Comments by Teratornis

1. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #181567 by Teratornis on May 17, 2008 at 1:51 pm

Comment #180797 by Goldy on May 15, 2008 at 8:16 pm

So, we go back to our grandparents mode of living. Not so bad, methinks.

Grandparent mode plus the Internet. Urban living has traditionally been more exciting than rural living, because the physical proximity of large numbers of people makes exchanging information easy with our naturally evolved communication tools (our senses, our voices, our faces, etc.). However, everything our brains detect about our environment reaches our brain through wires - our nerves. Therefore, in theory, everything we want to detect about remote environments can also reach our brains through longer wires. We can extend our nervous systems to much greater distances; it's just an engineering problem.

We have the beginnings of this with the Internet. While the Internet is improving fast (see: Moore's law), virtual travel is a lot newer than physical travel, and therefore has some catching up to do. However, there are many opportunities for any reasonably intelligent person to contribute to this catching-up progress.

I do, however, question if we need to this far - after all, we have tasted the sweet sweet taste of personal freedom, even for travel. Can we let it go so easily?

World oil production does not need our permission before it begins declining. I agree that people who are currently addicted to physical travel will do everything necessary to cling to it as long as possible. For example, even after the competition between food and fuel becomes clear to everyone, I expect mobility addicts to have no difficulty sacrificing millions of the world's poorest people to starvation, as necessary to continue purchasing mobility as long as possible.

The world food price crisis is the result of the free market allocating scarce petroleum to satisfy the wishes of the people who have the money. Food prices are shooting up because mobility addicts in the wealthy countries aren't about to cut back on mobility as long as they can out-bid the exponentiating hordes of poor people who have to spend all their income on food.

There are other modes of transport not yet allowed to peek from the shadow of cheap oil, other modes of propulsion.

There are, just nothing that can scale up quickly enough to maintain the volume of transport we have fueled with oil, with no interruptions. There almost certainly will be some interruptions; they may be substantial.

Since this issue clearly matters to just about everyone, it's worth researching the alternatives. I collected some useful videos on YouTube into a playlist about biofuels:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=4D831A41692C5D14

That's just a small introduction to this enormous field, but it gives a handle. The executive summary is that biofuels have huge potential, but also huge problems, so there is no quick fix. At least, the world's top experts know of no quick fix at the moment. There could be some miraculous research breakthrough at any time, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

For large-scale, relatively fast ground transport perhaps the most practical and potentially sustainable method is electric rail, but for nations which don't have electric rail networks now, building them will take decades and cost fortunes.

There are fewer options for air travel. Aircraft require a portable source of highly concentrated energy. It's possible to power aircraft with biofuels, but that means replacing tiny, unobtrusive oil wells with vast plantations of energy crops. For example, Indonesians are wiping out their rainforests as fast as they can, to replace them with oil palms.

The currently available energy crops are not very efficient converters of solar energy. There is much room for improvement. Just don't expect improvements to come quickly, or cheaply.

The potential for solar energy is very large. According to this map:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Us_pv_annual_may2004.jpg

where I live, insolation on a latitude tilt flat plate collector averages about 4.5 kWh/m2/day. If it were somehow possible to convert all incident sunlight into jet fuel (energy content: 35.1 MJ/l) at 100% efficiency, that would amount to:

(4.5 kWh/m2/day * 365 days/yr) / (35.1 MJ/l / 3.6 Mj/kWh) = 168 liters/m2/yr

Given that even the most efficient carbon-capturing plants (algae and cyanobacteria) are at best about 7% efficient, and then there are energy costs to tend the crop and harvest the fuel, it will take a sizable energy plantation to keep a single airliner flying a regular schedule. I read that Richard Branson is aware of this problem, and he is a bit perplexed over his airline's fuel bill, and his personal role in helping to destroy the world's climate.

The more you learn about energy, the more you realize that petroleum is an incredible gift from nature, which we are squandering as fast as we can suck it out of the ground. Burning petroleum is like living lavishly off a large, one-time inheritance from wealthy grandparents. Learning to live without petroleum will be like learning to make our own living. If we survive peak oil, expect a revival of old-fashioned values of hard work and thrift.

The fact that the free market encourages us to squander petroleum and fail to invest for life after petroleum probably amounts to the largest market failure in history. If there is a larger market failure, I don't know what it is.

Where there is a will, I dare say there is a way.

There is of course virtual travel; we have barely begun to scratch the surface, because petroleum and hence physical travel have been relatively cheap. As long as the people who build computers are all driving cars and flying in airplanes, they have little personal incentive to get serious about turning computers into a competitive alternative to physical travel.

One place where people have gotten serious is Wikipedia (and other large-scale remote collaboration projects). On Wikipedia, everybody works remotely, so everything on the site is set up to facilitate remote collaboration. Anybody who logs into Wikipedia from anywhere in the world quickly discovers they are at no disadvantage to anyone else involved in the project. One does not have to physically travel to a central headquarters location to access the best information in the form of an oral tradition. On Wikipedia the only way to have influence is to write your knowledge so everyone can share it, and the result is that all remote users are on an equal footing. Everybody who uses the site has to get everything through a wire, so everybody who works on the site makes sure to set everything up so it all fits through that wire.

Wikipedia is perhaps the first complete instantiation of the long-predicted paperless office. A few individual Wikipedians might print some pages off the site, but all the information exchange between participants on the site goes through the site itself.

One could say that Wikipedia started off as if physical travel was unaffordable. Wikipedia is a volunteer project, so there is no travel budget for volunteers. Wikipedia is like a business that operates in an environment where the cost of physical travel is infinite. So the participants make do, and very well I might add. If the rest of the world adapts to virtual travel with equal skill, we won't find a reduction in physical mobility to be much of any obstacle to getting work done with others. In fact, we will be more efficient once we stop wasting so much time and energy on travel.

Wikipedia's communication is almost all in text form, and thus it does not engage human senses completely. Most people find this less than fully satisfying after a while. We can expect that as declining oil production makes physical travel more expensive, the computer industry will respond by making videoconferencing technology better and more affordable, as well as everything else that supports remote collaboration.

2. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #181309 by Teratornis on May 16, 2008 at 9:59 pm

Comment #180773 by MaxD:

You said:

Most of us are rational enough to understand prayer is a waste of time - but is ignoring the oil problem any smarter? Is jabbering about things like the Expelled movie any smarter than praying for cheap fuel? I'm serious here. If your house is burning down, what is your highest priority at that moment? Perhaps everything else can wait. After we solve the energy problem - if we can solve it - there will be plenty of time to worry about creationism, religion, God, etc. again. Before we call the religious stupid one more time, let's show some ability to be smart about energy.

I do always get skeptical about end of the world preaching.

Why? Do you have a better grasp of the relevant facts than the preacher?

Or does the preacher just feel wrong?

I am reminded sometimes of sweaty-faced preachers as they hold forth on things like revelations when you really get your grove on.

I suggest you remind yourself to focus on facts. It doesn't matter who the preacher is nor how much he sweats. All that matters is whether the preacher has the facts straight, and draws logically valid inferences from them.

When you can evaluate an idea from someone else the same way you evaluate your own ideas, then you have the beginnings of rationality.

If someone had predicted your death every year since your birth, that someone would have been consistently wrong. Would that make you immortal?

We know for a scientific fact that humans will eventually cease to exist. The only uncertainty is the schedule.

I don't know that any human is truly capable of imagining this. We can say yes, intellectually we acknowledge that someday there will be no more people. But I don't think any of us can really comprehend that.

However, total extinction is not in even the worst case scenario of peak oil. The worst case is a die-back to the pre-industrial world population. Even the best case probably means the near extinction of some things we have come to take for granted, such as air travel.

The odds of the worst case are inversely proportional to the number of people who understand Hubbert peak theory.

But this thread really is an appropriate place for you to post on the issue about which you are most passionate, so I am actually reading your posts on this thread.

If your house was burning down, would you ignore the neighbors screaming at you to get out, if they didn't post their warnings in the appropriate thread?

There are some problems that justify overriding some decorum. I've laid out the general case for the importance of peak oil, and thus far I haven't seen any factual refutations. Just a few ad homs and so on.

And as I have claimed several times, in five years you will agree with me that peak oil is the most important problem facing humans collectively. (Individually we might have some even more important problems, but we don't generally discuss purely personal problems on this site.) And I'll try to stick around long enough to say "I told you so."

What I have to take issue with is your insistance that these other issues aren't important.

As I said, we'll see what you think in five years.

Perhaps lost in my hyperbole was my insistence that these other issues will seem trivial when gasoline hits $10/gallon in the U.S., when millions of the world's poorest people are starving to death because they can't afford to buy food, and relief agencies themselves become overwhelmed due to too many needs and their own rising costs.

Suppose you and everybody you know has to cut back on personal travel by 80%. How many issues in society will seem more important than that?

I believe I can make a pretty good case for a reduction of that level. We use petroleum for personal transportation, goods shipping, agriculture, and petrochemicals. I'm sure food will always be our maximum priority - a starving man will spend his last money on food, so food will get its share of petroleum. The one area with the greatest slack to give is personal transportation, so we can expect personal transportation to absorb the best part of any reductions in oil supply. If the oil available for the U.S. to import drops by 25% over the next five years, personal travel is going to drop by a lot more than 25%.

As it turns out they are important skirmishes in the general campaign of unreason. If you think it would be a good idea to let things like expelled, ID in the schools get a foothold then not only are you a one issue trick pony, but you would not be very bright either.

