Total energy consumption and production...?

[Keevan_Colton]

Yeah, though a massive crash in standard of living shouldnt just be shrugged and accepted.

This is the ultimate problem with the free market will solve things mentality.

It is completely reactive. There is no real motivation for fixing things until they break, take for example the state of the following in the US:

The Grid
Air Traffic Control
The Health Service

That's three critical systems for society and they're all ballsed up and on their way to disaster, or just hovering on the fucking brink.

[Faqa]

Air Traffic Control

Isn't Air Traffic Control goverment-controlled?

[Keevan_Colton]

Air Traffic Control

Isn't Air Traffic Control goverment-controlled?

Yes, I didnt say they were all privately controlled. They are all run on the retarded principles that america holds so dear, which are at the heart of my point.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

I think we're arguing over pretty fine details, here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we both think that there will be a crushing blow to the economy, possibly rivaling or exceeding the Great Depression, but that it is unlikely to take more than a decade to be alleviated.

I was primarily arguing with the people who think that it will turn into a scenario where the highways are empty and so are the airways, and people don't use appliances or electronics unless it's absolutely necessary.

Ummm, that's what happens when people can't afford to buy gas, which is what would happen if we go through another Great Depression. You do understand that people during the Great Depression had trouble buying food, right? What the fuck makes you think people would still be tooting around in their cars, using electrical appliances with abandon despite much higher electricity costs, and taking vacations in planes?

Except that not everyone was on skid row during the depression. It characterized the era, but most were still employed and still had to get to work. In the modern era, a car is the only good way to get to work in most places, so there will still be plenty of those on the road. People will definitely leave lights off and use appliances more sparingly, but it won't be like we'll go back to people buying food fresh for fear of using a refridgerator or refusing to turn on the TV. Plane traffic for vacations probably will go way down, although middle class people don't take that many vacations compared to the rich who will still be able to afford to do it, and plane traffic for business trips shouldn't crash and burn, although it will slump since unecessary trips won't be funded.

[Keevan_Colton]

Have you considered this as adding to the likelyhood of problems with cars rather than alleviating them?

Supply and demand and inflation and all that jazz?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Have you considered this as adding to the likelyhood of problems with cars rather than alleviating them?

Supply and demand and inflation and all that jazz?

20-25% fewer cars on the road is still a reduction in the need for gas.

[Faqa]

In the modern era, a car is the only good way to get to work in most places, so there will still be plenty of those on the road.

There will still be a need for the car, yes.

That doesn't mean said need will be met. You'll need "plenty of those on the road", sure. Who the hell says you'll have them?

That said, I'm putting my money on better public transport and landline-based telecommuting. If you can't get the people to work, you may well need to have them work from home whenever you can.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

So... the cars will spontaneously disintegrate?

[Faqa]

So... the cars will spontaneously disintegrate?

No, their fuel will go bye-bye. Economically, if not geologically.

[Darth Wong]

So... the cars will spontaneously disintegrate?

Perhaps you never studied the mechanics of the internal combustion engine, but in case this hadn't occurred to you, cars with empty gas tanks will not be driving around and keeping the roads full.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

I think we're arguing over pretty fine details, here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we both think that there will be a crushing blow to the economy, possibly rivaling or exceeding the Great Depression, but that it is unlikely to take more than a decade to be alleviated.

I was primarily arguing with the people who think that it will turn into a scenario where the highways are empty and so are the airways, and people don't use appliances or electronics unless it's absolutely necessary.

Ummm, that's what happens when people can't afford to buy gas, which is what would happen if we go through another Great Depression. You do understand that people during the Great Depression had trouble buying food, right? What the fuck makes you think people would still be tooting around in their cars, using electrical appliances with abandon despite much higher electricity costs, and taking vacations in planes?

Except that not everyone was on skid row during the depression. It characterized the era, but most were still employed and still had to get to work. In the modern era, a car is the only good way to get to work in most places, so there will still be plenty of those on the road. People will definitely leave lights off and use appliances more sparingly, but it won't be like we'll go back to people buying food fresh for fear of using a refridgerator or refusing to turn on the TV. Plane traffic for vacations probably will go way down, although middle class people don't take that many vacations compared to the rich who will still be able to afford to do it, and plane traffic for business trips shouldn't crash and burn, although it will slump since unecessary trips won't be funded.

The only ones who won't be seriously affected by a 3% to 15% per year decline in the production of oil would be the poorest people on Earth who don't have much use for an energy-rich economy, and the richest of the rich, who wouldn't too care much if oil went north of $100 per barrel.

