Peak Iron?

[Broomstick]

I have this vague memory of hearing that it's actually cheaper to recycle aluminum than to refine the ore in the first place, thus aluminum is one of the most recycled materials around. Certain grades of aluminum are worth the effort to collect and recycle, with some of them paying premium scrap metal prices.

If it becomes cheaper to recycle iron than to mine a new supply we'll see the same. Even now, my local recycle does a brisk business in recycled iron and steel ($240 a ton when I drove by today).

Last time I took a pickup load of stuff down there I left with enough money to buy lunch, do the laundry, and put half a tank of gas in the truck.

As for the energy shortage - as the cost of energy goes up so does the pressure to become more efficient. Just about every appliance and light bulb for sale to the consumer today is significantly more efficient than they were when I was a kid, thus allowing shrinking energy supplies to stretch further. On the downside, we also have a lot more stuff to plug into the wall than when I was a kid, so maybe we're using more overall anyhow.

But while the LED lights and computerized cars and so forth are better for the end consumer some of those "green" technologies aren't so green in manufacturing. Is an LED light, over it's entire lifetime, a net gain or a net loss of resources and energy?

[Sea Skimmer]

That would depend on how responsible the manufacturing company was, and what the source of electrical power is, but I would be willing to bet an LED would always be better as long as it was recycled in the end. Though, if you live in a cold area, all the heat thrown out by an incandescent bulb isn't really waste either, but this would be a small part of the world population that is cold enough to need heating year round. Nor is electrical power an ideal source of home heating.

IIRC though, incandescent bulbs were actually threatening a near term problem with peak tungsten by the end of the 1990s, but this issue was then replaced by more pressing energy and CO2 issues as the reason to abandon them. The filaments used up a serious tonnage per year, almost none were recycled and meanwhile very few materials can replace tungsten in its key industrial and chemical roles. Most of the stuff you can replace the tungsten with in the bulb meanwhile would be even rarer material.

[UnderAGreySky]

Also, isn't the problem of heat with tungsten bulbs the fact that these bulbs are generally on the top of the house, and heat tends to stay there? More efficient to use central heating and switch to CFLs if I'm not mistaken.

[Broomstick]

CFL's bring up the issue of mercury, which is a necessary part of them, as well as toxic. Forget recycling, no one wants them once they burn or break, not the usual receivers of garbage either. CFL's are efficient in use but present a problem at the end of their life.

LED's are more efficient in using energy than CFL's and don't contain mercury. They also (based upon empirical evidence at my home) work much better in cold conditions. However, I have not yet researched the environmental impact and cost of their production, and I'm not sure what happens when they stop working and need to be replaced. How practical is recycling or are they landfill material? And do LED's incorporate any material that is nearing peak?

This is why trying to go green can be complicated.

[mr friendly guy]

America is still the worlds largest manufacturer.

According to most metrics (ie total value of goods) China surpassed the US in 2010. Of course the US has a fraction of the number of workers. *

* Note the website is a Chinese source (first one that came up on google highlighting what I wanted), however I remember reading about Chinese manufacturing surpassing US in value a few years back on numerous Western sites including CNN.

Here is another one showcasing goods where China now outproduces the US including manufactured items like steel, automobiles, tobacco (not a particularly enviable one), beer (again not an enviable one) and high tech exports (presumably China mainly produces in the lower end of the high tech market for now).

[madd0ct0r]

I must be out of date then - point retracted.

[General Zod]

Here is another one showcasing goods where China now outproduces the US including manufactured items like steel, automobiles, tobacco (not a particularly enviable one), beer (again not an enviable one) and high tech exports (presumably China mainly produces in the lower end of the high tech market for now).

Define "lower end". Pretty much everything Apple was made in China, after all. The bulk of cell phone electronics for other handsets? China again.

[Sea Skimmer]

China assembles everything Apple makes. It does not manufacture all of the high tech components that go into them. The latest CPUs for Ipads and Iphones for example are made by Samsung in a Texas factory.

