Although I share your enthusiasm for bicycling, there is much you write today that I don’t agree with. 1) Apparently you subscribe to the Peak Oil theory and the idea that humans are exhausting it and other natural resources. And you make no distinction of who may be using these resources, apparently lumping all humans together. Peak oil, to me, is a highly questionable theory at best, because of a few simple facts: the actual known reserves of oil are a carefully guarded secret, so who can actually know what they are? Additionally, and very importantly, the price of oil is given in US dollars. The increasing price of oil reflects the decline in value of the US dollar, not an increase in the price of oil that one would expect from a decline in supply in the face of continued demand. If one uses the real price of oil measured in dollars, there is very little, if any, change since the 1960’s (the era of 25 cent/gallon gasoline). If oil seems expensive because it takes a larger portion of the family budget it is because workers’ wages are not keeping up, and hence they have less disposable income, making all natural resources, including oil, more expensive. If one prices oil in gold the price is a straight line parallel to time on the X-axis. That relationship, more than anything else, indicates that Peak Oil is just another propaganda myth.
Yes, the actual amount of oil is a secret, almost certainly including Alaskan oil, capped off after a few test wells under Carter, and the Antarctic volume is not certain, but Russia thinks it is the second biggest find ever.
That being said, the science of depletion of a finite resource is made easier on the time scale when the increase in consumption is exponential, as was the case when M. King Hubbert predicted peak US oil production around 1971 in the 1950s, and nailed it.
Looking at money and economics often adds confusion, but depletion by itself is an engineering study.
The 25 cent per gallon gasoline of 1970 is similar to $3.00 per gallon these days, so it remains an easy hurdle for the US economy, though people have much higher general expense levels and debt, than was the case then.
Do try this interpretation of world events over time. It holds pretty well. I have been tracking it since 1974, 10th grade, when I found out about it. It seemed pretty obvious in those days of alternate-day fill-ups and gas lines.
Who uses the resources? Some more than others, to be sure. We don't know much about secret deep underground military bases, for instance, and the "missing" $11 trillion, or whatever it is up to these days.
But what I really wanted to say is that instead of following their theater we should stop partaking and we need to tell them they have overstepped their mandate and authority.
There's no such thing as 'Peak Oil"; oil is abiotic continually created at the earth's core. (1)
'Peak oil' is a term derived from Rockefeller's paid 'scientists' that oil was formed from fossils which is a limited resource to give more value to his monopolistic company Standard Oil.
Now deeper oil is more expensive but a tech knowledge grows will not be that more expensive.
Abiotic oil is an appealing hypothesis, but on a human scale, with accelerating extraction of what is readily available, there is still a "peak". For "conventional oil" this was in 2004-2005. For "oil plus liquids" it appears to have come at the end of 2018. One should look at net-oil, as the ERoI (energy return on energy invested) has fallen from 100:1 in "Spindletop" days, to something like 14:1 now, though it varies on the field. Venezuelan, and Canadian tar sands are about 3:1.
Timescales matter. Humans don't live as long as geological formations.
By the abiotic oil theory, oil is not "created at the earth's core", which is a big huge chunk of hot metal.
I am familiar with the theory, and like it more or less.
Wikipedia notes this:
Creation within the mantle
Russian researchers concluded that hydrocarbon mixes would be created within the mantle. Experiments under high temperatures and pressures produced many hydrocarbons—including n-alkanes through C10H22—from iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water.[17] Because such materials are in the mantle and in subducted crust, there is no requirement that all hydrocarbons be produced from primordial deposits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
So, this oil, created by heat and pressure in the mantle, must rise through geologic formations, and may tend to come up through deep fissures and collect in dome-like formations. Geologists look for these kinds of formations, then try to figure out if they contain oil, or gas, anything worth drilling for, correct?
My impression is that I do "get it", because it has long interested me, and I have looked into it for well over a decade, and discussed it with a Geologist friend.
This is still the same within spans of human life and history, I believe.
Do feel free to provide information that would lead me to change my views.
"So, this oil, created by heat and pressure in the mantle, must rise through geologic formations, and may tend to come up through deep fissures and collect in dome-like formations. Geologists look for these kinds of formations, then try to figure out if they contain oil, or gas, anything worth drilling for, correct?"
Yes that is correct ; but abiotic oil has infinite supply whereas 'fossil' are finite.
That is the difference.
Yet as the easy geological finds have been found so new supply they are deeper , under oceans or remote so the cost does increase-the question becomes can the technology increase enough to cover the increased cost.
