With gas prices exceeding $2 per gallon, an alarmed American public is prone to believe scary predictions about a future without gas. And so into this hyper-charge environment will step a number of commentators who claim to marshall all the data to show that we must dramatically change our lives. [FULL ARTICLE]
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/2016/will-we-run-out-of-energy/
Will We Run Out of Energy?
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A little unfair. More properly Goodstein and the others are asking, “Will we run out a certain kind of very useful, efficient and energy dense fuel?” Unless you believe that fossil fuesl are near infinite, like Thomas Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory, or so plentiful as to be useless to consider, then there is cause for concern. With all due respect to the usefulness of the economic theories and with compliments to the site, one cannot eat a mere incentive. Lest-wise, for instance, mariners might have discovered a thriving community on Easter Island, rather than the dregs of a burnt out civilization. Indeed, the review quite blithely ignored Mr. Goodstein’s points regarding the energy density and usefulness of oil, etc.
Good to read your opinion. Where does environmental impacts from air pollution and other natural resources figure in this scenario?
With my interest in gardening, I was recently led to the book “How to Grow More Vegetables”, available on the website of, and associated with Ecology Action(Link). The book is indeed a good resource for the gardener, but is also filled with claims that are poorly documented and hard to swallow, such as:
“Current agricultural practices are reportedly destroying approximately 6 pounds of soil for each pound of food produced.” (footnote reads: “Developed from USDA statistics.”)
This is hardly compelling. I could develop just about anything with a bunch of assumptions and a few data.
“US croplands are losing topsoil 17 times faster than the soil formation rate. This is not sustainable. In fact, worldwide only about 50 to 100 years’ worth of topsoil remains.” (footnote to P. Buringh, “Availability of Agricultural Land for Crop and Likestock Production,” 1989, in D. Pimentel and C. W. Hall (Editors), Food and Natural Resources, pp. 69-83, San Diego Academic Press, as noted in “Natural Resources and an Optimum Human Population” David Pimentel, et al., Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 15, no. 5, May 1994.)
This is the most solid footnote, but it is clear that he is referencing a reference, not a source he read, which is always dangerous in case the context of the original is misconstrued.
“…since mechanized, chemical agricultural approaches have been used in China (as opposed to traditional Biointensive practices), China has lost as much as 33% of her farmland.” (footnote reads: “New York Times, March 27, 1994.”)
Lost, in the original context, may merely mean that it is submarginal or even forced out of production for political reasons. But, in the context of the quote above, it seems to imply that farmland is vanishing at alarming rates.
Most interesting, I think, are the author’s claims regarding soil maintenance:
“Conventional agricultural practices often deplete the soil 8 to 80 times more rapidly than nature builds soil…Even organic farming probably depletes the soil 7 to 70 times faster than nature builds it…”
He goes on to propose the “biointensive” method where soil maintenance is key, and a 99% sustainability rate be the goal (he smartly notes that the 2nd law of thermodynamics rules out 100% sustainability). Composting on-site and recycling of this plant material into the soil for future use is the method for soil maintenance.
I have several considerations which occur to me all at once.
As a gardener, I use what works best for me, and I use prices to determine the most economical way to achieve my goals of growing food at home and having fun at least cost. (Least cost is hard to define here, since part of the labor of maintaining my garden is a consumption good. This is sometimes hard for non-gardeners to understand. How could weeding be fun?)
It is unlikely that agricutural soil structure, texture, and nutrient makeup is dwindling without the owners of the land knowing it. I see it over time if I don’t add compost and/or man-made fertilizers and nutrients to my garden over the course of a single season. Surely, people whose *job* it is to husband the capital assets of an agricultural concern have powers of observation that rival my own, and have access to even more knowledge about N, P, K, pH, trace minerals, moisture retention and erosion properties than I.
So, two possiblities present themselves. Either arable soil is indeed dwindling, and the businesses regard this capital consumption as economically acceptable; or, the alarmists are wrong about soil depletion. I don’t actually know which of these are true.