If we ignore peak oil, as most people are doing, it's easy to predict a range of possible consequences, all of them unpleasant, and some of them dire. At a minimum, we can be virtually certain that the energy supply problem is going to get a lot worse, and probably very soon. We also have the closely related climate problem which we need to solve at the same time.

If we ignore ID in the schools, what exactly do you think that is going to harm? I don't doubt that some harm would result, but can you seriously suggest the harm would be as great as the harm that will result from oil at $400/bbl?

I mean, come on. I grew up indoctrinated to believe in young earth creationism. I got a much bigger dose of it than any student is likely to get in a public school. And yet it was fairly easy for me to shrug off the nonsense as soon as I made the effort to read what science had to say.

Seriously, if anybody gets all the way to adulthood and can't comprehend the readily-available facts of evolution, I think they have a much bigger psychological problem than we could fix by keeping ID out of the schools. I don't think religion is the real problem; the real problem is that people are somehow suckers for religion. Keeping ID out of the schools really just treats the symptoms of the underlying disease. We need a real cure for irrationality, not just palliatives with which to play an endless game of whack-a-mole.

For the vast majority of students, what they believe about evolution isn't going to have any appreciable impact on their ability to do their jobs. The small percentage of very smart students who go on to careers in science aren't going to be damaged much by having heard some ID nonsense. Anybody who really needs to learn about evolution will learn about it. Plenty of great scientists emerge from the Bible belt. Science doesn't have to care too much what hoi polloi believe as long as they pay their taxes. That's the true meaning of NOMA. Sure, it would be wonderful if everybody agreed with me on everything. But that's not going to happen. So I have to pick my battles.

I have a lot more to lose on the energy problem than I do on the ID problem.

Tell me how ID compares to $400 oil. Because I can't think of a way that it does. It's like comparing a stubbed toe to losing a leg.

I thought I was clear enough that these secondary battles will be worth fighting once we solve the real problems of petroleum depletion and global warming.

Are you familiar with the concept of priorities? It is possible to believe several things are important, but when you lack the resources to deal with all of them at once, you have to pick the most pressing problem and deal with that one first. People always prioritize in life. For example, everybody who is reading my post has for some reason decided that reading my post is more important than everything else he or she could be doing right now. (I'm not sure whether to feel flattered, or dismayed.)

YouTube gives some indication of the relative priority people assign to various topics. The atheism-related videos on YouTube seem to receive many more views than the peak oil-related videos. The books on "new atheism" probably sell more copies than books about peak oil. Perhaps that will change, when the price of petroleum doubles or triples from its current level. Or maybe civilization will collapse and most people won't have the first clue about why, or what they should have done to prevent the collapse.

Do we just let the forces of unreason march into our schools? Our governments?

What do mean by "march into"? Do you suggest the forces of unreason are not already running our schools and governments?

There's a chance that in ten years we won't have any functioning schools or governments. That's peak oil scenario Z, the worst case.

I am unable to muster any facts that definitely rule out the worst case.

I certainly agree, that if our present society had an ironclad guarantee of stability for the next several decades, then it would be well worth fighting against even the most trivial forms of irrationality in our schools. You seem to be ordering your priorities on that rosily optimistic assumption.

But how many of us are actually fighting against irrationality in our schools? Mostly it seems we are just preaching to the choir on this site. It's not like we need to convince ourselves to reject ID.

Peak oil, on the other hand, is an extremely under-recognized problem, even among the kind of people who are educated enough to recognize ID as a problem. I'm simply trying to redress this shocking priority imbalance. It seems quite a number of readers of this site had only the vaguest notion of peak oil before I began schooling them. As evidenced by the staggering misconception that peak oil somehow equates to running out of oil. That's on the same intellectual level as all the dumb creationist objections to evolution.

Part of the reason we get no traction on issues of dramatic ecological importance is because we've let unreason go unchecked for so long. We've let the virulent strain of American anti-intellectualism spread.

It seems to me that the most productive way to counteract irrationality on the issues that matter most is to disseminate the facts about the issues that matter most, rather than facts about issues which matter less. This is not to say we stop disseminating those other facts, but the real question is, why aren't we talking about the issues that matter most?

If I wasn't here, would there even be a peak oil discussion on the RDF site?

No, it is important to have these other discussions because it helps people understand how science works. On your advice we would only focus our attentions on this one issue and let everything else go. Do you not see why this would be catastrophically bad?

Frankly, no. Because if we don't focus everything we've got on the problem which matters most, we might not have a functioning civilization in which to focus on other problems.

Do you have any concept of what $400 oil could mean? Do you think you will still be able to think about problems as trivial as ID in the schools if the price of oil goes that high?

Not everyone is an expert on this question, but they are expert on other questions. It is good that people apply their expertise where it is most needed.

Anybody who is smart can easily become an expert in any field, just by focusing on it for the requisite time. It doesn't take a lot to become an expert on peak oil, relatively speaking, since the general population is profoundly ignorant on the issue. Anybody with a basic understanding of physics and chemistry can quickly grasp the essentials of peak oil, what to do about it, and why fixing the problem is so difficult.

We need a lot more of our limited number of smart people to focus on the energy problem, soon, or we're screwed.

Nobel prize winner Steven Chu agrees; check out his talk:

The Energy Problem: What the Helios Project Can Do About It
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLr4YbStc0M

Chu doesn't actually mention "peak oil" in that talk. He uses the quasi-euphemism of "energy security", and he shows a graph of America's skyrocketing bill for imported petroleum. Actually we have a tight bundle of related problems: peak oil, energy security, climate change, and food supply. So everything Chu is doing is the same stuff he would be doing if he was talking about peak oil in so many words. He's trying to motivate more of the top scientists to shift their attention to the energy problem. I hope he succeeds.

Now I must get back to reading your tomes.

Your avatar photo suggests you have the necessary stamina.

I hope you look farther than my posts. I can't do justice to the large and impressive peak oil literature. Hubbert peak theory is really elegant. It is parsimonious in a way somewhat like evolutionary theory: a compact theory, which seems completely intuitive once someone explains how it works, and then lots of other things suddenly make sense that otherwise wouldn't.

Once you understand Hubbert peak theory, you will find yourself shouting at the dimwits on the TV news when they talk gibberish about the fuel price rise and the world food price crisis. Virtually none of the TV talking heads seem to be aware that Hubbert peak theorists have been predicting all this stuff for decades and have a completely sensible explanation for it.

3. Indian village proud after double 'honor killing'

Comment #181272 by Teratornis on May 16, 2008 at 8:25 pm

This is an interesting story, but everyone is probably wondering: what does this story have to do with peak oil?

Perhaps not much at the moment. But India's population has exploded over the past century, in large part due to gains in agriculture from the application of petroleum (for mechanization, fertilizers, pesticides, processing, shipment, etc.).

India has a large and rapidly growing population, a large percentage of which is very poor. Perhaps the killers of Sunita and Jasbir will not survive the post-peak oil dieback, when skyrocketing oil prices lead to skyrocketing food prices, and basically there just won't be enough oil to feed all the poor while simultaneously keeping the wealthy comfortable.

Since I don't see the wealthy choosing to sacrifice any comfort voluntarily (charity is fine so long as it isn't a sacrifice), our social Darwinist world economic system will probably sacrifice the poor first. If, as if seems virtually certain, world oil production falls faster than substitute technologies can make up the difference, these impoverished Indian villages that are stuck in such backward practices might get starved back toward their pre-industrial size.

4. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #180755 by Teratornis on May 15, 2008 at 5:29 pm

Comment #180686 by Frankus1122:

I could be wrong here but I think the idea is that we have gone past the half way point.

World oil production has in fact been approximately flat since 2005, despite the enormous run-up in oil price. This strongly suggests we are at or near peak oil right now. If Hubbert peak theory is correct, that would mean the world has used approximately half of all the conventional oil it will ever use, give or take.

Politics has already changed the shape of the Hubbert curve. If the OPEC nations had not artificially reduced production and driven up prices, the world would have peaked much sooner at a higher production i.e. dependency level. That would have made peak oil worse than it is going to be.

Up to the early 1970s, world oil consumption was increasing at 7% per year, i.e. doubling every ten years. That meant in each decade, the world used more oil than it had used in all the preceding decades.

The OPEC oil embargoes were very traumatic for a world accustomed to 7% more oil every year. The actual reduction for the U.S. was only about 5%, but that had an enormous impact.

Afterwards, world oil consumption began increasing again, but not as fast. And at least a few people began thinking about life after the oil peak. So we are slightly better prepared than we would have been without OPEC imposing some early discipline. Which is not to say we are anything like adequately prepared.

Production data for non-OPEC countries in unequivocal: collectively, they peaked in 1997. The U.K., for example, has seen its North Sea fields decline rapidly, and is now a net importer of oil. At least the U.K. had the good sense to keep its high fuel taxes in place during its fleeting years of oil plenty. Otherwise, U.K. citizens would have evolved into profligate gaswasters like U.S. citizens did in response to low fuel prices.

There are more oil deposits but they are not the readily available ones. You have stuff like the Alberta tar sands - not the easiest stuff to extract. It will become increasingly more difficult and expensive to get the oil we need.
It is not that there is no oil left but rather the oil that is left will be subject to the law of diminishing returns.
I think that's right. If not the big T will set us straight.

Nothing to set straight there. That's peak oil in a nutshell.

