From American University via Eurekalert, professor Matthew Nisbet demonstrates that the impact of peak petroleum on public health may be a way to unite conservatives and liberals in an effort to move away from fossil fuels and towards alternative forms of energy.
Peak Oil & Public Health: Political Common Ground?
WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 8, 2011)—Peak petroleum—the point at which the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production begins to decline—is a hot topic in scientific and energy circles. When will it occur? What will the impact be? While geologists and economists debate the specifics, American University School of Communication professor Matthew Nisbet believes peak petroleum and the associated risks to public health may provide an opportunity to bring conservatives and liberals together in the move toward alternative forms of energy.
“Somewhat surprisingly, conservatives are more likely to associate a major spike in oil prices with a strong threat to public health,” said Nisbet—an expert in the field of climate and energy communication. “This could present a gateway to engagement with conservatives on energy policy.”
In a forthcoming peer-reviewed study at the American Journal of Public Health, Nisbet and his co-authors find that 76% of people in a recent survey believe oil prices are either “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to triple in the next five years. A dramatic spike in oil prices is a commonly recognized outcome of peak petroleum.
Even more telling is that 69% of respondents believe a sharp rise in oil prices would be either “very harmful” (44%) or “somewhat harmful” (25%) to the health of Americans. According to the survey, strong conservatives were the most sensitive to these possible risks, with 53% believing that a spike in oil prices would be “very harmful” to human health. Similarly, in a separate analysis of the data, those who were strongly “dismissive” of climate change (52%) were the most likely of any subgroup to associate a sharp spike in oil prices with a negative impact on public health.
According to Nisbet and his co-authors, this creates a challenge and an opportunity for the environmental and public health communities. Peak oil and energy prices are often talked about in terms of economic and environmental impact, but rarely as a public health concern. Nisbet argues that his findings show reason to reframe the debate.
“These findings suggest that a broad cross-section of Americans may be ready to engage in dialogue about ways to manage the health risks that experts associate with peak petroleum,” said Nisbet. “Peak petroleum may not currently be a part of the public health portfolio, but we need to start the planning process.”
The study was co-authored with Edward Maibach of George Mason University and Anthony Leiserowitz of Yale University and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 11th Hour, and Surdna Foundation.
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It’s the conclusions where he goes most off the rails. The solution to rising hydrocarbon prices is NOT to force whacko renewables down our energy throats, but to maximize the supply side of the hydrocarbon equation. That the Greens are doing everything in their power to slash supply is the “tell”.
They missed the conservative point. By jacking up oil prices, those on fixed incomes or who live in restrictive fuel use areas will not have the heat or electricity they need to stay healthy, simply because they can’t afford it. Conservatives also believe that the pending oil price spike is sourced from a misguided attempt to wean us off carbon based energy onto the equally expensive “green” energy. The only point we will agree on is to open up carbon based energy exploration and fund technology research in that area, and to drop this silly and unsubstantiated notion that carbon based fuel is bad. It isn’t bad. Period. End of compromise.
David Schofield says: August 9, 2011 at 8:35 am
“Where’s the evidence of peak oil? Oil prices will rise but it wont be because of a shortage – it will be because of unnecessary taxes.”
For the US here 41 years ago. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_US_high.svg
Ignore all the alarmist stuff surrounding the subject any anything to do with cost, it is the simply how much of the natural stuff we pump out of the ground each year and we probably won’t be getting any more of that than currently. Of course there are other energy sources that can be used as well as natural crude oil.
“The entire peak oil idea is a myth. There are VAST amounts out there – easily thousands of years of supply.”
You are still missing the point of peak oil. Peak oil is not about what’s in the ground, it’s about flow rates and ERoEI. Re reached peak flow rate (how fast the oil can be recovered) in 2005.
See:
http://www.tsl.uu.se/uhdsg/Publications/GOF_decline_Article.pdf
http://www.jfcom.mil/newslink/storyarchive/2010/JOE_2010_o.pdf
https://www.msu.edu/~ralsto11/PeakOil.pdf
http://www.ukerc.ac.uk/support/tiki-index.php?page=Global+Oil+Depletion
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/
Richard Wakefield: your
The expectation is the MOST that will ever be extracted is 1% of what’s in the ground
That is the low end of the estimate. The high end is 50%. The industry expects it to be closer to the low end, at about 5-15% of OOIP (original oil in place).
More likely to have Peak Lithium, or peak peaches.
“Nope. Global oil production in 2005 was about 85 million bbls/day. This year its 87 to 88 million per day. Oil production has increased, and more importantly, OPEC has about 5 million per day of withheld production now, vs about 3 million in 2005.”
What the Saudi’s claim they have and actually have are two different things. Fact is Ghawar is in tertiary recovery, that’s right against terminal decline. Read the book Twighlight in the Desert on what the Suadi’s are all about.
Also, that recent increase, if you look it up, is not from fields, but from other methods of producing oil, synthetic oil. The basic production from ground sources, some 75mb/day, has been flat since 2005. The Oil Drum has had a number of studies on their site about this.
Peak oil will not be a sudden event characterized by a huge and immediate increase in the price of crude. Rather, it will be indicated by a gradual increase in the price as the resource becomes more scarce and competition for available production increases. As the price increases other forms of energy production will become economically viable and we will adjust accordingly. I think we can remain reasonably calm.
Richard Wakefield
August 9, 2011 at 8:55 am
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Looks like most of your “Peaks” are conditions manufactured by socialist manipulation.
Fo those who think there are hundreds or thousands of years of oil remaining, need to see this:
http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/key_graphs.pdf
Particular graph on page 7. Notice the item “oil yet to be discovered”. Yeah, right. That’s all guesswork.
The 2011 report should be interesting, as each year the IEA has dropped available oil.
