US oil production is about to peak, but the world is unprepared for the tremendous economic and political consequences. The only path through is energy and economic transformation.
The global economy is currently teetering on the edge of a banking crisis. The IPCC has just released its final major report warning that global carbon emissions need to peak and decline immediately if we are to avoid plunging into dangerous global warming by breaching the 1.5C ‘safe limit’. And in recent weeks and months, industry leaders have announced that the US shale oil and gas revolution is over.
Yet few if anyone is talking about why these things are happening at the same time, and what they really mean.
One of our biggest problems is that we tend to think in silos and sectors. But in the real world, the sectors we assume operate separately are in fact fundamentally interconnected. We ignore and downplay these systemic interconnections at our peril.
The persistence of global inflation has taken many economists by surprise. While they recognise that the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on energy and food supplies has been the biggest driver, that silo-ed assumption has led to a failure to understand why inflation is unlikely to simply disappear anytime soon.
We have good reason to believe that the underlying drivers of inflation go beyond just the war in Ukraine. Although it’s extremely difficult to quantify, climate change and environmental degradation is driving inflation by eroding agricultural productivity leading to higher food costs. The impact of extreme weather events is also creating larger and larger damages to infrastructure which in turn is incurring greater costs. As these costs feed into the system, the supply of goods and services becomes more expensive.
Less difficult to quantify is the fact that inflation is historically linked to energy price hikes. And there is mounting evidence that the world is experiencing a major shift in the global fossil fuel system that entails rising costs and diminishing returns, which will end up having a major inflationary effect for far longer and deeper than conventionally assumed.
The end of the shale boom
Since late last year, there have been a growing number of reports pointing out that the US shale revolution is coming to an end. Yet the massive global consequences of this are not being discussed.
“US Shale Boom Shows Signs of Peaking as Big Oil Well Disappear” read one headline in the Wall Street Journal. “The aggressive growth era of US shale is over,” Scott Sheffield, CEO of top independent shale firm Pioneer told the Financial Times. “The shale model definitely is no longer a swing producer.” And according to Bloomberg: “The specter of peak oil that haunted global energy markets during the first decade of the 21st century is once again rearing its head”.
US industry executives are now openly acknowledging that US oil production is likely to peak within the next five or six years, or perhaps in 2030. But there is mounting evidence that the peak will come much earlier, with some industry observers pinpointing its arrival as early as within the next one or two years.
What’s extraordinary about these admissions is how little they are impacting public debate. The implications are seismic. They contradict bullish overinflated forecasts of the industry made two decades ago – in 2005, for instance, Washington DC think-tank RAND Corp was forecasting that the US had enough shale oil to last some 400 years; and in 2012, a senior ExxonMobil executive claimed that the US has “about 100 years of natural gas supply”.
These grand claims were often breathlessly reported as unimpeachable fact by some of the most respected media institutions in the world.
Naysayers (like myself) warning that shale oil and gas would offer at best a temporary boost that was bound to peak and decline in the near-term with major global economic consequences, were dismissed as ‘doomers’.
Now, it turns out, we were right all along.
Mistakes of forecasting
That’s not to say that the traditional ‘peak oilers’ at the time were spot on. They wrongly expected that following the plateauing of conventional oil around 2005, oil prices would rocket up permanently into triple digits as global oil production would go into terminal decline. That didn’t happen. Instead, global demand shifted to the more expensive forms of unconventional oil and gas – especially US shale – which made-up much of the short-fall as conventional oil production slowed down.
But this was a recessionary environment, so global demand was much lower than expected. The massive 2005-2008 global oil price spikes helped induce a banking collapse. After the 2008 financial crash, this meant that there was much less demand for oil – but as oil production projects are planned years in advance pegged to expectations of demand, the oil just kept pumping despite much lower demand due to economic recession.
The result was a glut of shale oil and gas on world markets that allowed oil prices to drop and fuelled widespread belief in a new era of ‘Made in America’ cheap oil.
The US shale boom had a good run, no doubt about it – but its ‘healthy’ lifespan appears to be around two decades. If US shale oil and gas is about to peak and decline in the next few years, what does this mean for the US and global economy?
