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As far as I can say, we're getting pretty close to "Peak Everything". It's important to add that this is not because we run out of resources (like no more uranium etc. on the whole planet), but because we have already exploited the most concentrated sources of them. What's left is less concentrated, ie. we're wasting more and more of the available energy to gather, concentrate, and process the lovely stuff we have left - and that energy is no longer available for the rest of the economy, leading to more productivity problems etc. The biggest whopper is that the same happens to our energy sources: the eroei of our global energy supply has been dropping for the last decade, because our finite supply of high-quality oil is running low - and we have to spend even more energy to get LESS energ out of the lovely kinds of oil. So yeah, you can imagine the rest. Our current use of resoures cannot and will not be maintained - thanks to basic physical laws. For graphs, more info, have a look at the 40-year update to "The Limits of Growth" or works from John Michael Greer. One of his books is Called "Green Wizardry" and describes ways to make do with less... and we will all have to do with less in the future. Edit: Just Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested), but here are a few interesting pieces of info on varying oil eroei: US produced Oil & Gas: EROEI Source 30.0 Oil and gas 1970 14.5 Oil and gas 2005 8.0 Oil discoveries Non-Us sources, imported into the US: EROEI Source 35.0 Oil imports 1990 18.0 Oil imports 2005 12.0 Oil imports 2007 So the energy return of the oil we use get more and more lovely with every year - and this absolutely fucks with the rest of our economies, even if nobody talks about it. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Feb 10, 2017 |
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Feb 10, 2017 15:55
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CyclicalAberration posted:If post industrial revolution history is any indication, human technology and ingenuity has more than compensated for natural resource depletion. Fears that population growth will outstrip food supply or that we will run out of oil seem completely unsupported by empirical evidence 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... which becomes even less believable when the posts before you pointed out that our amazing technological solutions of the last centuiry were only possible because they were powered by the same 'free'/high eroei oil that is running out and is replaced by more and more diluted variations. And seeing how badly projects like ITER are over budget/mismanaged, the chances of fusion power coming online in any meaningful/afforbale way before our economies are buttfucked by water/soil/resource/oil shortages, climate change and its sociopolitical effects are really slim. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 17:31
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Not really sue why some people here are dismissing my arguments with "technology will change everything and save us" and just leave it with that. Many cultures on earth have accessed resources at an unsustainable rate, rose, and then collapsed when they lost easy access to them. Even NASA is pretty sure we're running into the same trap(https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/14/nasa-civilisation-irreversible-collapse-study-scientists) I would even give you that we could be able to think of new substitues for most of the stuff we're running out of - but all of that depends on a ready supply of cheap, concentrated energy. And it's exactly here where we're running into massive problems. The cheap oil sources that powered our rise through the 20th century are running out and alternative energy sources are not doing so well on the eroei front - if they will ever get online. Just saying "I'm sure they will think of something" is not really a contribution to the discussion, but a way to make sure one does not need to engange with the possibility that technology will not help us out of this predicament. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 22:24
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:By what metric are they "running out"? Like I am sure you will claim that the government and oil companies all conspire to hide the truth and you know in your heart the apocalypse is coming any minute now to punish the wicked but all the data anyone seems to actually have shows a world where fossil fuels are gonna be just fine for a very long time. What I mean is not that we're quantitavely running out of oil - far from it, governments and companies are doing everything they can to get more oil sources online.  This is just the US example, but it's similar on a global scale: it's not that we have no oil left: Conventional oil (the stuff that just flows freely out of the ground, is mostly free of impurities and does not need much refining) production is declining, but unconventional sources are coming online to close this gap. But let's have a closer look on them: The 'oil' that is produced from tar sands, fracking, etc is super hard to extract, full of impurities, and not highly concentrated. We have to spend MUCH more energy and resources, money and time on it to refine it for use. Let's have a look at the energy we get from it compared to the energy we have to spend on extracting, refining, and distributing it: (short via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_invested) Conventional oil's best-case EROEI can be 30-50:1. So for spending 1 unit of energy, you get basically 29-49 units of energy to use on your economy. Whee! Unconventional sources: Fracking, etc. hovers at around 8:1 while Bitumen tar sands are at a glorious 3.0 EROEI ratio. That means you suddenly have to spend a shitload of work end energy just on generating energy that almost came for free before. The net return is suddenly super low - and our contemporary Western lifestyles are absolutely dependant on that not happening. The thing is that a low EROEI is adding invisible costs to every action that a fossil-powered society performs...which is one of the reasons why Western economies are super slow to recover. So if we're NOT stumbling over the final and definite technological energy solution in the next 10 years, our economies will be further weighted down by this energy issue - while climate change accelerates. It's an uncomfortable scenario because it shows few ways to uphold the status quo - but it's not the sudden apocalypse you're trying to strawman me into. Things are just getting additionally lovely: Oil will once again get pretty pricey while governments will have even less money to spend on infrastructure, healthcare, etc. and the economy regularly amputates non-vital parts of itself in the crunch between high energy/resource costs and increased automation. I'd love to see a solution for these problems that allows us to live as we'e used to, but everything I have read about fusion research (have a look at ITER: http://www.businessinsider.com/r-iter-nuclear-fusion-project-faces-new-delay-cost-overrun-les-echos-2016-5?IR=T) gives me little hope. We in Germany tried renewables, but are finding out the hard way, that renewables (via EROEI) cannot pick up the slack of fossil fuels. SavageGentleman fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Feb 11, 2017 |
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Feb 11, 2017 23:39
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:You seem well informed enough in the rest of your post that it seems like you are trying to trick people rather than not knowing that this isn't true. World oil production hasn't followed that graph in any way that is similar.  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. You were right that beyond some point, all future scenarios become science fiction. However, various scenarios activate us in different was. I guess it's easy to subscribe to the two 'common ones', i.e.a utopian one and a dystian one. Both don't really activate us as individuals - in the utopian version, all our problems will be solved by 'someone' and we don't have to do commit to any actions ourselves. In the dystopian version (we're all gonna die!), the same happens - we don't really have to act because we're all hosed anyways. But I think the scenario I've described in the posts above is different because it forces us to really do something: to consider its variables, its possible results for our lives - and to consider the changes we could implement now and in the future in order to thrive in it.
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Feb 12, 2017 01:01
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