Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:GrandMasterTerwynn wrote:Now that sort of thinking is the sort of Pollyanna-ish thinking that will carry people clear through Mike's reasonable scenario of effective (as far as standard of living is concerned) regression to the dawn of the 20th century and right into the worst-cast scenario of eventual regression into the nineteenth or beyond.
The fact that the transnational petrochemical companies are tacitly admitting that Peak Oil is upon us, and subtly urging us to consume less of their product means that they think that our current plateau in production is at an end (remember, companies don't do things that hurt their bottom line until they feel they've got no other choice in the matter. For example, sure the tobacco companies might be telling you how bad their product is for you now but they had to be sued and legislated into compliance first.) Mark my words, production will begin to decline within the next few years . . . a decade at the outside. Once the global market realizes the game is up, the price of oil will likely do things you never thought possible. And when the price of oil shoots up like an Osama bin-Laden wet-dream, the price of oil-based commodities will appreciate similarly. The sorts of short and medium-term effects of that kind of deflation of the average consumer's buying power will not be very pretty.
Technology will not develop quickly enough to save us from our own excesses. The end of cheap energy will hurt, make no doubt about that. How much it will hurt will depend directly on what courses of action our elected leadership will take.
All I'm saying is this: When there's such a great need that every other scientist in the country is working on clean, renewable energy, when the currently insurmountable political barriers have been thrown aside, when the corporate complex throws its entire weight behind these efforts instead of in front of them, change will happen a lot faster than current predictions indicate.
Several problems with this scenario. First, research and development kludges and economically feasible prototypes are not the same thing. For another, taking a technology from a few gee-whiz prototypes and replacing decades of infrastructure with them will take . . . decades to accomplish. And this is under the best of circumstances. No amount of pushing will overcome the sheer inertia involved in constructing all new factories and tooling, nor will it alleviate the initial cost overruns, delays, shortfalls in production, and first-run bugs that affect every new venture. It certainly won't solve the interfacing headaches of getting the new pieces to play well enough with the old, since you couldn't possibly replace all infrastructure everywhere in one fell swoop. It won't overcome the need to train people how to install, inspect, remove, and service/repair these marvelous new technologies.
Of course, add to that the fact that you'll have to build in the dramatically rising cost of oil into every industrial step in the process (from powering the factories, to shipping/extracting the raw inputs, to constructing the initial runs of parts, to paying a liveable wage to your workforce (whose purchasing power will be dropping as fast as the cost of oil rises) and to getting parts shipped from the factories out to the relevant sites,) and progress slows further still.
This isn't going to be anywhere near as easy as sending a man to the Moon. It's going to be about forcing entire nations to undergo a fundamental transformation of their basic infrastructure utterly alien to the human experience (As J pointed out, in the past the 'alternative' power sources were already ready and raring to go when the in-vogue sources were waning. For most of us, this is nowhere near the case.) Some will make it. Some won't.
Nuclear power combined with cars running on diversified fuels can solve most of our energy problems with today's technology. Between ethanol, bioethanol, biodiesel, propane, natural gas, greater use of regular diesel, kerosene (I didn't know cars could run on that either until I went to Chile), and electric cars, and with a much greater percentage of the population using mass transit, there's no energy problem.
Screeching Greenpeace anti-nuke ultra-green neo-Luddites won't go away just because the oil is running out. Anti-nuke howlers will be just as implacable about having a nuclear power plant in their backyard as they are now. They'll probably continue to be this way until enough rolling blackouts, being shot by police/National Guard/federal troops, or lynchings by their neighbors convince them to shut up. Not to mention nuclear power doesn't begin to provide even a sixth of the world's power. Just four nations get the majority of their power from nuclear power-plants. Just sixteen get more than a quarter of their power from nuclear powerplants.
And this is completely ignoring the fact that nuclear plants take not-insignificant amounts of time, effort, and material to build. The costs of all of which are going to feel the pinch imposed by rising energy costs.
As far as all those "alternative" fuels are concerned, they're not really oil alternatives, they're oil
derivatives. Ethanol, and biodiesel require the sort of high-impact farming only made possible by the fossil-fuel based Green Revolution of the 1950s. Natural gas production will peak and decline not too long after oil does. Not to mention many power-plants are, in fact, fired by natural gas. And you're going to be needing that electricity to power the factories so you can perform your massive infrastructure upgrades and construct those scads of nuclear powerplants you're talking about.
Not to mention diesel and kerosene are refined products of petroleum. Not as refined as gasoline, yes . . . but these are still dead dinosaur juice. Sure diesel and kerosene might stretch out the oil supply on the account that they cost less to refine, and on the account that diesels bitch-slap gasoline motors in efficiency; but it's literally solving the oil crisis by burning more oil.
The only things stopping this scenario are that consumers don't want to have to choose between cars that use that many different fuels and political resistance, both of which will melt away in a bad enough crisis.
If human history has taught us anything, it's that the average citizen, and the politician she votes for, will tolerate a
lot of bullshit before she deems it "bad enough," or a genuine "OMG we're all gonna DIE" crisis. I mean, look at the excesses of King George the Wonder-Chimp and the overwhelmingly "blah" reaction it's elicited from the voting public. In a post-oil world, citizens won't be choosing between flex-fuel and hybrid cars, they'll be giving them up entirely and learning the virtues of walking, bike riding, and mass-transit. The only time personal motorized transportation will again be within the realms of the typical consumer is when electric cars and fuel-cell powered vehicles can be produced cheaply on non-fossil-fuel inputs.
I don't disagree that we're headed for a major economic splash, one that could be worse than the Great Depression, but when there's that much of a pressing need, things will change fast, and they won't stay like that for more than a decade or so, certainly not long enough for our lifestyles to regress to resemble pre-WW2.
Snapping enough of the public out of its complacency will require a decade of things going into the shitter, or a suitably shocking market panic. Getting the public into sensible crisis-management mode and out of stupid "ZOMG PANIC roffle" mode will take another decade by itself. Infrastructure replacement will take decades, unless you happen to live somewhere where the territory is small enough, and the reliance on fossil fuels light enough, and the government and corporate structures flexible enough, that the change-over can be phased in not-so-painfully (in short, move to France.
)
Sure, for some countries, peak-oil won't affect them much at all. Then again, these countries are generally already
in the shitter, and the only way things will get worse for them is that the developed world will be too busy with its own troubles to adequately bail them out of their famines/civil wars/psychotic military takeovers/episodic ethnic cleansings.
-- Asuka