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SavageGentleman posted:sorry what? Did you completely miss the last posts? Going "well technology will solve everything" is not even a proper argument - it's basically a statement of faith Your evidence that technological growth won't be able to compensate is? Historically it has. Of course this doesn't mean it always will, but without reason to believe otherwise I know what I will bet on. The Al Bartlett talk is kind of a case in point, the only solid argument in there is that consumption of crude oil cannot continue indefinitely, which of course it can't. Yet, there is no real talk about the nature technological growth or even population growth which is vital to understanding how consumption might change. For example, all the population estimates I've read expect that world population is likely to peak sometime in the next century because of demographic transition. Instead that talk implicitly advocates for population controls, which at least presently look like they would've only been harmful.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:36
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CyclicalAberration posted:Your evidence that technological growth won't be able to compensate is? Historically it has. Of course this doesn't mean it always will, but without reason to believe otherwise I know what I will bet on. this is literally faith by the way
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Feb 12, 2017 01:46
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"Technical solutions to environmental and resource challenges are impossible" is as much an article of faith as assuming technology will solve anything. There's a fairly clear path to keeping the Earth below 2 degrees of warming. It may be possible within the existing mitigation framework adopted in Paris or that agreement may have to be expanded, but it's hardly some fantasy. Resource depletion is more complicated and there's no true answer to the OP's question because we simply can't answer it scientifically yet.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:48
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SavageGentleman posted:welp, seems you're right! Crude Oil production seems to keep up on a global level for now. Knowing that the planet is finite, this will not stay like that forever, but anything that keeps us afloat a few more years hels, I guess. Yeah but it's not "a few more years" like 4 years, it's "a few more years" like "well beyond the rest of our entire lives". And at that point you can still do the whole "everything is finite!" and "it's just faith that technology will change" but there is something absolutely realistic about the idea that a human simply can not talk about what technology will be like a hundred years after their life or whatever. It's just not a meaningful conversation that is possible to have.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Yeah but it's not "a few more years" like 4 years, it's "a few more years" like "well beyond the rest of our entire lives". And at that point you can still do the whole "everything is finite!" and "it's just faith that technology will change" but there is something absolutely realistic about the idea that a human simply can not talk about what technology will be like a hundred years after their life or whatever. It's just not a meaningful conversation that is possible to have. Hell, you can't realistically predict where technology will be in twenty years, unless you're talking about something like fusion reactors or particle accelerators where there's agreed-up timetables stretching out decades for when facilities of a given development level are going to be built.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:08
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Helsing posted:I guess I'm confused by how you're saying that "the whole moralizing about Western lifestyles isn't true anymore" yet you agree that "It's definitely true that the West emits more than it's fair share, and has historically been responsible for the bulk of emissions". You're absolutely right that we can't reduce a complicated like global warming issue to a single cause but that hardly exculpates the west from some very legitimate criticisms about how westerners and especially North Americans are consuming an extremely disproportionate share of the planet's resources. Thug Lessons posted:"Technical solutions to environmental and resource challenges are impossible" is as much an article of faith as assuming technology will solve anything. There's a fairly clear path to keeping the Earth below 2 degrees of warming. It may be possible within the existing mitigation framework adopted in Paris or that agreement may have to be expanded, but it's hardly some fantasy. Resource depletion is more complicated and there's no true answer to the OP's question because we simply can't answer it scientifically yet. If you assume that technology will bail us out, and that isn't correct, billions of people die and society as we know it collapses in an unguided fall.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:13
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Paradoxish posted:Peak oil is actually just a prediction about production, not supply. You can have peak oil while there's still plenty of the stuff in the ground, it just has to be so expensive to extract that we don't bother or can't afford to increase production anymore. That's the thing. We're nowhere near that state now. The only reason the massive shale oil fields in Texas, for example, aren't being exploited now is because the Middle East flooding the market has kept the price of crude so low it isn't very profitable to extract. That profit point is ~$80 (Edit:updated) a barrel, nowhere near unsustainably high, but when we're currently seeing ~$50 a bbl also not a priority. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 02:15
