There is an anti-human TV program on the History Channel called Life After People, which portrays the aftermath of the imaginary scenario where all people on Earth suddenly vanished in a rapture-like event tomorrow.
I’ve often seen it flipping channels, and it has always been my impression that it represents the ultimate utopian vision of radical environmentalists, who see people as a scourge on the planet, sort of a Fear and self loathing in Las Vegas applied to Gaia.
I get word from Dr. David Deming, Geologist at the University of Oklahoma, of an essay he has composed asking about what would happen to people if fossil fuel based energy disappeared tomorrow. Deming asks this simple question: What would happen if we gave the environmentalists what they want?
It is an eye opener for those that really don’t think much about where the energy they use daily comes from. I’ve excerpted parts of it below, and I have a few observations of my own that follow.
What If Atlas Shrugged?
by David Deming
Atlas Shrugged is the title of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel in which the world grinds to a halt after the productive segment of society goes on strike. Tired of being demonized and exploited, the world’s innovators and entrepreneurs simply walk away.
What would happen to the US today if the fossil fuel industry went on a strike of indefinite duration? What would happen if we gave the environmentalists what they want?
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Within 24 hours there would be long lines at service stations as people sought to purchase remaining stocks of gasoline. The same people who denounce oil companies would be desperately scrounging the last drops of available fuel for their SUVs. By the third day, all the gasoline would be gone.
With no diesel fuel, the trucking industry would grind to a halt. Almost all retail goods in the US are delivered by trucks. Grocery shelves would begin to empty. Food production at the most basic levels would also stop.
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With no trains or trucks running there would be no way to deliver either raw materials or finished products. All industrial production and manufacturing would stop. Mass layoffs would ensue. At this point, it would hardly matter. With virtually all transportation systems out, the only people who could work would be those who owned horses or were capable of walking to their places of employment.
Owners of electric cars might smirk at first, but would soon be forced to the unpleasant reality that the vehicle they thought was “emission free” runs on coal. Forty-two percent of electric power in the US is produced by burning coal.
With natural gas also out of the picture, we would lose another 25 percent. The environmentalist’s favorite power sources, wind and solar, could not fill the gap. Wind power currently generates about 3 percent of our electricity and solar power accounts for a scant 0.04 percent. The only reliable power sources left would be hydroelectric and nuclear. But together these two sources could only power the grid at 27 percent of its normal capacity. With two-thirds of the electric power gone, the grid would shut down entirely.
Read his full essay here. (note: this link does not imply endorsement of the website on which the essay resides – Anthony)
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Here are a few observations of my own about what would happen if fossil fuels disappeared tomorrow:
- After elevated tanks of municipal water systems were depleted of drinking water in a few days, there would be no more water supply. This would force people to start looking for alternate sources, and we’d be back to a time when water treatment was unknown. Disease and death would follow for many as tainted water spreads disease. People with water wells would have to tear out electric pumps and install hand pumps or windmills to get water.
- Related to the first point, toilets would be useless without water to flush them. Fecal matter disposal becomes an issue as gravity fed sewage systems eventually clog, and eventually fecal matter will end up in streams and rivers contributing to the spread of diseases much like the Great Stink in old London.
- Garbage collection becomes a thing of the past. Garbage will be piled high in the streets.
- People that have grid tied solar power systems would be no better off than their neighbors, because the DC to AC inverters require an AC power grid presence signal. Otherwise they shut off for safety. Some people with electrical skills might be able to rewire them, but then they’d only have electricity during daytime.
- People who may have working solar energy might be targeted by the have-nots. They might wish they had paid attention to the Second Amendment to protect their home based energy source. People who still have gasoline in their cars trying to escape cities might find themselves victims of mob attacks as the have-nots look for the last remaining bits of energy. Mad-Max world ensues.
- Windmill farms (that also need grid presence to operate) will stand as icons of folly, unusable, and cursed by the populace since they can’t make use of them. Eventually they’ll all look like these wind farms or fall down.
- Radical climatologists like Mike Mann and James Hansen will no longer be able to communicate their apocalyptic visions of the future to us, since there will be no Internet or radio/TV networks or newspapers printed to disseminate their views.
- Along the same lines, thankfully, we’d never see another episode of Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo.
- Climate modelers like Kevin Trenberth would never be able to run another computer model telling us how hot our future apocalypse might be, since his NCAR computer is run by Wyoming coal. Likewise, NOAA’s Gaea supercomputer will be DOA since it can’t run on recycled vegetable oil.