That answer is above my pay grade-but, to me, that is the real Peak Oli Theory.
Yes, this is all the same within the context of human historical time frames.
Shale oil was known to M King Hubbert, and other geologists, but it was not economical to extract, so it was not calculated in to estimates of "conventional oil".
What is happening with the decline curve is that it is being fattened-up a bit with technology, but most of that is bringing-forward the production that would go on for decades from "stripper wells".
Some is "oil" which would not have been extracted, but it is not the crude of old, mostly not something that diesel can be made from, though probably gasoline.
A slow creation of oil, leaking towards the surface, over billions of years, still looks like a one time bonanza to a human who lives to be 80.
"A slow creation of oil, leaking towards the surface, over billions of years, still looks like a one time bonanza to a human who lives to be 80."
no, it still come down to costs-there is enough oil to tap but how do economically.
The Russians though drilled a 10,000 meter well in the 60's then fracked (put explosive and or chemicals to blast to open the formation) it with nuke so bring the rely deep oil to the surface.
It was a primitive method but other methods are being conducted now...
Oil represents a liquid form of potential chemical energy, when reacted with ubiquitous oxygen, so people call it either, right? It's a critical feedstock, too, like natural gas. We are mostly clueless as to how involved this all is.
Would there be a possibility that exporting so much of our manufacturing base to China is to put them on an energy dependence treadmill that accelerates and forces them to consume and exhaust energy resources? Such would put increasing peste
Pressure on China to run faster. This has led to vast expansion globally by China into other countries using unfavorable terms for bailing out other governments and forcing a default and takeover of these resources.
Chinese loans are currently very favorably managed and written-down for those countries who are unable to pay in full, very unlike western finance, and approximately as laid out in that explanation of "Communitarianism".
I don't personally have reason to trust this in the long term, when China might not have competition to consider as fully.
As John points out, the fundamental conflict in the world as long as governments have existed is always the haves vs. the have-nots. All other conflicts are subordinate to that basic truth. John is, unfortunately, not yet widely followed but his ideas are powerful and central to today’s world of sharpening class conflict.
"Man is a wolf to man"... The "haves" vs the "have nots" is how he lays it out, but I lay it out in my own mind, for over 40 years, as being an apex-predator model of ecosystem management.
Humans as hunter-gatherers were conventional apex-predators in their ecosystems, but they multiplied and learned agriculture, and became more like grazing herd, displacing all but their own domestic livestock, and then they overgrew their pastures and depleted them, and/or bad weather ruined crops.
How to cull the herd before it starved to death?
New apex-predators, human apex-predators upon the human-herds, a special breed without compassion, perhaps... Some sociopaths can stay at the top; others can't, and may end up in prison, or gangs, etc.
I started working this out in med-school, when we studied sociopathy, and of course, genetics. These genes persist because they are useful to the group, but they kill group-members, as well as "others", so how WOULD that be "useful" in the world?
Our mission (should we choose to accept it) is to contribute to the establishment of a system of ecosystem management which does not cause so much anguish and suffering.
I remain interested in all efforts in that direction.
I seek Divine Guidance, myself, but I can't push that on anybody. It has to be sought.
China is massively consuming its resources, and mostly needs to import things like coal, certainly oil. At this point they need to keep all of the industry running to support their very large and aging population. They had a one-child-policy for a good reason. It is now working. There are second order problems. ;-(
Although I share your enthusiasm for bicycling, there is much you write today that I don’t agree with. 1) Apparently you subscribe to the Peak Oil theory and the idea that humans are exhausting it and other natural resources. And you make no distinction of who may be using these resources, apparently lumping all humans together. Peak oil, to me, is a highly questionable theory at best, because of a few simple facts: the actual known reserves of oil are a carefully guarded secret, so who can actually know what they are? Additionally, and very importantly, the price of oil is given in US dollars. The increasing price of oil reflects the decline in value of the US dollar, not an increase in the price of oil that one would expect from a decline in supply in the face of continued demand. If one uses the real price of oil measured in dollars, there is very little, if any, change since the 1960’s (the era of 25 cent/gallon gasoline). If oil seems expensive because it takes a larger portion of the family budget it is because workers’ wages are not keeping up, and hence they have less disposable income, making all natural resources, including oil, more expensive. If one prices oil in gold the price is a straight line parallel to time on the X-axis. That relationship, more than anything else, indicates that Peak Oil is just another propaganda myth.
