Peak Oil is Coming. That Won't Save the World (cnn.com) 156
The shift to clean energy is sending the oil industry into decline. But the world needs a much more ambitious plan to save the climate and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. From a report: That's according to the International Energy Agency, which said in its global energy outlook published Wednesday that more aggressive climate action is needed as world leaders prepare for the crucial COP26 summit in Glasgow in November. "The world's hugely encouraging clean energy momentum is running up against the stubborn incumbency of fossil fuels in our energy systems," Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. "Governments need to resolve this at COP26 by giving a clear and unmistakeable signal that they are committed to rapidly scaling up the clean and resilient technologies of the future."
More than 50 countries and the European Union have pledged to meet net zero emissions targets. If they live up to those commitments, demand for fossil fuels will peak by 2025, but global CO2 emissions would only fall 40% by 2050, far short of net zero. In that scenario, the world would still be consuming 75 million barrels of oil per day by 2050 -- only 25 million barrels per day less than today. The energy sector has been bolstered in recent weeks by a sharp increase in prices.
More than 50 countries and the European Union have pledged to meet net zero emissions targets. If they live up to those commitments, demand for fossil fuels will peak by 2025, but global CO2 emissions would only fall 40% by 2050, far short of net zero. In that scenario, the world would still be consuming 75 million barrels of oil per day by 2050 -- only 25 million barrels per day less than today. The energy sector has been bolstered in recent weeks by a sharp increase in prices.
Peak Oil (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Peak Oil (Score:2)
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However, last time we approached that, fracking was developed and became economical due to rising prices, making previously unproven reserves proven, and providing enough supply to lower the price back down.
If renewables cause consumption to go down, it is unclear whether that will reduce oil consumption enou
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Fracking was developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There have been about 5 major (and I forget how many minor) boom-bust cycles in the oil industry since then.
The first wells (two, adjacent ones, extending in more-or-less opposite directions along the crest of a structure) that I worked on which I'm fairly sure were fracked we drilled in 1993. (We batch drilled the wells, section by section, beca
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>Wanker-speak for, "We need to reduce the world's population even more."
Say there's 10 people using the kitchen floor as their bathroom. Wouldn't it be better, rather than focusing on evictions, to first work on getting them to go in toilet.
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I'm focusing on pollution, not carbon in itself, but the way humans are polluting their environment, air, land and water making it less hospitable to themselves.
>The burning of fossil fuels is a good thing ... We are restring the carbon, returning the earth to its pre-determined level of carbon.
Pre-determined level of carbon? What do you mean by that.
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The last 10000 years have been pretty stable with regards to the environment. That is actually quite an anomaly. The environment on Earth actually swings from one extreme to the other relatively abruptly, if ice samples and ground samples are to be believed.
While this won't kill off mankind, it won't be good for the survival rate. This 10000 year period didn't had to end so soon, but with the current population/pollution level, that is what will happen. No-one to blame but ourselves.
A drop in survival rate
Re:Peak Oil (Score:4, Informative)
Antartica is at 90 degree south.
With enough warming most of the ice will melt.
But that will not make arctic winters go away.
In other words: there never will be a forrest unless the continent drifts to a position where it was at the time when it had forrests.
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Actually there has been times when the poles were forested.
No there was not.
North pole has no land, and south pole was close to the equator when it was full with forests. (* Facepalm *)
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100;s of million years back, whether there was land at the poles has no relationship to today and when the CO2 levels were 10 times today, you had temperatures of about 30C at the poles. Consider the Ordovician where Gondwana was mostly at the south pole and full of life. It was a pretty hot period as well.
Something like 80% of the Earths climate history has been hothouse conditions where there was basically no ice at the poles.
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With no carbon sequestration, Earth would be much more similar to Venus, where all the CO2 released through volcano-ism is still in the atmosphere.
The carbon balance is an important part of why the Earth has been inhabitable over billions of years, in the sense of liquid water available, even early on when the Sun was 70% as bright as today.
Of course the important thing to us is that we have evolved for current conditions and even going back to when there was an order of magnitude more CO2 in the atmosphere
the 70s called, want to Know if it has peaked yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh we have been hearing about peak oil for 50 years and it hasn't happened. We found new oil fields, better extraction technology, new sources, more efficient engines, and now it looks like we will be moving toward a majority electric car production in the next decade. Some places (California) are in the process of banning small gas engines for yard equipment lowering oil consumption further.