[amigocabal]

We're in "Peak Everything" right now, all statistics showing "X many years/centuries" of stuff still in the earth neglect to mention the exponential increase in the energy required to extract diminishing quality of the stuff nor the envirionmental degredation as a result of having to extract said resources from increasingly remote and fragile ecosystems.

For example despite the amount of US coal being mined increasing exponential in terms of quantity the stuff being mined is so poor in its stored energy that the energy value extracted from coal mining has actually flatlined, this has catastrophic implications has increasingly complex societies require an energy surplus.

Why should the results be catastrophic?

In some ultimate sense, the total quantity of resources must of course be declining. However, a resource that is going to run out centuries after it becomes obsolete, or a thousand years after the sun grows cold, is not a serious problem. If it is going to run out within some time period that is a matter of practical relevance, then this rising present value of the resource whose exhaustion looms ahead will automatically force conservation, without either public hysteria or political exhortation.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, 2000 edition, page 190

So declining coal supplies mean that people will use less coal, and also use alternatives from wood to plutonium. And indeed, as you yourself has pointed out, it would "[force] us to scale down significantly."

What's needed is a real national effort at sustainable development and a national plan to plan ahead and implement things as well as a broad international effort at environmental problem solving especially wrt greenhouse effect.

Canada cant because of HarperGov(tm) and the United States can't because of.... Where do I even begin!? It's like the whole political system conspires against getting anythign done.

Well, who would be in charge of a national plan?

Barack Obama?

Harry Connick, Sr.?

How can any one person know the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of people, and how much each of those hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay for a good or service? Centrally planned economies do not work with such huge populations.

[Simon_Jester]

How can any one person know the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of people, and how much each of those hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay for a good or service? Centrally planned economies do not work with such huge populations.

You seem very sure of yourself.

So, prove it.

[mr friendly guy]

Here is another one showcasing goods where China now outproduces the US including manufactured items like steel, automobiles, tobacco (not a particularly enviable one), beer (again not an enviable one) and high tech exports (presumably China mainly produces in the lower end of the high tech market for now).

Define "lower end". Pretty much everything Apple was made in China, after all. The bulk of cell phone electronics for other handsets? China again.

Not the CPUs for one. China is starting to develop their own version and I expect to see them improve their technology in the years ahead. However for now, they aren't there yet.

[amigocabal]

How can any one person know the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of people, and how much each of those hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay for a good or service? Centrally planned economies do not work with such huge populations.

You seem very sure of yourself.

So, prove it.

I only need to cite the example of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

[Alkaloid]

Well thats awfully good evidence that a massively corrupt oligarchy doesn't work, but no one was arguing that.

[Blayne]

We're in "Peak Everything" right now, all statistics showing "X many years/centuries" of stuff still in the earth neglect to mention the exponential increase in the energy required to extract diminishing quality of the stuff nor the envirionmental degredation as a result of having to extract said resources from increasingly remote and fragile ecosystems.

For example despite the amount of US coal being mined increasing exponential in terms of quantity the stuff being mined is so poor in its stored energy that the energy value extracted from coal mining has actually flatlined, this has catastrophic implications has increasingly complex societies require an energy surplus.

Why should the results be catastrophic?

In some ultimate sense, the total quantity of resources must of course be declining. However, a resource that is going to run out centuries after it becomes obsolete, or a thousand years after the sun grows cold, is not a serious problem. If it is going to run out within some time period that is a matter of practical relevance, then this rising present value of the resource whose exhaustion looms ahead will automatically force conservation, without either public hysteria or political exhortation.

Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell, 2000 edition, page 190

So declining coal supplies mean that people will use less coal, and also use alternatives from wood to plutonium. And indeed, as you yourself has pointed out, it would "[force] us to scale down significantly."

What's needed is a real national effort at sustainable development and a national plan to plan ahead and implement things as well as a broad international effort at environmental problem solving especially wrt greenhouse effect.