Yes, the actual amount of oil is a secret, almost certainly including Alaskan oil, capped off after a few test wells under Carter, and the Antarctic volume is not certain, but Russia thinks it is the second biggest find ever.
That being said, the science of depletion of a finite resource is made easier on the time scale when the increase in consumption is exponential, as was the case when M. King Hubbert predicted peak US oil production around 1971 in the 1950s, and nailed it.
Looking at money and economics often adds confusion, but depletion by itself is an engineering study.
The 25 cent per gallon gasoline of 1970 is similar to $3.00 per gallon these days, so it remains an easy hurdle for the US economy, though people have much higher general expense levels and debt, than was the case then.
Do try this interpretation of world events over time. It holds pretty well. I have been tracking it since 1974, 10th grade, when I found out about it. It seemed pretty obvious in those days of alternate-day fill-ups and gas lines.
Who uses the resources? Some more than others, to be sure. We don't know much about secret deep underground military bases, for instance, and the "missing" $11 trillion, or whatever it is up to these days.
You re right there is no such thing a 'Peak Oil"
Do you know of "Waiting for Godot"? by Samuel Becket?
It is a bit like "Waiting for the Apocalypse" by the Christians.
The big problem is... if we know it will happen we can undo it... we can unmake it before it is ever made.
All it takes is courage..
We should simply say: "We will not comply and we stand in your way"... and this will undo the curse.
https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/we-will-not-comply
If you knew the Titanic would sink... why bother taking the trip?
We know what they plan... and we can take ourselves out of the equation.
Let the Financial System collapse... it don't work anyway not for us.
They don't own me...
We can simply cull them and take all they own which is us and take it back.
Simple as this.
All it takes is courage.
Why wait for a bad thing to happen when one man can make all the difference in this world?
Courage is contagious.. and so is fear..
Grab the next life-support-system before you let go of the current life-support-system.
I've never culled a billionaire.
There was that superyacht that flipped. Nobody knows how that happened yet.
This is all pretty fancy.
Culling does not always mean to chop someone's head off.
Culling also means to take their power.
Simply by non compliance.
And telling other people to do the same.
A simple "We will not comply" shouted loud and clear will go a long way.
We must resist.
I think it is safer to just cancel their power, without taking the power, because power-corrupts, and these are dangerous times.
;-)
Semantics...
Nullify their power by not partaking...
I think we speak the same logic.
But what I really wanted to say is that instead of following their theater we should stop partaking and we need to tell them they have overstepped their mandate and authority.
I still need food, water, and other stuff like that.
I seek viable alternatives, and I look out for their tricks and traps.
I know you do.
But waiting for them to set the trap can be erased by exposing them setting the trap.
There's no such thing as 'Peak Oil"; oil is abiotic continually created at the earth's core. (1)
'Peak oil' is a term derived from Rockefeller's paid 'scientists' that oil was formed from fossils which is a limited resource to give more value to his monopolistic company Standard Oil.
Now deeper oil is more expensive but a tech knowledge grows will not be that more expensive.
1. https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/on-energy/2011/09/14/abiotic-oil-a-theory-worth-exploring
Abiotic oil is an appealing hypothesis, but on a human scale, with accelerating extraction of what is readily available, there is still a "peak". For "conventional oil" this was in 2004-2005. For "oil plus liquids" it appears to have come at the end of 2018. One should look at net-oil, as the ERoI (energy return on energy invested) has fallen from 100:1 in "Spindletop" days, to something like 14:1 now, though it varies on the field. Venezuelan, and Canadian tar sands are about 3:1.
Timescales matter. Humans don't live as long as geological formations.
You don't get it-oil creation nothing to do with geological formations: oil is created at the earth's core and then percolated to the surface.
I am in the business-if you want to be educated read the Russian proof of abiotic oil-or stay ignorant , your choice.
By the abiotic oil theory, oil is not "created at the earth's core", which is a big huge chunk of hot metal.
I am familiar with the theory, and like it more or less.
Wikipedia notes this:
Creation within the mantle
Russian researchers concluded that hydrocarbon mixes would be created within the mantle. Experiments under high temperatures and pressures produced many hydrocarbons—including n-alkanes through C10H22—from iron oxide, calcium carbonate, and water.[17] Because such materials are in the mantle and in subducted crust, there is no requirement that all hydrocarbons be produced from primordial deposits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
So, this oil, created by heat and pressure in the mantle, must rise through geologic formations, and may tend to come up through deep fissures and collect in dome-like formations. Geologists look for these kinds of formations, then try to figure out if they contain oil, or gas, anything worth drilling for, correct?