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I agree with the people saying that believing in technology to save us is basically faith. Its magical thinking. The problem is that technology progress is actually slowing down. Compare 1900 to 1950, and then 1950 to 2000. The 1900-1950 interval is way more impressive and saw way more technological progress. Cars and electric power becoming widespread, radios, film, television, airplanes, nuclear energy, x-rays, peniccilin, rockets, submarines, tanks. Now look at the 1950-2000 interval. Computers, cell phones, internet, video games....um....better visual effects in movies.... You can do it decade by decade, too. 1987 to 1997 saw way more progress than 1997 to 2007. And since 2007 barely anything has changed, tech-wise. We already had computers, internet, cell phones, and whatever back in 2007. Video game graphics have barely gotten any better, same goes for CG effects in movies. What's changed in medicine? Nothing. What's change in energy? Nothing. So technology is definitely grinding to a halt. We've picked all of the low hanging fruit.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:39
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Blue Star posted:I agree with the people saying that believing in technology to save us is basically faith. Its magical thinking. The problem is that technology progress is actually slowing down. Compare 1900 to 1950, and then 1950 to 2000. The 1900-1950 interval is way more impressive and saw way more technological progress. Cars and electric power becoming widespread, radios, film, television, airplanes, nuclear energy, x-rays, peniccilin, rockets, submarines, tanks. Now look at the 1950-2000 interval. Computers, cell phones, internet, video games....um....better visual effects in movies.... This is incredibly stupid.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:41
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That's a pretty stupid post, but it's less stupid than believing that technology is going to continue fixing things forever and we will never suffer again thanks to human ingenuity. At least OP is smart enough to recognize that things are starting to fall apart, unlike the cult of futurism fucks that pop out of the woodwork in these threads.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:44
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Blue Star posted:internet, video games....um....better visual effects in movies.... the internet is a human right now and up there with some of the greatest technological achievements of humanity. You can trade medical information instantaneously cross-continent. The fact that most people trade cat videos with it doesn't lessen what an incredibly world-changing thing it is. Cars were total poo poo at first. It took a long time for the benefits to begin becoming widespread, like fridges, like electricity. The internet jumped from a CERN project to a human right in less than two decades. So, Blue Star posted:
No. Not even slightly.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:44
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Rime posted:That's a pretty stupid post, but it's less stupid than believing that technology is going to continue fixing things forever and we will never suffer again thanks to human ingenuity. You are the one crying the end is nigh, who's the cult?
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Feb 12, 2017 02:46
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Why would anyone ever believe technology might solve any problems? what has technology ever done for me!? Name one problem technology has ever solved! they haven't even made videogame graphics better since 2007!
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Feb 12, 2017 02:47
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You are the one crying the end is nigh, who's the cult? is the cult the guy arguing that things are on a path to end badly and just might, or the idiots who assume that it'll just be resolved by *magic* because that's what you think technology is. The rest of us call what you're thinking of magic. This is the greatest threat to the species yet faced; perhaps we will overcome, but indications currently aren't too good.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:48
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Spangly A posted:This is the greatest threat to the species yet faced; I don't think that's remotely true, thought it might be the greatest threat we've faced since the turn of the 20th century.
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Feb 12, 2017 02:59
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Spangly A posted:because that's what you think technology is. The rest of us call what you're thinking of magic. This is the greatest threat to the species yet faced; perhaps we will overcome, but indications currently aren't too good. "You have too much faith in technology and treat it like magic! Also I have identified a particular technology as so vital to human life that I believe the human race would cease to exist if it does not remain exactly as it is in 2017 forever till the end of time and no conceivable technology could ever replace it"
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Feb 12, 2017 03:09
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Dead Reckoning posted:But everyone in the world wants to live like people in the first world, now that such a lifestyle is possible. A billion Chinese bootstrapping themselves from an agrarian economy to an early 21st century consumer one was one of the greatest ecological disasters of the last century, and we're due to see it repeated several times in this one. Our options are either to convince the wealthiest nations in the world to deliberately reduce themselves to a 3rd world standard of living, to forcibly keep the 3rd world from developing (because they aren't going to do it voluntarily) while improving efficiency in the first world, hope like hell that massive, unheard of improvements in efficiency & energy tech bail us out, or other, more odious options. This post is so pre-1988.