Canada cant because of HarperGov(tm) and the United States can't because of.... Where do I even begin!? It's like the whole political system conspires against getting anythign done.

Well, who would be in charge of a national plan?

Barack Obama?

Harry Connick, Sr.?

How can any one person know the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of people, and how much each of those hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay for a good or service? Centrally planned economies do not work with such huge populations.

1) How is it that you can at all interpret my post as meaning switching to an Command Economy? a "National plan" can be something like the MITI in Japan or the effort to land on the moon in under 10 years. Basically an intensive government driven effort to switch to sustainable development doesn't mean nationalizing everything.

2) The results are catastrophic for various reasons that I listed earlier in this thread and posted links to substantiate the point, why did you not read these links? I understand its about two hours long to get the full point but its absolutely required to understand the whole thing.

[Simon_Jester]

How can any one person know the needs and wants of hundreds of millions of people, and how much each of those hundreds of millions of people are willing to pay for a good or service? Centrally planned economies do not work with such huge populations.

You seem very sure of yourself.
So, prove it.

I only need to cite the example of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

OK, now that you've reduced your argument to "command economy = USSR," prove the Soviet Union didn't work.

First, you would need to define "work" coherently. If you can do that, I'll be impressed.

See, the problem here is that you're arguing by quote and cliche. Here, you're simply going "command economy doesn't work because Soviets." And I want to see how much thought you can bring to bear on the issue. Just saying half a dozen magic code words isn't good enough; if I'm going to take you seriously I think I want to be convinced you can back up what you're saying.

I actually don't much care whether you're right or wrong about command economies not working, but I think it's reasonable for you to make an effort. If you're going to be a firm believer in capitalism, shouldn't you have sat down and worked out why it's better in an intellectually honest way?

[Blayne]

I would be curious as to see him substantiate why 'capitalism' ie laissez faire economics could solve the issue beyond nitpickity naysaying.

[Simon_Jester]

There are a lot of things he could say against the Soviet economy, and a lot he could say for other styles of economy. But I'm not going to fill in the blanks in his own argument for him.

He seems to want his argument to be "a national resource plan is communism and command economy, and we all know THAT doesn't work."

That requires two things to be true:
1) A national resource plan really is the same thing as a command economy.
2) Command economies are always bad things, no exceptions.

(1) is probably wrong, (2) might be true or at least something you could put up a credible argument for. So I'm softballing it by throwing him (2) to prove, in hopes that he'll back something up if it's important enough to him.

[amigocabal]

I would be curious as to see him substantiate why 'capitalism' ie laissez faire economics could solve the issue beyond nitpickity naysaying.

"Capitalism is not an "ism." It is closer to being the opposite of an "ism," because it is simply the freedom of ordinary people to make whatever economic transactions they can mutually agree to." -- Dr. Thomas Sowell

Under capitalism, no one person has to know how much resources there are still left, what and how much every single person in the country wants, and how much they are willing to pay for every possible good or service. Take, for example, iron. Most people do not know the intricate details of iron mining, the associated costs, the difference between ore grades, etc. But they do know prices. Someone buying a desk, for example, would know the relative price of steel desks to wooden desks. From those prices, someone considering to buy a desk may choose the steel desk, the wooden desk, or to go without. Manufacturers do not need to know the intricacies of the steel industry from top to bottom either. All they need to know is the price of iron, and hence, whether it is profitable to make goods out of iron. And while the iron industry itself would likely have more knowledge about iron resources, prices will tell them if it is worth it to mine more iron out of the ground or recycle scrap iron.

The same thing goes on with other resources. Land can be used to raise corn, or cattle, or cocoa. Prices help people determine whether to use land to raise corn, cattle, or cocoa, or just build a housing tract or office building on top of it, without needing to know the details of things like the manufacture of fertilizer or concrete.