However, if the former is true, it would represent an excellent research topic for an agricultural economics graduate student. If the business finds it worthwhile to allow its land capital to fall in value, it is almost certainly due to political interventions such as negative real interest rates, taxation that exceeds the DMVP of the land, or price controls that prevent agricultural product values from being freely expressed.
I don’t have the inclination to pursue this, but someone else might.
The real question of all of this is, are we riding a massive misallocation of resources? If we have spent the last 100 years in the US constructing infrastructure and cities that are inefficient, then we get to spent the next 100 tearing them up and rebuilding them in a more efficient manner. This as I understand it is rather expensive. And as I understand it the loss of all that capital would have an impact on my lifestyle.
Government recommendations aside, the case that we are running out of petroleum is compelling and should change the behavior of any rational consumers. (Note US petroleum production peaked in the 70s.) When someone invests tens of thousands of dollars in a petroleum-burning personal transporter that one expects to last for 20 years, one should reasonably ask what the cost/availability of petroleum will be at such time. One should also question the wisdom of government zoning that removes people so far from their work and food sources.
You fail to note that countries and companies have an incentive to exaggerate potential reserves. No doubt petroleum extraction efficiency will improve, but there are fundamental limits on how well one can extract petroleum and it will certainly never be sensible to extract all of the available petroleum because of the extraction energy cost.
You also fail to note the entire gist of this issue: Capitalist markets require growth. An increase in the price of the key energy of the market will drive up the price of everything in the market, thus causing inflation. If prices become too high, growth will cease. You’re an economist, you do the math. Rather simple equation actually.
Also, I find it alarming that so many people put faith into technology to save us. What if we don’t discover a way to make the process of extracting and refining less suitable oil stocks at or near current costs for suitable oil? Until that technology exists, I can’t see how anyone can put stock in it.
And on the discover side of things, hasn’t discovery peaked? Isn’t the geological methodology of finding oil today so technically advanced compared to what it was that we have already made every major oil discovery there is to make?
It’s one thing to have faith in a system, it’s another to have your head in the sand. The system we currently have is completely dependent on cheap energy, isn’t it? Taking away cheap energy would hurt the system, wouldn’t it?
You’ll have to pardon me but when it comes to the availability of a natural resource, I am far more likely to take the word of a geologist than the word of an economist. The education and training involved is very different, as you have probably realized. I have to say that it was a nice attempt at crossing into a new field. My advice, stick with the economy, leave the science of geology to the geologists.
Steven M:
You note: “You fail to note that countries and companies have an incentive to exaggerate potential reserves.”
The USGS did the survey data that he relied on. So unless we’ve uncovered a secret bias in the way this report was researched which I have no reason to believe, I don’t think that matters as much as it does much of the time when, say, OPEC announces a new study.
David L:
You said:
“You also fail to note the entire gist of this issue: Capitalist markets require growth. An increase in the price of the key energy of the market will drive up the price of everything in the market, thus causing inflation. If prices become too high, growth will cease.”
I can’t really see how your statement is somehow the “gist” of the issue. Forgive me if I’m wrong but someone who says something like “[c]apitalist markets require growth” probably isn’t someone who has done a lot of lucubrating on capitalist markets. It seems to have put a ton of misplaced emphASis on the wrong syllABle. Capitalist markets require growth to grow and the “inflation” (it’s not inlfation proper, just a rise in the price as a result of market forces) is a temporal event. It takes place IN time, OVER time, and there is causality to a lot of its nuance. To say that this event (a rise in the prices of all factors of production in the connate oil industries) will happen is one thing. You’re right, it will, most likely, other things being equal. But to say how, when, and where it will happen, and by how much, is another thing altogether, to be decided by the non-ceteris paribus events that will likely occur and the economic laws we all know. His article just drew out the immediately adjacent temporal events that would and should unfold in response to the circumstances he described.