That leaves the rest of us. Compared to even our grandparents and parents, we have it so easy it's almost obscene. I don't think there's anybody who's a member of this board who was alive in, say, Europe after the end of World War II, or who was alive for the Great Depression. And there's nobody alive now who remembers the sort of boom/bust cycles that marked the economy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The experience of a Great Depression or a real market panic is completely alien to us.

It's easy to say "Oh, we'll just suffer another Great Depression," except for many of those in the richest, most affluent societies . . . i.e. those ones that will be the hardest hit by oil shortages . . . such a calamity can only be grasped on an intellectual level. Unemployment during the Great Depression ranged from the mid-teens to nearly a full third of the workforce. Yes, most people were still working, but such unemployment numbers are almost unfathomable to us. Indeed, the highest unemployment rates in modern times were something like 10.8%.

And remember, declines will cause spikes in fuel prices, compounding the problems imposed by their gradual increase. If we say that a 3%-5% decline causes a mere 300% spike in fuel prices, then that means gas goes to $7.50 a gallon in the United States. Market forces would ensure that this peak lingers long after the price of oil loses 290% of that spike. This means, for the average suburban commuter, that a round trip commute suddenly costs three times more than it did before. So if one's daily gas budget was $2.00 before, suddenly, it goes up to $6.00. Sure, you might say, they'll cut $4.00 from somewhere else to break even. Except everything else is going up too.

Sure if you average out the 300% price spike with the overall 10% rise in prices when the spike goes down, you'll get a much lower overall price increase in food and other manufactured goods. If you had a three month spike, where the highest oil prices went was 300% higher, followed by the rest of the year where prices were just 10% higher than what you paid at the start of the year . . . the average price you've paid for fuel by the end of the year still ends up being some 40% higher than it was at the beginning of the year. This means that prices will grow by some large fraction of that due to the slower reaction times in the prices of food and durable goods. Even if you had a magical price jump of 300% in just one month, followed by the rest of the year being just 10% higher than where you started, you still end the year paying an average of 25% more than you might've had the price not had that spike. Economic growth tends to rely on people having surplus income to dispose on long-term things like mutual funds and retirement savings and savings accounts, where the bank lends out something like $6 to $12 for every dollar held in savings accounts, and on that surplus income being spread to other people in the economy by the purchase of luxury items and other commodities. If you imagine their effective incomes shrinking by even a significant fraction of that average rise in prices, then you can see just how quickly things could go south with even modest shortfalls in oil supplies. Even the gentle downturn in production at the start of the back S-curve will kick off recessions. Even then, it will take time for economic contractions to slow the growth in demand for oil, and this will exacerbate the situation. And this is the relatively happy case, where the decline starts out small, and only causes a 300% jump in prices, rather than the 400% to 500% spikes that history has taught us such small declines are capable of causing.

Even if we assume that people will be reasonable, that all futures traders will wake up dead one morning, a decline of output of just 3% (a decline that was stated as the minimum rate of decline post-peak by oil shill Dick "I got a shotgun and you ain't got one" Cheney,) combined with a growth in demand of just 2% and the resulting rise in prices would completely wipe out the 3% growth rate in GDP in the United States. So, in the very least you have a stagant, inflationary economy. And that's in a a world considerably divorced from reality. In the real world, we have spikes and jumps in prices, and 3% declines are the absolute minimum. Some petroleum engineers are forecasting accelerating declines starting at, say, five percent per year and eventually increasing up to 15% per year, based on experiences in places like the North Sea oilfields.

The Great Depression, in the United States, caused an economic contraction on the order of 10% per year, which lasted barely half a decade, before bottoming out, and the onset of recovery. From crash to recovery of pre-Depression GNP took a decade. Full recovery of the markets took up to a quarter-century. With the appallingly sluggish reaction we've had to the concept of Peak Oil thus far, we're looking at a decade at least, and maybe two decades or more, of 'severe' fuel shortages; and this isn't even the "ZOMG were all PWNT!!11" case or the "Oh God, oh God, we're all gonna die." case. This is the median case; my Option C-/D+ or D case. This is an economic slowdown that promises the potential of the Great Depression's severity, and at least double, or triple its length. Instead of a single generation seeing profound crash and recovery, you're looking at the spectre of a generation seeing the crash, with the full recovery not really coming until the a generation or so after. That is what will make the Great Depression seem like a relative walk in the park.