Prices also give people incentives to use resources efficiently. Far, far more pineapples are grown in Hawaii than Alaska, even though it is theoretically possible to grow pineapples in Alaska. This is because growing pineapples in Alaska requires insulated greenhouses and gas heaters, which of course have costs not associated with growing pineapples in Hawaii. And if the price of pineapples is not high enough, the only people who would grow pineapples in Alaska are wealthy hobbyists.

From agriculture to construction, from coffee to the Internet, prices determine what people buy and what people make. For example, if I want a cup of coffee, I do not need to know how much land is used to grow coffee, how much labor is required to grow coffee, or taxes in the jurisdiction where the coffee is grown, the costs of shipping the coffee, etc. . All I need to know is how much I have to pay for a cup of coffee. The same goes with everything else.

[Ryan Thunder]

Nitpickity naysaying it is, then, I guess.

Mr. Sowell (and you, I guess) do not seem to understand that no management at all is in fact a management technique, if generally a hideously ineffective one.

You could trivially say all of that about a command economy anyway. The constituent parts of the economy do not have to know how it all works. Only the planners do.

[Blayne]

I would be curious as to see him substantiate why 'capitalism' ie laissez faire economics could solve the issue beyond nitpickity naysaying.

Words

The well established and widely recognized problem with open markets when it comes to prices is that They. Predict. Shit. All. So running out of oil? Science Knows! But does the ~invisible hand~ of the market? Nope.

Because of this it means that the technologies, laws, legislation and regulations that *could* solve the problem will not arrive in time.

Notwithstanding the old truism/heuristic of "Prevention is better than cure" where we can avoid the wars, strike, price shocks, societal collapse, poisoned water supply, destroyed ecosystems and my personal favorite mass die offs from an extinction event from entirely man made problems entirely.

Also notwithstanding the fact that in one of the worser case scenarios of ~structural collapse of society~ the "free market" won't exist and any solution will be via government, martial law and emergency legislation that will probably wipe clean most if not all property rights.

I only need to point out that the USA was largely a command economy during WWII to fight an existential threat that the market can't solve to disprove the "command economy doesn't work" claim.

[madd0ct0r]

Looks at dogpiling counter, sighs, and pulls up a chair with popcorn.

[Guardsman Bass]

I would be curious as to see him substantiate why 'capitalism' ie laissez faire economics could solve the issue beyond nitpickity naysaying.

Words

The well established and widely recognized problem with open markets when it comes to prices is that They. Predict. Shit. All. So running out of oil? Science Knows! But does the ~invisible hand~ of the market? Nope.

Prices aren't supposed to "predict" things on the market, unless you're talking about futures markets. They're just representations of value of the markets as they are right now.

Notwithstanding the old truism/heuristic of "Prevention is better than cure" where we can avoid the wars, strike, price shocks, societal collapse, poisoned water supply, destroyed ecosystems and my personal favorite mass die offs from an extinction event from entirely man made problems entirely.

What is this, 2007? I'm not convinced that Peak Oil is going to happen fast enough to be the disaster you seem to think it will be. There's too much "unconventional oil" out there that can smooth out the transition period as barrel prices go up.

Not to mention, as DestructionatorXIII pointed out in another thread, we've been through doublings and triplings before. Oil prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, and again in the 2000s, and it didn't cause economic desolation.

Also notwithstanding the fact that in one of the worser case scenarios of ~structural collapse of society~ the "free market" won't exist and any solution will be via government, martial law and emergency legislation that will probably wipe clean most if not all property rights.

Or you could just impose higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels, where most petroleum is consumed. That sends the market signals that it's time to start shifting to other stuff for power consumption and transportation.

I only need to point out that the USA was largely a command economy during WWII to fight an existential threat that the market can't solve to disprove the "command economy doesn't work" claim.

The US wasn't even close to a full command economy in World War 2. Even rationing wasn't harsh aside from a handful of things (like gasoline).

[Blayne]

Prices aren't supposed to "predict" things on the market, unless you're talking about futures markets. They're just representations of value of the markets as they are right now.

Ex...actly? What's your point? What are you refuting?