It is also true that even though oil production had its so-called Hubbert’s Peak in the 70′s (you’ll note the author’s link to the USGS survey and revised levels of reserves and consumable oil outside the U.S. at 2120 billion barrels of oil equivalent), the amount of oil consumed annually also peaked in the early 80′s and has remained relatively level since.
I also think that the hagiographic article of faith in technology as humanity’s savoir is quite unwise at times. Articles and books like this, while I don’t agree with much they say, bring awareness to the public and help pass the word along to the business world that they better at least acknowledge the matter and do something to let us know they’re “looking into the problem” even if it’s not yet a problem or may never be one. It also helps the side who is optimistic (and capitalistic) about a market solution refine and sharpen their science in response to these alarmist claims.
Of course it’s possible that investment in alternative fuels like nuclear could concievably, if not probably, be done by non-petroleum related firms thus putting much economic pressure on the petroleum firms to funnel investment into research on refinement and unconventional oil shale and heavy oil extraction.
–Adam
The amount of energy consumed has a lot to do with the fact that the government so heavily subsidizes transportation, and politically guarantees access to foreign oil at taxpayer expense.
When something is artificially cheap, people use more of it. The economy is much more transportation- and energy-intensive than it would be with a free market.
If fossil fuels do become more scarce and expensive, it will just increase the market incentive toward decentralization and smaller scale production. Given the fact that most plants are operating far above peak productive economy of scale, and that overall economy of scale is distorted upward by externalizing distribution costs, it stands to reason that the economy would be much less centralized and oriented far more toward local production, if it weren’t for the monstrous subsidies to centralization and the government’s shifting the inefficiency costs of large-scale organization to the taxpayer.
That an old estimate by the USGS underestimated world oil reserves is unsurprising. Nearly everyone has consistently upwardly revised their estimates of world oil reserves for decades. What is different now is that most predictors are starting to revise their predictions downward.
Campbell and Laherrere of Petroconsultants state,
“According to most accounts world oil reserves have marched steadily upward over the past 20 years,” they said. “Extending that trend into the future, one could easily conclude, s the U.S. Energy Information Administration has said that oil production will continue to rise unhindered for decades to come, increasing almost two-thirds by 2020.
“Such growth is an illusion. About 80 percent of the oil produced today flows from fields that were found before 1973, and the great majority of them are declining.”
Happy motoring (while it lasts)
Also, I think that this article neatly glides over the difficulty of oil extraction from other means. This isn’t simply a case where the monetary value of the resource needs to increase to make it more valuable to extract. Rather, the energy cost to extract oil from these alternative sources is greater than the energy to be extracted.
Conservation advocates have done everyone a great disservice by focusing on emissions as the great problem with fossil fuel combustion. A battery powered car does no good if it is powered by an oil, gas or coal fired power plant, especially when you consider the losses of energy due to transmission and storage.
“You also fail to note the entire gist of this issue: Capitalist markets require growth. An increase in the price of the key energy of the market will drive up the price of everything in the market, thus causing inflation. If prices become too high, growth will cease. You’re an economist, you do the math. Rather simple equation actually.”
Rising prices doen’t necessarily cause growth to cease, but it does cause numerous problems that make the economy perform under it’s true potential. The 1970′s saw some tremendous growth rates when inflation was raging. It also saw some tremendous contractions as well. But the boom and bust cycle cannot be sustained, and forces reasonable people to do all kinds of things that don’t make economic sense.
No, the long-term price can only rise in an inflationary monetary environment. The price of oil will not cause all prices to rise unless the inflationary environment is already in place, like in the 1970′s. High Oil prices didn’t cause the inflation of the 1970′s, the inflation of the 1970′s caused high oil prices. The OPEC induced supply shocks were transitory events. But the erosion of the dollar based profits of the various oil producing countries necessitated an increase in the price of oil. The inflationary environment ALLOWED them to pass the inflation on to their customers, because the prices their customers and their customers customers paid for their products was rising because their customers had more nominal dollars in their pockets as well. Of course after adjusting for inflation they had less, but people don’t always realize that right away when it’s happening.