Coming economic contraction
Given that the US shale revolution played the key role in keeping global oil prices down and lubricating the energy requirements of continued economic activity, the retraction of the US shale revolution will have massive economic impacts.
US production has accounted for around 70% of the total increase in global oil capacity since 2019, and 75% of growth in liquified gas supplies. So as US shale oil and gas peaks, plateaus and declines, global oil and gas production will do so too very shortly after.
Gulf oil and gas producers, however, will not be able to step-in to fill the shortfall. US oil production is currently averaging around 11 million barrels per day (mbd).
A 2022 analysis of production data among the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which include the biggest powerhouses such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, suggests that the maximum OPEC could collectively increase production is around 4.5 mbd – that is, less than half of current US shale production.
It’s also not clear how long OPEC can deploy spare capacity to maintain maximum levels of production. This suggests that OPEC will not be able to meaningfully fill the supply gap as US shale declines, which is a clear indicator that total global oil production will eventually begin to peak and decline.
In 2017, I assessed these trends in Failing States, Collapsing Systems. I predicted that US oil and gas production would probably peak and plateau around 2025, and that major Middle East producers would peak and plateau around the 2030s. This scenario now appears to be unfolding before our eyes. Yet no one is talking about it.
The near-term economic and financial consequences will be devastating, and they could lead to permanent long-term consequences without significant transformative action. The impact on the US economy will be profound.
Shale production accounted for 10% of GDP growth in the United States from 2010-2015, which means that the next decade of shale’s plateauing and decline will gradually wipe this out. This will be experienced as a protracted inflationary economic crisis which, in turn, will contribute to volatility in global financial markets. Pundits will likely fail to understand these systemic interlinkages, focusing instead on failing banks, financial institutions and debt, without understanding its energetic triggers.
All this implies that we are sleepwalking into a global energy crisis that will, without accelerating the clean transformation of the energy system, create severe economic and financial consequences by undercutting the fundamental energetic basis of global economic flows. This will compound accumulated vulnerabilities in the banking system linked to unsustainable forms of debt.
The reverberations and bailouts seen in the cases of the Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse and others are merely the opening cracks, that will become widening fissures in the absence of root-and-branch economic restructuring linked to the rapid development of a new energy system.
While that new system is still emerging, it is perhaps unavoidable that we will hit a number of bottlenecks. The danger is that instead of using these bottlenecks to restructure and adapt positively, we may end up regressing, with a loss of capital and energy that forestalls the full potential of transformation.
The window for action is extremely short: we need to act within this decade. Along the way, we need to be aware of the major trends which are likely to emerge as a result of the end of the US shale boom:
1. The illusion of cheap oil is evaporating
While we may still see fluctuating prices, it is becoming clearer that the glut of cheap oil this last decade was not a permanent feature of the energy system, but a temporary symptom of highly specific circumstances as the energy system moves deeper into a state of increasing inputs and diminishing returns. The immediate impact of the peak and plateau of US shale will be sustained high oil prices.
2. The near-term beneficiaries of this will be Gulf oil and gas producers
They currently appear to be the only fossil fuel energy suppliers with sufficient capacity to maintain production. They will therefore not only begin to dominate market share, they will also of course continue to reap higher profits from this more advantageous market position amidst high oil prices.
3. Some capital will move into OPEC for safety, but this is a mirage
Just as this last decade created the illusion of fossil fuel abundance due to the US shale boom, we may see that OPEC’s near-term ability to ramp up spare capacity as shale production declines perpetuates this illusion. We can expect to see lots of bullish statements from Gulf oil producers vindicating grand plans to expand their oil and gas production. Capital will move rapidly into OPEC countries, seen as a last safe space for investors looking for stability and growth. However, OPEC producers will also begin experiencing their twilight very shortly after the decline of US shale, which means that investors will begin to make serious losses as a result far sooner than they imagine.
4. Oil prices will fluctuate within a higher range as US shale peaks
While we can expect significant oil price volatility due to the recessionary impact of high oil prices which would lower demand and therefore allow prices to drop, as we move further into the era of plateau and decline across US and OPEC production, the overall decline in supply is likely to lead oil price fluctuations to narrow within a far higher range which will become a ‘new normal’ as long as oil demand remains high. This may also incentivise near-term conviction in the idea that new oil and gas investments are economical. That would be a colossal mistake, though, as we will see below due to coming reductions in oil demand in the latter half of this decade that will ameliorate high prices and make fossil fuel enterprises increasingly unprofitable.