As for the on coming catastrophic global warming. food growing zones will move farther north or south depending on the side of the equator, oceans will rise a few inches so coastal cities will have to do some major construction but it nothing that hasn't been done before. Look at New Orleans it averages between 5 and 10 foot below sea level, almost a third of the Netherlands is reclaimed land below sea level, all available thanks to a series of dikes and water works. the world will go on.
I am not saying we should have let it get this far, thats a travesty, but its not the end of the world.
Re:the 70s called, want to Know if it has peaked y (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 70s, some were predicting peak oil due to supplies running out. Now we're looking at peak oil due to demand running out. As I've heard it said, the stone age didn't end due to running out of stones, and the oil age won't end due to lack of oil. Some say that peak oil may have already happened in 2019, which is likely true in many countries, but probably not globally.
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I don't think oil is going to be running low on demand its just to damn useful, the use will shift though. Instead of going out millions of tailpipes you will see oil use shift to plastics, chemical, pharmaceutical, cosmetics, fertilizer and pesticide production. Cheap long-chain hydrocarbons for which we don't have to provide the binding energy, are just to chemically useful to be left in the ground.
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a stored form of the geothermal energy of the earths crust which creates the pressure and temperature leading to the creation of fossil fuels
I think plant material formed with photosynthesis would like a little credit for being available for this geologic reforming.
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I can't tell if you're trolling or honestly economically illerate. Hanlon's razor says I should assume the latter, so: supply and demand are two sides of the same coin. If supply drops, you can raise the price to reduce demand [wikipedia.org] in order to keep the two in equilibrium. So supply falling and demand falling are both the same thing.
Re:the 70s called, want to Know if it has peaked y (Score:5, Informative)
Oil demand is very inelastic. If you raise the price, people still have to heat their homes and drive to work. Trucks still have to move goods. If you lower the price, people might raise their thermostats slightly or drive a touch more, but not much. So if you shift a sizeable portion of the transportation to EVs, you will reduce oil demand regardless of the price. So at some point, we will see both prices drop and demand drop.
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It's worse than that, though; Rather than being elastic, it's sort of like a ratchet.
If fuel becomes more expensive, it takes time and investment to transition to alternatives if there even are any. As you say, people will still need to heat their homes and drive to work, trucks will still be needed to carry cargo, etc. Response to fuel price increases is very slow.
But it's not the same story in the other direction: If fuel gets cheaper, the everything that relies on that fuel gets cheaper too - and it's a
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Oil demand is very inelastic. If you raise the price, people still have to heat their homes and drive to work.
That's not entirely true. Oil has substitutes in many cases. For example, I can switch from heating my home with oil to natural gas or electricity. Or I can add insulation. Similarly, I can my gasoline usage buy buying a more efficient vehicle.
That being said, another way to summarize TFA is we need to find good alternatives to fossil fuels so oil demand becomes elastic.
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In pretty much all sectors, fossil fuels are dropping as a percentage of the total energy consumed. Transportation is switching to electricity, heat has been transitioning from oil to gas and now to electricity (albeit very slowly), and electricity generation has been shifting very quickly to renewables (increasingly with battery storage). The question for the timing of peak oil is when those transitions will happen faster than increase in overall energy demand.
If you break down the fossil fuels separatel
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Except in a few portions of the USA without good gas pipeline infrastructure, heat has transitioned from coal or oil to gas a long time ago. In any case, gas is still a fossil fuel.
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Are you talking a specific country or globally?
It wouldn't surprise me if the US has hit peak coal and maybe peak oil. Ditto Europe. China seems to be taking action to stop increasing it's use of coal but I don't know if they've peaked yet. I have no idea what's happening in India. Africa still has huge swaths moving away from charcoal and dung so I wouldn't be surprised if they're still ramping up every fossil fuel source they can.
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So supply falling and demand falling are both the same thing.
So what you're saying is that there's no global chip shortage stopping motorvehicle production, people just don't want to buy cars?
Supply and demand are linked, that doesn't mean that one isn't the cause of a change, in the 70s the cause was presumed to be the supply side, now the cause is presumed to be the demand.
Before talking about economic literacy, try some basic literacy first and when you call someone illiterate try not to post something so mind-numbingly stupid as you just did.
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In the 70s, some were predicting peak oil due to supplies running out. Now we're looking at peak oil due to demand running out.
Yeah, it's a misleading use of the term "peak oil". I mean, technically, yes we'll may be at a peak in oil production but for very different reasons than what people have talked about as recently as 10 years ago.