So in a non-inflationary monetary environment the price of oil will go up temporarily due to supply and demand, but since the buyers of oil based products will not be able to pass that cost increase on to their customers, because they will be chasing scarce dollars instead of plentiful ones, the oil producers will be forced to find more oil to make the same profit. In the inflationary environment they can simply increase prices without going to extra effort of finding more oil or investing to increase the efficency that they extract oil from the ground.
Nobody really knows how much oil is left in the ground. There may be no new oil deposits to be found there may be many. We won’t know about them until they are discovered. To say that something we don’t know about is there or not there is equally absurd. That sounds trivial but it’s almost painfully simple.
One more fallacy I’d like to clear up: The price of gasoline is NOT at record highs, not even close, despite what the news media and opportunistic politicians keeps repeating. In today’s dollars, the price of gasoline peaked in the early 70′s at about $6.00 a gallon.
Putting it all together – oil consumption will drop as prices rise, and prices will rise as supply goes down.
It won’t be the case that all the oil just “runs out” one day. Prices will go up and up as supply dwindles. Consumption will go down. People will alter their production processes in order to use less oil. People will try to develop other ways of powering their devices. All of this will go on spontaneously and all over the place, without any need for a “policy”.
Unfortunately, it is the energy policies of the various governments of the world that pose the real “peak energy” threat. For one thing, by monopolizing energy production in so many ways.
This looks like another neo-Malthusian rehash. The argument is the same – if resources are finite and we continue to deplete then at an ever increasing rate, then at some point in time we will run out – in this case sooner rather than later. The article focuses on cars and oil. However, it generalizes the problem to energy as a whole.
Mark makes an excellent argument against the article on economic grounds. However, the problem is clearly a political one, rather than an economic, demographic, geologic or technological one –nuclear power can solve the problem.
The arguments against the use of modern nuclear power technology on the basis of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl make about as much sense as refusing to consider buying a Lexus because you once owned a Yugo. The MIT Pebble Bed Technology Project appears to address most of the major safety objections to nuclear power. By replacing the fuel rods with ceramic coated balls encasing the uranium and graphite moderator, and replacing the coolant with the inert gas helium, the key problems of meltdown and venting due to corrosion are effectively resolved by design. The other two major problems, disposal of spent pebbles and the danger of extraction of bomb-grade material are also mitigated by this technology. The technology promises an almost unlimited supply of cheap non-polluting energy that could be used to generate the hydrogen to fuel Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vision of clean non-polluting vehicles. It would be foolhardy to suggest that any new technology will be without problems – most technological advancements proceed by identifying problems and correcting them.
The difficulty getting this technology off the ground will be that environmental lobby is dead set against any nuclear technology, and will use every legal means at their disposal to oppose and obstruct its development. Also, politicians fear running afoul of the environmentalists and are unlikely to take the initiative.
In California, pandering to the environmental lobby has been a disaster. Apart from the energy crisis, which has been addressed in other posts on Mises: Our swordfish and tuna are now polluted with mercury from coal fired power plants: Forest fires burn out of control every fire season: Our lakes are polluted with MTBE and its carcinogenic by-products such as formaldehyde: Californians pay 30 cents a gallon more for gas to pump this poison into the air. Despite the health hazard, corrupt politicians in the pocket of the oil refineries, refuse to pull this product off the market, and then have the gall to run ads criticizing the tobacco industry. Meanwhile, you still can’t see downtown LA from the Palos Verdes hills on most days. To plagiarize Clemenceau – the environment is too important to be left to the environmentalists!
What we have here is a choice – we can look for a technological solution or suffer the consequences. Washington politicians preach conservation and alternative energy sources yet go to work in limousines and go golfing on Gulfstream Jets on the weekend, burning more fuel on a single trip than 10 Hummers in a whole year. Then they turn around and blame big oil! (BTW The Gulfstream is not going to fly on solar power or wind power!).