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Feb 12, 2017 03:20
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It's also weird to claim that oil is NEEDED for human civilization and human existence because of the fact of how late it came into the modernization of the world. Like we already had radios and movies and stuff before we had cars. The US was supporting a population of 100 million in 1910. Like cars are certainly a major factor in the US culture. And if a wizard vanished it all in an instant that would be bad. But it's not even hard to think of what a technological civilization would look like without oil since we went through quite a few years of rapidly modernizing cities before it even was a big thing. Like people were living in skyscrapers before cars were common.
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Feb 12, 2017 03:42
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Oil is an absolute necessity now, because most of the products of the 'green revolution' require oil. Or do you think pesticides and fertilizers make themselves? Or just think about the incredible mechanization of agriculture that we have. You can't turn the clock back, we have a lot more people alive now than we did in 1910, and that is basically off the back of oil discovery and usage.
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Feb 12, 2017 04:19
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Also talking about the morality of western consumption (and requiring it to 'exculpate') is 100% bullshit. Deploying moralism to solve climate change will absolutely fail, because high resource consumption is not a loving moral failing, it's the fairly standard desire to have a better quality of life. Moralizing about the 'evil west' is just a self-serving and self-righteous way to dodge the fact that people want better lives, yet the technology to give that to them is costly in terms of a specific set of resources. The developing world will eventually increase their consumption per capita to match the US, the issue is how that same quality of life can be delivered as cheaply and sustainably as possible. In essence, to invert the accusations of 'techno-fetishism' thrown around in this thread, this is a problem that can only be solved with the newer technology, which also concurrently means having the political will to develop that technology in the first place But we actually have to live up until the point that that happens, so that means adapting to circumstances, which means management of limited resources, notably fresh water and arable land, and the products that they are used to produce. Or, in other words, ban biofuels, ban cotton, replace all natural fibers with synthetic fibers, place limits or disincentives on meat production and especially large disincentives on using cropland to grow feed for animals, put water management schemes into place and regulate the activity of farmers to a greater degree. Also invest in better rain catchments and flooding protections, as well as drought protection measures, because you're going to get less rain but it'll probably be more extreme when it does happen.
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Feb 12, 2017 04:32
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rudatron posted:Oil is an absolute necessity now, because most of the products of the 'green revolution' require oil. Or do you think pesticides and fertilizers make themselves? Or just think about the incredible mechanization of agriculture that we have. You can't turn the clock back, we have a lot more people alive now than we did in 1910, and that is basically off the back of oil discovery and usage. Fertilizer is made from ammonia. Modern fertilizer is made from natural gas in the west and coal in china. Not oil. Pesticide isn't particularly a fossil fuel thing at all. Like yeah, if a magic wizard comes and makes oil disappear in a day then it'll be bad. But the idea that oil is vital to human civilization is absurd. The human race had invented fax machines before it had oil wells.
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Feb 12, 2017 05:15
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Fertilizer is made from ammonia. Modern fertilizer is made from natural gas in the west and coal in china. Not oil. Pesticide isn't particularly a fossil fuel thing at all. Hope you don't use anything made of plastic!
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Feb 12, 2017 05:20
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stone cold posted:Hope you don't use anything made of plastic! Like I said, if a wizard comes and casts a spooky magic spell that makes oil cease to exist all at once then yeah, we are screwed. I don't even know though? Is there any products that are vital to human civilization's survival that require plastic be as cheap as it is? If the price of plastic rose 10x because it became so valuable that doesn't even seem like it'd increase the price of most things more than a few cents. The cost of materials in anything plastic so tiny.
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Feb 12, 2017 05:29
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Guess what tractors need to run. Also guess what the trucks that move the food around need to run. Also ammonia is only for nitrogen fertilizers, phosphorus and potassium has to be mined from the ground and then transported all across the world. That means oil. Like you keep pointing back to 'well humans were alive before oil', and yeah, not poo poo, but poo poo has changed since then. Populations have increased, supply chains have become more complicated, global shipping is a real thing now. You cannot turn the clock back.