5. We can expect heightened political polarisation
Incumbent industry ideology will likely blind many energy actors from recognising the writing on the wall – which explains the regressive self-defeating actions of the Biden administration in committing to Arctic drilling. This is like betting on the losing horse after being told it’s about to be overtaken by cars. It illustrates the power of America’s oil lobbies in their last ditch desperate attempt to stay alive on the back of taxpayer subsidies – flying in the face of hard economic realities (a few years ago I broke the story of the British military study which concluded that Arctic drilling was pointless for economic reasons because the costs are so high and returns so low as to make it commercially infeasible). That in turn suggests the political battleground between fossil fuel lobbies and clean energy advocates will become more fraught as the incumbency seeks to double-down in demanding more government subsidies. Millions of jobs will be at risk as the US shale industry declines, and this could create further negative economic and cultural consequences as the US returns to net import status.
6. Clean energy transformation will be critical to stabilise the global economy and restore prosperity
The only viable pathway through this crisis will be to accelerate the clean energy transformation focused on the deployment of exponentially improving technologies which are already scaling because they are cost-competitive with fossil fuels – namely, solar, wind and batteries. This will lay the groundwork for other potential applications such as e-fuels or green ammonia from green hydrogen. This transformation is already underway, and provides the opportunity for the US and others to produce larger quantities of energy at a fraction of the costs of fossil fuels. In Rethinking Climate Change, a RethinkX report for which I was contributing editor, we found that even in the absence of appropriate policy-decisions and major institutional barriers, economic factors will inevitably drive incumbent industries to collapse by 2040 as they are replaced by new solar, wind and battery systems. Unfortunately, while this is far faster than conventional analysts acknowledge, this is not fast enough to avoid dangerous climate change.
7. Oil demand is going to haemorrhage, because the clean energy transformation is now unstoppable
The data examined by RethinkX implies that oil demand is likely to peak far earlier than incumbent energy agencies predict, and decline far more rapidly following the peak. The RethinkX report suggests that oil demand will likely peak sometime between 2025 and 2030, followed by an escalating drop out to 2040. It’s critical to recognise that the economic drivers of this approaching decline in oil demand are not confined to disruptive energy technologies, but include the disruption of the transport and food systems by electric vehicles, autonomous electric vehicles, precision fermentation and cellular agriculture. This also shines a light on the knife-edge civilisation is moving into this decade: as the incumbent energy industry declines, bringing with it the economy, there is a risk that it derails the economic factors currently driving the exponential adoption of clean energy technologies. Which means that we need to accelerate adoption this decade.
8. High volatile oil prices will be followed by crashing oil prices once demand peaks and declines
In the late 2020s, then, we will likely see oil demand begin to peak. This will be exacerbated by the fact that the global oil industry is going to become economically unsustainable by around 2030, when it will begin consuming a quarter of its own energy just to keep pumping out more oil. Even the Journal of Petroleum Technology published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers is taking this prospect seriously. As oil demand declines, oil prices will also decline. At this point, assuming the accuracy of the latest EROI studies, the collapse of the global industry will begin to accelerate because once prices go below a certain point and with EROI levels already unsustainable, the industry will simply become impossible to sustain economically.
What to do?
A big question that emerges here, of course, is how to accelerate the transformation.
The main task is simple: we need to raise awareness of the fact that the end of the Oil Age is fast approaching and will arrive within the next two decades. This inevitable arrival will not in itself mean that we avoid dangerous climate change. But it will mean that oil and gas assets are stranded – they have been vastly overvalued and therefore investments in them will never incur the projected returns, resulting in trillions of dollars of losses. This is not simply due to the prospect of climate policy action, but the reality of unfolding technological disruptions of energy, transport and food, and the internal EROI dynamics within the industry itself.