[Faqa]

I see the auto industry as the prime victims. Whatever else may happen, private vehicles will be probably be the LAST thing to recover, if they do at all. Especially since the priority will be getting the farming equipment online. If the goverments have any brains at all, they'll institute rationing of gas, with first priority to the plastics/agriculture industries. That does, umm, mean a non-oil-company guy at the U.S reins, for example.

The main thing will be getting nuke plants online. If THAT fails, we're fucked, because that means no communication, which really does fuck us hard up the ass.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

So... the cars will spontaneously disintegrate?

No, their fuel will go bye-bye. Economically, if not geologically.

Oh, I see. I didn't understand what you meant when you talked about "no cars". Anyway, the gas will still be there as new sources come online, it will just be more expensive, and it's better to pay a lot for gas to get to work than not to have a job.

@GAT: I'm not trying to minimize the shittiness of the scenario, I'm just pointing out that it's unlikely to be worse than that. The world did recover from the Great Depression after about 10 years, as bad as it was.

Anyway, it's not at all guaranteed that it will shake out this way. It could very well be much less severe depending on how long it takes breakthroughs to happen and how quickly certain key people wise up.

[Junghalli]

Sometimes I wonder if global thermonuclear war might actually be better for us in the long run than a total economic & production collapse caused by lack of oil. With nuclear war we can wipe out billions of people overnight while leaving the resource base mostly intact, and the couple billion people left alive will likely grow accustomed to living frugally in a post apocalyptic world.

Perhaps, in the very long run. The scary thing about the idea of civilization collapsing for lack of oil (aside from all the scary things about the idea of civilization collapsing, period) is that with most of the fossil fuel reserves - especially the easily accessable ones - depleted technological civilization will have a much harder time getting off the ground the next time around. The resulting Dark Age might just last forever - or at any rate until the next big asteroid comes along and wipes out everything bigger than a mouse.

[Seggybop]

I see the auto industry as the prime victims. Whatever else may happen, private vehicles will be probably be the LAST thing to recover, if they do at all.

It better not recover. Our society building its infrastructure around the private ownership of a car was one of its most grievous mistakes, and this is the chance to correct that error.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Sometimes I wonder if global thermonuclear war might actually be better for us in the long run than a total economic & production collapse caused by lack of oil. With nuclear war we can wipe out billions of people overnight while leaving the resource base mostly intact, and the couple billion people left alive will likely grow accustomed to living frugally in a post apocalyptic world.

Perhaps, in the very long run. The scary thing about the idea of civilization collapsing for lack of oil (aside from all the scary things about the idea of civilization collapsing, period) is that with most of the fossil fuel reserves - especially the easily accessable ones - depleted technological civilization will have a much harder time getting off the ground the next time around. The resulting Dark Age might just last forever - or at any rate until the next big asteroid comes along and wipes out everything bigger than a mouse.

Someone actually took the trouble to codify this into a published theory and gave it a name, the Olduvai theory.

It essentially postulates that what we call industrial civilization occurs when our energy production per capita rises to a minimum value that is 30% of its peak value, and ends when energy production peaks and declines below that 30% value. Or, to put in fewer words, the life-expectancy of modern industrial society is roughly 100 years.

Talk given on the subject preserved as a webpage here.

[His Divine Shadow]

I see the auto industry as the prime victims. Whatever else may happen, private vehicles will be probably be the LAST thing to recover, if they do at all.

It better not recover. Our society building its infrastructure around the private ownership of a car was one of its most grievous mistakes, and this is the chance to correct that error.

Cars will never go away. When the oil dries up, electrical cars will take over, who will in turn be fueled by electricity generated by nuclear power and later fusion as well. Electricity will likely become the new oil.

The freedom and comfort granted by individual transportation is just so extreme that the incentive to make it afforable will be a driving force to be reckoned with.

[Stuart Mackey]

extreme that the incentive to make it afforable will be a driving force to be reckoned with.

Boo! I say, Boo!

[Uraniun235]

I see the auto industry as the prime victims. Whatever else may happen, private vehicles will be probably be the LAST thing to recover, if they do at all.

It better not recover. Our society building its infrastructure around the private ownership of a car was one of its most grievous mistakes, and this is the chance to correct that error.

Life spent in an apartment/condo/whatever complex surrounded by a bunch of people I don't care about and probably won't like, without convenient access to friends who don't live within a few miles of me or the local mass-transit system.

Sounds like Hell to me.

(Well, okay. More like Purgatory. Still.)