embrace again…)
Oh, and the USA is dabbling in ever more Lang Type Socialism and going down the tubes so fast it’s making my head spin…
Which means that it isn’t any concern about the accuracy of the science that drives them (which is clear just from the fact that science is actually more than good enough), it is their preexisting ideological commitment that leads them into denial mode.
Ah, yes, my religion is better than your religion so you are a D-word.
Sorry Jack, just ain’t so. In fact, it is a more strict and rigorous concern for the science that drives me TO being a skeptic. The ‘science’ is just slipshod and crummy.
FWIW, I find Brazil fascinating. Nominally a Socialist leader, and thriving. Yet the leader specifically stated he would not implement socialist economics. So Brazil thrives. Still, PBR Petrobras is significantly State Owned. There is a curious condition where a capitalist system is inhabited by some Government Socialist enterprises acting as capitalist monopolies that DOES work well.
It’s not proven yet, but if it can be shown to ‘deliver the goods’ better than a ‘mixed economy’ I’ll be willing to support it. The trouble is it takes 5o years and the potential destruction of a country to find out…
On BOTH the economic system of choice AND the question of Global Warming, what drives me is a strict adherence to “the science” and “what really happens”. Frankly, I HATE having to deal with a competitive market (though I’ve done it for years). It is only the observation that my life is better for doing so that gets me to accept it. I like the SOUND of the Socialist Siren as much as anyone else; it’s just the results that are sucky.
The rest of your wandering off into the land of self flagellation and doom saying are just too maudlin to even address.
Look you are convinced we’re all going to die in an imminent apocalypse. Fine, go get a bottle of something to guzzle and let the rest of us get back to just improving things by fixing problems. We’re good at it, and do it every day. You can come back later after the hangover wears off and enjoy the BBQ with the rest of us…
I just have one tiny little request. Take a moment to consider the “Earthship”. Constructed of garbage and dirt. Collects and processes it’s own water and power. Works in deserts with 7 inches of rain a year, or snow covered mountains. It is a stellar example of what can be done when you realize that EVERYTHING is a resource and just get on with it.
This one is in Scotland: http://www.sci-scotland.org.uk/home_earthship.jpg
doing a google of “Earthship” will give a load more of them. Earth friendly. Pleasant places to live. Surely you can find a bit of joy in them, even if they do show that we never run out of resources… even used tires and pop bottles can make a nice home..
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
As I said in the post above that still hasn’t gotten past moderation for some unknown reason, there can be absolutely no productive discussion if one side refuses to accept the validity of the laws of physics. Once someone decides that those aren’t off limits for denial, it becomes impossible (and meaningless) to argue with him
Just how do you really cost, say Alberta Tar sands. The world rigged price goes up. They estimate usd 14 to 18 per barrel to produce it. So they invest 9 billion to produce a 500,000 barrel a day production facility. As they come into production the price shoots to usd 150 per barrel and they get their investment back in 60 days.
So as the price falls back to usd 80, their start up costs paid for, what is their ongoing production cost. Not a lot.
Plus what they dont say is the cost they advertise is not crude production cost but part refined production cost.
GM says: As I said in the post above that still hasn’t gotten past moderation for some unknown reason, there can be absolutely no productive discussion if one side refuses to accept the validity of the laws of physics. Once someone decides that those aren’t off limits for denial, it becomes impossible (and meaningless) to argue with him
I agree entirely. And as soon as you accept that the laws of physics say all the matter stays on the planet and everything is a resource, perhaps we can get somewhere. But as long as you are in denial of the reality, that functionally unlimited resources exist and we can support our population for hundreds to thousands of years with no major issues, then perhaps productive discussions can’t begin.
Until then, your tedious lack of inspection of the existing resource base and solutions is, at best, unproductive.
I certain believe that today is better than the awful conditions of even 100 years ago. Before the motor car London was piled high with horse crap and the smell, you can imagine. Development is a cure for lots of things and a certain reducer of birth rate- as child mortality rate drops so does procreation rates. We have to ignore so called AGW and concentrate on the development of Africa and the rest of the third world.
It doesn’t work at all like that and if you had some basic energy literacy you would see why. While it is a big problem that energy cost and $ prices are decoupled, there is still quite a bit of correlation, especially when a large portion of your costs come directly from fuel use. So if the EROEI of tar sands is 3-4:1, then if the price of oil is 80 dollars, then the energy cost of extraction alone is at least $20, without all the labor and other associated costs, and if energy prices double, so do the costs of energy extraction.