I might add that the law of diminishing returns has a technical name: EROEI (energy returned on energy invested). When humans stop pulling oil from the ground, there will still be large amounts of oil left, but getting it out will take more energy than it yields. Technology can help with this to some degree, but when it comes to squeezing out the last scraps of oil from exhausted fields, technology gains tend to be incremental at best.

The Canadian tar sands are huge, but as with all resources, the Canadians began with the easiest deposits, the sands right at the surface. The deposit they're mining now goes on for a few miles, then it dives under deeper layers of earth. If the Canadians have to go to a deep mining process to get the tar sands, the cost will skyrocket. Although if oil hits $400/bbl, it might still be worth doing. Just don't expect to see many Hummers and Escalades on the road if oil gets that high.

According to Matthew Simmons, the current state of the art in enhanced recovery technology has not appreciably changed the ultimate yield of fields like Cantarell - it only allowed the fields to get sucked dry faster.

The take-home lesson is, oil means three main things, in descending order:

1. Transportation
2. Food
3. Petrochemicals

Transportation will be the first thing to get cut, especially discretionary travel. Food and petrochemicals generate more value from a barrel of oil than, say, driving or flying around on holidays, so we can expect transport to lose the bidding war first.

This means the first and most important adaptation to life after the oil peak is learning to live - and prosper! - with far less physical travel. The people who figure that out first will do better than the people who are slow to figure it out.

Getting a bicycle and learning how to maintain it would also be a good idea. But you'd also like to find a way to make money without moving, even if it's only a part-time option.

If things get really rough, we might see problems with food. This would be a good time to think about starting a garden, just so one has the skills in place if it becomes necessary. Even if one can afford to buy food, growing some of one's own reduces competition on food prices, which might be something to think about if you care about the starving Haitians who are getting priced out in part because people like me have been too lazy to garden.

Getting to know one's neighbors better is advisable as well. Reduction in travel will require communities to become more self-sufficient than they have been lately.

5. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #180748 by Teratornis on May 15, 2008 at 4:51 pm

Comment #180671 by al-rawandi:

What about the rest of Saudi Arabia's potential oil fields. Which have not even been explored yet? You are certainly only talking about currently discovered oil fields.

U.S. oil discoveries peaked in 1939; U.S. oil production peaked in 1970. After U.S. production peaked, the U.S. went on a drilling boom. Despite drilling more wells than the rest of the world combined, the U.S. saw its domestic production steadily decline, with a couple of bumps on the decline curve from Prudhoe Bay and deepwater Gulf of Mexico fields.

World oil discoveries peaked in 1960. 1980 was the last year when the oil industry discovered more oil than it extracted. The last major field yielding more than a million barrels a day was found in Mexico in 1976.

The oil industry has steadily improved its technology for finding oil, steadily reducing the chances that any really large fields have been overlooked in areas as well-explored as Saudi Arabia.

Anything is possible, of course. Maybe tomorrow the Saudis will find another Ghawar field. The odds are pretty low that the downward trend in discoveries since 1960 will reverse itself, but you never know.

This review says don't get your hopes up:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047173876X/counterpunchmaga

Indeed, Aramco has prospected extensively outside the Ghawar region but found nothing of significance.

The nature of oil discoveries is such that the biggest fields are the easiest to find. Being bigger, they are more obvious to geologists, and easier to hit with test wells.

With world oil consumption so high now, and wanting to grow steadily, any relief from large new discoveries will be temporary. The world oil peak might get moved back a few years at best.

At some point, every government in every nation will have to adopt the policy that you don't burn more than what grows back sustainably each year. The countries that voluntarily get there first will be best-positioned to ride out the mess when reality allows no other option.

For some qualified doubts about the official Saudi reserve estimates (which the Saudi government refuses to allow outside experts to verify), see Matthew Simmons' Twilight in the Desert.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Simmons

6. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Comment #180713 by Teratornis on May 15, 2008 at 3:32 pm

Comment #176295 by thyseeker:

I am a lurker and seldom post…but I am also an old investment advisor and oil man and can not resist comment on this topic.

It's good to hear from someone who actually knows something about the topic.

1. The Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia recently noted that the price of oil was headed to $200. I have no reason to doubt him.
2. Last week a CIBC Research Report noted that the sale of Autos was up 60% in Russia in 2007 over 2006. In Brazil this same figure was up 30% and in China this same figure was up 20%. What does this tell you about the use of oil?
3. Just yesterday, a Goldman Sachs Research Report predicted a "Super Spike" in the price of oil in the months ahead. Goldman expects $150 oil within six months and $200 oil within 24 months.

Goldman Sachs has been steadily upping predictions of the future price of oil. In late 2007, a Goldman Sachs report predicted $95/bbl oil by the end of 2008, and that was an increase over their previous prediction.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/energy/goldman-sachs-oil-prices-hit---barrel/
http://www.energypublisher.com/article.asp?id=11171

The whole world seems to be playing catch-up to the peak oil camp, which for decades had predicted rapid increases in the price of oil as the world approaches and passes peak oil. So far, everything is going about the way the peaksters have predicted, which suggests we might seriously consider their further predictions. The former oil optimists (DOE's IEA, the EIA, and CERA) have been steadily downgrading their rosy predictions of enormous growth in oil production through the year 2030.

My main disappointment with the peak oil camp is that none of them seem to fully grasp the implications of Moore's law for replacing physical travel with virtual travel. But then again, neither does about 98% of the population. I believe that will soon change.

CIBC and Goldman are gold plated investment firms. I think that their predictions will help their expectations come true (because people will act upon them).

To me it looks more like a matter of everybody else playing catch-up to the predictions of parsimonious peak oil theory. M. King Hubbert's simple observations about extraction rates of finite resources in 1956 have pretty much explained everything that's happened in oil since. Predictions of investment firms might move the price rise schedule forward or back a few months, but cannot change the overall trend, which results from boundlessly growing demand crashing into declining supply.

As for the USA…

The above facts/ trends call for change. Here are a few facts that have caught my eye…

1. About 85% of drillable public lands (esp in Alaska and off shore) are now closed to oil and gas drilling. This will change in response to pain.... and the fact that Chinese company has been drilling 50 miles off our shores in Cuban waters and Brazil recently made a multi billion barrel find 200 miles off of its shores at great depths may ease the way.
2. T Boon Pickins (a legendary oil operator) is in the process of self financing a $10 billion dollar wind farm in Texas. This will be the nations largest…4000 Mega-Watts.

That sounds interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._Boone_Pickens#World.27s_largest_wind_farm

3. The Canadian Pacific Railroad has purchased a small railroad (the DM & E) that has Govt approvals to build/ patch together another rail line out of the Wyoming coal fields to the Mid West. The US has a 200 year supply of coal in Western Wyoming. This will be the nations largest rail project in 100 years and could greatly increase the coal supply for electricity generators in the heart of our nation.

One must be cautious about characterizing fossil fuel deposits in terms of "years of supply." Such estimates hinge on several shaky assumptions, such as the amount of resource that is actually recoverable, and consumption rates holding constant.

If the U.S. were to replace all its oil use with coal, and maintain past growth in energy consumption, a "200 year supply" would shrink by several times.

4. The Government recently estimated the bakken shale lands in North Dakota and Montana hold about 4 billion barrels of oil. There are over 50 oil drilling rigs in that area right now. Small potatoes…but an indication of what is going to happen…happiness is a low cost oil field.
5. The nuclear fear factor will be overcome. Many do not realize that about 20% of the US power supply comes from nuclear power…even though the nation has not built a new nuclear power plant in decades. Dozens and dozens of new plants are in the works around the world. China has about 20 plants in the pipeline, about a half dozen are under contract.

Uranium is a finite resource. It's huge, like coal, but massively expanding usage to make up for declining oil would cause it to deplete much faster. Breeder reactors could extend the supply of uranium by many times, but there are no commercial power breeder reactors, and there would be problems if power plants all over the world are generating weapons-grade plutonium. Plus it takes more than ten years to build a new nuclear power plant in the U.S. And, unfortunately, nuclear power cannot quickly supply fuel for the existing transportation fleet, which depends on petroleum for almost all its energy.

I do not think that we are headed for a cold and dark future…in the West but I do think we are headed for painful and costly change that could disrupt world economic development and lead to a rush to tie down supply contracts. We will see more economic aid tied to mining and drilling activities (look at recent Chinese deals in Africa). Also, shipping and tanker stocks have done well for the past few years and should continue to do well.

I don't know what we are headed for, other than it looks sure to be a lot worse than it needs to be, with almost everyone in government and industry being caught flat-footed and surprised by the current surge in oil prices. It's as if none of the people in charge had ever heard of Hubbert Peak theory. I knew about this stuff since the 1970s when I saw a graph of Hubbert's curve in a National Geographic article about the energy crises of the time. The peaking of world oil production somewhere between 2000 and 2010 has been predicted for decades, and the predictions have gotten more accurate as more researchers have refined them. The actual peak in conventional oil appears to have been in 2005, and the peak in oil from all sources in 2006.

The U.S. would have no trouble meeting the challenge if everyone adopted my lifestyle. But that is not going to happen until people get forced to change, and that's going to create serious problems.

Even if the wealthy nations ride out the storm and transition smoothly to renewable energy, the world's poorest billion people, or two billion, look to be in for a rough go. Already lots of poor people are rioting over food prices around the world. When oil hits $200/bbl, they won't have the strength to get up and riot. If oil keeps going to $300 or $400 as the doomers predict (and what else can it do, once world oil production starts dropping at 4% or more per year while world demand wants to keep growing?), it's hard to see how there won't be starvation on a massive scale in the poor countries.