Just because “wolf!” has been cried before, predicting a decline in reserves of recoverable oil, does not mean that consumption can continue at present rates indefinitely. (Note that I do not use the word “production”. Man does not “pruduce” oil. He extracts and consumes it, leaving the earth impoverished as a result.) Extraction must decline at some time, and even present levels of consumption are incontrovertably causing global warming with demonstrably adverse effects on human, plant and animal life. Apart from a few mavericks, all scientists are agreed on this. As a professional meteorologist, and former UK Chief Defence Forecaster, I know something about it.
Here are a few stats from the DOE and CIA Fact (oxymoron? ) Book.
World Proved Reserves 1,025,000,000,000 barrels/day
US Proved Reserves 22,500,000,000 barrels/day
World Oil Production 80,000,000 barrels/day
US Consumption 20,000,000 barrels/day
US Production 5,700,000 barrels/day
In a static environment, at the current burn rate we have about 33 years to depletion. The US reserves will be depleted in about 11 years. This has potentially dire consequences for the US in particular. The US presently consumes 25% of world oil production. Over the past 20 years the US has become increasingly dependent not only on imported crude oil but also on imported refined products. If this trend continues, it will not be long before the US is totally dependent on imported oil. With rising prices, world reserves will probably increase. However, with the prevailing NIMBY/BANANA attitude, prospects of even looking for more US reserves look bleak. Also, there is the lead time problem. Even if we started to look for oil in the Arctic Reserve or the Gulf of Mexico, how long would it take to do the exploration to find the oil (assuming that there is any there) and then to start production (particularly in the Gulf)? Meanwhile, we will be competing on the world market where demand is going up, particularly from China. It looks like higher gas prices are here to stay.
Peter:
It is not true that we can not “produce” oil. During the South African Oil embargo Sasol actually built plants to produce diesel oil from coal. They can also produce natural gas from soy beans that can be used to produce diesel oil. In the US, we produce ethanol from renewable resources. However, as you point out, this still pollutes the atmosphere.
I would, however, disagree with on the global warming issue. My major bone of contention is that the computer models for climate prediction do not work. I bring this up on this Blog because the Austrian School tends to eschew econometric modeling on the grounds that human action produces non-linear feedback that is very hard to model mathematically, leading to unstable and unreliable predictions. Computer models for climate prediction suffer from the same problem. There are no good models for cloud formation or dynamics. Even the mathematical properties of the solutions Navier-Stokes equation governing fluid flow are unknown. The research by Svensmark on the effect of sunspots on cloud formation and its correlation with climate changes going back thousands of years appears to be a far more promising approach. It also explains why the problem of climate prediction is likely to remain intractable – if sunspot activity is the major determinant of cloud cover, and cloud cover is the key determinant of climate change, how can we predict climate change if we can not predict sunspot activity?
Kevin Carson, thank you for your voice of sanity.
My God, the horror of a world without oil: fewer cars, fewer subsidized roads and multi-millionaire paving contractors, less travel, less air pollution, more cohesive communities …
And we tell the Jews and the Muslims to go pound sand. (Other phrases come to mind, but this is supposed to be civil.)
I urge everyone on this forum to increase your consumption of oil at every opportunity.
I found this website to be interesting, provided you take it with a grain of salt.
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
Mr. Smith, you might want to check out something called the Haber process. You can add “food” to your list.
Mr. Walt D. “Produce”. Semantics. The issue is energy. We can produce a lot of things. But the laws of thermodynamics prevent us from creating energy without fuel. See entropy.
Further to Walt D’s comments on whether oil is “produced”, rather than the opposite (extracted then consumed), I take the point that the consumption of oil produced from renewable resources like soybeans could be sustained indefinitely. It would not even increase carbon dioxide levels beyond a certain point, since the soybean plants would extract carbon dioxide until an equilibrium is reached in the atmosphere. However, come down to earth, Walt! Such means of oil production are never going to be sufficient to maintain our present rate of consumption.
As for Navier-Stokes’ equations, these are generally applied to the dynamics of an incompressible fluid, not a compressible one like the atmosphere. This is a red herring!