So it’s not at all as if costs are fixed and everything above a certain price is profit. There are very large upfront infrastructure building costs, but there are also very high running costs.
And it’s true not only for tar sands, it is true for deep water oil too – projects that were going to deliver oil at, say $50 per barrel cost when the prices was $80, all of a sudden cost $100 pet barrel when the price was 150. All because of the inflationary effect of oil price all over the system.
As I said, we have a very serious problem with the decoupling of energy costs from prices as measured in $ signs, which masks the real cost of a lot of things, but as a whole there is no escaping from decreasing EROEI
They don’t teach entropy in schools in the US, I forgot that…
Well yes, we are better off. That’s not the question. The question is how are we going to be 100 years from now, and the answer is that if we are to be at all, we will be in all likelihood much worse than we were 100 years ago
GM says: Absolutely no worries indeed. There are no such things as economic and population growth happening at the same time the curve goes down
Yes, growth happens, as does efficiency improvement, as does ‘resource substitution’ as covered further down. The point of this paragraph was that the “peak” (should it ever come) is not a cliff but a rounded curve over decades and easy accommodated.
And of course we get hundreds of units of energy for each unit invested in those processes,
Most of the list is highly energy positive. But the EROI thing is just silly anyway. It ignores that in most cases it’s the FORM the energy is in that is of value. Even if all we did was take nuclear power and lift oil at a net energy loss, it would still be ‘worth it’ as we have unlimited nuclear power and ‘oil’ as a carrier of energy is a benefit even at NEGATIVE lifting and refining energy gain. For this same reason we are happy at present to toss away 1/2 or more of the energy in coal and oil in the processes of making them into things like electricity and gasoline.
But yes, tar sands, coal liquids, etc. are energy gain positive (as are tertiary oil recovery from ‘depleted’ fields and several other interesting methods).
and they can absolutely provide hundreds of millions of barrels a day, so there is simply no reason to be worried about anything
World oil production is more like 87 Mbbl/day, so we don’t need ‘hundreds’, just enough to offset any (eventual) decline. Then we slowly ramp it up over time as needed. Yes, it could give ‘hundreds of millions’ of bbl/day, but long before that I expect we’ll have electric cars far enough along to start substitution on that front.
And that is the basic flaw in your process. The blind projection into the future without allowing for resource substitution over time. The stone age did not end for lack of stone, nor the iron age for lack of iron, and the oil age will not end because there is no oil left. It will end when a newer better cheaper process comes along.
E.M.Smith said:
“Recent advances in ‘tight gas’ extraction have put us in energy “glut” for many decades to come with TRILLIONS of cubic feet “found” via this new technology.”
And that’s absolutely great because those wells have a much higher EROEI than conventional ones,
Really hung up on that EROEI nemonic you learned once, I see.
Look, it’s a hole in the ground out of which flows massive quantities of natural gas. Produced via a modest increase in drilling activity and some hydro-fracture of the tight shale. Not a significant energy increase on the inputs compared to the outputs. I’d expect it to be about the same total energy in vs out as regular drilling.
Folks are still making a profit down at $3 gas (down from $15 prior to this technique and these finds) so it’s got to be a pretty darned efficient process.
I’ll skip your mindless hyperbole, as it’s just that.
those people who have looked at the depletion profiles showing wells running dry in a year or two are totally out of their minds…
Well, since they have been in production for over 2 years now, I’d have to say “yes”.
Out of their minds are also the people who point out that thrash to fuels doesn’t really provide you with any energy because you had already spent a lot of energy to produce the thrash to begin with…
Well, yes. I can burry it and lose the energy, or I can turn it to fuel and use it. Net gain. But FWIW, since most of the energy comes from paper and wood products, it’s not that hard to figure how much FUEL went into making a ton of cardboard. And it isn’t much. (The electricity can be ignored as it can come from nukes, so the whole EROI thing is mooted for electricity consumed. Think of it as refining costs to turn a product you don’t want into one you do. Or if still hung up on it, think of it as putting nuke power into your fuel tank, then the EROI of nuke gets averaged with the oil/trash/whatever for a net average gain anyway).
Could you please enlighten us on what those”Accessible prices” are and why nobody is doing it now given that people are already worried about uranium shortages in the not so distant future?
Sure. The original price was about $100 / lb when mine source was $40 / lb (IIRC). I quoted the cost / price data in the links you didn’t follow.
But by now it’s probably in a race condition between technology improvement dropping it and inflation raising it. You can get Uranium prices here:
http://www.uranium.info/
$46.50 as I type. So we’re still in the land of abysmally low prices (so the higher priced ‘resources’ will ‘not exist’ as they are not ‘reserves’ at those prices.)