Even in the U.S. we could see food shortages, and a breakdown in long-distance food transport.

I'm not personally betting on collapse - yet. But I haven't seen anybody make a convincing case against it. The only arguments I've seen basically amount to hunches, or denial, as in "I don't see how collapse is possible, therefore it won't happen."

I'd feel better if industrial civilization rested on something more substantial than the argument from ignorance or the argument from personal incredulity.

Finally, Islamic oil producing nations are now in the drivers seat and there are no short term prospects of removing them from their position of power. The only way to reduce their power long term is to reduce imports of oil. If prices keep climbing….we do have a chance of doing just that. Time will tell.

Price is an inefficient method for reducing the power of Islam, because as oil prices rise, oil exporters keep making more money even if they sell a little less oil. For example, even though U.S. oil consumption is dropping slightly at the higher prices, the U.S. is spending far more on oil imports because the proportional change in price has been far higher:

Crude Oil Prices Drive up Cost of U.S. Addiction

If the U.S. would impose European-style fuel taxes, then we might reduce Islam's revenue, but the odds of that are nil. U.S. politicians are even talking about a holiday from the tiny fuel taxes we have now, which is exactly the wrong thing to do at a time when we desperately need to cut fuel consumption.

It would be nice if we had an eruption of plain old intelligence in the U.S., and people just voluntarily stopped buying oil and financing Islam, but that doesn't seem likely. This is, after all, the nation in which half the population believes the Earth is 6,000 years old.

It looks like anybody with oil will be in the driver's seat until their oil runs out.

7. UC Berkeley is going to court over Evolution website

Comment #180703 by Teratornis on May 15, 2008 at 3:16 pm

I wonder, does UC Berkeley take a position on female genital mutilation, thereby endorsing some religions over others? How about the religious practice of taking psychoactive drugs which happen to be controlled substances in California? How about polygamy and child marriages?

Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA wishful thinking is not actually a bad idea, if only religions would agree to stay in the tight box Gould provided them. However, that would require all religions to avoid making any scientifically testable claims.

I suspect that any claim which is not scientifically testable is also devoid of real-world meaning and therefore devoid of real-world consequence.

A religion based only on such claims would therefore not be practically useful. Not many people would be satisfied with a religion that had absolutely nothing to say of any consequence while people are still alive. Certainly, none of the religions on offer seem to have historically restricted themselves to purely untestable claims.

The Bible, for example, is chock full of testable predictions about the pre-death consequences of actions such as sin, prayer, animal sacrifice, etc. The Bible is essentially an instruction manual for propitiating God.

Gould's plan was "blessedly simple" as he claimed in Rocks of Ages: ask religious people to give up most of their current religion, and agree to further cuts in the future as science learns how to test more and more claims.

If only persuading religious people to give up all that stuff were blessedly simple.

8. Americans pray at the pump for cheaper petrol

Comment #180448 by Teratornis on May 15, 2008 at 1:51 am

OK, my restraint has reached its limit. I simply must enter this thread. Time for a giant bird to swoop in. Back, by popular demand. Hopefully the giant extinct carrion-eater will not disappoint too much more than normally.

To paraphrase Archimedes, give me a place to stand, and I will offend the Earth.

Comment #179215 by Roland_F:

39. Comment #179213 by GordonYKWong

eh? there seems to be a resiliance to tetra's message about Peak Oil.

yes when they come under a topic of religious violence, 'Expelled' trash movie etc... where the discussion has nothing to do with Oil at all.

I believe this claim is objectively wrong. Although I have mentioned peak oil gratuitously a few times - sometimes even labeling it as such - in most cases where I chime in about peak oil, it's when the discussion has veered onto issues that most certainly do have to do with oil - for example, Islam. We cannot talk about Islam and the clash of civilizations and expect to say much that is coherent if we pretend oil has nothing to do with it. A billion Muslims bow five times per day toward the greatest concentration of petroleum left on Earth - and without which we wouldn't be able to have all these discussions.

Mark my words (or just wait for me to come back and say I told you so): in five years, or less, everybody who wasted even one brain cell fretting over the Expelled movie - as if it was an issue that mattered - will regret not having focused that spare mental capacity on the energy problem sooner. Not just the energy problem in the abstract, which is certainly worth educating ourselves about, but also your personal problem with energy. How will you manage, personally, when oil hits $200/bbl? $300/bbl? $400/bbl? What is your plan? Now is the time to prepare. Everybody needs to think about this, starting yesterday.

Shooting the messenger is not going to put one drop of oil in the ground. Everyone has the option to wallow around in denial, and push all those unpleasant thoughts away, but reality does not care about anyone's little sensitivities. Reality is going to assert itself regardless of how anybody feels.

I predict that in five years (2013) everyone who remembers this thread will think back to those happy, carefree days of 2008 when the world was only about 2 years past the global peak of oil production, when the full effects hadn't yet been felt in the advanced countries, and marvel at how many of us thought it made sense to allocate some of our scarce attention to issues of pure frivolity like the Expelled movie. The situation is quite different in places like Haiti, of course, where peak oil is already killing people. Everyone who is comfortable and well-fed today is enjoying the benefits of our ruthlessly efficient social Darwinist global economic system, which makes sure to sacrifice the poorest first, sparing the rich as long as possible. (Personally, I'm not entirely opposed to the social Darwinism we have created, particularly when my belly is full. If I was a starving kid in Haiti I'd probably feel differently. But in that situation I might ask my impoverished Haitian mother why she thought I needed six siblings.)

However, the world's poorest people don't consume much oil, so even when a billion of them starve (and I say "when" not "if" because we probably cannot hope to feed them when oil hits $300/bbl and we're struggling just to keep our own economies going), they won't lighten the lifeboat all that much. Thus the industrialized nations which foolishly addicted themselves to petroleum - with the U.S. leading the way as the most profligate oil-consumer of all - are about to get seriously schooled in the consequences of ignoring reality.

Thanks in part to my tireless efforts, every faithful reader of the RDF site comments now knows far more about peak oil than about 99% of U.S. citizens, and certainly far more than all those particularly foolish U.S. citizens who believe prayer is going to lift them out of the liquid fuels dependency abyss they have been busily digging for themselves for the last 20 years of anomalously low oil prices.

Most of us are rational enough to understand prayer is a waste of time - but is ignoring the oil problem any smarter? Is jabbering about things like the Expelled movie any smarter than praying for cheap fuel? I'm serious here. If your house is burning down, what is your highest priority at that moment? Perhaps everything else can wait. After we solve the energy problem - if we can solve it - there will be plenty of time to worry about creationism, religion, God, etc. again. Before we call the religious stupid one more time, let's show some ability to be smart about energy. If the rational, educated people of the world, the so-called "Brights," cannot figure out what the real problem is, and solve it, then who will? Those of us who happen to have received the gift of brains that work better than average, thanks to the genetic crap shoot of life, have a responsibility to apply our brains to the problems that matter. And right now, the energy problem matters more than any other problem. People who are smarter than average should get this sooner than average people.

The oil glut of the 1980s and the resulting period of low fuel prices reminds me of the ocean receding from a beach before a tsunami strikes. People on the beach who don't know how to read the ocean might run out onto the suddenly exposed seabed to grab stranded fish. While greedily exploiting the unexpected bonanza, they fail to notice what is about to come crashing down on them.

Most people don't know much about tsunamis - as evidenced by the number of victims each new one claims - but is there any excuse for not knowing? All the information is in writing and easily accessible. It's even on the science channels on TV. The same goes for peak oil. Everything that is happening today in the oil markets has been predicted for decades. Unfortunately, people like Julian Simon assured everyone there was nothing to worry about - if we run out of one resource, the magic of the market will create new resources, even better and cheaper than the one which ran out. But for the market to do that, somebody had to be worrying about the problem all along, yet we have been drastically under-investing in energy research for decades.

Comment #179233 by AllanW:

It's waaaaaay past time;

Teratornis! Paging Teratornis! Your prescence is requested on a thread to do with oil prices! Teratornis! Oh! wherefore art thou, Teratornis?

Behold, the giant extinct bird, descending from heaven, with a familiar message! Honestly, I'm wondering what I can write here which I haven't already written a dozen times. But if you insist...

I'm sort of like an introduced species on all those other supposedly non-oil threads. Call me the kudzu of peak oil. So, finally, we get a thread where I get to be endemic for a change. This could take some getting used to.

I stand by my prediction that in five years, there won't be much else to talk about, we will be so absorbed in our energy problem. It will be hard for people to think about much else. Our forced withdrawal from petroleum addiction is going to be ugly, a lot uglier than it needs to be if we quit the habit before reality yanks the needle away.

Comment #179364 by Richard Dawkins:

I suspect that the prayer part of this story is another Onion type joke.

I live in Ohio, a mere bike ride from the Creation Museum across the Ohio River, so the joke certainly seems believable here. Almost every time the local TV news reports on some house fire or road accident or vicious crime, the victims or friends and family being interviewed prattle on about God and prayer and Jesus, and even the reporters solemnly nod in agreement. I almost want to pray that this story is a joke. But I fear that would be just more evidence of prayer's ineffectiveness.

But what is not a joke is the fact that US gasoline prices are so ridiculously low. I calculate that current British prices are 2.27 TIMES as great, and I wish they were higher. We need US prices to be double or even triple what they are today, in order to force motorists to buy more economical cars -- small cars, hybrid cars, electric cars etc.

