INFORMATION / IDEAS / PEAK OIL

2012-01-05T05:18:00.000-08:00

PEAK OIL / 2011 / 11-12 /

3.11 Peak Oil and Climate Change - An Introduction

Peak Oil and Climate Change - An Introduction

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Peak-Oil-and-Climate-Chang-by-Kevin-Gosztola-110106-995.html

(Please watch the video, where Noam Chomsky, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg and others clarify the nasty situation we are in .. Selvaraj)

3.12 The Dollar vs. a Freight Train

Michael Ruppert tacitly believes that five billion people will be wiped off the face of the earth sometime in the next few decades.

His proof? One chart.

http://www.wyattresearch.com/article/the-dollar-vs.-a-freight-train/22780

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It is really amusing that much of the doomsday prediction is emanating from the investment community.

The media? They could not care less, they have been misleading the public for the last 50 years.

The gentlemen who award one another Nobel Prizes? They can continue to awarding these prizes irrespective of what is happening around them (So nice to have such a clear conscience).

The economists (leaders by default of human society)? 'In the long run we are all dead', so spoke John Maynard Keynes.

It is just our bad luck that the investment community did not wake up 50 years ago - their radar unfortunately, does not work in this range! The book 'Limits to Growth' was published in 1972; computer modeling was done by MIT scientists. M. King Hubbert modeled peak oil in 1956. In the mean time a dishonest media debunked Malthusian ideas (and a complacent public decided to believe in fairy tales), conveniently ignoring the immense damage being done to the natural world by increasing human population.

Ordinary folks should keep in mind that we are indeed 'Home Alone'.

Selvaraj

2012-01-05T05:11:00.000-08:00

PEAK OIL / 2011 / 6-10 /

3.6 The Failure of Networked Systems

The Failure of Networked Systems:

Several years ago, sweet light crude oil started getting a bit more difficult to obtain. In response, we stopped talking about “oil” and started talking about “liquids”. The word “liquids” covers Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), ethanol, heavy oils, tar sands, and an increasing number of other oil-substitutes.

Essentially the part of the network called “Sweet Light Crude” turned red, so we started connecting the "Oil Network" to other networks.

We connected oil to the “food” network by turning food into ethanol. Actually food was already connected because you need oil to make food in the modern world, but now the circle is complete-–previously we used oil to create food, and now we use food (corn, sugar, palm oil, etc) to create oil (or oil-substitutes)...

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Failure-of-Networked-Systems-The-Repercussions-of-Systematic-Risk.html

3.7 Students Protest Exxon Chair's Commencement Speech

Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA invited Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, to give the commencement speech at its 2011 graduation ceremonies on May 14. When students heard this, many were surprised and upset. As Linnea Palmer Paton of Students for a Just and Stable Future put it in a letter to the college president, “[W]e, as conscientious members of the WPI community and proud members of the Class of 2011, will not give [the Exxon CEO] the honor of imparting ... his well-wishes ... for our futures ... when he is largely responsible for undermining them.”

The students then invited Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, to give an alternative commencement speech. After a few days of negotiations, the college administration agreed to give Heinberg the podium immediately after the main ceremony. Many students chose to walk out during Tillerson’s address. This is what Richard Heinberg had to say...

(Each of these core problems will take time, intelligence, and courage to solve. This is a challenge suitable for heroes and heroines, one that’s big enough to keep even the greatest generation in history fully occupied. If every crisis is an opportunity, then this is the biggest opportunity humanity has ever seen.)

http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/peak-oil-a-chance-to-change-the-world

3.8 The Ethanol Lie

The Ethanol Lie - destroying forests to plant corn ...

Watch the video below to see first-hand how ethanol production is having an enormous negative impact on the environment and community of southern Ecuador.

http://www.greenerideal.com/alternative-energy/other-energy/8714-the-dark-side-of-biofuels-how-ethanol-production-may-kill-200000-people-per-year

3.9 Does Peak Oil mean an end to economic growth?

Whatever the future looks like, it's pretty clear it won't look anything like the past. Heinberg makes a pretty good case for why that is.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/01/peak-oil-economic-growth.php

3.10 frustrations of an unknowing people

As unemployment in the U.S. grew and grew, every politician with a prayer of winning positioned him or herself as the "jobs" candidate who could and would get us all working at good high-paying jobs again. This of course has not returned and is unlikely to do so. We are not only contending with a growing debt bubble of gigantic proportions, we are also rapidly running out of the cheap, abundant energy that allowed us to be so prosperous for the last 200 years.

... All this is by way of saying that there is a serious downside to simply ignoring the realities of the current situation and relying on hope rather than leveling with the American people. By failure to guide the country to real solutions to real problems, our leaders are risking increasing violence as the frustrations of an unknowing people continue to grow.

http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/8238-the-peak-oil-crisis-civil-unrest.html

2012-01-05T04:44:00.000-08:00

PEAK OIL / 2011 / 1-5 /

3.1 Peak coal

Again conventional thinking suggests that we have roughly enough coal reserves for at least 200 years. The crux of the 'peak' commodity theory is, however, less about the reserves and more about how easy it will be to get to the product. So the peak would signal the point of maximum global production. Thereafter, the theory suggests that the rate or production would enter terminal decline.

According to analysis in the journal Energy last year, the global peak of coal production from existing coalfields is predicted to occur close to 2011. After this year the production rates are seen as dropping to 1990 levels by 2037 and reaching 50% of peak production by 2047.