Since a pellet about the size of the tip of your pinky has the energy of a bbl of oil ($74) in it, you can see that even at $200 / lb there is plenty of profit and energy available.
And nobody is doing it now because yellow cake from land gives you $46 fuel and, well, $54 is $54 even if it isn’t relevant to the actual cost of the energy produced. So that solution sits on the shelf until we use up the yellowcake on land.
Per folks being worried about shortages: What can I say, there’s always someone who doesn’t understand resources and resource economics getting all wound around the axle about ‘shortages’ for no good reason. Though sometimes there are temporary shortages. Usually after a price collapse when nobody wants to mine and refine product at a loss. Raise the price a little and tons of the stuff shows up shortly.
Heck, fuel has been so cheap we even just run it through the reactors on a once through basis instead of running breeders.
Well, if the only thing you have done in science classes in school is sleeping,
Um, I actually got mostly “A”s in science…. Pretty much across the board. Got a couple of awards, too. In fact, I do it for fun and even when not in classes. Made money as a tutor for some of the folks who needed help. But I can understand why you might think other folks were prone to familiar behaviours.
there is absolutely no shortage of energy to be worried about.
There isn’t. Oh, it will take a bit of work, what doesn’t. But nothing very hard at all, really, as every one of the needed technologies and resources are already in hand.
It seems like it’s already in the hands of people who haven’t even been in science classes to begin with…
Sadly, yes. The politicians and the government bureaucrats are typically science training deficient. Largely lawyers (and increasingly green activists in the EPA) they have little clue about either business or technology.
We really need to get engineering back in the hands of the engineers.
And again, I’d encourage you to follow the links I posted. Many of your questions are already covered there. Including links to the Japanese source for sea water U mining with polymer mats and cost / production information.
Oh, and Thorium refining is about the same as U on a cost basis. This paper has reactor grade prices from back when we were bothering to make some for use / testing and with projections to more recent prices showing a roughly $30/ kg price. But I’d expect that to drop with a bit of volume.
http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/thorium/690798.pdf
This is the reason why I said the following:
And I still stick to it
Sadly GM still burbles about his fantasy doom figures that satisfy his own dark thought. The oil Companies themselves priced the cost of production of Tar sands in the range 14 to 18 USD. Whatever you say, thats the fact. Now if their cost estimate included the price of extraction and processing over the life of the resource, which is their usual way of doing things, then that figure changes downwards when those costs are recouped within days of completion. The fact is that they will not advertise that but instead seek to hide in in simple accounting tricks.
Even allowing for the vast size of that particular resource, it is but a pimple on the total that is available and that thorium stuff just makes any doom and gloomer redundant, totally.
No matter how I hate dirty energy and all things related to it, I know that we have the resources and skills to not only overcome the limitations and drawbacks inherent in our current system but go beyond and improve both our lot and that of the planet.
Just Imagine how much better your life will be.
“Largely lawyers ……. they have little clue about either business or technology.”
Well, there are exceptions !!!!!
May I have an influencial well paid job as one of the few lawyers with at least some idea ?
GM says:
Just where to begin on this fantasy description is hard to decide… Perhaps first a direct answer to Grey…
Grey Lensman said
Just how do you really cost, say Alberta Tar sands.
Pretty straight forward. Land, land restoration at the end, fixed capitol costs, variable labor and fuel costs, Add up the fixed costs and estimated variable costs, divide by bbls of product = $/bbl.
Over time, as actual costs accrue, you adjust your costing accordingly.
Notice that at no time did the word PRICE show up. The price of oil is irrelevant to a cost of production (other than the oil you consume for truck / plant fuel).
Then the question just becomes: Am I above or below break even cost? When below, you shut down, when above you run. (It’s a little more complicated than that in real life as sometimes you run at a small short term loss to avoid shutdown / restart costs of larger size…)
Tar sands started at $50 ish / bbl to produce, then as processes like in situ heating came along, costs have dropped toward $26 / bbl or so.
One interesting twist: A lot of natural gas is used to warm the tars. When Nat Gas spiked to $15 there was a great worry about the viability of some properties… Now that it’s down to $3-4 the costs are much lower. Note that in all cases it’s a lot below $76 so yeah, IMO and SU are minting money (AND making loads of net energy).
So as the price falls back to usd 80, their start up costs paid for, what is their ongoing production cost. Not a lot.