But while the immediate implications of this for conventional investments in incumbent industries are dire, the wider implications are mind-blowing. It means that the most lucrative areas of new investments where the highest potential for returns can be found will ultimately not be in the dying fossil fuel industries but in exponentially improving technologies which are on track to transform our societies for the better.
These technologies could help unlock future prosperity for all, as long as they are deployed in in the context of a new social, organisational and cultural paradigm optimised for decentralisation.
Among the biggest barriers to transformation are that financial institutions and policymakers still do not largely understand these processes, which are phase-shift dynamics. This means that the inflation crisis is not a crisis within a static, incumbent economic system; it is a symptom of the demise of the Oil Age system as a new potential system emerges, which means that trying to solve it using the same old macro-economic tools (e.g. hiking interest rates; austerity; etc) of the old system will not work. Rather, we need to accelerate the emergence of the new system, which requires maximising capital flows into the major drivers, technologies and organising structures of that new system. That, at its most baseline level, requires macro-economic incentives for those capital flows.
It is therefore imperative to increase awareness of the end of the Oil Age among key stakeholders, to increase the scope for better decision-making. That means much more robust forms of organising to disseminate these more accurate systems approaches to understanding the world into the most strategic spaces to leverage maximum potential for impact.
We also need to prepare ourselves and our organisations for what is coming. That requires not only looking at material processes, supply chains and things like that – it also means looking ahead at what sort of values, societal structures, and economic models work best for the emerging system. Ultimately, we need to develop and embody new holistic ways of seeing and being in the world which empower us to recognise and navigate complexity, and especially for this coming period of upheaval.
In future posts, we are going to explore further implications of this analysis. We will look at what all this means for how we think critically about systems and increasingly mainstream concepts like ‘polycrisis’; based on the major trends identified here we will explore various emerging scenarios that could plausibly unfold over the next decade; and based on that, we will be able to develop a more precise idea of what needs to be done.
Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel / Unsplash
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I like Nafeez. He’s even quoted my work on debunking Simon Michaux’s “We’re running out of minerals” straw-man. But I’m confused by this next bit.
Maybe he means no one in investment circles or Wall Street are talking about it? Maybe he had a specific group in mind? Because I see heaps of people talking about it.
No less than the head of the IEA for starters!
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
I have often wondered how the contraction of specific oil products like gasoline and diesel would impact other services, say – jet fuel. Then I watched Nate Hagen’s “Just stop oil” series and his claims that oil refineries suffer the “Butcher’s dilemma.” That is, just as the Butcher must buy the whole carcass and sell every bit of it to stay in business – even if everyone suddenly only wants prime fillet steak and no sausages he still needs to sell the sausages, so to big oil must buy the whole barrel even if people are only after jet fuel because everything else has pretty much been replaced!
That didn’t sound optimal – so I googled around and here’s the relevance. Big oil are talking about it! Not so much admitting the peak of geological oil extraction – but peak demand. And they’re kind of scared. So while Nate then interviewed a refining expert on (interesting talk and I loved the lego!) who confirmed there would be problems adjusting within months, I felt that interview avoided the coming years and decades and missed what many renewables systems engineers and even big oil themselves are predicting.
Note: the physics and chemistry in these conversations is too technical for me – I do have a Social Sciences background after all. But I’m just quoting what I can understand from the reports themselves – and if anyone more technical wants to reply in an article to the claims from the links below, I’m happy to forward that article to whomever for comment.
RATHER THAN FACE THE BUTCHER’S DILEMMA – CLOSE A BUTCHER
Yes – big oil have too many refineries for the coming decade/s, and yes – many are geared towards today’s enormous diesel and gasoline sectors. But the misconception appears to be that each individual refinery must face the “Butcher’s Dilemma” all at once when oil demand drops significantly. Big Oil knows what is coming. They’re trying to lobby against it and stall it – but to no avail. The energy transition is now unstoppable. But finally, hanging on by their fingernails, they’ll keep some refineries running at full capacity as normal – while they shut others. Butcher’s Dilemma solved, more or less. Then as the market contracts, they’ll close the next one. Etc
NIMBLE REFINERIES
There are also other refineries that can adapt for different products. The energy transition will crush most ‘standard’ oil refineries. But big oil are already planning for different refineries with a view to increase petrochemicals and jet fuel. They are also thinking about adaptable refineries or modular refineries with components that can be swapped out – “nimble” is a word some are using for the decades ahead.