My impression is that I do "get it", because it has long interested me, and I have looked into it for well over a decade, and discussed it with a Geologist friend.
This is still the same within spans of human life and history, I believe.
Do feel free to provide information that would lead me to change my views.
"So, this oil, created by heat and pressure in the mantle, must rise through geologic formations, and may tend to come up through deep fissures and collect in dome-like formations. Geologists look for these kinds of formations, then try to figure out if they contain oil, or gas, anything worth drilling for, correct?"
Yes that is correct ; but abiotic oil has infinite supply whereas 'fossil' are finite.
That is the difference.
Yet as the easy geological finds have been found so new supply they are deeper , under oceans or remote so the cost does increase-the question becomes can the technology increase enough to cover the increased cost.
That answer is above my pay grade-but, to me, that is the real Peak Oli Theory.
Yes, this is all the same within the context of human historical time frames.
Shale oil was known to M King Hubbert, and other geologists, but it was not economical to extract, so it was not calculated in to estimates of "conventional oil".
What is happening with the decline curve is that it is being fattened-up a bit with technology, but most of that is bringing-forward the production that would go on for decades from "stripper wells".
Some is "oil" which would not have been extracted, but it is not the crude of old, mostly not something that diesel can be made from, though probably gasoline.
A slow creation of oil, leaking towards the surface, over billions of years, still looks like a one time bonanza to a human who lives to be 80.
"A slow creation of oil, leaking towards the surface, over billions of years, still looks like a one time bonanza to a human who lives to be 80."
no, it still come down to costs-there is enough oil to tap but how do economically.
The Russians though drilled a 10,000 meter well in the 60's then fracked (put explosive and or chemicals to blast to open the formation) it with nuke so bring the rely deep oil to the surface.
It was a primitive method but other methods are being conducted now...
I'm curious - is it oil, or is it energy?
Oil represents a liquid form of potential chemical energy, when reacted with ubiquitous oxygen, so people call it either, right? It's a critical feedstock, too, like natural gas. We are mostly clueless as to how involved this all is.
Would there be a possibility that exporting so much of our manufacturing base to China is to put them on an energy dependence treadmill that accelerates and forces them to consume and exhaust energy resources? Such would put increasing peste
Pressure on China to run faster. This has led to vast expansion globally by China into other countries using unfavorable terms for bailing out other governments and forcing a default and takeover of these resources.
There we go...
Chinese loans are currently very favorably managed and written-down for those countries who are unable to pay in full, very unlike western finance, and approximately as laid out in that explanation of "Communitarianism".
I don't personally have reason to trust this in the long term, when China might not have competition to consider as fully.
On “China vs. US”, “US vs. Russia”, etc. , it is useful to read John Spritzler’s writings such as this one: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnspritzler/p/public-discourseboth-in-the-mainstream?r=12w4ze&utm_medium=ios
As John points out, the fundamental conflict in the world as long as governments have existed is always the haves vs. the have-nots. All other conflicts are subordinate to that basic truth. John is, unfortunately, not yet widely followed but his ideas are powerful and central to today’s world of sharpening class conflict.
"Man is a wolf to man"... The "haves" vs the "have nots" is how he lays it out, but I lay it out in my own mind, for over 40 years, as being an apex-predator model of ecosystem management.
Humans as hunter-gatherers were conventional apex-predators in their ecosystems, but they multiplied and learned agriculture, and became more like grazing herd, displacing all but their own domestic livestock, and then they overgrew their pastures and depleted them, and/or bad weather ruined crops.
How to cull the herd before it starved to death?
New apex-predators, human apex-predators upon the human-herds, a special breed without compassion, perhaps... Some sociopaths can stay at the top; others can't, and may end up in prison, or gangs, etc.
I started working this out in med-school, when we studied sociopathy, and of course, genetics. These genes persist because they are useful to the group, but they kill group-members, as well as "others", so how WOULD that be "useful" in the world?
Our mission (should we choose to accept it) is to contribute to the establishment of a system of ecosystem management which does not cause so much anguish and suffering.
I remain interested in all efforts in that direction.
I seek Divine Guidance, myself, but I can't push that on anybody. It has to be sought.
It looks like you hit send too soon.
China is massively consuming its resources, and mostly needs to import things like coal, certainly oil. At this point they need to keep all of the industry running to support their very large and aging population. They had a one-child-policy for a good reason. It is now working. There are second order problems. ;-(