I think you are confounding P&L with “cost accounting”. That the property and capital get paid off early does not change the cost basis for the project. It just adds more P to the P&L in later years…
Plus what they dont say is the cost they advertise is not crude production cost but part refined production cost.
Um, well, yes, that too. I think it’s about $7/bbl of costs to refine… but it’s been a while since I’ve looked up the number so that’s a bit soft…
Back to GM:
It doesn’t work at all like that and if you had some basic energy literacy
Way to go! Insulting and alienating folks right out the gate! Makes it a lot easier for me to get a sympathetic audience… Thanks!
But it does work a lot like that way it had been stated. Capital costs get amortized and depreciated over time on a approved schedule, as does any other long lived fixed cost. Expensed costs and variable costs are typically expensed as they happen. Net result is a ‘cost basis’ for the oil produced.
Then you sell it. Subtract any added costs (things like dividends and taxes and…) and subtract that quarter allotment of the fixed costs along with the variable costs. The ‘leftovers’ are roughly your profits. (To all the cost accountants out there: I know, I’m skipping a lot and simplifying.. It’s ok…) At present oil prices that profit is high.
While it is a big problem that energy cost and $ prices are decoupled,
It is not a problem at all. Not in the slightest. Here, I’ll give you a fictional example to illustrate. Say it took 1 B BTU of natural gas to turn tar sands into 100 M BTU of gasoline. If that natural gas was ‘free’ and making gasoline was not, I’d be better off taking that horrid “negative EROI” but ending up with a desired product (gasoline) than a bunch of useless natural gas.
This isn’t quite as ‘fictional’ as it sounds, as in many remote places (including parts of Canada and Alaska) there are large fields of Natural Gas that can not be sold. The cost of a pipeline would raise the price of that “stranded gas” above market price of $4 or so, thus making a loss instead of a gain. For this reason, “stranded gas” has zero value (and thus is not a reserve and “doesn’t exist” even though we have billions of cubic feet of it…) Turning that into ‘gasoline’ or ‘Diesel’ either via a GTL facility or via cooking tar sands still makes net energy, even if the cost of the ‘refining’ is a negative.
, and if energy prices double, so do the costs of energy extraction.
The fallacy here is treating all energy as costing the same. It isn’t. Nat Gas that can not be shipped is ‘worthless’ either as dollars or as BTUs. It just sits. Gasoline has value (either in BTU or in dollars). And “double nothing” is still nothing.
deep water oil too – projects that were going to deliver oil at, say $50 per barrel cost when the prices was $80, all of a sudden cost $100 pet barrel when the price was 150. All because of the inflationary effect of oil price all over the system.
Just nutty. Look, rigs make their own power, often from the nat gas they would flair anyway. CPST Capstone Turbine sells a ruggedized generator for just that purpose. So the price of my fuel is irrelevant and decoupled from oil prices I turn a waste product into electricity, heat, light, whatever I want and the variable cost is zero.
It’s all capital cost and labor costs. Landed oil has a cost basis decoupled from oil prices.
but as a whole there is no escaping from decreasing EROEI
Sure there is. Nuclear electricity running the drills and pumps. Or in the case of offshore platforms, ‘waste gas’ running them for ‘free’ too.
Maybe a simpler example will help.
I have 10 lbs of grain. I’m sick of grain. So I feed it to the chickens. Now I have 3 lbs of chicken. I don’t really care that I’ve got negative Protein Return on Protein Invested. All I care about is that I’ve got fried chicken… and we do this on a massive scale globally.
All that matters is that I have more of SOME Protein than is lost in the conversion to the one that I want.
And every time you eat beef, pork, chicken or even that Thanksgiving Roast Turkey, you are indulging in Negative PROPI. Oh, the HORRORS!!! We’re all going to die from shortage of Protein!!! /sarcoff>
We have way too much nat gas and nuclear fuel, and want more gasoline and Diesel. Not a problem, turn one into the other. And EROEI is just not important.
The problem with peak oil theorists is not that they do not understand physics (some do) is they do not understand economics. Based on GM’s logic no company should be investing in the tar sands. But that is where EROEI fails and economics kicks in. So to further support E.M. …
Thermodynamics and Money (Peter Huber, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, MIT)
Stephen Wilde says:
“Largely lawyers ……. they have little clue about either business or technology.”
Well, there are exceptions !!!!!
May I have an influencial well paid job as one of the few lawyers with at least some idea ?
