“The energy needed to get the sand out of the tar sands or the oil out of the shale oil has to come from somewhere, and that energy, in turn, is not available for other uses. ”
There’s a lot of energy hitting our planet from the sun. You can use some of that energy and concentrate tar sands or shale oil or something else into whatever nice dense energy storage thing you want. And then there’s plenty of energy left over for other uses.
The price of your energy reflects the energy you used to refine it. We know that at $100/barrel oil prices, there are numerous technologies we can use to produce $100/barrel oil. And once we are manufacturing oil instead of mining it, manufacturing economies of scale kick in to start dropping the price.
]]>What is the answer to insatiable land development, 15,000% higher than it was for thousands of years before the 19th century? Insatiable land development scrapes off the vital few feet of fertility/habitat of Earth’s crust, disrupts balance in species, and causes widespread extinctions, famines, disease, etc., etc.
Both vis à vis fractal, dome made up of Leonardo Sticks, or ephermalization?
]]>Regarding solar as a viable alternative to fossil fuels, there’s a lot of debate around the true EROEI of solar PV.
http://www.springer.com/br/book/9781441994363
Regarding oil prices check this.
http://www.artberman.com/kunstlercast-art-berman-clarifies-whatever-happened-to-peak-oil/
—
You may have heard deflation is a bad thing, something to be feared. This might have been true in a scarcity based economy, but the opposite is true in an abundance based economy. No where is this more true than in the information technology sector, where annual deflation runs well over 50%. This is a huge rate of deflation, yet it comes from a sector of the economy that generates the most robust economic growth each year. Deflation is the result of advancing technology that generates greater efficiencies resulting in ephermalization – doing more and more with less and less. Ephermalization is now impacting the energy markets in earnest. Soon, energy is about to become even cheaper than it already is, despite falling oil prices. Below are two articles you should read, back to back. The first is a projection from Citigroup, a traditionally conservative institution, that advancing battery technology is going to be even more disruptive than solar, supplanting the entire fossil fuel industry withing the next *decade*. The second is a brilliant explanation of Saudi Arabia’s smart and prescient move to drop oil prices. Time is running out for fossil fuels remaining competitive, so with each passing day remaining reserves are becoming less valuable. Soon they will be worthless. Better to make some money now while the world still needs your oil, than none later when the world has moved on to something better.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2015/02/as-night-closes-in.html
“I will try to write more posts explaining exactly what the issues are in developing a new society. Basically, we have to start over either completely, or with bits and pieces of our current system that can somehow survive. This is far different from back in the days of the Roman Empire and other early collapses, where farmers could simply move their location from one place to another. We are instead faced with some number of survivors from the current civilization, each with skills that are not very useful in the new civilization. Instead of knowing how to use a computer on the Internet, people will need to figure out how to get along without grid electricity and our current paved roads. Your ideas of modular reusable tool sets seem “pie in the sky” to me. We haven’t figured out today how to get rid of friction; I doubt we will without grid electricity. Rocks are reusable tools that can be easily replaced. Perhaps we need to think about them.” – GT
]]>Here’s another guy trying to do the quantitative analysis: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
My problem with Tverberg’s analysis is not that she does not factor in innovations that do not quite exist yet, but that she assumes the current economic system will survive the coming crises. Greer does not, but doesn’t hold much hope for something better, either. I do. But I could be deluded.
]]>Having finally taken the time to visit Gail’s site proved to be quite revealing – she’s an actuary! Her site and all her podcasts, guest appearances, websites are all on places like “doomsdiner”, “peak prosperity”, “our finite world”, not the best bastions of non biased reporting.
I raised my eyebrows on the actuary part, because actuaries are notorious for complete missing any kind of discontinuity – they simply do not take into account any kind of novel development. Almost everything we take for granted in our modern society today was at one point a discontinuity. The invention of the telephone, airplanes, radio, TV, antibiotics, computers, lasers, the Internet, are discontinuities in so called “trend lines”. Now it makes sense why her projections completely ignore the revolutionary advancements that are occurring in solar and battery technologies, 3d printing, and regenerative technics. Actuaries are the same people who erroneously predict the lifespan of children at the time of birth!
Although I suspect we may be in for a catastrophic economic crisis anytime, I simply can’t take the rest of her analysis seriously, given the gapping omissions in her work.
]]>