Yes, sunspot activity may well have an effect on cloud amounts and temperatures in the earth’s atmosphere. However we can’t predict sunspots. Their effects happen over millenia and are beyond our control. The consequences of greenhouse gases are predictable, happening here and now and will get worse this century if nothing is done about it.
Fascinating. Those responding to this article have articulated almost every important economic fallacy. It was obviously not the intent, but one could build an entire economics course around this slew of misconceptions. My favorite is that the availabiity of resources has nothing to do with economics! One can hardly imagine what might, if that is the case. Surely not agriculture (leave it to the farmers), or war (leave it to the soldiers), or taxation (leave it to the politicians). Economics is obviously about some abstract, heavenly thing, entirely divorced from real life.
Peter:
Your point is well taken. While soybeans could supply South Africa, it is not likely that this could be implemented on a large enough scale to replace the current US consumption (20 million barrels a day). If the DOE/CIA numbers are accurate, the US will import nearly all of its oil within the next 10 years. The alternative technologies, oil shale, tar sands are expensive and polluting. 21st Century nuclear technology has not yet been proven (Eskom wants 5 years to build and test a pilot then another 5 years put it into production). The advantage of nuclear is that we can produce hydrogen without and hydrocarbon emissions leaking into the atmosphere.
However, my point is that this new technology is not going to appear overnight. The US is likely to continue with its oil-based economy by buying foreign oil, not only because it is still relatively cheap but they really don’t have any viable alternative.
Meanwhile, I can look forward to the days when it rains when I can not only see Downtown LA but also the San Gabriel Mountains – most days I have to settle for a hazy view of Long Beach!
“My favorite is that the availibity of resources has nothing to do with economics!” -Nicolas Martin
Mine too. Really cuts to the chase. But I detect a bit of sarcasm. So be it. While the others are discussing the useful but marginal issues (gvt. intervention, the weather), let me ask: is the earth round, does it occupy a finite space, aren’t the fossil fuels in it therefore of a finite quantity?
Granted the sun’s rays/energy might be considered infinite for our purposes, but yet isn’t the potential energy to be derived from the finite source of fossil fuels necessarily finite?
Granted the market is not perfect, but doesn’t the world’s relatively large use of fossil fuels –instead of solar, nuclear, wind, geo-thermal, wave, man or beast power (from food, from photosynthesis, from solar), suggest something about the nature of fossil fuels as an energy source vis a vis other power/energy sources?
The usual objection is that man’s ingenuity, etc., is infinite. Granted.
But why are fossil fuels, for instance oil, the best fuel resource now known? What’s the next best fuel source after fossil fuels? What might be the most useful fuel source to develop next and why? If the reviewer hadn’t blown-off Goodstein’s “brief history of energy and discussions about energy issues such as thermodynamics and electromagnetism” [note: those words being the reviewer’s entire commentary on the main point of the book], he might have done the issue justice. As it is, he concludes, like you seem to be doing, that “declines” [to his credit he implicitly admits of the finiteness of the physical earth] will create “incentives” “to develop new energy alternatives.”
Fascinating. I think tonight I shall try an “incentive” dinner. Maybe I’ll have the “incentive” steak.
All the commenters have much more interesting things to say than the article’s author.
My comments on the article here:
mobjectivistic blog
This has been an interesting series of posts.
a) The US will be entirely dependent on foreign imports of oil in about 10 years
b) No plans are presently in place to increase US production. Congress is blocking the development on any future production.
c) The US currently consumes 20% of world oil production.
d) Current US oil consumption has undesirable effects – smog (undisputed) – global warming (accepted by some, but disputed others – but if Peter Taylor is correct, we can expect catastrophic long term consequences).
e) The world supply of oil will be exhausted in 33 years. Or alternatively, if the current oil-based technology is to be sustained through 2100, we need to discover TWICE the current proven oil reserves.
