Topic: Peak oil, fact, fiction or government scape goat? - page 2. (Read 5653 times)

Oil prices will only matter until they surpass the next cheapest energy source. That's not to say damage won't be done. So let's think at the margin here. What are the incentives built into our current energy paradigm?

The average American household spends nearly $17,000 (34% of total average expenditures) per year on their over sized, piece of shit house in the middle of nowhere (the suburbs. I live in the 'burbs, too, so don't get offended.) $3,500 of that is spent on utilities to heat and cool that empty space created by vaulted ceilings, power the flat screen TV, etc.

A function of our city design (the suburbs) makes it impossible to live your middle class American life without at least one car. I've tried going without, and unless your in a select few neighborhoods in a select few cities, you'll spend half your day trying to get to where you need to go. It sucks. So the average American household spends $8,700 (17.6% of total average expenditures) per year on transportation.

Source: http://www.visualeconomics.com/how-the-average-us-consumer-spends-their-paycheck/

What does that tell you about the economy of the US? It tells you that a large portion of the economy exists to build and maintain the suburbs (over 50% of our household expenditures go toward this!!!) So, when the price of gas goes up to $10/gallon and electricity costs $1/kilowatt, I'm sure everyone will happily give up food, healthcare, entertainment, etc. to continue supporting their extravagant suburban lifestyle, eh? No! Instead, we'll abandon the suburbs, sell our cars, and hopefully start building traditional cities. That is, beautiful, dense, urban environments surrounded by wilderness or farmland with no suburbs in between. Instead of keeping the heat on all winter and the A/C on all summer, maybe we will start building homes suited to the environment in which they're built, with plenty of insulation and strategically placed windows. Instead of going to the bahamas for vacation maybe we'll just go to see more plays or more movies. Maybe we'll spend more time socializing with friends. Instead of lighting our homes with incandescents, maybe we'll switch to LED's. Maybe not, maybe that's worth the extra price. More of our money will go toward food, and less will go toward shitty plastic imports. More of our money will stay local, I imagine, as shipping prices will go up. Thankfully we have modern technology that can easily be adapted to serve local markets rather than global ones.

Our consumption patterns will shift toward energy efficiency, and a localized service based economy. We'll pay more for food, but I bet it'll taste better. We'll stop driving cars, but when we build beautiful, car free urban environments, walking will be a pleasure. We'll give up a huge house for a smaller one, with less stuff and instead spend our money on more "experiences" like going out to eat with friends or watching a show or taking in a concert; entertainment that doesn't rely on oil! I don't know..... I'm sure the transition will be a bit painful, but the end result doesn't sound too bad to me!

Further reading:

The Problem of Scarcity 3: Resource Scarcity
Let's Kick Around Those "Sustainability" Types
Life Without Cars
What a Real Train System Looks Like


Oh no! No cars! What will we do!

So, I have been hesitant to post this for a while, but I have been thinking about it a lot.  I also have great respect for the bitcoin community when it comes to sound economic and philosophical analysis.

A few weeks ago, I was told by a buddy to watch the documentary Collapse http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1503769/  It is essentially chronicling one man's attempt (Michael Ruppert) to expose what he finds as the biggest reason why governments all over the world are making huge power grabs.  He argues that it is not actually a quest for power so much as it is literally a quest for survival (the two are obviously very related).  In essence he's talking about the whole "Peak Oil" thing (that from here on out, we have exhausted over half of the world's oil supplies).  Here are a couple of the claims:

• We have exhausted over half of the world's oil supplies
• We use oil for so much more than just heat and locomotion these days.  It is an input to so many economic goods you can't even count them all anymore.
• It is extremely unlikely that we will find a true replacement (economic substitute) for oil anytime in the near future.
• World population growth started increasing exponentially with the discovery and industrialized use of oil.  They claim this to be beyond mere correlation, and that abundance of oil actually opened the floodgates for population growth.
  
• When oil eventually is either exhausted or priced beyond reach, the world as we know it can only actually support 1/3 of its current population, in their current lifestyles.
• Governments have known this for quite some time and have been scrambling to maintain ownership/control of oil around the world (eg, we are not in the middle east to spread "democracy" as they like to say).  Many would argue that they have been preparing for a time when large portions of their populations will starve (ration) to death (FEMA camps, etc).
• The US will NEVER leave the middle east, for the above reasons.

All-in-all I would recommend the film to anyone interested, and it's made me contemplate picking up a book like http://www.amazon.com/Ecotechnic-Future-Envisioning-Post-Peak-ebook/dp/B002TLTSB0 or http://www.amazon.com/Transition-Handbook-Dependency-Resilience-ebook/dp/B001ANYD6I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1294646498&sr=1-1

So that's a lot of pretty crazy claims.  However, it's also pretty hard to argue with the data presented as well.  I, like many of you on these forums, am adamantly for unhampered markets.  I'm sure that oil prices will rise so high that we will truly attempt to innovate our way out of this (once governments get out of the way and stop keeping the price artificially low).  And I'd like to think that we CAN innovate our way out of this.  However the more I look into it, the more it seems highly unlikely that we can maintain our current world population AND ween/replace our dependence on oil.

My question is this:

• Is the whole peak oil thing and it's doomsday predictions just a bunch of mis-information?
• If the consequences of peak oil are what some of these "experts" are predicting, what contingency plans do all of you have in place?
• Assuming oil was exhausted, do you think the market can innovate to support the current world population? If so, how?  I personally have yet to see a technology or resource that could even remotely compete with all of oil's uses.

Essentially, I'm just trying to see whether any bitcoiners think there is validity to all of these peak-oil claims.  And if there is, what you propose we do about it.