- Al Gore will no longer be able to jet around the world to tell us how the world will end soon if we don’t pay attention to his new book about The Future. He’ll be reduced to holing up in one of his many properties and hoping the Mad-Maxers don’t come for his solar panels.
- Congress would be reduced to debating in hot, sweaty, non air-conditioned rooms, just like the founders of our country did at the first Continental Congress and as they did in the summer of 1988, when Dr. James Hansen and his sponsor, Senator Tim Wirth, turned off the A/C in the hearing room for effect while they sold the idea of global warming to the Senators.
- Without air conditioning, city dwellers would truly experience the Urban Heat Island effect in the summer, that is when they weren’t scrounging for food and water, and fighting off the Mad-Maxer gangs who would take anything they could from them, including their life.
- Wood burning to stay warm during the winter becomes all the rage again. Smoke pollution returns to cities, especially in winter.
- Real climate refugees start streaming south from high latitude countries as people run out of fuel. Many towns in Alaska and Siberia that survive only because of regular supplies of heating oil and gasoline would be abandoned.
- Global warming, environmentalism, politics; all would be a thing of the past, since survival trumps everything.
- Paul Ehrlich wanders the streets near Stanford, dressed in rags shouting at people “I was right! I was right!“
I could go on and on, but you get the picture.
So which is the worse future, a slightly warmer one with fossil fuels or one without them?
SAMURAI says: @ur momisugly February 9, 2013 at 7:52 pm
A couple of problems…
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You are correct, however at least in the USA, the EU and Australia not only fossil fuels are under attack but also nuclear. Therefore this What if? is something to think about.
In the USA, Congress passed a resolution of producing 25% of our power from ‘renewables’ from our “farms and forests” by 2025, a short 12 years from now. The EPA has a regulation that is shutting down 10% or more of our coal capacity or about 5% of our electric. Texas has ~ 12% wind power and CenterPoint Energy is now planning to use ‘Smart Meters’ to preferentially shutdown residential electric during rolling blackout to deal with the problems reliance on ‘renewables’ is causing.
The market-clearing price for new 2015 electric capacity went from a price of just $16 per megawatt in 2012, to a high of $357 per megawatt for Ohio. For the people in Ohio this is the same as shutting down their electricity because they are losing one third of their coal plants 30 coal-fired power plants in Ohio threatened. ( The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity predicts a total of 204 closings will be spread across 25 states.) Who can afford to go from $160/month to $1,000/month and eventually $3500/month in today’s economy?
Coal fuels 78 percent of Ohio’s electric generation and Ohio ranks third in manufacturing employment. Ohio had 119 coal-fired generating units at 35 locations, with 23,825 MW of capacity so if 6,600 megawatts of electric generating capacity were to be shut down by the EPA it would be about one third.
Here is a Graph: Forecast Price of Residental Energy 1996 to 2031 As those costs are rising causing the price of everything to also rise, American wages are declining.
This is the picture that Americans are not seeing.
Gail Combs issued the following:”What is really really scary is the commitment of politicians in the EU to the 80% reduction of CO2 by 2050 and the commitment of the US congress to 25% RENEWABLE by 2025, a short 12 years away.”
Don’t worry about CO2, I am a Gas Analyst in Holland and as such I happen to know quite a lot about all gasses, the fact of the matter is that all plants require CO2 to synthesize the sunlight to produce the oxygen that all animals, birds and us require to live, if these governments should be able to remove so much CO2 from the atmosphere, then all plant life would die, and so would we (as we would have no more oxygen). They are all a bunch of idiots, did you know that in Holland, greenhouse farmers pump CO2 into their greenhouses to enhance the quality of their product!! And, how about all the 200 volcanos worldwide that are pumping out CO2 24 hours a day, in fact Mount Pinatubo volcano, in four years, yes, has produced more CO2 than the entire human race has produced since the begin of time, perhaps the governments think that they can stop volcanos from erupting. So forget what the governments and greenies say, it’s all just hot air…
Anthony, I’m surprised you would even bother to address this “no more fossil fuels” garbage. How many “green weenies” actually want to suddenly stop using fossil fuels? The ones I know want to gradually switch over to renewables.