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Feb 12, 2017 05:33
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like I said, if a wizard comes and casts a spooky magic spell that makes oil cease to exist all at once then yeah, we are screwed. I hope you literally never need a medical procedure, lol
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Feb 12, 2017 05:36
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stone cold posted:I hope you literally never need a medical procedure, lol What medical procedure has even 1% of it's cost be the material costs of plastics? Again, we are not facing a crisis where a wizard is going to teleport all our oil to the void one day. quote:Like you keep pointing back to 'well humans were alive before oil', and yeah, not poo poo, but poo poo has changed since then. Populations have increased, supply chains have become more complicated, global shipping is a real thing now. You cannot turn the clock back. Just seems weird how people are crying "wah, you have too much faith in technology, it's not going to save you!" while also having this weird belief that humans need specifically oil to even exist or have civilizations. Like I guess the only faith in technology allowed is some weird faith that oil is a savior which sure sounds suspiciously like a bit of "fact" some rich companies are invested in people believing on a large scale!
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Feb 12, 2017 05:51
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We can't feed 7 billion people without oil. That's not even up for debate. Modern agriculture is completely reliant on having oil. Not just to grow the food but to move it to the population centres which are, these days, almost always nowhere near where the food is grown. A reduction in the availability of oil is also a reduction in the availability of food. It doesn't have to disappear, there just has to be less than we need. A civilisation can exist without oil but not this one.
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Feb 12, 2017 07:35
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rudatron posted:Also talking about the morality of western consumption (and requiring it to 'exculpate') is 100% bullshit. Deploying moralism to solve climate change will absolutely fail, because high resource consumption is not a loving moral failing, it's the fairly standard desire to have a better quality of life. Moralizing about the 'evil west' is just a self-serving and self-righteous way to dodge the fact that people want better lives, yet the technology to give that to them is costly in terms of a specific set of resources. The developing world will eventually increase their consumption per capita to match the US, the issue is how that same quality of life can be delivered as cheaply and sustainably as possible. Bit of a straw man with the 'evil west moralism' bullshit. Full-blown consumer capitalism is a recent phenomenon and not an inherent fact of life. There's a difference between improving quality of life and stomping heads on Black Friday. It would be interesting to know how much of our emissions are due to basic needs and how much due to wanting to drive our second SUV to the airport to fly to Bali to buy mass-produced trinkets to fill our central-heated houses with 5 too many rooms. I'm not saying people shouldn't be allowed to do that, but I'm also not going to say that it's the inalienable right and fundamental desire of every human. I do, however, agree that it's not going to change any time soon for the majority of people under that spell and it's not 'the' solution to climate change. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be critiqued and alternatives explored.
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Feb 12, 2017 09:43
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Funky See Funky Do posted:We can't feed 7 billion people without oil. That's not even up for debate. Modern agriculture is completely reliant on having oil. Not just to grow the food but to move it to the population centres which are, these days, almost always nowhere near where the food is grown. A reduction in the availability of oil is also a reduction in the availability of food. It doesn't have to disappear, there just has to be less than we need. Carbon emissions from agricultural transportation makes up a tiny fraction of global carbon emissions, somewhere on the order of 0.001% of total emissions. It's not nearly the factor you imagine. Even were oil essential for agricultural transport, (it isn't, the system is relatively well-prepared for electrification), it doesn't use a significant amount of oil and can be continued more or less indefinitely even if Peak Oil were real.
