[MonteQuest]

However, I'm a believer we don't know everything there's to know about everything, even the most tried and observed simple laws of biology. It seems you do. Good for you. A bit arrogant, but it takes all colors to make a rainbow.

Guess you are willing to bet your life on it, eh?

You, me, and everybody who wakes up the next day bet with our lives and win it. Not bad odds.

We bet that known biological science is flawed???

[VMarcHart]

However, I'm a believer we don't know everything there's to know about everything, even the most tried and observed simple laws of biology. It seems you do. Good for you. A bit arrogant, but it takes all colors to make a rainbow.

Guess you are willing to bet your life on it, eh?

You, me, and everybody who wakes up the next day bet with our lives and win it. Not bad odds.

We bet that known biological science is flawed???

Please let me tell you a personal story. When I was 5-6, I was diagnosticed with a severe disorder. My parents were told I was not going to reach 10. I'm even told that funeral arrangments had already been made. Evidently those nice doctors, scientists, and biologists must have missed something, and that's OK, because we don't know everything. Known biology is an awesome science, but the key word is "known". So, no, I'm not betting it's flawed, but I'm putting a little money on the unknown biology. And mind, not on a techno-fix.

[MonteQuest]

So, no, I'm not betting it's flawed, but I'm putting a little money on the unknown biology.

So, you posit that it is an unknown facet of biology that humans will not be subject to the crash of an overshoot population like every other species ever known?

We will be above nature and not subject to "no stinkin' limits."

Good luck with that.

[VMarcHart]

So, you posit it is an unknown facet of biology that humans will not be subject to the crash of an overshoot population like every other species ever known?

Yes. We are not like every other species.

We will be above nature and not subject to "no stinkin' limits."

I don't know. Time will tell.

Good luck with that.

Thanks. Remember: every morning you wake up, something unknown happened. Just be thankful.

[MonteQuest]

So, you posit it is an unknown facet of biology that humans will not be subject to the crash of an overshoot population like every other species ever known?

Yes. We are not like every other species.

We will be above nature and not subject to "no stinkin' limits."

I don't know. Time will tell..

So full of hubris you have no room for the truth.

[mos6507]

You don't try to feed hay to a dead horse.

This is what you do to a dead horse!

I believe the proper graphic is this:



And yet it persists because of this:


Which leads to the battle between two forces. This:

and this:

[Tanada]

I turned on CNBC this morning to try and catch the WTI price because I have not looked for about 10 days. (WTI $50.43)

What I got by accident was the interview about how Technology saved us and pushed Peak Oil way off into the future. It is all happy motoring at the current price for at least 3 or 4 years according to this interview. I don't k now the hosts by name and did not recognize the person being interviewed, I came into the middle of the conversation so I may have missed something important at the beginning. The conclusion reached however was Fracking is the miracle cure of the 21st century. Not only is it making $50.00/bbl oil abundant in the USA but within a year or so massive oil shale fracking projects in foreign countries will be flooding the world with oil at these prices for the next several years. They predict prices will only rise after all the on shore frackable tight oil shales have been exploited world wide and we have to transition to polar and off shore tight oil shale fracking.

[sarc]Hooray, technology has saved us all. Might as well head out, last one to leave please shut off the lights.[/sarc]

[ROCKMAN]

T - Which only emphasizes why sites like this and all others) will remain completely impotent when it comes to getting the word out. In addition to the fact that a 1000+X more folks hear the CNBC story then will read anything here today many who experience both will right this site off as crackpots because it is CNBC, after all. While we may enjoy our chats here we’re still spitting into the wind and not changing the course of the hurricane heading our way.

[Tanada]

T - Which only emphasizes why sites like this and all others) will remain completely impotent when it comes to getting the word out. In addition to the fact that a 1000+X more folks hear the CNBC story then will read anything here today many who experience both will right this site off as crackpots because it is CNBC, after all. While we may enjoy our chats here we’re still spitting into the wind and not changing the course of the hurricane heading our way.

That is what scares me about the whole situation. Human have a tendency to plug their ears and go "nahnahnah" as loud as they can when they get bad news, and if a competing source is blowing sunshine up their collective skirts they only want to hear the good news. If things turn out to be sweet no harm is done, but if things go sour they turn on the bearer of bad tidings and punish them for having brought the bad news into their realm of knowledge.

On the other side of the coin if you know a disaster is coming and you do nothing how can you live with yourself for not trying to do anything to help?

[Newfie]

Ganda,

There is nothing you can do to help. Sorry.

The most you can do is to figure out how to survive.

You can't hlep anyone else if you can't help yourself. Trite, but true.

Again, sorry. Helping is a deep human psychological need. When not nourished it leaves a huge lit in the stomach. It's why you hear stories of a series of folks dying of asphyxiation trying to save someone in an enclosed space.

I'll bet Rockman can attest to that.

[Subjectivist]

When the day comes I meet my maker I want be able to say, I tried to help.

[ROCKMAN]

T - "...if you know a disaster is coming and you do nothing how can you live with yourself for not trying to do anything to help?" Easy: some will look to the govt for help and blame them for not doing anything first. And then there's the other side that will simply slide the gate closed and click the safety off their Glock.