OVERBUILDING RENEWABLES WILL CRUSH MANY OF THESE LAST NICHE SECTORS
Many renewables systems engineers are speaking of Overbuild and Super-grids to get through winter (a largely Northern concern given most of humanity lives nearer the equator where there is no winter – or your neighbours have no winter.) Once these models++ sail through winter on just a few days PHES storage, the question becomes what to do with 2 or 3 times your national energy requirements the other 9 or 10 months of the year? That’s when we can refine all the synthetic SAF (Sustainable Aviation Fuel) and circular petrochemicals for a green chemical industry that we want. (++Please don’t wince at the power of a model. Most of what we know about climate impacts in the coming decades is from models.)
LINKS TO NIMBLE REFINERIES:
RMI has a report on how refineries can adapt.
https://rmi.org/how-to-slash-refinery-emissions-quickly-washington-state/
“FCC to steam cracking. India’s Reliance Industries aims to use steam cracking in the innovative multifeed cracker it is planning. The company’s goal is to maximize monomer output by upgrading a refinery’s unsaturated light and heavy streams through catalytic cracking. When operational, the feedstock used by the unit is expected to yield about 70 percent petrochemicals (24 percent ethylene; 33 percent propylene; and 14 percent benzene, toluene, and xylene).”
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/chemicals/our-insights/from-crude-oil-to-chemicals-how-refineries-can-adapt-to-shifting-demand
https://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/news/2023/07/digital-exclusive-refineries-pandemic-turmoil-knpc-s-gasoline-demand-opportunities-and-challenges/
The IEA, EIA and oil producers are all talking about it.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2498500-us-is-at-peak-gasoline-demand-phillips-66
Thanks Mary Wildfire.
In my essay, Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy
( https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/ ), I listed the Heinberg Pulse and the Michaux Monkeywrench as two examples for why the standard, familiar, mainstream “energy transition” paradigm is almost certainly at least very implausible. But there are other reasons, besides. Another reason could be called the Smil Crawl, after Czech-Canadian scientist, and energy expert, Vaclav Smil, who explains that energy transitions have always been very slow, and the one we’re in is likely to be very slow, also.
The Heinberg Pulse is the energy cost of ‘energy transition’ — which acknowledges that greenhouse gases must increase in the near term in order to build out renewable energy infrastructure in the near term—, if the popular image of ‘energy transition’ is adopted.
The Michaux Monkeywrench is the monkey wrench tossed into the theoretical gears of “energy transition” when we acknowledge that the world can’t possibly provision sufficient rare and rare-ish metals and minerals to enable the popular vision of “energy transition” to proceed.
The Smil Crawl is basically a name for Vaclav Smil’s explanations for why energy transitions have always been slow, and there’s hardly any reason for us to assume the proposed “energy transition” to renewables would be otherwise.
But none of these explanations for why the conventional, mainstream narrative on “energy transition” is wildly unlikely directly gets to answering the question — okay, then what do we do? And my answer is that Chris Smaje’s Small Farm Future book answers this question about as well as anything else I can think of. The very near term future is likely to involve a steep reduction in fossil fuel use, which means a steep reduction in net energy, which means a smaller and slower economy, which means access to livelihood will become increasingly a matter of having access to land right out your front door, where you can walk or bicycle to the permaculture gardens which will supply the most crucial of your basic needs — food. Shelter will also be mostly a matter of local self-provisioning, ideally in a village economy context.
Cities will not be a place where most people now living in them can have access to livelihood, for reasons I explain in Energy Transition & the Luxury Economy.
As I see it, the principal reason for telling this “alternative” story about energy transition is that it will take time to set people up with a means of access to livelihood which will function after the present mode of economy fails — which will be soon enough. If we wait for the Megamachine to grind to a halt, it will be too late to avert social chaos, famine and bloodshed.
Also, we need a land reform movement — worldwide — immediately. And not just in poor countries, but also in rich countries. A basic ethical principle we should apply to the real energy transition (steep energy and economic descent) should be that everyone deserves adequate land access for basic subsistence within a system of local community self-provisioning of our most basic needs — food, water, clothing, medicine….