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Feb 12, 2017 09:53
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Rime posted:We'll run out of fish before we run out of oil, OP, but yes things are going to get pretty bad due to the whole EROEI equation and developing nations finally hitting a Malthusian wall. quote:There won't be another Norman Borlaug and thank gently caress for that, really.  nevermind, he's an intellectual vegetable who belongs in the gulag
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Feb 12, 2017 09:57
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Funky See Funky Do posted:We can't feed 7 billion people without oil. That's not even up for debate. Modern agriculture is completely reliant on having oil. Not just to grow the food but to move it to the population centres which are, these days, almost always nowhere near where the food is grown. A reduction in the availability of oil is also a reduction in the availability of food. It doesn't have to disappear, there just has to be less than we need. The earth supported about 2 billion people before we had cars or used oil widely for anything particular. Again, unless the problem is that a wizard magically magics away all the oil in the middle of some night there is no situation where we can not power our tractors. Burning oil is the power source we use for things right now, it's not some inherent god given one true energy of life or something. People existed before it. There are other sorts of energy. People fuss about building nuclear power plants and solar power plants and say not in their back yard and we have the luxury right now to say "no, your right, not in your back yard", but when the choice becomes the fall of man or building a nuclear power plant in a town that doesn't want it we are probably going to go with building the thing.
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Feb 12, 2017 15:36
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:"You have too much faith in technology and treat it like magic! Also I have identified a particular technology as so vital to human life that I believe the human race would cease to exist if it does not remain exactly as it is in 2017 forever till the end of time and no conceivable technology could ever replace it" no I'm just not making a positive statement on the matter until evidence predisposes one way or another the evidence of "well we usually do it" is not actually evidence
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Feb 12, 2017 17:19
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Spangly A posted:no I'm just not making a positive statement on the matter until evidence predisposes one way or another Evidence of what? Evidence that the human race can survive without oil? Like I said we had fax machines and sky scrapers and 2 billion people before cars and oil were even a thing. And we have invented quite a lot of stuff since then. Quite a lot of other power sources AND oil doesn't disappear by wizards, we will still have oil no matter what if you want to pull some dumb gotcha about some specific use that absolutely requires oil and couldn't be anything else. Beyond that, on scales of 100+ years it's absolutely sane to assume the trajectory of science is going to bring a whole host of unknown technologies that we can't even name at this point. Between 1617 and 1717, between 1717 and 1817, between 1817 and 1917 and between 1917 and 2017 things were discovered that we literally did not even have words to describe. You can say there is no way to know that will happen again, and you are right, maybe science ended in 2014 or something, but at this point that seems like a risky bet. Like you are not being the calm and reasonable one assuming the end of science and the end of the human race and I'm being the wacky fantastic by saying "life will probably go on if one specific resource becomes more expensive slowly over several generations" Owlofcreamcheese fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 17:40
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:
Again I'm the guy saying science is nowhere near finished but if you can name a technology that replaces oil without massive population changes go ahead. You've literally got no idea what you're talking about or arguing for here. You can continue to justify your magical thinking to yourself but you've got nothing interesting to say.
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Feb 12, 2017 17:46
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The issue isn't necessarily running out of oil, it's an increase in cost, and the resulting knock on effects. Remember what I said about food price increases and how income inequality is going to make that a bigger problem than it needs to be? It's the same with oil. Okay, human society functioned without oil with 2 billion people - we have, what, 7 billion now? Then you've got the fact that cities, social structure, everything has changed since then. If global civilization was structured such that resources were distributed optimally, political malfunction wasn't an issue, conflict and resentment could easily be defused, then it would still be a big problem, but not one that necessarily ends industrial civilization as we know it. But none of that is true, we live in an exploitative capitalist system subdivided into competing states with varying levels of stability and popular accountability - what the gently caress do you think is going to happen when resources start 'running out'? It all gets talked out rationally? loving Nope. Politics and political-economy is going to make everything more complicated, and likely much worse. rudatron fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 17:58