We can look at this from a theoretical economic point of view – that is, given the best economic analysis, where should we go from here and what is the optimal path. However, since optimal economic input is unlikely, the relevant question is, given where we are, where are we likely to go, given the fact that the path is going to be chosen in the US by congressional ignoramuses. (Is ignoramuses the plural of ignoramus – I forget my Latin Grammar!)
From my perspective, the situation is bleak.
1) If we accept the DOE/CIA forecasts the US will run out of oil in about 10 years.
2) Nothing is in place to decrease the US dependence on foreign oil.
3) The US has nothing in place to replace the oil-based technology and so has very little alternative to continue to import foreign oil.
4) Even if Peter Taylor’s evidence was irrefutable, the US has no alternative to “damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead”.
If we look at the current US presidential election rhetoric, we can asses the futility of the situation. Bush criticizes the Congress for failing to enact his energy proposal. Kerry’s “solution” is to provide a “tax-credit” (from where?) to subsidize fuel-efficient vehicles.
(I could add that Kerry has six houses (mansions), flies a Gulfstream Jet that uses 10 times more fuel per take-off-landing than the average car uses per year and takes a limousine to work, and has to rank among the most environmentally incorrect citizens on the planet. However, in the grand scheme of things, this would be irrelevant rhetoric.)
My point is.
a) We have a problem.
b) There could be viable economic and technologic solutions.
c) Political strategy trumps everything else – (at this point, any effects of policy that occur after November 2004 are irrelevant – the media is more concerned as to whether Iraq prisoners were forced to wear red or white women’s panties!).
d) I do not intend to imply that bureaucrats should determine energy policy.
Chris:
I assume your reference to the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Entropy refers to something in the original article that I have not read. My contention is the following. Soy beans derive their energy from sunlight and photosynthesis, and in this situation, the entropy argument does not apply until the Sun turns into a red dwarf in 5 billion years.
If nuclear power is used to provide electricity that is the converted into nuclear power, then the entropy argument does not apply until we have exhausted the supply of fissionable isotopes. If we look at current proved reserves of U3O8, we are looking at depletion occurring hundreds of thousands of years in the future If we look at the Earth’s core, the supply of fissionable material appears to be inexhaustible within the life of the Earth. Given that the outer planets are “Gas Giants” energy supplies in the solar system would appear to be limitless from the point of view of the life of the solar system.
If we look at the fate of the universe your assertion is correct – the law of entropy dooms the entire universe. However, even when Keynes said “in the long run, we are all dead”, I don’t think he was looking this far ahead! From the tone of the original article, it would appear that Goldstein was talking about imminent danger. A cursory analysis of US government websites appears to confirm at least the US is heading towards the depletion of domestic oil reserves within 11 years.
From my perspective, I do not see a problem of running out of energy unless we do nothing – which in the US, is what the Congress is forcing everyone to do. Again, my contention is that the reason why 2 billion people on the planet have no access to electricity is not an economic or a technical one but rather a political one.
Chris,
Life before oil was extremely hard. People didn’t even grow food. They just lay inert on the ground, waiting for insects to crawl into their mouths.
Mr. Walt D: Points taken and thank you for your comments. You are obviously more educated with regard to several aspects of this debate than I and so I appreciate your sharing of that knowledge.
With regard to soy beans and other life on earth which processes energy from the sun, however, I understand there are currently, and for the foreseeable future, certain limits to production of food and bio-fuel. I further understand from Goodstein and others that, given those limits, life might be pretty draconian if we had to live on just –or even substantially, on those fuels anytime within the next 20-100 years.
In addition, and with regard to the nuclear fuels (which Goodstein asserted, by process of elimination, offered the best hope), I understand that currently the energy costs of mining the uranium, building the plants, setting up the infrastructure for distributing the energy, and safely disposing of the spent fuel, just don’t compare with the efficiencies of using fossil fuels. As I recall my reading, the difference was tremendous, by orders of magnitude. Further, Goodstein spoke of nuclear power more as a transition fuel than as a permanent solution. By implication, he seemed to suggest solar as the long-term most likely source. No doubt thanks to the 5 billion year warranty that you correctly note.