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True, but peak oil was never about production. It was about consumption outstripping the growth in proven reserves.
You think? My understanding was "peak oil" meant we'd passed the maximum amount of oil we were ever going to pump in a given year. We'd passed our peak production year. Production was going to inexorably decline from here on out.
As you say, the reason was not because demand was falling but because we were not finding enough new viable (technically and financially) reserves to replace ones we'd pumped dry. But it was still about production peaking.
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Some say that peak oil may have already happened in 2019, which is likely true in many countries, but probably not globally.
Some people are incredibly stupid when looking at statistics. 2019 was a record high oil consumption. As was 2018, 2017, etc. 2020 was not. That doesn't mean peak oil happened in 2019, it means that people need to remember that all statistics need a big frigging asterisks next to 2019 and 2020 due to something happening in the world.
The world has been on a linear upward trend. One of the best sources of statistics on energy consumption and global prediction of economics are the bp reports which have been pu
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Even in the 70s, peak oil was not about "running out of oil". Peak oil was always going to be the peak of oil production and consumption (as there is limited storage capacity, these are practically the same), i.e. a point where the rate of oil production and consumption would not continue to increase. This was expected long before oil would "run out", for simple economic reasons: It was believed that oil would become too expensive to use for many purposes due to scarcity. Now we still expect "peak oil" for
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Actually, some were predicting peak oil due to the growth in demand increasing and the growth in proven reserves slowing. They were anticipating large increases in prices when growth in proven reserves dropped below growth in demand, which is the actual definition of peak oil. Turns out that in the long run those higher prices slowed growth in demand and greatly increased growth in proven reserves, putting off peak oil by decades. Pe
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how much of this is politics induced. if there weren't a pissing contest between the EU and Russia, or the US and Iran what would fuel availability be like.
oil is a finite resource (Score:3)
Peak oil is indisputable as a fact. It will/is/has happened. What is in disagreement, is wheth
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Prices will have to go up considerably for those to be considered proven reserves.
Meh? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you have no concerns about the increased levels of flood/heat/drought events, that will result in crop failures and thus less food?
No concern that areas around the equator will become less and less habitable with each passing year, resulting in unprecedented migration?
No concern that vast areas of Asia will lose the water sources they have relied on for millennia? - resulting in a migration unlike anything we have ever seen? A total catastrophe?
No concerns about more tipping points, some we don't even kn
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in a matter of years, as if by moving them, they are conveniently moved out of the way of extreme weather events.
You make it sound like extreme weather events are an anomaly caused by global warming. They aren't.
Evidence that CO2 warms the atmosphere is clear and well accepted. If you want to be scientific, you shouldn't deny it. Evidence that global warming causes extreme weather events is shaky and not strong. If you want to be scientific, you shouldn't keep saying that it's well accepted.
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Evidence that global warming causes extreme weather events is shaky and not strong
You are mistaken, it is exactly the opposite.
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I would love to be shown how I'm mistaken.
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Just scroll up on /. for one of the most recent articles.
And did I actually answer to you? I thought I did not.
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Oh really, do the research.
We KNOW that the natural world, without human intervention, results in profound impact on life forms.
For example, that 250 million years ago, 90% of life on the planet was wiped out.
That an asteroid impact of significant magnitude could do the same, if not completely end life on the planet.
That a super volcano could result in something similar.
That the earth goes through cycles of glaciation and back out again.
Global warming ABSOLUTELY causes extreme weather, especially when it ha
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That the timescale in which it is happening, is so rapid, it threatens our civilisation.
Global warming doesn't threaten our civilization. That's fear-mongering, not science. CO2 warms the earth. That's science.
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So you have no concerns about the increased levels of flood/heat/drought events, that will result in crop failures and thus less food?
on the contrary I absolutely do but think they are inevitable at this point, (no use crying over spilled milk) and they will provide the needed incentive to make the hard necessary choices that will enable us to overcome them going forward. and in the long view will be short term problem.
Crop failure will make us move to dense efficient vertical hydroponic farming that we should have done a long time ago. Once shortages hit that will force our hand to move to better techniques that have a higher upfront cos
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That reminds me of the man who fell off a tall building, and every time he passed another floor, he thought to himself, "so far so good!"
The skeptics have to be right consistently until the end of time, but the doomsayers only have to be right once.
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Statements of the fact - do not shoot the messenger.
In 2003 IPPR published a paper which detailed how UK generation will end up with a gap which green cannot fill. Exact publication date 01/01/2003: https://www.ippr.org/publicati... [ippr.org] - abstract, full PDF right left on the page.