Even better, to ride bicycles and telecommute.

Saudi Arabia has one of the vilest ruling regimes in the entire world and, as somebody said, the SUVs to which so many people are addicted today might just as well carry little Saudi flags. The US gasoline addiction is playing into the hands of the oil sheikhs.

Richard

That's the message Americans need to comprehend. And let's not forget air travel, which burns more petroleum per passenger-mile than any other form of transportation. Air travel in the U.S. has increased five times faster than population growth since 1978 - but that is about to get reversed, as airlines get clobbered by record high oil prices. (Air travel in general may be about to go the way of the Concorde, only for the superrich.) When air travel is solely for the purpose of exchanging information - which can be done for far less energy electronically now - our choice to reward our Saudi Arabian "friends" for the privilege is somewhere between suicidally stupid and criminal.

It might help if Americans could see the staggering increase in U.S. dollars getting shipped to Saudi Arabia year by year. Saudi Arabia is currently the second-largest source of oil imports to the U.S., it recently crept past Mexico as Mexico's production peaked several years ago and its exports are declining fast now. The Saudi Islamic theocracy is getting twice as much cash as just one year ago, since oil prices have doubled.

I read an interesting proposal to impose a fuel "nontax" in the U.S. This would involve slapping on a European-style fuel tax, but then refunding the tax revenue back to U.S. citizens in lump sum payments at the end of the year, with everyone getting an equal share of the total fuel tax revenue. This would seem to be pointless, but it would have the effect of rewarding U.S. citizens who use less than the per capita average fuel consumption. The tax would be progressive, as low-income people tend to drive and fly less than high-income people. Those outer beltway McMansions and first-class tickets aren't being bought by the working poor, and neither are lots of Hummers.

The U.S. has 5% of the world's people and we use 25% of the world's oil. European nations maintain a similar standard of living on about half the per capita use of oil, with further efficiencies readily possible. It's about time that the rest of the world tells the U.S. to stop wasting oil that everybody needs. If the U.S. would start living like Europe, we could free up 10 million barrels of oil per day - that would be like another Saudi Arabia flooding the market.

Of course even adding another Saudi Arabia's worth of efficiency would not permanently solve the problem, because world oil production is going to decline by that much and more within a few years. But it would buy us a few years to work on advanced biofuels and wind turbines and still-better conservation methods.

Comment #179392 by al-rawandi:

I don't want to talk oil with Tertornis. He seems convinced we are running out. Which isn't the case, near as anyone in the oil world can tell.

I don't know where you could have gotten that idea - at least you're smart enough not to try to quote me saying such a thing. Your misrepresentation of Hubbert peak theory is like Ben Stein's portrayal of evolution. Ben Stein showed that he hasn't understood the first thing biologists have been explaining for years. Will you ask why we still have monkeys, if people evolved from monkeys?

There is no excuse for being ignorant of evolutionary theory - but for most people, evolutionary theory has almost no real impact on their lives. They can believe the Earth is 6000 years old and still do just fine in most jobs. So it doesn't matter much that half of Americans believe nonsense about natural history - the U.S. remains an economic and military superpower.

In contrast, being ignorant of Hubbert peak theory - as you still somehow manage to be - has real consequences. In this life. In fact, real soon now. Try to imagine a world in which people who don't understand evolutionary theory were about to get smacked hard. That's where we are heading with respect to energy.

Peak oil is the point at which humans have consumed about half of the world's conventional oil. If you understand the exponential function, you'd realize that at that point, humans would need about 10 years to polish off the rest if they could manage to increase their consumption by 7% per year, as humans did during the first hundred years of the oil era, up until the first OPEC oil price shocks of the early 1970s. Whether or not you understand the exponential function, you should watch Albert Bartlett's classic lecture, which I have arranged into a playlist for viewing convenience:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=86564447E33EE0D4

However, Hubbert peak theory predicts (and the prediction worked very well for U.S. production) that at the halfway point, the rate of production (and therefore, consumption) will unavoidably start to slow. The reason for this is very simple: whenever humans exploit a natural resource, we quite logically start with the easiest deposits. It's a lot easier to ramp up production in the early days. Then as the easy stuff gets exhausted, getting the rest becomes progressively more difficult, i.e., slower and more expensive. Production eventually levels off, then goes into decline. If demand continues to grow as it did in the early days of abundance - and why wouldn't it - then the gap between demand and supply will grow. And therefore, the price of the resource will also grow, to destroy enough demand to bring it down to match supply, unless viable substitutes can be found. But so far, nobody has come up with a viable substitute for oil in the quantities that we use, and nobody who has seriously looked at the problem can imagine we will have viable substitutes in sufficient quantities for at least a decade. Thus we can expect that for quite a while - possibly, for the rest of my life expectancy - the world is going to deal with a severe scarcity of liquid fuels.

(I may have used the word "shortage" in my earlier writings. I recently heard from an economist who enlightened me to the proper use of the term. A "shortage", to an economist, does not occur when the market is free to allocate scarcity via price. Rather, a "shortage" is when the price of a scarce commodity is artificially held down, and then sellers simply run out, and some willing buyers do not get any product. So, if the price of petrol doubles or triples from current levels, lots of motorists won't be able to afford as much as they want, but the market will insure that everybody who can pay the going price will get all they are willing to buy at that price. The average motorist will perceive a "shortage," but economists won't call it that as long as price is free to match demand to supply.)

I have never read any peak oil proponent who claims oil will suddenly run out. Every one takes pains to correct this routine misconception by people who are willfully ignorant of Hubbert peak theory. Suddenly running out of oil is physically impossible. Pumping oil from the ground is not like draining oil from a tank. The less that remains, the slower the remainder comes out. We can expect the downslope of the Hubbert curve to extend about as far as the upslope, which is longer than a century. But a century from now, humans will not be pulling oil from the ground in large quantities.

There are enhanced recovery techniques which can suck oil out of the ground faster. That's what Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) used on its mighty Cantarell field in an attempt to maintain production at peak levels. It worked for a while, but now Cantarell's output is declining at a rate much faster than is typical for mature fields.

The world, of course, has "vast" supplies of non-conventional oil, but there are severe limits as to how fast Canadians can dig up Alberta, or the U.S. can dig up Utah. The Canadians expect to run out of the natural gas they use to melt the tar out of their Athabasca sands fairly soon, and they might have to build a nuclear plant to keep the tar sands project running. And even if production could be ramped up, exponential growth in consumption would make short work of these "vast" deposits. Watch Prof. Bartlett's discussion and get schooled in how the exponential function works.

Comment #179324 by phasmagigas:

as for food prices, well i suppose we in the west get a far greater deal than most, i wonder what % of income/work hours is spent on food in the USA compared to say some subsistence farmer in a less developed nation. i bought a huge bag of nuts the other day for about $5 and it had enough calories for a couple of days, that to my mind seems incredibly inexpensive.

In the U.S. I think the figure recently was about 10% of income goes to food, and that includes all the dining out, which is more expensive than home-cooking. Of course that figure is going up, because modern agriculture is a system for converting petroleum and natural gas into food. As the price of oil rises, the price of food rises. If oil hits $300 to $400/bbl as the peak oil doomers predict, the cost of eating in the U.S. could start to become seriously burdensome even for the middle class. Even now, obesity rates are higher among poor people in the U.S. than among the wealthy, and that might start to change as poor Americans might start to have difficulty purchasing excess calories, and have to start walking and bicycling more.

In the countries with food riots now, the people throwing rocks and looting stores are expressing their discontent with the subsistence diet which has risen to more than 100% of their income.

The world's poorest billion live on about $1/day/person, and the next poorest two billion come in under $3/day/person. Even before peak oil blew up food prices, $1/day was already barely enough to survive. The cost of food in dollar terms is pretty much the same everywhere, so living on $1/day in, say, Nigeria is not much different than trying to do it in the U.S.

I think farmers around the world are generally doing better now that food prices have risen. Certainly U.S. farmers are enjoying a boom that hasn't been seen in decades. The problem for the poor countries is that lots of poor people aren't farmers any more. The population explosion combined with globalization and petroleum-fueled transportation has led to a great increase in urban populations. The limited amounts of arable land in poor countries can't support the huge and growing number of people, so the excess populations moved to cities and became dependent on food grown by other people. The global trade in food kept food prices low, because farmers everywhere had to compete with super-efficient U.S. farmers (and Argentines, etc.) Now those people who moved to cities and bet their lives on food staying cheap forever are getting clobbered.

That's enough for this installment. I'll let Switzerland's young vocal phenom, Stefanie Heinzmann, play me out with her topically appropriate cover of Tower of Power's 1974 hit, Only so much Oil in the Ground:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAWI-PHM600

(Worth the click, if you like old skool soul/funk music.)

9. Richard Dawkins interviewed by John Humphrys on Cardinal Murphy O'Connor

Comment #178135 by Teratornis on May 10, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Comment #177744 by Paula Kirby:

No, you are confusing ACHIEVING a public forum with BEING GIVEN a public forum. Day after day, week after week, religion is GIVEN free access to our airwaves. Unchallenged.

Well, be careful what you wish for. Here in the U.S. there is no comparable government subsidy of religious broadcasting (other than the tax break, which atheists can also get - I'd like to see all such tax breaks eliminated), and the result is that instead of a weak state-supported religion, made soft through centuries of being shielded from competition, we have vigorous private-sector religions.