There will be no luxury economy in the near-ish future, and so we need to get ready for its end before it comes crashing down.
What happens to people who live on a small, over-crowded island??
I can answer this question in a figurative and a literal sense.
Figurative:
We all live on a small, over-crowded (with humans) island. That island is Earth. There are no other islands nearby we can sail off to, which can provide for our needs. So we need to behave as if we’re living on a small, over-crowded island by sharing scarce resources in an equitable way. That means deliberately choosing a smaller “footprint” with regard to resource use while designing one’s life for what could be called “lean comforts” — or low-impact pleasures and happiness.
Literal:
Folks who live on literal small, over-crowded islands should do much gteh same as described above. However, they have the option of — if possible and necessary — relocating to “the mainland” or to another island which is less crowded.
People should just face up to the fact that we are probably going to “see” (would see if we were still alive) a 90% wipe out of the human population in the coming 10 years max.
I love it!
We are already past peak oil, at least in terms of conventionally acquired. Human beings became aware of oil because at one time it seeped to the surface. Then, with the benefits of the industrial revolution (better metals, but also other technologies) it became possible to drill into the Earth. That took a bit more effort, but gave access to a lot of oil at a cost of less than 1% of the energy produced.
Having long run short of oil (note: not out, but diminishing) that can be reached from dry land by conventional means, we have for many decades drilled out at sea (at increasing depths, despite the costs and risks), as well (opps, pun) as drilling ever deeper on land, horizontal digging, fracking, and even extracting ‘tar’ from oil sands.
Clearly the energy cost per barrel have gone up; we are well past the point of using 1-2% of the energy retrieved in getting at the energy stored. In some cases, by the time you get to the final refined product we are getting less than 80% out of each barrel.
But you are 100% correct; the US, Europe, and Japan have set the example, and others are eager to follow. I also agree that even if we set the right example there’s no guarantee that others will follow. If we fail to do the right thing, though, the results ARE guaranteed.
There may always be some necessary petroleum products, but it could well be that it will take more energy to get the raw material than it would produce if burned for energy.
As far as ‘oil running down towers or that have burned’, sources please.
As far as EV cars burning, gasoline cars burn far more often, as do garage fires caused by improperly stored gas cans, or spontaneous oil rag fires.
“The call for an energy transition is just wrong. We need a societal, a civilisational, transition to a much simpler way of living. That will inevitably arrive, whether we want it or not, but an unplanned change will not be pleasant.”
What seems very unreasonable to me is to identify “energy transition” as “the full replacement of fossil energy with renewables at the same energy intensity of the present culture and economy”. That cannot happen, as I see it. But it certainly cannot happen while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So that story isn’t true. It’s Just Not True.
We do need a major energy transition however — which is a dramatic reduction on energy intensity of our economy and culture. But that’s not the conversation the world is having — because we’re pretending that we can replace current energy use with renewables… while also reducing emissions. (!) So we’re having the wrong conversation about how to prepare for the future, and so we’re not getting prepared for it at all.
We have to hope that the work of Tim Garrett and others is just showing correlation that’s a coincidence. It shows that energy use is directly related to accumulated wealth (not money but includes production, invention, knowledge), so that the only way to reduce energy use is to destroy some of that wealth. It will take a collapse of civilisation.
Hrmmm….
How much would solar, wind and batteries cost if every step in the process from mining to maintenance, is powered from solar, wind and batteries? No fossil fuel subsidy.
Is it even possible to make these products without fossil fuels?
You could mange a coppiced wood lot without fossil fuels but i am not sure what other energy sources can be accessed without fossil fuels? (simple water wheels? simple windmills? simple solar thermal?)
But the mantra of Exponentially Improving Technology is preventing clear thinking on this topic.
“The reverberations and bailouts seen in the cases of the Silicon Valley Bank, Credit Suisse and others are merely the opening cracks, that will become widening fissures in the absence of root-and-branch economic restructuring linked to the rapid development of a new energy system.”