What is this, 2007? I'm not convinced that Peak Oil is going to happen fast enough to be the disaster you seem to think it will be. There's too much "unconventional oil" out there that can smooth out the transition period as barrel prices go up.

Not to mention, as DestructionatorXIII pointed out in another thread, we've been through doublings and triplings before. Oil prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, and again in the 2000s, and it didn't cause economic desolation.

As pointed out in one of the video's I linked it doesn't cost us anything to "prepare" for a potential disaster that might happen; but if we don't and it happens how much worse will people be? It's very simple game theory.

Additionally the "we've been through price shocks before so we'll always be fine" is a fallacy and one that ignore's what has been said in the videos; that things are very different now.

Or you could just impose higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels, where most petroleum is consumed. That sends the market signals that it's time to start shifting to other stuff for power consumption and transportation.

No idea what your responding to, this sounds like something that supports the earlier point of "a national plan doesn't have to mean command economy."

The US wasn't even close to a full command economy in World War 2. Even rationing wasn't harsh aside from a handful of things (like gasoline).

Government spending was over 50% of GDP and taxes were about 90% and virtually all war production by government contract. It's pretty damn close or are you going to say the WWI total war economies aren't command economies either because there's still private property and corporations?

[Guardsman Bass]

Prices aren't supposed to "predict" things on the market, unless you're talking about futures markets. They're just representations of value of the markets as they are right now.

Ex...actly? What's your point? What are you refuting?

You were using the fact that prices don't predict crisises as a criticism against capitalism. I pointed out that they're not supposed to predict those anyways.

What is this, 2007? I'm not convinced that Peak Oil is going to happen fast enough to be the disaster you seem to think it will be. There's too much "unconventional oil" out there that can smooth out the transition period as barrel prices go up.

Not to mention, as DestructionatorXIII pointed out in another thread, we've been through doublings and triplings before. Oil prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, and again in the 2000s, and it didn't cause economic desolation.

As pointed out in one of the video's I linked it doesn't cost us anything to "prepare" for a potential disaster that might happen; but if we don't and it happens how much worse will people be? It's very simple game theory.

It costs us plenty to force a change to a more expensive form of new energy and energy infrastructure through regulation and taxation.

Additionally the "we've been through price shocks before so we'll always be fine" is a fallacy and one that ignore's what has been said in the videos; that things are very different now.

That's what they all say. They also continually bring up the EROEI argument, which is a red herring - we have no lack of energy, and oil's main virtue was just that it was a particularly convenient form of stored energy. Besides, we take cheaper energy in one form and convert to a more portable, more expensive form with negative ERORI all the time (just look at most batteries).

The US wasn't even close to a full command economy in World War 2. Even rationing wasn't harsh aside from a handful of things (like gasoline).

Government spending was over 50% of GDP and taxes were about 90% and virtually all war production by government contract. It's pretty damn close or are you going to say the WWI total war economies aren't command economies either because there's still private property and corporations?

Government spending over 50% of GDP is not the same as a "command economy". It just means that the government is doing a shit-ton of purchases and borrowing in the economy.

[Spoonist]

Prices aren't supposed to "predict" things on the market, unless you're talking about futures markets. They're just representations of value of the markets as they are right now.

Ex...actly? What's your point? What are you refuting?

You were using the fact that prices don't predict crisises as a criticism against capitalism. I pointed out that they're not supposed to predict those anyways.

Uhm, Bass, I think you missed something there. In this case that balyne said "ie laissez faire economics " so he is thinking in that context.
I don't necessarily think that amigoblabla and blayne are talking about the same thing though since his response made no sense since pricing has been here in all forms of governement, regardless of political views.
But the standard defence of laissez faire economics is that it will solve unrelated stuff through the magic of the market. Like the discussion about the tragedy of commons etc bla bla bla.
So while it is not eloquent I think that blayne's rant of pricing was against laissez faire as the solution to everything, not as an attack on the concept of pricing.