I'm wondering, though, just how many centuries of state support it takes to cripple a religion? Whatever the figure, it appears Saudi Arabia has not had enough centuries yet to cripple its state religion of Wahhabism.

If the U.K. would switch its state religion to a younger, more vigorous religion such as Scientology or Mormonism, which might survive state support for several generations at least, then you might pray for the return of Anglicanism.

10. Richard Dawkins interviewed by John Humphrys on Cardinal Murphy O'Connor

Comment #178123 by Teratornis on May 10, 2008 at 2:40 pm

Comment #177574 by Star Spangled Eagle:

people, whether it's like Hitler or Stalin, bringing up - having a country in which, if you like, a God free zone, a dictatorship ruled by reason, and where does it lead? To terror and oppression

This must be one of the most stupid fucking things anyone could ever say.

Reason leads to oppression and terror?

This man is evil.

Certainly not my reason. I hope.

I wouldn't say the comment is stupid so much as it is becoming dated and irrelevant. It appears that modern information technologies are closing the window for Hitler-style despotism, at least in the OECD nations. The real threats today are not from first-world despotism, but from resource depletion, most immediately the peaking and decline of world oil extraction. Talking about Hitler is like being the proverbial general who insists on continuing to fight the previous war, instead of accurately meeting the new enemy.

But O'Connor's might have something of a point, in that most people who are successful at something, whether it is good or evil, usually are able to reason clearly enough to accomplish whatever they are trying to do. As Richard has pointed out, there is a "logical pathway" which can lead from faith to evil actions. Presumably, a person can only navigate a logical pathway by being somewhat logical. The starting premises may be false or illogical, but from them one can make some structurally valid logical inferences, at least enough to get the job done.

We can be certain that to carry out the attacks of 9/11, the terrorists had to employ plenty of critical thinking along the way. They had to accurately determine everything they would need to carry out the plot, and then stick to the schedule with utmost discipline and coordination.

If someone is going to succeed at doing evil, apart from stumbling into an opportunity from sheer dumb luck, they probably have to approach it systematically and apply the same tools of reason that almost all successful people use, at least within the domain of their success.

Some forms of evil do seem to require selective reason, such as for example declaring certain questions off-limits to reason: how do we really know whether we will get 72 virgins in the afterlife if we commit suicide for Allah? A comprehensively reasonable person would have serious doubts about that proposition, and consider flying airliners into skyscrapers an unlikely way to find endless romantic bliss, whereas a selectively reasonable person can easily roll with it.

However, it's not clear that more and more reason must automatically cause everyone to be kind and compassionate. On some level, it seems we are nice to (some) people not because we arrived at that strategy through cold logic, but simply because our emotional brains happen to feel like being nice to (some) people. Since our compassion does not derive from reason, it is unreasonable to suppose that everybody else will magically feel the same compassion, even if they adopt some of our reasoning. (It is also unreasonable to suppose that everyone else will adopt 100% of our reasoning, so even if our reasoning did make us nice, there is no guarantee that sharing our reasoning with other people would give them a sufficient dose to yield the same outcome.)

Furthermore, there are some moral dilemmas which appear to have no good solution at the moment. For example, suppose a person suffers from a genetic defect, and wants to make babies. Ever since Hitler, we consider it odious for the state to interfere with an individual's reproductive rights. But what about the rights of as-yet-unborn children in future generations, to be born free from genetic defects? Should the state seek to protect them?

Given our current inability to repair an individual's defective genes, our only available option is to decide whose ox will get gored. Will the person with defective genes suffer a loss of reproductive freedom, for example by having the state forcibly sterilize him or her? Or will we respect the reproductive freedom of the defective carrier, and allow him or her to inflict defects on future people?

Since the unborn aren't around to protest, we generally regard them as having no rights. Each individual is currently free to inflict as much genetic damage on future generations as his or her genome and mating opportunities allow. To my mind, few forms of terrorism sound more frightening than genetic terrorism.

There are also forms of terror and oppression that affect people who don't enjoy comfortable first-world lives. There is, for example, the terror and oppression of being judged expendable by the global market. This is happening right now in impoverished nations like Haiti, where millions of the world's poorest people are being systematically priced out of a subsistence diet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hKhbf41H6o
World Food Crisis

The global market is a ruthlessly reasonable system for allocating scarcity. The market assigns each person an economic "worth," which manifests itself in terms of our incomes and wealth, and the market assigns every desirable commodity a worth, in the form of its price. Those of us who are at least reasonably comfortable can live with the idea that Bill Gates has a lot more. But those at the bottom of the market are becoming increasingly less able to live at all.

First world consumers will, quite reasonably, seek to maintain their accustomed first world lifestyles despite declining resources. This will become increasingly difficult, now that the metaphorical ship of the world economy has blundered into the Horse Latitudes of the post peak oil era. Just as desperate ships' crews of the past threw their horses overboard to conserve water when they were becalmed, so too will first-world consumers react to higher prices for oil primarily by paying more rather than by consuming less. This will, by inexorable market logic, drive up the costs of all commodities that depend on oil, such as food.

Rising commodity prices are, at least initially, merely an inconvenience for affluent consumers, but for people who were already living at the margin, such price increases probably seem to them like being the victim of an extermination campaign.

Because it is so hard for the average person to see the effects that a local behavioral choice has on a distant nation, almost no one views the petrol-fueled morning commite, or jetting off on holiday, as equivalent to participating in a genocide. But these customary activities are equivalent to participating in the genocide that is starting up right now.

Just ask those starving kids in Port-Au-Prince, who are surrounded by food their reproductively irresponsible parents cannot afford to buy.

The people who are rioting over food prices, when oil is trading for $126/bbl, will most likely be dropping dead in large numbers when oil hits $200/bbl and keeps climbing.

One could argue, and I think correctly, that we got into this mess by being unreasonable and ignoring the warnings of the Malthusians as long as oil appeared to be cheap, and oil-fueled prosperity seemed expandable without limit. But now that reality has intruded into our fantasy, the bills are coming due, and there aren't enough lifeboats for everyone. Faced with this situation, the reasonable solution (i.e. the market solution) is going to be cruel beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler and Stalin - picture up to two billion people starving in the next ten years. That's how many people right now are too poor to afford food if the price of oil climbs as high as peak oil theorists have been predicting. Saving them might not be possible even if the wealthy nations want to save them, as the wealthy nations will be facing severe economic troubles of their own, given that no nation adequately prepared itself for life after the oil peak.

I'm not suggesting that any form of superstition could do a better job of dealing with the unfolding crisis, just that reason can unleash cruelties to rival those of unreason.

11. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176590 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 5:15 pm

Comment #176582 by Podaar:

By the way, I understand your view on peak oil. Really I do. I think most regular readers of this site do. I think most readers probably agree with you...but, I also think you're loosing your audience.

We've probably also lost ASMarques.

I wish I could put more oil in the ground by losing my audience. Exxon would pay me billions of dollars to go around alienating people!

Unfortunately for my prospects for obscene wealth, reality doesn't care what anything thinks about reality.

When we argue with holocaust deniers, they can stay in denial forever. It's unfalsifiable, like believing in God - the belief does not depend on anything that will happen in the real world.

Peak oil is a lot more interesting, because very soon we will see who is right. Anyone who has experienced being out of gas knows how difficult it is to stay in denial about that.

Everyone should carefully examine the viability of their jobs, career plans, life plans, living arrangements, recreational preferences, etc., and see how they're set for oil at $200/bbl, $300/bbl, or $400/bbl (current price: around $120/bbl). Can your employer and your community continue to function at those prices? Can you?

Everybody should ask their employer, what's the plan if employees start having trouble getting fuel to drive to work? Are we set up to let people telecommute to the extent possible?

The $200 mark is looking like a near certainty within two years or less. The larger numbers are by no means out of the question either - throughout the oil price run-up since 2003, almost all "mainstream" projections about the future price have been too low. The exception has been the peak oil camp, of course, which said "I told you so" after the U.S. peaked in 1970, and is doing it again now that whole world appears to be peaking. The world has no spare oil production capacity any more, and demand continues to increase. New discoveries aren't keeping up with the decline in existing fields. So the price of fuel has nowhere to go but up.

I know it's a disturbing topic - which is why, of course, I obsess on it - but that's why we need everybody to get in the game. The problem is not going to solve itself, and (the nonexistent) God knows our politicians aren't going to solve it for us.

It's more fun to focus on comparatively meaningless trivia like the creation/evolution/ID controversy, or holocaust denial. We will have plenty of time to play whack-a-mole on those, but only if we solve our energy problems first.

12. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176581 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 4:06 pm

Comment #176555 by Podaar:

Teratornis,

I look forward to your patient reply to the above. I don't have the intestinal fortitude to even approach it. The anger that you deplore is too close to the surface.

"Deplore" sounds kind of angry to me, and anger at anger seems a bit self-referential, so I'd prefer to say "The anger that I advise against", or perhaps, "The anger that I suggest we remain consciously aware of."

Anger is a natural human emotion which results from a failure to impose our will on our surroundings. Since none of us can get reality to conform exactly to our wishes, there's no way to be human and entirely free from anger, but the main danger comes from not being consciously aware of our anger, and then acting impulsively on it. That's usually a maladptive response in a civilized society.

Actually, I'd say if you feel angry upon reading ASMarques' reply, then it would be a good exercise for you to rebut it. See if you can respond using only the tools of reason and not emotion. If you can do that, then you will have accomplished something, even if you convince him of nothing - you will have convinced yourself of the value of not submitting to your anger.