This by the way was an official working document used in the Blair governments. I had to read that when working on energy related telecoms probl
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You are obviously an idiot.
What has replacing coal with wind to do with heating your house with gas?
And FYI: France did not build any new nuke since decades.
And the oldest just went offline today.
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Meh we have been hearing about peak oil for 50 years and it hasn't happened. We found new oil fields, better extraction technology, new sources, more efficient engines, and now it looks like we will be moving toward a majority electric car production in the next decade. Some places (California) are in the process of banning small gas engines for yard equipment lowering oil consumption further.
Electric cars and more efficient engines aren't a counterargument to peak oil, they ARE peak oil.
Peak Oil isn't the pumps running dry, it's the increasing costs of extraction and processing causing the price to rise to the point that consumption decreases.
As for the on coming catastrophic global warming. food growing zones will move farther north or south depending on the side of the equator,
And take all the good soil and farmland with them??
What about the mass extinctions? How well will crops grow without a healthy ecosystem around them?
And all the extra extreme weather events?
Maybe we can adapt and maintain the food supply... but it's hardly
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Peak oil does not mean what you think it means.
It simply means: peak of production, and we are basically right there at the momenr.
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Dude. That sounds too reasonable. "Peak oil" clearly must mean peak of production *because of* blah de blah. It's much easier to argue with that way, and also easier to claim you weren't really wrong when it happens.
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Peak oil always was about "peak of production".
No idea what you want to say.
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It's the *because of* part. That's why I put *'s around it. Did you read any of the other comments? A whole bunch of apologists claiming that it's only peak oil if it's because it ran out and we're stabbing each other with forks for the last drops of sweet sweet crude.
Also, my post was well marinated in sarcasm, in case you missed it.
Global cooling (Score:2)
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When I compare the price of oil after the 70's with the price before the 70's [macrotrends.net], I'm not sure I'd consider their panic unjustified.
Nuclear power is the only answer (Score:2)
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2) Store the waste underground, in places like Yucca mountain (will require a federal mandate, but if we can make a place like Oak Ridge appear overnight, we can do that)
These are solvable issues
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> 1) There is plenty of uranium for the forseeable future
According to the World Nuclear Association, at current consumption using current reactor tech, we have enough Uranium to last about 90 years [world-nuclear.org] (With the assumption that the cost of extracting the uranium is no more than three times the current cost, so we have more than 90 years worth as long as we're willing to pay through the nose for it)
> 2) Store the waste underground, in places like Yucca mountain
We would need a lot more storage volume.
Also,
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we use modern designs that reprocess used fuel form older reactors and result in less overall waste with the waste remaining being less dangerous.
as for that waste we have safe places to put it already we just let NIMBY get in the way. This isn't the 50s any more we know a lot more about containment
First we don't need to contain it for million of years we just need to make sure the amount that gets out is at or below the amount that would be there naturally from the ore in the ground already, secondly the s
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Reprocessing causes more waste, not less. /. ers: or do you use magic to separate the "true waste" from the reuse able part of the spent fuel?
A no brainer, every one knows that, just not
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We need a crash program to build more nuclear energy. Dozens in North America, dozens in Europe, and at least 100 in Asia
So something that has no hope in hell of even being built before 2040 is the answer to a problem that we need to address in 2030?
When your wife asks you to hurry up and get in the car so you can get to the airport or you'll miss your flight, is your genius solution to walk to the airport instead?
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Crash and nuclear don't belong in the same sentence. Neither does rush, but hey anything for a religion.
There's no good technical reason building a nuclear power plant takes decades. If we'd been investing in improving production for the last 40 years, I'm quite sure we'd be able to bang them out in a few years by now, but that's water under the bridge.
The time challenges now are legal and procedural, not technical.
Where's fusion? (Score:2)
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"It's still 30 years away."
Even ITER is billions over budget and years behind and that's just a research project.
Slow newsday space filler thread (Score:2, Troll)
Peak oil has been clickbait meme before clicks existed or memes were so named.
Fuck off with these garbage threads. We understand you hate your job and invest as little effort as possible but you can do better for the same minimal work.
Horse poo (Score:2)
Horse poo, caca, and more caca.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone.
Just not more number 2 apocalypso tunes.
No (Score:2)
Peak Oil was originally pushed as a retread of 1970s shortage scares. It was used in the same context: demanding government rationing.