I take the phrase “rapid development of a new energy system” to be synonymous with “rapid energy transition” (to so-called ‘renewables’) of the conventional, mainstream narrative variety. But that story is wildly implausible at best, and is most likely a deliberately created set of propagandistic bullshit (can I say “bullshit” in here? Actually, I used “bullshit” as a “technical (scientific) term” in an essay published here in resilience, so I guess I can.)
I’m here to say something nobody wants to hear. There is no Santa Claus. Santa Claus isn’t going to fly over your house in a sled pulled through the sky by sexy flying reindeer — led by Rudolph with his bright red glowing nose.
The way we can learn to cope with the inevitable, rather dramatic changes ahead is to stop telling flying reindeer stores to one another. It’s time for humanity to begin to grow the *heck* up! Let’s stop pouting and roll up our sleeves and get to work making a world that isn’t grounded in magical fairy dust fables. I’m serious. We have a lot of work to do to prevent utter chaos and madness.
We should not let the billionaires and hundreds-of-millionaires continue to hijack public discourse! No more sparkly glitter, okay?!
“7. Oil demand is going to haemorrhage, because the clean energy transformation is now unstoppable.”
Uh-Oh… We have a major glitter spill in aisle 11. Can we get a clean up crew on this, please?
I’m not so sure that a transition to a solar and wind-powered economy “with prosperity for all” is possible. Seems to me that with the problem of the Heinberg Pulse, as JRiver Martin calls the spike of fossil fuel emissions from building out a massive renewable infrastructure, and questions about whether the minerals and material exist to build such a massive system…and the enormous equity questions of whether every place that has lithium deposits, for example, will be ravaged for that mineral, running roughshod over objections from locals (yes of course), likely just to continue supplying a modern lifestyle to the privileged–there will not be enough for all. And even more importantly, this vision of–well may as well call it Unplug/Replug, a continuation of modernity except without fossil fuels–means the continued ravaging of what’s left of the nonhuman world, the further elimination of habitats. There can be no viable future without facing up to the need to END GROWTH.
Hence why Warren Buffet is loading up on Occidental Petroleum
The times, they are a changing. Renewable energy, including its production, transport, storage and distribution will keep on changing, too. The economics and geopolitics will change as well. One model of orderly change is on the West Coast, the Central Coastal Community Energy cooperative. It is coordinating home and business energy conservation and building out community RE production and storage in the area of Monterey, CA.(3CE.org). In 20th century US history communities often took on the opportunity themselves to build out public electric utilities. Rural electrification by cooperatives helped by a measure by federal money changed the productivity and prosperity of much of the country.
I am not a fan of corporations in the electric utilities that consolidated the earlier systems, but they did provide electricity at scale. RE development calls for community RE to lead the change. We are working to introduce RE cooperation and a cooperative system for the county where I live in Western Pennsylvania, which includes Pittsburgh.
Just so you know , oils are in EVERYTHING you touch and I mean EVERYTHING .
You can never live without fossil fuels and I mean LIVE .
There is no way we can go to green energy and survive unless you are ready to go back to caveman days , which with the way this world is going may be better .
How much farm ground are you willing to give up for solar panels , I see it nearly every day hundreds of acres of land being used for solar panels . I see wind turbines that have oil running down the tower or that have burned . Yes there is oil in those generators .
California already ” please turn off your thermostats because we can’t handle everyones ac in this heat .
Just think when everyone comes home and plugs in those cars . You can’t provide a grid to handle it . And just wait until those cars catch on fire in your garage , you won’t get out of the house alive .
Good luck going green cause you’ll need it .
I have never seen a more delusional article in my life It will be a 100 years before the oil industry and the energy industry collapses for windmills and solar power It will be a 100 years before the oil industry Caves in To other forms of energy.Until they are perfected which they are a long way off, so until that happens we need to focus on becoming energy independent which we will never happen using these alternative sources of energy and power. They are a good Complimentary sector of the energy industry but they will never become the primary source of power imagine running a Tri axle truck or a 40 ton excavator with electric power The thought process of all of this is so ridiculous
Anyone that thinks that America is going to affordably/reliably power America’s electrical grid with just solar panels, windmills and batteries has no clue and they’re in for a rude awakening.