Sorry, thought I was making a clear point that it was Politicians that happened to have law degrees that had little technical background. There certainly ARE lawyers that have technical know-how (many starting as Engineers…). But those that enter politics typically have no interest in things other than politics and get a law degree without much else.
Sadly, all the technical lawyers I’ve known have had to settle for exceptionally well paid non-influential positions… 😉
Peak Oil:
Myth: The World is Running Out of Oil (Video) (5min) (ABC News)
Nuclear:
Another scare tactic,
Uranium resources sufficient to meet projected nuclear energy requirements long into the future (Nuclear Energy Agency)
Oil Sands:
Shell Says Oil Sands Expansion Would Remain Viable With $30 Oil (Bloomberg)
GM says:
They don’t teach entropy in schools in the US, I forgot that…
I think you for a moment may have forgotten that the big ball of fusion power up in the sky which we usually call the sun.
Do you realize the absurdity of that statement? This is where the saying that in order to think that infinite economic growth is possible you have to be either a madman or an economist. This is also why people of the Milton Friedman and Julian Simon kind should have been straight locked up in the mental yard and never let out.
What exactly governs what happens in the world we live in? Physics or economics? Is the economy a subsystem of the natural world or is it the other way around?
I repeat that statement.
E.M.Smith says:
September 30, 2010 at 4:53 am
“Sorry, ”
No need for apologies. I was commenting in amused vein 🙂
GM asks: “What exactly governs what happens in the world we live in? Physics or economics? Is the economy a subsystem of the natural world or is it the other way around?”
In a “society” (a man made structure) these processes interact, often in unusuall ways. Poptech gave a rather long post, plus one or two that followed. I suggest you read them, along with EM Smith’s.
Nice strawman as no economist would argue that infinite growth of some meaningful quantity is possible in a finite space. If you believe otherwise please show me where this argument was made.
They both have forgotten more about economics than you know,
Milton Friedman, B.A. Economics, Rutgers University (1932), M.A. Economics, University of Chicago (1933), Ph.D. Economics, Columbia University (1946), Research Assistant, Social Science Research Committee, University of Chicago (1934-1935), Associate Economist, National Resources Committee, Washington, D.C. (1935-1937), Lecturer, Columbia University (1937-1940), Member of Research Staff, National Bureau of Economic Research, New York (1937-1945, 1948-81), Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin (1940-1941), Principal Economist, Division of Tax Research, U.S. Department of the Treasury (1941-1943), Research, Columbia University (1943-1945), Associate Professor of Economics and Business Administration, University of Minnesota (1945-1946), Associate Professor of Economics, University of Chicago (1946-1948), Professor of Economics, University of Chicago (1948-1963), Consultant, Economic Co-operation Administration, Paris (1950), John Bates Clark Medallist, American Economic Association (1951), Visiting Fulbright Lecturer, Cambridge University (1953-54), Consultant, International Co-operation Administration, India (1955), Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1957-1958), Ford Faculty Research Fellow, University of Chicago (1962-1963), Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago (1963-82), Wesley Clair Mitchell Visiting Research Professor, Columbia University (1964-1965), Columnist and Contributing Editor, Newsweek (1966-1984), Visiting Professor, U.C.L.A. (1967), Visiting Professor, University of Hawaii (1972), Nobel Prize for Economic Science (1976), Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (1977), National Medal of Science (1988), Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988), Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University (1977-2006)
Julian Simon, B.A. Experimental Psychology, Harvard (1953), M.B.A., University of Chicago (1959), Ph.D. Business Economics, University of Chicago (1961), Assistant Professor of Advertising, University of Illinois (1963-1966), Assistant and associate professor of marketing, University of Illinois (1966-1969), Visiting Senior Lecturer in Business, Hebrew University (1968), Professor of Economics and of Business Administration, University of Illinois (1969-1983), Visiting Professor of Business Administration and of Demography, Hebrew University (1970-1971), Visiting Professor of Business Administration, Hebrew University (1974-1975), Visiting Senior Fellow, Heritage Foundation (1983), Professor of Business Administration, University of Maryland (1983-1998)
GM – you’re free to explain why you mentioned entropy, but the short story is that there’s no law of physics that stops the entropy of the earth system to decrease – until someone shuts off the sun.
@ur momisugly Poptech:
That’s like listing the credentials of the pope within the Catholic church when you’re trying the argument that he’s an authority on evolutionary biology. Exactly the same thing in fact – you have science on one side and religion and ideology (economics in this case) denying its results
Enneagram says:
September 29, 2010 at 1:40 pm
REPLY: Now that I finally have your attention,….,– Anthony
With due respect, I meant GOD.