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ASPO-USA Conference Takeaways
MontyHigh, World of Wall Street
… I attended the Peak Oil conference downtown last week. Here’s the key results:
- Peak oil is proceeding right on schedule with growing oil supply/demand tightness leading up to the Peak around 2015.
- Expect the USA to have to get along with between 20% and 50% less oil by 2020.
- Expect the price of oil to continue to limit economic activity, especially in the OECD (including USA) resulting in
- much slower or no economic growth in the OECD.
Expect ordinary investment vehicles (stocks and bonds) to produce negligible to negative real returns with great volatility.
The entire financial system requires exponential growth (to pay the interest on debt). As Peak Oil blocks the possibility of continued exponential growth at prior rates expect either a complete financial system collapse or significant money printing injected straight into big finance to simulate exponential growth.”
I think it summarizes my honest appraisal of the situation at hand. My overall reaction to the conference was: …
(7 November 2011)
IEA economist: ‘We have to leave oil before it leaves us’
Arthur Neslen, EurActiv
The International Energy Agency (IEA)’s annual World Energy Outlook, due for publication on 9 November, will contain alarming research that the world is on track for a catastrophic rise in global temperatures unless fossil fuel subsidies are cut, energy efficiency is improved, and more countries introduce some form of carbon pricing.
Fatih Birol is the IEA’s chief economist, tasked with overseeing the World Energy Outlook reports, the Energy Business Council, and the organisation’s economic analyses of energy and climate change policy. He spoke to EurActiv’s environment correspondent, Arthur Neslen.
… Q: Some people have proposed that Greece could pay off some of its debts to Germany and other countries with solar power. Do you think that’s a good idea?
Fatih Birol: I think there are many ideas in that direction and why shouldn’t we look at the different problems at different times? The energy issue is a bit different than the current debt crisis in Europe, but if such trade opportunities arise, why not?
Q: You’ve said that the world needs to invest $19 trillion (€13.8 trillion) in oil and gas infrastructure over the next 25 years. What would the consequences of that be for the climate?
Fatih Birol: The consequences for the climate would be in line with our central scenario, which is that if countries do only what they said they would do after Copenhagen, that would bring us to a 3.5 degrees [global warming] trajectory which is unacceptable for us.
… Q: You’ve said in the past that you believe that the world has already passed its ‘peak oil’ moment – the point at which the amount of oil already used outweighs the amount left in the ground. How far past that moment do you think we are, and what are the economic and environmental consequences?
Fatih Birol: We have said that we have seen the peak of commercial oil. There is still uncommercial oil and other forms coming and we will definitely need oil for our mobility systems for cars, trucks and jets and for our economic daily life to continue. However, one day we will run out of oil – not tomorrow or the day after but one day we will. Given its strategic importance for our societies, it is important to prepare our societies for that very day and try to find alternatives to oil especially in transportation systems. These could be electric cars, hybrid cars, natural gas, or biofuels-driven cars, or putting more emphasis on mass transportation.
When we talk about CO2 emissions, people think directly about coal. But if you look at the numbers, the contribution of oil to global CO2 emissions is only a few percentage points lower than coal. Therefore it needs to be taken closely into consideration. We’re not running out of oil today or tomorrow but we need to prepare ourselves for the day that we do. We have to leave oil before it leaves us.
(7 November 2011)
New book by Colin Campbell: Peak Oil Personalities
Colin Campbell, Inspire Books
A unique insight into one of the greatest problems ever to face mankind
Peak Oil Personalities is a collection of biographical essays by some of those who have played – and continue to play – a crucial role in raising awareness about the impact of Peak Oil.
Compiled by Colin Campbell, a pioneering exponent of the Peak Oil concept and a founder of ASPO, it shows how the various contributors, many with direct experience in the oil industry, came to realise the importance of the issue for themselves and for society in general.
It also provides a fascinating insight into how new ideas evolve and commonly meet opposition from vested interests and the so-called establishment.
(November 2011)
The publisher says the book is due out in November. You can read an excerpt of the book online – the excerpt is Colin Campbell’s bio.
-BA
Peak Cheese: the bleak science of cheese depletion
Articleman, Dagblog
It is an article of faith for some, both on the evangelical right and the secular left, that we live in the end times. For every millennialist who is reading Nostradamus or prophecies of the end of days in the Bible, there is a secularist waiting for aliens to take their “container” from the Earth, or a Dmitry Orlov prophesying the apocalyptic end of modern culture from the end of our free recourse to oil. Lost in these more grand hypotheses of abrupt ends to the world we know is a deeper, darker truth with more grounding in science than any of them. It is this. With supplies of arable land declining, and the number of dairy cows that can be sustained static or falling, our diets are threatened with chaos. The science doesn’t lie. The numbers are there. Dairy wanes, while the planet’s gluttony for cheeseburgers and pizzas increases exponentially. This post tears the roof off of the coming culinary catastrophe our complacent consumption conceals: Peak Cheese.
The Era of Unlimited Cheese Consumption
The problem is an easy one to see coming, in retrospect. For centuries, it was the relatively developed civilizations of the West that controlled cheese, and the resources with which to create it. Britain alone has made over 700 kinds of cheese in its illustrious history. The French have made 400 distinct types of cheese, which are a lot better than some of those crappy British cheeses, with some claiming that figure is closer to 1,000. Poorer nations under the military and economic boot of the West were nearly cheeseless. Consider Ethiopia, with its lone (though concededly very tasty) cheese, called ayib. Mmm, ayib. While cheese thus was distributed with stark inequality, there was a stable system of cheese production and consumption, which made sustainable for a time the West’s voracious consumption of this uniquely tasty snack, sandwich ingredient, and all-purpose complement to any salad or meat.
Yet the expansion of population bases of the West after World War II sent cheese consumption spiraling upward to levels even the West’s ample supplies of bucolic meadows would prove unable to sustain. It was in 1965 that dairy scientists at the University of Wisconsin, led by Professor Werner Oppenbarger, first postulated that the curve representing increasing cheese supply was demonstrably limited by the number of nice, grassy plots in the world. Oppenbarger’s multivariate analysis of cheese production, Cheese Factorials and the Malthusian Dairy Dilemma, was a must-read in the tempestuous academe of the late 1960s.
A Turn To Alternative Sources of Cheese Amid Increased Demand
But as the world turned hopefully to bell-bottoms and the idealistic music of The Monkees, scientists fueled by an analogous optimism proposed a cultural turn to alternative and renewable cheeses. Yet these have not proved the answer that many thought in the Sixties when scientists at the University of Wisconsin first postulated the Peak Cheese hypothesis
(8 November 2011)