Future mines are also not likely to reverse the trend.

http://www.businesslive.co.za/experts/2011/10/19/peak-coal-puts-sa-growth-at-risk

3.2 Peak Oil

DearTim

You’reavoiding the central truth of the peak oil argument:

THEREIS ONLY A FINITE QUANTITY OF OIL.

Theearth (the ultimate swimming pool) cannot be increased in size and we have noway of increasing the amount of oil in the earth. We will almost certainlycontinue to find new reserves for some time and we

willprobably continue to find better ways of extracting higher percentages fromreserves. So we may, for a time, find ways to maintain and even increaseproduction rates. However as there is only a finite

amountof oil, this cannot continue forever.

Thereis absolutely no question that peak oil will happen. The real question is whenit will happen. You begin to address this question; “As long as …” is not thesame as forever.

Sorry,Tim. PEAK OIL IS NOT NONSENSE IT’S INEVITABLE

PSHow about addressing EROEI, and the fact that increasing costs limit furtherextraction – both of these will bring forward the investable point of maximumextraction rate – ie peak oil.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/10/19/peak-oil-entirely-nonsense-as-is-peak-gas/

But peak oil as it turns outisn't about supply but rather demand. It is a concept rooted more in economicsthan geology. It doesn't matter if there are billions of barrels of oil waitingto be tapped from oil sands or oil shales if the prices to extract them arebeyond our economies' capacity to pay.

The peak in our oil consumptionwill be determined by our ability to pay ever rising prices for the fuel, notby the ability of those same prices to drive new sources of supply.

The energy industry's task isnot simply to find new fuel sources but to find new supplies of oil oureconomies can afford to burn. While the energy industry has an impressiverecord on the first count, it has a much less impressive track record on thesecond.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jeffrey-rubin/peak-oil-price_b_1020945.html

Most economists view the economic growth of the last centuryand a half as being fueled by ongoing technological progress. Without question,that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been animportant component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource thatwas extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It isnot clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

"Pretty similar" to 2005-09 means a big spike inoil prices that causes a big recession. The chart on the right shows what hemeans. The green line shows expected economic growth. The dashed line shows theGreat Recession. And the red line? That's his estimate of the effect of thehuge spike in oil prices in 2007-08. If Hamilton is right, then the oil spikeis responsible for about two-thirds of the Great Recession all by itself. Thehousing and credit bubbles are only responsible for a fairly small piece of it.

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/10/peak-oil-and-great-recession

3.3 English Translation Of German Military Analysis Of Peak Oil

From the comments section:

Unfortunatley based on current levels of poltical expediency I see mankind destroying whats left of this planet in the deaththrows of peak oil. Wood and bio mass will be scavenged until we have scraped the surface of the planet clean. We are worse than locusts. The German report seems to avoid one obvious issue. Population. The world population is simply unsustainable without oil. Billions will starve to death. There will be conflict. If all Governments act now, throw growth and capitalism in the bin, take stringent steps to control their polulations and move back towards sustainable organic farming we might have a chance. Peak phosphates is coming next.... Finally I disupute the US is in a highly secure food security area. More like hanging by a thread. I detect more political involvement in the report.

http://www.countercurrents.org/munroe310811.htm

3.4 Why Coal Prices Will Soar in the Coming Years

World energy policy is gripped by a fallacy — the idea that coal is destined to stay cheap for decades to come. This assumption supports investment in ‘clean-coal’ technology and trumps serious efforts to increase energy conservation and develop alternative energy sources. It is an important enough assumption about our energy future that it demands closer examination.

There are two reasons to believe that coal prices are likely to soar in the years ahead.

First, a spate of recent studies suggests that available, useful coal may be less abundant than has been assumed — indeed that the peak of world coal production may be only years away. One pessimistic study published in 2010 concluded that global energy derived from coal could peak as early as 2011.

Second, global demand is growing rapidly, largely driven by China. Demand rose modestly in the 1990s (0.45% per year), but since 2000 it has been surging at 3.8% per year. China is both the world’s biggest producer of coal (40% of global production) and its biggest consumer. Its influence on future coal prices should not be underestimated.

Economic shocks from rising coal prices will be felt by every sector of society. Better data on global coal supplies is long overdue and energy policies that assume a bottomless coal pit need rethinking urgently.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/Why-Coal-Prices-Will-Soar-in-the-Coming-Years.html

3.5 China's Imminent Collision With Peak Coal

Reader's comment:

"That economics failed to ever become a hard science has doomed humanity".

Read more: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8064?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theoildrum+%28The+Oil+Drum%29#ixzz1RI81kEjr

2012-01-05T04:18:00.000-08:00

PEAK OIL / 2011

Dear Friends,

The purpose of this blog is to make available to a larger audience my posts, mainly in the IIT Global Current Affairs Group and a few other groups.

Most of these posts refer you to the store house of knowledge - The Word Wide Web. A few of the posts are also my 'bright?' ideas.

This blog is for posts in the category 'Peak Oil'.

3. PEAK OIL

3.1 Peak coal (30/10/11)

3.2 Peak oil (25/10/11)

3.3 English translation of German military analysis of peakoil (1/9/11)

3.4 Why coal prices will soar in the coming years (23/7/11)

3.5 China’s imminent collision with peak coal (6/7/11)

3.6 The failure of networked systems (19/5/11)

3.7 Students Protest Exxon Chair’s commencement speech(18/5/11)

3.8 The ethanol lie (30/3/11)

3.9 Does peak oil mean an end to economic growth? (7/2/11)

3.10 Frustrations of an unknowing people (13/1/11)

3.11 Peak oil and climate change – an introduction (6/1/11)

3.12 The dollar vs. a freight train (5/1/11)

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