Which was debunked as an issue decades ago [juliansimon.com] because economic forces will call into existence more discoveries and substitutions, from raw materials to new engine types. E.g. electrical instead of gas, solar and other renewables instead of mining.
And the key point: this happens faster than it becomes a serious shortage problem in the long run, though there will still be sho
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And TFA is misdescribing Peak Oil. It was when the maximum oil was being extracted, because it wss being harder and harder to find. Here, nothing remote is taking place, as there is plenty of room for increased production for decades, perhaps centuries as there is for coal and natural gas.
This is just max production because the market for it is declining.
In short, Simon's predictions win again.
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harder to find because of political barriers. When people can't get their plastic iPhones or fill their tanks, those political barriers will disappear quickly.
Hey wait, we're already there.
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But plastics, medicines and fertilizer represent a small amount of demand for crude today. But as motor vehicle fuel demand decreases due to EVs and mass transit, these will be more important factors in the future market for crude. Pretty soon, they will have this waste product called gasoline from the refining process that they will have to pay me to burn in my classic cars. Or your iPhone and medicine production will grind to a halt.
Good times.
Peak Oil (Score:2)
Give me a break, Iâ(TM)ve been hearing about peak oil longer than flying cars and fusion energy.
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The peak oil you've been hearing about is on the supply side, this peak under discussion is a peak in oil demand. You have a low UID, I assume you've spent 30 years not reading TFA?
And coal and gas? (Score:3)
Little reminder here, burning other stuffs also generates CO2.
Coal seems to be plateauing: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
Gas production seems to be still on the rise: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]
I'm glad I'm already 48. If the younger generation doesn't understand that the production numbers have to fall sharply, and soon, tough.
Re:And coal and gas? (Score:5, Interesting)
Little reminder here, burning other stuffs also generates CO2.
Big reminder here: Nothing generates quite as much CO2 per unit of energy output as burning oil. Literally doing anything else is better.
I'm glad I'm young. The old generation can't seem to handle an equation with more than one variable.
Is Peak Oil still a thing??? (Score:2)
I've been hearing about the pending peak oil since the 80's and it seemed to die around 2000ish. I had no idea it was still a looming crisis!
Has the definition of "Peak Oil" changed? (Score:2)
FUD is coming. Repent. (Score:2)
Chicken Little unavailable for comment.
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Methane abuser. Canceled.
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Doesn't matter. Petrochemicals aren't going aywhere.
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But how they are used is changing. Currently about 60%-65% of all the oil pulled out of the ground goes towards transportation. With the rest used for industrial feed stock, energy and agriculture. A decline in use of the 2/3s of the oil currently extracted for transportation were itself to decline even 10-15% that represents a net decline in fossil fuel use, and I don't think, over the next quarter century, that's an improbable drop. Now unless one imagines that that 10-15% drop is replaced by, say, increa
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>If by the latter half of the century a large percentage of transportation is now fueled by EVs or hydrogen
Unless you finally discovered how to get working electrolyte for lithium-air batteries, and small scale nuclear reactors go into every sizable ship, that's not going to happen. Aircraft require the energy density per weight, and ships still need to get energy somewhere. And the same people screeching about peak oil yet again are the very people who in real life arrange for politics of building up co
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No one is talking about a complete cessation of fossil fuels. I'm talking about a decline. Even if air travel continues to use fossil fuels for a couple of centuries, aviation fuel amounts to around 6% of total usage.
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It is more like 2%
Unless the remaining 4% of your number is the military.
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According to the US government, 66% of all oil is used for transportation. Of that 66%, 6% is used in aviation. The overall statistic is about 2%. Now this is, I think US statistics, so obviously global use may very, but it's probably a typical enough statistic. The overall point is that even if you maintain that the aviation industry remains completely fossil fuel powered (probably in the short and medium term a reasonable prediction), that is only a very small percentage of the overall uses for oil, which
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My point was that _world wide_ flight is only about 2% of CO" emissions.
And if you are right with your number for the USA, then we should pick other targets: aka get the low hanging fruits first!
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Environmentalists just can't stop crying that the sky is falling.
"They can't get enough of that doomsday song" - David Bowie, The Next Day
And it never seems to happen. This is what the sixth time we hear "peak oil!"?
I've heard "Peak Oil" every decade since the 80's. And it's always followed by more huge reserves found. This isn't even taking fracking into account. Just normal oil exploration (usually in some ocean patch).
"Peak Oil" is a modern form of sympathetic magic; the doomsayers seem to think if they say the words Peak Oil enough, then the oil will magically dry up.