Easy peasy...no problamo.

[Pops]

Like the guy said; you don't know what you don't know.

One benefit of having written the PO Primer (What Is PO? on the sidebar) is that I can look at it and have an idea of exactly what I thought the situation was in 2004:

World discovery of oil peaked in the 1960s, and has declined since then. If the 40 year cycle seen in the US holds true for world oil production, that puts global peak oil production, right about now; after which oil becomes less available, and more expensive.

That was my interpretation of "If you can't find it you can drill it" stated in the most diplomatic, moderate language I could manage. That forecast was golden if you split the hair of "oil production" to redefine it as only "flowable crude oil from a conventional, vertical hole drilled into a reservoir." Crude oil from those "conventional wells" has indeed been flat since 2005 because we go to all sorts of trouble to always keep the unconventional liquids separate so we can point to the validity of our prediction.

Back then it was also widely held by peakers that nat gas was on the skids and that would double the effect of peak oil. Gas had been on a plateau all through the nineties and Matt Simmons said we would soon be in a permanent crisis, Boone Pickens bet his first billion on the nat gas peak. This is not talked about much around here. In my mind the gas peak really was a foundational problem even larger than oil, while you can transport yourself by foot motion there isn't a whole bunch of ways to produce electricity manually.




But it turns out that gas didn't peak. In fact fracked wet gas wells (many probably defined as "oil" wells because it is better from a PR/stock market value standpoint) have provided an increasing stream of NGL which are the biggest portion of "the unconventional" oil we all deride as inferior.






I'm going to guess that red area is under-representative of lighter liquids because it is better (again from a stock valuation standpoint) to report in an oil well with lots of gas than to book a gas well with lots of liquids.


My personal assessment around 2002 was that by 2015 oil in excess of $100 would begin to wreck the economy and we would be headed into a permanent depression. That was the timeline of my planning and I acted upon it. It turns out that technology did increase "Liquids" production and in fact did "save" us from peak oil in that period. No need to point out to me all the terrible news and all the "dots" between then and now - the world in 2015 is not the one one I had forecast and definitely not the one predicted by the majority of peak oil experts - let alone the real Doomers.

So what is my point?
Basically that arguing whether technology can or can't save us in the future is the very same as arguing whether or not there is a heaven, you just can't know until you get there. Meantime, the best you can do is plan for anything to happen, including nothing, and live accordingly.

[Tanada]

I hear what you are saying Pops, but after ten years on this merry go round it just gets extremely frustrating to hear the same BS technobabble will save us all crud when the evidence does not support the argument.

[Pops]

No doubt T.

I'm trying to wean myself off knee-jerk pessimism. I expect to achieve peace of mind on or about the moment of collapse.

[Tanada]

No doubt T.

I'm trying to wean myself off knee-jerk pessimism. I expect to achieve peace of mind on or about the moment of collapse.

ROFL!
I buy a Lotto ticket from time to time and I always used to say if I win the collapse will start the next day, because my luck runs that deep.

[Subjectivist]

People refuse to accept that there are limits. For example, if someone puts you in a sealed room and fills it with water or pumps all the air out to make a vacuum inside you will die. That doesn't mean you can not put on a diving tank or a space suit and get along just fine, but without that technological help you are soon dead.

By analogy technology can help us extract more oil from existing sources. It can even create synthetic oil from smaller molecules like water and carbon dioxide if we put enough energy into the devices that use those chemicals to make synthetic oil. What it can not do is make oil reserves miraculously appear just because we want them too, producing unlimited light sweet oil at $5.00/bbl.

[ROCKMAN]

Sub - "That doesn't mean you can not put on a diving tank or a space suit and get along just fine, but without that technological help you are soon dead." Not a bad analogy but let's put it into the proper context:

That doesn't mean you can not put on a diving tank or a space suit and get along just fine, but there's a machine in that room with an air hose you can suck on but you have to put a $100 bill in the slot every 10 minutes or the air flow stops. So yes: without that technological help you are soon dead...as long as you keep feeding it $100 bills. And if you don't have the money? Your DEAD...DEAD...DEAD. LOL. No tech is going to save your ass if you can't afford it.

The vast majority of the 7 billion on this planet did not benefit from the increase in US oil production. In reality many of those folks suffered significant damage to their daily lives as a result of the high oil prices that gave the US an increase in oil production. The increase in US oil production has been beneficial to a very, very small percentage of the human race.

[Pops]

People refuse to accept that there are limits.

True, but that isn't the question for those of us who do.

Acknowledging we don't have no real clue whether oil is half gone, 10% gone or 90% gone doesn't deny its limit, merely the unlimited nature of our ignorance.

(I realize this is the internet, the place where 'I don't know' is seldom seen, LOL)

The problem is the timeframe. Here from my very first PO.com post 11 years ago:

That is the wild card; how long do we have to prepare before the cost of preparing is out of reach or the necessities unavailable?

That was my feeling the first time I really saw the argument laid out in the SciAm article in '98 (read it on a plane).

Still the same question.