So to the “were doomed because of peak oil” crowd, just how devastating was peak coal? Oh that’s right, peak coal never happened except in the fevered mind of Marxist economists. Jevons, who originally proposed the idea ( and I mistakenly thought was a Marxist because of all the Marxist rewriting of history), thought that a truly free market was the only viable solution.
Assuming that Prof. Nisbet is right – I don’t believe this- is there no coal in the US and did he never hear of the Bergius-Process or the Fischer-Tropsch -process. In combination with a high temperature nuclear power reacter there will be enough oil products for hundrets of years.
“Peak oil”, the next guilt trip slogan to lay on capitalism and the greedy middle class!
Lol, like you all know how much oil is left.
You lot have NO idea and yet you such off the cuff remarks. Just to go against the greeny pinko socialist doo gooders.
The AGW alarmists annoy me as much as anyone but the quality of comments here makes me realize its often a case of a flip side of the same coin.
Doesn’t present a good example if us “sceptics” cannot raise the level of debate.
Both Goldman Sacks and the International Energy Agency have said that peak oil may already be past us. (No increases in total delivered oil will ever happen again)
Were the “early peakers” right after all?
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-11-11/iea-acknowledges-peak-oil
http://theenergycollective.com/sklowem/61012/saudi-arabia-has-reached-peak-oil-output-commodities-rise-goldman-sachs
I thought ‘peak oil’ was to occur about 1992.
That was the prediction in about 1978….
Then there was the millenium bug…. And then of course there was Man-Made Global Warming…
People shouldn’t get united over nonsense. What happens when resources become less in overall amount available, we find ways to get more use out of them. This is the natural evolution of a free economy, there is nothing to unite to do. An actual problem with oil becoming scarcer in terms of the amount we can get versus what we need (as opposed to simply getting scarcer in terms of the overall amount, whether we need as much or not, would be manifested, presumably, by a long term increase in prices. Well, I have yet to see anyone who has shown a continuous increase in Oil Prices, as opposed to brief increases against a backdrop of decreasing long term prices.
Here’s the thing, inexpensive, reliable energy is good for public health. Expensive energy means less money for health and the environment. Alternative energy needs to become affordable and reliable. As it currently stands, “investing” more in alternative energy will likely have the opposite effect as Nisbet expects
Richard: your
Also, that recent increase, if you look it up, is not from fields, but from other methods of producing oil, synthetic oil.
Oil is oil. 88 million bbls per day(2011) is greater than 85 million (2005). Peak oil did not occur in 2005. As long as production (and shut in production) is greater than demand, we are not at peak oil, regardless of the source of the oil.
On synthetic oil, chemists at a Texas university has brought the costs of coal to liquid technology down to about $40 per bbl. With several hundred years of coal in the ground in the US, its obvious we are not at peak oil. Peak conventional oil? Probably not, but its moot.
We ALWAYS only have a “few decades” of oil remaining because it is uneconomical to find an produce marginal oil BEYOND that horizon. Only when there’s a technological “leap forward” (to borrow Mao’s phrase) that unexpectedly brings cheap oil & gas to market does supply ever exceed a few decades.
One recent example of a technological “leap” is the production of shale oil and gas; a combination of known techiques (accurate horizontal drilling and staged fracturing), first practiced by Mitchell Energy in the Barnett Shale in north Texas, has transfomed the domestic USA energy business.
The USA is now the LARGEST producer of natural gas in the world (“leaping ahead” of Russia two years ago), LNG import facilities are being “turned around” to facilitate the EXPORT of LNG, and the price of natural gas is stuck in a range between $4 and $5 per thousand cubic feet at the wellhead, roughly equivalent to $24 and $30 per barrel oil on a per-therm basis. Major chemical companies are now shelving overseas work and planning expansion of US chemical plants simply because methane, their most important feedstock, will likely be cheap and abundant in the US for the foreseeable future.
Most importantly, the “peak oil” production in USA in the 1970s (famously predicted in an SPE paper by L. King Hubbard, a Shell engineer), is now likely to be blown away within a couple of years by the “oil equivalent” production of shale oil and natural gas.
What is frustrating to me is that “environmentalists” are so completely ignorant of economics and chemistry. Here we sit on spectacularly cheap energy, with the highest ratio of hydrogen-to-carbon of all the fossil fuels, and we insist on subsidizing wind and solar, which domestic shale gas has now rendered uneconomical for at least several lifetimes. As one of my engineering profs used to say, “never let the ‘best’ be the enemy of the good.”
>> Richard Wakefield says:
August 9, 2011 at 9:23 am
Also, that recent increase, if you look it up, is not from fields, but from other methods of producing oil, synthetic oil. <<
Synthetic oil is still oil. Coal can be converted into hydrocarbon fuel, and we have plenty of readily-available coal.
Richard: your own source (World Energy Outlook), projects oil production of 96 million bbls per day in 2035.
Peak oil did not occur in 2005.
Plenty of options, including Coal-to-liquid, biomass-to-liquid and of course the thing that always works: higher prices that incentivize research, exploration and innovation to feed a market that is willing to reward suppliers.
“The stone age wasn’t ended by lack of stones”.
Peak oil is a lovely seductive concept – but doesn’t help you think about the problem properly.
My good!!!
Rep and Democrats must……. bla bla bla. The only thing politicians are able to do is stop or forbid. The future of energyproduction and ditributtion is never goona come from politicians, science and development decides what the future tecnoligies and energy sources will be. The only thing politicians should do is to keep out!! The hole startingpoint of the discussion is a postmodern ideocracy aproof that buerocrats and politicians has to be thrown out and resposible people with skills and integrity take ower.
Energy supply is not about ideology its about rationality function and price.