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Re:the sky is falling...again (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd RTFA you'd note that it's not "peak oil" in the sense that we're running out, but peak in the sense that demand for fossil fuels are approaching their peak and will go into decline.
This decline in demand clearly will happen, and it is supposed to happen. As technology advances and we use a broader number of energy sources it's inevitable we'll use less of any one energy source when we have more to choose from. Does it mean oil use will go to zero? No way, we're not at that level of technology yet.
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Neither of which are the original meaning of "Peak Oil", which was coined to describe the point where economically proven reserves no longer grow as fast as consumption.
Demand for oil was inelastic, so "Peak Oil" should trigger large price increases (see the oil embargoes of the 70s for evidence of that inelasticity)
Re: the sky is falling...again (Score:3)
Re:the sky is falling...again (Score:5, Informative)
And it never seems to happen.
If you're referring to climate change, it is happening; it's gradual, but just because we don't all wake up dead one morning, doesn't mean it's not there. The problem is that the system has huge inertia - it starts changing slowly, but once it gets started there is no way to stop it quickly. That means we need to take measures before the sky actually falls, not wait until things have become too bad to ignore anymore.
Strictly anecdotally, weather changes are visible to the naked eye. I'm fortunate enough not to live in an area at risk of flooding and/or hurricanes, so the impact on me is (still) minor, but I still had to do some changes. For example, I had to install air conditioning, which I didn't really need before; I started planning my vacations for September - October instead of the usual June-August (that was, of course, before COVID made vacations so difficult), because summers are becoming too hot in many places. I know this sounds like a "first world problem" (which it actually is), but I'm sure there are lots of other folks which are affected in much worse ways.
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it starts changing slowly, but once it gets started there is no way to stop it quickly. Sort of
there is no way to stop it quickly easily cheaply or politically feasible that wont simply incentivize current bad actors to continue their behavior.
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as climate has been changing in the current direction for last thirty millenia
Simply: nope.
The last ice age ended 12 - 10 thousand years ago. Depending how you count. And since then climate was more or less constant. Until about 50 years ago the massive heating up, we are experiencing right now started.
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Do you accept the reality of thermodynamics? Yes or no will do.
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What happened to Algore's temperature hockey stick? Never happened.
If by "never happened" you mean confirmed by multiple studies [wikipedia.org], then you are correct.
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it's not hard to find predictions that came true, there are so many of them.
Here's one that is still on track:
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its First Assessment Report, predicting global warming of about 1.1 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2030. The report’s “best estimate” was that the world would warm by about 1.1 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2030, meaning that the halfway prediction would be about 0.55 degrees Celsius by 2010. In fact, the world has now warmed by about 0.39 degrees Celsius, coming very close to the prediction despite several unforeseen historical events, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Mt Pinatubo volcanic eruption and the rise of China.
I think it's hard to dismiss all predictions and models, especially without looking at them. To claim that every so-called "Doomsday" claim is hysteria without digging deeper than the headline is more about self-serving politics than any real interest in expanding human knowledge.
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Of course it's easy to find parts of the predictions if you're willing to cherrypick.
"Planet will warm up, which will cause mass desertification, leading starvation and death of billions".
"But planet warmed up, therefore it was true!"
And see, people back then weren't worried about "planet warming up" part. They were worried about "claimed consequences of warming" part. You are spinning it as the opposite, as if "warming" is the bad part, and "what we think warming will lead to" is irrelevant.
And today, now
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Of course it's easy to find parts of the predictions if you're willing to cherrypick.
No. this is not a monolithic process. You don't get to dump everything you don't like into one bucket and judge them collectively.
The real world is more complicated and you have to evaluate each model, prediction, and research program on their own merits. Those that stand up to scientific scrutiny are added to our collective knowledge, and those that do not are added to the wastebasket.
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>The real world is more complicated and you have to evaluate each model, prediction, and research program on their own merits. Those that stand up to scientific scrutiny are added to our collective knowledge, and those that do not are added to the wastebasket.
We agree. However that goes against what you did above, where you cherry picked a small part of conclusions "it will lead to warming" of most models, and discarded the actually relevant parts, "what will warming cause".
And that's why catasrophism an
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I provided a counter example to the claim "Not a single enviro-wackjob gloom-and-doom prediction has come true. "
I hope you can follow along before posting more comments.
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Are you on drugs?
All deserts are growing.
And the planet is most certainly not greener than 50 years ago.