'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time 604
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
Collapse by Jared Diamond (Score:5, Informative)
Please don't use "peak" with regard to non-oil. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Comparing apples and oranges (Score:3, Informative)
In that the societies mentioned were consuming much faster than the resource could renew itself, I think it to be a valid comparison. Nothing mentioned in the article involved replanting of trees, to my knowledge, but maybe someone knows differently.
Re:Abiogenic Petroleum (Score:4, Informative)
Or, someone could read about the idea and see it is considered bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin [wikipedia.org]
Re:Comparing apples and oranges (Score:4, Informative)
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
Re:Please don't use "peak" with regard to non-oil. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Abiogenic Petroleum (Score:3, Informative)
Not sure where you got your quote from, but it wasn't from the link you gave, and the entire site doesn't hold a single reference to Yukos. Not completely surprising, because it is the webpage for International Continental Scientific Drilling Program - nothing to do with Yukos. Not to mention that drilling a super-deep well has nothing to do with whether the drill probe found an economically viable field.
Re:Abiogenic Petroleum (Score:2, Informative)
Look up thermal depolymerisation - changing organic waste into long-chain hydrocarbons can be done using fairly straightforward refinery processes (cycles of controlled changes in pressure & temperature). It's a fairly artificially-accelerated process (since we don't have millions of years to wait for the oil to come out), but it does show how patterns of changes in pressure & temperature can create long-chain hydrocarbons from basic organic waste.
Re:Abiogenic Petroleum (Score:3, Informative)
How many of those particles should we find, as a percentage, of any given biological mass? 1%? .0001%? Does that account for the quantities of He found accompanying natural petroleum deposits?
Probably not. There's no need for the oil source to be the same as the Helium source. The most likely source of all the helium in a petroleum deposit is the radioactive material in the rocks in and below the deposit's formation. For example, the amount of Americium found in your smoke detector creates 30,000 alpha particles per second, a kilogram of Uranium ore produces 25,000,000 per second [nucleonica.net] (scroll down a bit to see the activity rates table in the linked reference). Since alpha particles are equivalent to ionized Helium nuclei, ore and mineral deposits that generate alpha particles are basically Helium sources. The Helium migrates upwards until it's trapped by the same formation that prevents the upwards migration of underground hydrocarbons.
Re:I Hate to Be the One to Point This Out (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Well here's the thing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Arguably, the timber examples are even less (Score:3, Informative)
Oil, unless you subscribe to one of the abiotic origins/provided by Jesus to empower the American Way of Life(tm) theories, is in more or less fixed supply.
Some of the theories are pretty crazy. For example, the Brazilians are under this bizarre mass delusion [wikipedia.org] that they're using around 25% renewable oil in their cars.
Re:Well here's the thing (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I Hate to Be the One to Point This Out (Score:3, Informative)
It has a faint ring of no true Scotsman [wikipedia.org] to it.
Except it's not, so... nice try.
If someone says "some triangles have four sides" and then point to a square, and I say "that's not a triangle, you fucking idiot", that's not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Similarly, communism is *defined* by the works of Marx. He invented it, ffs! So if someone goes and claims the USSR was an example of communism, and I say "no, that's not communism", that's a valid argument because we *have* a complete definition of what communism is, and the USSR never fit that definition, despite what the red scare mongers would have you believe.