Punx0r said:
I don't understand how you can envision a future where the lights go out, people freeze in their homes and starve because there's no fuel for tractors. That would require a deliberate (and somehow irreversible) complete abandonment of fossil fuels with no viable alternative in place. Why would the various world leaders simultaneously chose to do that?
It's not deliberate. It's not up to us. Or the politicians. Or anyone. Whether fossil fuel becomes remote.
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Resources are finite. Depletion happens.
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We have been completely blinded by a cornucopian mindset of endlessly increasing access to fossil energy for the last 150 years. And it has been true up until very soon. All of our modern economic theories have been developed during the up swing of this one time carbon pulse. Embedded energy is made into everything around us. All of our stuff and infrastructure. This is why China uses most of the world's energy. Their people don't use much directly. They are making it into all of the stuff we consume. And buy with money. Money is a proxy for energy. And debt is a proxy for future energy. The debt bubble will burst at the first sign of diminshed growth of access to energy. And all of the best economists will wonder why when the answer is quite simple.
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Our resources are finite. And sooner than you think. People have very serious time bias. We are not evolved psychologically to worry much about the future beyond the maturity of our children. At the longest scale. And only very vaguely then. Most decisions look at years or the next election cycle.
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Liquid fuel is indispensible for agriculture, mining, and building big projects like hydro and wind turbines. Crude oil will be the first to spike. Cooking tar sands to get oil has an ER/EI of 8:1. Our economy was designed back in the days of100:1. When we really get desperate enough to rely in large part on fracking and tar sands, pricing will skyrocket to $200/ barrel.
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35 years. Or sooner. Tom Murphy made this graphic 10 years ago. We are now much closer to the top as far as crude oil goes and have long ago accessed all of the easy stuff.
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Natural gas will be right behind it in another 40 years with all of the increased consumption for electric generation we are adding. Then what?
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We better make damn sure we have everything built that we want before then because after that we will have no surplus energy to invest for the future. We will be scraping by, using everything we can frack to keep all of the economic plates spinning. If we want to stick any kind of graceful landing we need to stop everything superfluous and focus like a war time effort. The war on energy depletion.
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The numbers of what is needed are gigantic. Many different authors have written about it. Interestingly physics PHD's turned forward thinkers seem to be most commonly objective enough to realize the scale of our extreme predicament. Whenever I write about scale you guys fluff it off like we have it so under control. Solar and wind have been working dilligently for 7 years now with huge rebates and feed in tarrifs and have yet to scratch out 2% of total energy. You all say " if solar isn't enough to replace fossil fuel, we'll just build more." "we'll build more than more." We are running out of time and energy to build things and raw materials will come into play. renewables in this chart from 2015 includes 2% from biomass.
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There is no comparison to the density of liquid fuel. 1 tanker truck driving down the road next to you is carrying 9,000 gallons of diesel. 340 MWh of energy. Once this is out of reach, civilization will be much smaller, simpler. But we can focus what we have left to do the best we can to have electricity in the day and hopefully maintain chip manufacturing (and bicycles) for an internet of knowledge.