In fact, as a tree hugger myself, I support the elimination of coal in favor of natural gas-if and when I’m convinced that we won’t destroy too much of our aquifers by injecting chemicals (currently unknown chemicals, since so many are “trade secrets”)
I’ve been a climate skeptic for many years-ever since seeing the GARBAGE “science” promulgated by Al Gore in his ridiculous movie “inconvenient truth”, which opened my eyes to the fact that i’d innocently believed the CO2 hype up until that point (I was like those I now criticize for simply jumping on the bandwagon with their friends, rather than doing some actual thinking and research)
However, your apparent hatred of all things green, not to mention some of the odious comments following this article, make me seriously consider that lots of you folks are as ignorant of the issues as the warmists, and just parroting what you hear from anti-enviros.
Darn shame, frankly. If I keep seeing this kind of nasty, enviro bashing rhetoric, I won’t keep using wuwt as what i’ve always considered a source of good information.
And here we have you,Anthony, supporting this “What if Atlas Shrugged” article. Going to Deming’s website, I get accosted with a bullshit scare video, filled with baloney, including the claim that “China and Japan have stopped trading for US Dollars for the first time ever!!!!”
Since I have not heard that anywhere else, and since this dude is trying to sell us his “survival instruction book”, I googled the dollar and china and japan.
First hit. Reuters. Day before yesterday:
“Chinese central banker sees dollar remaining dominant, strengthening
By Alan Wheatley, Global Economics Correspondent
LONDON | Fri Feb 8, 2013 4:06am EST
Feb 8 (Reuters) – The dollar will remain the world’s dominant reserve currency and is likely to strengthen over time as the U.S. balance of payments improves, according to a senior Chinese central banker.”
Anthony, PLEASE disassociate yourself from these wack jobs!
BTW, I don’t want to replace coal with gas because of CO2-DUH!. I just happen to think mountain top removal is only one step above nukes.
Wikipedia says “Watts has expressed a skeptical view of anthropogenic CO2-driven global warming. He has said that in 1990 he had “been fully engaged in the belief that CO2 was indeed the root cause of the global warming problem,” but that he later changed his thinking after learning more about the science and “found it to be lacking.”
Good on you, Anthony; you figured that out about 16 years before I did. I had to be hit in the belly with a dead fish (Inconvenient Truth) to start looking into all the claims I’d long believed.
Fred Irving says:
February 10, 2013 at 9:51 am
Gail Combs issued the following:”What is really really scary is the commitment of politicians in the EU to the 80% reduction of CO2 by 2050 and the commitment of the US congress to 25% RENEWABLE by 2025, a short 12 years away.”
Don’t worry about CO2, I am a Gas Analyst in Holland and as such I happen to know quite a lot about all gasses, the fact of the matter is that all plants require CO2 to synthesize the sunlight to produce the oxygen that all animals, birds and us require to live, if these governments should be able to remove so much CO2 from the atmosphere, then all plant life would die, and so would we (as we would have no more oxygen)……
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Thanks Fred. (I am a chemist)
You might be interested in this study Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California. And this information: CO2 Heals Lung Damage and Lung Injury Seems low CO2 levels are not only bad for plants but they are bad for humans too.
I am not worried about CO2, I am worried about the idiot politicians who pass laws without understanding the real consequences for the rest of us. To me CO2 Sequestration especially Geologic CO2 Sequestration is nothing more than an accident waiting to happen even if you ignore the damage to the biosphere reduction of CO2 would cause.
Other papers of interest on CO2
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2007/06/on_why_co2_is_known_not_to_hav.html#more
http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/
malco says:
February 10, 2013 at 11:55 am
Anthony, I’m surprised you would even bother to address this “no more fossil fuels” garbage. How many “green weenies” actually want to suddenly stop using fossil fuels? The ones I know want to gradually switch over to renewables…..
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Malco, what activists wanted and what has actually happened are two entirely different things. The political ‘sausage making’ always makes sure money is funneled from the pockets of the laboring class into the pockets of the elite and this is no different.
I has been a ripoff of the poor by the wealthy from day one, just like the fractional reserve fraud.
3 times as many coal plants are closing in the USA as was predicted by the EPA. As I showed above the price of electricity will skyrocket because the new plants cost money. In the UK which is ahead of the USA in renewable mania, More than one in five British households suffers fuel poverty in 2011 according to the World Socialist Website. In 2012 another news article says As energy prices go through the roof, shocking figures reveal one in four families has been plunged into fuel poverty. This is causing REAL PEOPLE to die. Some 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly, says fuel poverty expert Professor Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster. That works out at 65 deaths a day.