In any event, whether the transition to nuclear power is permanent or temporary so that we could further transititon to solar power or some as yet undiscovered source, still it would constitute an end to civilization as we know it due to those laws of thermodynamics –again, because the fossil fuels are just so much more efficient from a net energy and ease of use perspective.
Also, Goodstein was very careful to qualify his agreement with the Hubbert model’s predictions. He closes his book stating a time range for the effective decline of oil at anywhere from 10-100 years from now. I hope I can concede that alarmism is in the eye of the beholder with a reasonable critic such as you, but I can’t condone the willful blindness to physical reality espoused by certain economists (don’t worry about it, the market will take care of it, these scientists speak in fallacies).
So, finally, I am in vehement agreement with your final perspectives. And I believe Goodstein might also agree with you. Ultimately, we will not run out of energy. The Sun will shine. But it might be lights out soon for more than just 2 billion.
Mr. Smith: What are you talking about?
Chris:
It’s not so much that oil is infinite, or even that the amount of energy we can extract from oil is infinite… (although some here have tried to argue positions similar to this)
It’s that as oil becomes more scarce, it becomes more expensive, and consumption goes down.
People can create substitutes for oil. It may be relatively inefficient to do so right now, but if the price of oil goes up enough it won’t.
Either way, people will deal with it. People may have to cut back on driving, running large machinery, etc… but they will. So be it. There’s no Consumption God saying that we have to live in the manner of our ancestors.
The only real danger is if oil extraction/consumption gets subsidized somehow.
Even then, many people will figure out what is going on and account for it.
Adem: Glad that you acknowledge the facts regarding finiteness. For the records, I have never denied but freely admit of the laws developed by the philosophers of political economy, including the insights and observations regarding supply and demand and incentives.
However, to paraphrase, it’s not that incentives don’t apply to how humans behave. It’s not that I deny the rule you state: “as oil becomes more scarce, people it becomes more expensive, and consumption goes down.” Where we part is in the idea that “people can create substitutes for oil.” That remains to be seen –at least according to Goodstein, the provost of the physics department at Cal Tech, and other scientists, geologist, energy industry professionals, etc.
So what I suppose I really object to is the seeming lack of humility amongst the would be natural philosophers of political economy.
It isn’t just that it “may be relatively inefficient” to use anything other than fossil fuels now, it’s that, again according to Goodstein et alia, it is relatively inefficient from an energy perspective (which perpsective is reflected in the pricing of the various means of delivering energy). From a net energy perspective, it doesn’t matter if the nominal price of oil goes up or down enough. The pricing system cannot add or subtract energy from a molecule. To say people will deal with it [the using up of the fossil fuel inheritance] is an unrealistic gloss. It’s denial.
“It’s that as oil becomes more scarce, it becomes more expensive, and consumption goes down.”
That’s true. Or at least true enough. I completely agree.
But: “consumption goes down.” Consumption goes down. Consumption of what? Of the fuels that power this civilization. Consumption goes down. Energy use goes down. Consumption goes down…. Is there another fuel?…. Consumption goes down…. What follows?
Chris:
I acknowledge that energy cost is predominant – in a free market I would expect the price of a fuel to fully reflect the energy cost (the cost in ergs or whatever to release a marginal erg).
I also acknowledge that it may be difficult to create substitute fuels/energy supplies. In fact it may well be the case that we cannot develop anything as good as oil for a long long time.
But part of the “substitution” that I was speaking of was the rearrangement of how we use energy. In other words, if oil prices go up, it is more economic to develop low-energy-consuming devices and replace our old inefficient ones.
It will become more economic to carpool. Etc.
We may suffer a bit from this, but I don’t think we will overconsume oil until one day there is a crisis – if (and this is a big if) the gov’ts of the world allow oil prices to rise normally, and do not subsidize energy consumption or extraction.
too much to read sorry
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