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rudatron posted:The issue isn't necessarily running out of oil, it's an increase in cost, and the resulting knock on effects. Remember what I said about food price increases and how income inequality is going to make that a bigger problem than it needs to be? It's the same with oil. Okay, human society functioned without oil with 2 billion people - we have, what, 7 billion now? Then you've got the fact that cities, social structure, everything has changed since then. I don't think I'm disagreeing with OOCC on tech as much as I'm agreeing with your assessment here, when we start using shale we will not have the ability to feed 7 billion people the way we are now. We're already dealing with food instability in unexpected places, like chocolate and palm oils, this is not going to get better before it gets worse. We don't have the technology and we don't have the financial impetus required to totally overhaul energy companies globally. We'll find some technological replacement, but the sooner we find it the less likely we are to see deaths. We're not on a timescale to do that. We won't be on a timescale to do that, or predict what disruption we'll see, until we can start assessing the viability of our new technologies. Tech doesn't simply appear out of thin air. It builds on related technologies. There have been a few freak moments, perhaps notably penicillin (willing to be corrected), but the mentioned examples of things like combustion tech in cars have clear predecessors. What are we building on, fusion or shale? shale fucks the food chain through pricing. Fusion requires more coordination than we're giving it. I imagine there's a lot of techs bubbling around to be developed but it's not like we're seeing an answer appear. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Why would I be able to name the exact combination of technologies? When in history has anyone ever been able to say the exact details of technological progress from 100 years after their death? Yes. This is faith. Spangly A fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 18:03
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Spangly A posted:Again I'm the guy saying science is nowhere near finished but if you can name a technology that replaces oil without massive population changes go ahead. You've literally got no idea what you're talking about or arguing for here. You can continue to justify your magical thinking to yourself but you've got nothing interesting to say. Why would I be able to name the exact combination of technologies? When in history has anyone ever been able to say the exact details of technological progress from 100 years after their death? Either I name technologies that exist now, then you say they don't work exactly perfectly now then throw the unsolved issues they have and demand I solve those problems right this second in a forum post. Or else I talk about beyond speculative far future sci-fi technologies that could exist in 100 years then you dismiss them as sci-fi. So the answer is "no technology can replace oil instantly in 2017 but nuclear power and things like solar could already do it given a generation of time to transition to them, then in some far flung future technology in it's infancy like fusion power will take over, but if you are really talking about hundreds of years the real answer is that modern physics is primitive and the energy sources of 2200 or whatever will be based on words and concepts we haven't even thought of yet, the same way it's been every century"
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Feb 12, 2017 18:05
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rudatron posted:If global civilization was structured such that resources were distributed optimally, political malfunction wasn't an issue, conflict and resentment could easily be defused, then it would still be a big problem, but not one that necessarily ends industrial civilization as we know it. But none of that is true, we live in an exploitative capitalist system subdivided into competing states with varying levels of stability and popular accountability - what the gently caress do you think is going to happen when resources start 'running out'? It all gets talked out rationally? loving Nope. Politics and political-economy is going to make everything more complicated, and likely much worse. That is true but that would be true no matter what. If a magic alien portal opened up that spewed forth infinity oil forever do you think we wouldn't just war nonstop about who owns the portal?
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Feb 12, 2017 18:10
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There's also real limits on the technological advancement that has occurred, and no easy way past then, and especially no easy way past them in scientific funding keeps getting cut, to make up for budget shortfalls, in this age of austerity. Let me give you an example. The majority of your food depends on plants, growing plants. If you were to get every single scientist into the same room, ask them to build a 'replacement' for a plant, could they design something as equally complex? No, they couldn't. Not in a 100 years could they even try, we're nowhere near that level of technical capability. Living things right now are far, far more complicated than your stupid smartphone or whatever, all human beings are doing is tinkering a bit with them to make them more useful. Part of this is increasing the 'harvest index' (the proportion of biomass that is a useful product) of plants, but you can't take that too far - you actually need like, roots and leaves and poo poo for the plant to grow. Part of that is using fertilizers, to meet all nutritional needs of the plant. Part of that is killing every other living thing in the field, with herbicides and pesticides, so said nutrients only go to the plants you want. But at the end of the day, the 'medium' you are working with is a loving plant, and in needs arable land, and water. You cannot innovate around that, you cannot push past that limit, because it's a fundamental limitation of the tool you're working with. As such, bringing up analogies with microprocessors or flight or whatever is missing the scale of the problem here. That's not to suggest that the problems are intractable, or that technology can't solve the problem - in a real sense, it has to, there's no other option. But you've got to be realistic about it, you can't be flippant about the problem, and you can't just dismiss it.
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Feb 12, 2017 18:12
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That is true but that would be true no matter what. If a magic alien portal opened up that spewed forth infinity oil forever do you think we wouldn't just war nonstop about who owns the portal?
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Feb 12, 2017 18:15
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