Meanwhile the financiers, corporations and bankers are rubbing their hands in glee.
To add insult to injury, while politicians are closing down coal in the EU and USA More than 1,000 New Coal Plants [are] Planned Worldwide financed by our tax dollars that are given to the World Bank by the US government. World Bank: Record sums were invested last year in coal power. You can see the major leap in loans for coal fired plants in the last year in this Graph of World Bank spending on coal fired plants. US coal will not just sit in the ground either. Coal’s not dying — it’s just getting shipped abroad Along with the UNION jobs that cheap coal-fired plants support.
The BIOFUEL RIP-OFF:
ADM profits soar 550 percent as ethanol margins improve
Cornell ecologist’s study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy
ADM is the largest donor to both political parties:
Mother Jones:…whether the issue is possible price-fixing in Bulgaria or influence-peddling in Washington… no other U.S. company is so reliant on politicians and governments to butter its bread. From the postwar food-aid programs that opened new markets in the Third World to the subsidies for corn, sugar, and ethanol that are now under attack as “corporate welfare,” ADM’s bottom line has always been interwoven with public policy…
“Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is one of the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: These bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and robberies committed with depreciated paper.” ~ Daniel Webster 1832
The ‘Carbon Economy’ is just the newest twist on the old game of “cheating the laboring classes of mankind” because every single one of those dollars comes from the pockets of the laboring classes and finds its way into the pockets of the financiers with nothing given in return but a bunch of bovine feces.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
Dr. Deming’s articles are posted at Lew Rockwell’s blog, which describes itself, “The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard.” (Rockwell provides a link and LOTS of content on that page. Rothbard looks worthwhile to me, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard, but I haven’t really looked into him.)
Rockwell looks okay, http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Lew_Rockwell, but I’m reserving my opinion until such time as I can study a bit.
I like Dr. Deming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deming Being he is at OU gives me a bias. I like Oklahoma. Those of us who lived and grew in the Midwest and South-Central Plains, have an inherited sense about the land and what real extremes are in weather and the like. (http://thislandpress.com/11/14/2012/south-by-midwest-or-where-is-oklahoma/?read=complete )
There is no doubt Deming is brave and willing to speak his mind. I like that.
http://lewrockwell.com/deming/deming-arch.html
So, my two bits: We humans, even us Americans, will continue to burn everything that will burn until it is all oxidized. Given the human track-record, it seems we will come up with alternatives before the things to burn get too expensive. It won’t be windmills, and it won’t be solar, it will be fission in at least a couple of its forms, and we will move to fusion eventually, but later rather than sooner. We just don’t have the engineering-wherewithal to deal with the structural effects of fusion neutrons and energy intensity. We will, but the capability is too far in the future to predict with less than a plus-or-minus of one century. It could easily take three or four centuries to make fusion practical for human needs, but fission is practical right now, and we have several decades of fossil fuel to burn while we convert to fission, and how many centuries can we support ourselves on fission? Many, and probably more than that.
Gail Combs says:
February 10, 2013 at 3:18 pm
Gail, thanks for all the information. I was not aware of much of it, especially the cost of converting power plants from coal to gas, which seems counterintuitive, considering the reputedly low cost of gas.
The point I was TRYING to make is how frustrating I find it to see Anthony Watts seeming to join up with teabaggers in green bashing, and fighting against renewable resources. I’m a 99% AGW skeptic (No honest person can be 100% IMO), but I’m also totally in favor of GRADUALLY getting rid of oil. For that matter, IF we can actually produce frac gas without destroying our aquifers, i’m also fine with using natural gas for the next two hundred years.
[bockquote] son of mulder says:
February 7, 2013 at 10:54 am
So should I become very overweight in advance so I could outlive thinner people or would that simply mean I would be eaten sooner?
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We have good – or rather very bad – data on this.
The Japanese took many thousands of British Empire Forces prisoner in WW2 many of them from the surrender of Singapore 15 Feb 1942.
During the ensuing dreadful years, it was noted by the doctors, trying desperately to keep men alive with insufficient nutrition, rest or medication, was that the big, beefy and pudgy guys were the ones that wasted away fastest. The smaller, leaner, skinny guys managed best…