Everything you need in the way of data is right here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Holocaust_denial

Frankly, I'm far more concerned about peak oil denial. Even if everybody on Earth rejected the facts about the Holocaust, civilization would probably carry on. Now that the Jews have nuclear weapons, they aren't likely to go down easily again. And there are still genocides occurring from time to time despite the orthodox acceptance of the reality of the holocaust, so it's not as if getting the facts right guarantees smooth sailing.

In contrast, civilization might not survive a large-scale rejection of the facts surrounding peak oil. What we think about peak oil, and how we choose to act right now, will probably have a huge impact on our prospects for the very near future.

The problem with peak oil is probably more a matter of simple ignorance. When I watch the news correspondents reporting on oil prices breaking record highs every few days, I don't see many who can provide anything resembling a coherent explanation for the price run-up. Except this guy from Australia:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kWMa1Qpusc
Alan Kohler on Oil
(1 min 26 sec into the video, notice the graph entitled "It's Simple Really")

The astounding ignorance about the imminent peaking and unavoidable decline of world oil supply matters, because most people still seem to have no inkling of the severity of the problem we face, nor of the massive changes in attitudes and lifestyles that must occur - and should have started years ago.

13. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176549 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 3:07 pm

Comment #176534 by MPhil:

Thanks, Teratornis... Actually, that article is quite basic... I think all rational people who have ever encountered someone employing these strategies can identify them...

Well, a refresher rarely hurts. Especially if we find ourselves getting emotional during a disagreement. I can't be the only person who becomes stupider when I become angrier.

Sad nevertheless.
I'm just really pissed off by ASMarques, me being a native German who shares no responsibility, and feels no guilt, but acknowledges the responsibility of Germany as a nation (and every other nation as well) to never let such a thing happen again - to remind people to be cautious about nationalism, patriotism, discrimination, marginalisation of non-violent groups etc.

I experience at least a normal human allotment of anger so I understand the emotion all too well. Anger is the productive emotion when a cave bear wanders into "your" cave, but it is precisely the wrong emotion to bring to the Internet.

That's another example of the emotional brain looking to the past. The rather distant past in this case.

On the Internet, we do not use brute physical force. Instead, we push with the flimsy rope of logic. Imagine trying to push objects around on the other side of the room by pushing on a rope. That's what reasoned debate is like on the Internet - it takes superhuman patience and sangfroid. As I am still working on merely getting up to subhuman, I have some way to go with those.

I suggest looking on any online discussion group as an exercise in emotional desensitization. Even we atheists have our sacred beliefs, and we get upset when someone tramples them.

But let's remember we like to trample on other people's sacred beliefs. If we expect religious people to remain calm while we logically eviscerate their cherished hopes, then we might try showing them that's how we roll.

I get the idea that Sam Harris rolls that way. It's rather embarrassing that he seems to have learned his emotional control from a religious tradition rather than from a secular/scientific tradition.

I know of the importance of combined effort, and of the value of "knowing where to look" - I'm a student of philosophy after all :)

I apologize for unintentionally condescending then - I redirect my advice to anyone else reading here who might learn something from the article.

The article itself is basic, but the links therein are dense and rich.

14. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176530 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 2:43 pm

Comment #176493 by MPhil:

Oh please, you're still here, ASMarques? The guy who accuses native Germans, who have (and have had) perhaps the most comprehensive exposure or the fullest access to the evidence, who say the holocaust did happen, of having been brainwashed... puh-leese. Teratornis posed some excellent questions there - I am anxious to read your answers.

While you're waiting, this article is a good read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism

See how many of the denialist strategies you can identify in ASMarques' writing. For a harder challenge, see if you can find whether he has written something else.

Always remember - you are not alone! Nearly every argument we have is a repeat of previous arguments, and some people have used the power of collaborative editing ("we are smarter than me") to write down some pretty good arguments. That is no substitute for thinking, but part of thinking is remembering to look things up.

15. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176517 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 2:23 pm

Comment #176496 by Podaar:

The whole thinking critically and not projecting motivations onto others is hard. I've struggled with it myself at different times of my life.

At least you are consciously aware of the struggle. That puts you light-years ahead of the generally oblivious masses, for whom emotions are reality.

As I'm sure I've already written here, since I endlessly repeat myself, critical thinking becomes especially important during times of crisis, i.e. times of rapid change.

Most logical fallacies and cognitive biases seem to be, or to have been, actually pretty good heuristics. For example, argumentum ad hominem can be a pretty reliable rule of thumb in some cases, such as: Hitler had no problems with killing people, so perhaps he wouldn't have minded telling some lies now and then. You'd want to scrutinize a claim by Hitler a bit harder than you'd scrutinize a claim by someone who appears to value honesty. Of course ideally you would logically analyze every claim the same way, but in real life there isn't time to do that. You invariably have to trust some people who you don't have time to personally check out yourself.

Similarly, appeal to tradition is a pretty good heuristic in a stable, traditional society. A society that has had thousands of years to figure out what works in its stable environment has probably settled on at least a locally optimal code of behavior by now. In a sufficiently stable society, imitating everybody else is probably a better strategy for most people than attempting to think everything through from scratch, even if there wasn't pressure from the society to conform.

But when things are not stable, and game rules are changing rapidly, then we cannot trust our emotions as much. Our emotions typically look backwards, to what worked in the past, maybe even millions of years in the past.

Responding intelligently to change demands a fresh look at new data.

I won't bother to mention the new data I have in mind just now, because my faithful readers already know the example I would give.

16. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176509 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 2:09 pm

Comment #176495 by Star Spangled Eagle:

Question: How can you tell if someone doesn't wipe after they use the bathroom?

Answer: Check their underwears for ASSMARQUES.

If I were the referee of RDF, I would flag you 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct.

While I understand your hate, I don't think expressing it does much to elevate the discussion here. If someone makes an error, it's enough to point out the error and let the readers decide who to like and who to hate. It's not as if anyone needs to be told.

It's always tempting to do a goal line dance and fire AK-47s into the air and urinate on the graves of our enemies, but we must guard against lapsing into emotional thinking.

If we are not gracious in victory, we can hardly expect to be treated graciously in defeat.

When I see people on RDF dishing out the ad homs when they are right about something, I assume they want exactly the same treatment when they are wrong.

And I have a long memory about such things. So as a general warning to name-callers, don't make any mistakes on my watch. I assume everyone is prepared to take what they dish out.

A more constructive way to respond to the wrong thinking we see in others is to reflect more carefully on our own thinking. Do we really have all our logical ducks in a row, on every subject?

I have direct personal experience with having made some mistakes in my past thinking, easily on par with any mistakes I see other people making. I try to keep that in mind when I write - although I don't always manage to.

The take-home lesson is, it's all too easy to be really sure and really wrong at the same time. Anybody who thinks they've never done it, or will never do it again, is probably doing it right now.

17. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176492 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Comment #176486 by al-rawandi:

Teratornis,

That was awesome. Just awesome. That was the perfect response for ASMarques. Perfect. Well done. Now he can choke on his shitty argument.

Thank you for recognizing my logic. It's the same logic I bring to all my writing, for example on the more important subject of peak oil (more important because the Holocaust, as horrible as it was, is history now, but the worst effects of peak oil are probably just ahead of us). However, in my experience, the thinking patterns and logical fallacies of Holocaust deniers srongly resemble those of these other groups of people:

1. Creationists

2. Cornucopians (who believe human population and resource consumption can grow exponentially forever, with no ill effects)

3. 9/11 conspiracy theorists

4. Apollo Moon landing conspiracy theorists

5. Conspiracy theorists in general

For example, the argument from ignorance (or from personal incredulity) resurfaces again and again. "I can't imagine how a monkey becomes a human, therefore humans did not evolve from monkeys." Or "I can't imagine the Germans rounding up and systematically exterminating six million Jews, therefore they did not." Or "People have incorrectly predicted that the world would run out of oil before - therefore the world can never run out." Etc.

And these arguments are always selective. The creationist, or Holocaust denier, invariably cherry-picks the claims of the orthodox position, considering some to be rock-solidly reliable, and others to be utter fabrication, without presenting a systematic method for telling which is which.

I haven't had much luck at changing anybody's mind on much of anything on which they had already formed strong emotional beliefs. But it's still fun to expose wrong thinking when I smell it.

As a general rule, when someone makes a whopping logical error such as creationism, Holocaust denial, etc., that is rarely the only error they make. So it's only a matter of time, if they keep talking long enough, for them to come up with other whoppers that are easier to refute.

Such as the ridiculous left-wing chestnut that when an Islamic suicide bomber looks into the camera before his final mission and says "We love death more than our enemies love life!" that cannot really be why he's doing it.

I've never met a conspiracy theorist who seemed truly comfortable with Occam's Razor.

18. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176487 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 1:04 pm

To ASMarques:

1. Do you believe the Apollo Moon landings were faked on a sound stage at NASA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_theories

2. Do you believe George W. Bush ordered airliners to crash into skyscrapers on 9/11 by remote control, and the story about the Islamic hijackers was a false cover story?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

3. Do you accept the findings of the The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Commission

4. What do you make of the clever arguments which cast serious doubt on the belief that the Earth is spheroidal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society

I'm wondering if the Holocaust is the only one of our cherished belefs you would have us abandon.

19. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176479 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 12:46 pm

Comment #176425 by ASMarques:

though unfortunately the air bombing was, of course, a Churchillian true holocaust (in the sense of an incineration of entire cities, not of really attempting to "exterminate the Germans." My point being we are dealing with what really happened, not what might have happened or some people might have wished had happened.

What is your evidence that these massive air bombings of European cities actually occurred, or if they did occur, that the casualty figures are accurate?

It seems to me the only available evidence is of the same quality, and from the same sources, as the evidence for the Holocaust which you reject.

The only things I know (or think I know) about the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden, I learned from historians who in turn assembled data released by the same military agencies which also told us about the Holocaust.

If you think the military and historians are way off on the number of dead Jews, why do you trust the same people to tell you how many Germans died in Dresden?

Your whole argument against the Holocaust seems to hinge on casting doubts on the credibility of the governments, militaries, and historians who tell us what happened. If these institutions and people are so good at cooking up vast conspiracies to mislead the public, how do you know when to believe them?

I.e., how do you decide which historical evidence you will cherry-pick?

20. Shaw TV Interview with Richard Dawkins

Comment #176476 by Teratornis on May 7, 2008 at 12:37 pm

Comment #176224 by ASMarques:

On a different register, what a silly theory this "sucide bombers blow themselves up because they think they'll be rewarded in heaven" thing is.

That's not the reason why they do it. Palestinian bombers, for example, do it because they are furious at the way they have been occupied, robbed of their land, humiliated, oppressed and their predicament ignored by the World at large, and they cannot fight back their Jewish overlords with equal weapons.

If a Palestinian can sneak into a crowded restaurant with explosives, why would he detonate the explosives while wearing them?

Why not just toss the explosives into the restaurant with a short-delay fuse (like a hand grenade), and attempt to flee? Even if the chance of escape is low, it is not zero. The chances improve with concealed explosives and longer fuse delays.

Asymmetrical warfare dates back to at least Roman times. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_strategy

More recently, T.E. Lawrence taught Arab partisans how to blow up the supply trains of the militarily superior Turks:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.E._Lawrence

In most cases, the weaker side in an asymmetrical conflict has a choice of many options which do not involve certain death. Accordingly, few people choose tactics which involve certain death, unless they have accepted the ideology of some sort of death cult.

There are some spontaneous tactical suicides in war, such as when a soldier dives onto a grenade to save his buddies in a foxhole, or when the pilot of a damaged airplane deliberately crashes into the enemy rather than bailing out.

However, spontaneous suicides, as well as high-risk missions, are quite different than premeditated suicides, before which the suicide warriors videorecord their last wills and testaments. Since even the most overmatched combatant still has some potentially survivable tactical options, choosing in advance to make a point of committing suicide requires some sort of ideology, over and above simple anger and resentment that could motivate someone to fight.

Consider the analogy with criminals going to jail. While many criminals eventually get caught, most of them behave as if getting caught is something they would rather avoid.

If a new cult arose in which members committed crimes in direct view of police for the express aim of getting caught and incarcerated, one could not coherently equate their motives to the motives of ordinary criminals who seek to avoid apprehension.

The risk of death has been part of combat throughout history, but it is unusual for combatants to pre-plan their deaths. It's not very convincing to claim the motives of suicide warriors are exactly the same as the motives of warriors who try to survive. Clearly, it takes some extra suicide cult ideology.

Granted, the suicide cult ideology may exploit the underlying resentment, but it is hardly the only way for people to express resentment.

21. What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Comment #176106 by Teratornis on May 6, 2008 at 2:50 pm

Comment #175766 by LaTomate:

Concerning the fact that it costs a lot of money, well so does a lot of other stuff.

High-energy physics also costs brains, namely, a big chunk of the tiny minority of the people with the high intelligence and technical training necessary to save civilization from collapse as we drive off the peak oil cliff.

Money is a lot more plentiful than the people who can do what high-energy physicists do. So the real opportunity cost is in terms of what those people happen to find uninteresting at the moment.

It's not solely a question of funding. The physics community has a lot of clout for setting its own priorities. Politicians generally don't know science, so they have to trust the scientific community to tell them where the science funding should go. The near-term survival of industrial civilization may depend on how many scientists come to the same realization as CalTech's David Goodstein. Namely, peak oil is the problem that matters right now, and if we don't fix that one, then nothing else we're doing may matter much at all.

The internationally funded and run experimental fusion reactor in France is costing a lot, but you'd say it may be worth it (possibly cheap and abundant fusion energy), wheras for the LHC it is not really so since it does not solve any problems.

Hot fusion is a longshot, something like investing in lottery tickets, but there is a finite chance the lottery could pay off. Probably not soon enough to cushion the landing when we drive off the peak oil cliff, however. It might make more sense to delay the hot fusion research for a few years and have those people help figure out some things that could work sooner, like quantum dot solar cells, or algae fuel.

I have to disagree... even though practical applications of the research done there won't arrive so soon, it is through theoretical physics and experiments supporting the theory that we make the biggest advances in technology and it seems to me that the LHC won't be an exception to that rule.

I agree that if industrial civilization remains stable and prosperous enough to support the LHC for a long time, useful things should come from it. But here is the salient question: how much research will occur at the LHC when the price of oil hits $400/bbl?

(For comparison, today the oil price hit $122/bbl on NYMEX, yet another record in a long run of records so far this year. That's up from around $20/bbl in 2003.)

There are already some questions about how the global economy will manage with oil at the current price, let alone the prices that folks like OPEC and Goldman Sachs are predicting.

The question is not whether the LHC research may provide long-term value - it probably will, if it continues for a long time. The question is whether the research will continue.

Many large businesses find it important, at some point, to vertically integrate their supply chains. Similarly, scientists need to think about their own supply chain, i.e. the industrial economies which generate excess wealth to spend on science. Scientists, better than anyone else, have the ability to anticipate and mitigate threats to industrial economies. A few scientists have, in fact, predicted the peak oil crisis, and some of them even got pretty close on the timing. But this tiny group of people weren't able to get the issue into the general conversation in the same way the global warming folks have done.

Humans have almost always been in crisis of one sort or another. I agree that the latest one, climate change, is a great one, but it's not a reason to reject all scientific research to sort out other science problems.

I'm not talking about global warming. Peak oil is not global warming, although the two are related in the sense that ending our need for fossil fuels would solve both of them. Global warming is a longer-term problem - it will probably take humans at least a few decades to pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to trigger the next anoxic event which might exterminate most if not all humans. Peak oil, in contrast, seems to have already occurred in 2005 or 2006, which if true casts some doubt on the survival of industrial civilization over the next 10 or 20 years.

Almost everything we do depends in one way or another on the availability of cheap, abundant petroleum. Almost everything we want to do, such as improve the living conditions for poor people, depends on expanding our use of petroleum.

When nature tells us we have no more cheap petroleum, and we have to steadily reduce our use of expensive petroleum on nature's schedule - not ours - then we have a very serious problem. It appears we are already in the early stages.

If people invested their time and money on these sorts of projects rather than wasting time and ressources on their religions we wouldn't be having so much trouble funding proper science.

That's true, but we can't expect religious people to think rationally. Religion is inherently about rejecting rationality. Scientists, on the other hand, should be able to recognize the correct priority ordering of our problems.

If scientists cannot think critically and reason from the available evidence, then who can?

If the major powers invested half of their military budget on pure scientific research we weouldn't be having a discussion about funding priorities either I'm afraid.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next quite a few big-spender nations combined. During the Cold War, the impetus for military spending was superpower rivalry. Now that the U.S. is the last remaining superpower, the impetus is petroleum.

This is another reason for self-interested scientists to focus their efforts on making the U.S. self-sufficient in energy, especially to eliminate the U.S. dependence on foreign oil i.e. Islam. If the U.S. had no energy-supply worries, think of the vast resources that would be available for all sorts of useful things. The Endless Petroleum War in the Middle East is screwing up priorities.

New Orleans had lots of problems before Hurricane Katrina. Shoring up the sagging levees was just one crisis among many competing for the same limited resources.

While everyone acknowledged the city was at risk, nobody could predict exactly when a hurricane might strike, so people's focus went elsewhere, and kept leaving the levees for "next year." Then nature demonstrated its utter indifference to human schedules, and obliterated most of the city.

Peak oil is a much worse problem than a hurricane, because one cannot simply move up the river to Baton Rouge. Peak oil is a problem everywhere people depend on petroleum, which is pretty much everywhere people are these days.

Peak oil is like having a house on fire. Regardless of how many other important things you need to do, you should probably attend first to the fire.

If we solve the current energy problem, we will have the stable productive society which can afford to play around with particle accelerators.

If we don't solve the energy problem, the few people who survive the dieoff may be reduced to pre-industrial subsistence farmers, who won't be doing any science for a long time.

22. What really goes on at the Large Hadron Collider

Comment #175708 by Teratornis on May 5, 2008 at 11:13 pm

Comment #175667 by Rtambree:

Take about hype. The LHC is being talked up like Deep Thought in Hitchhikers - the answer to everything, will solve all problems! What isn't it going to find? Supersymmetry? Dark matter? Higgs bosons? Mini black holes? Evidence of string theory? Other dimensions? My missing favourite sock?

How about a source of energy capable of running the thing, let alone the countries surrounding it?

The genome project was hyped in a similar way in the late 1990s - and the payoffs haven't quite materialised.

I don't know. The crime shows are pretty good, and they would be even less plausible without DNA technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_(genre)

I just wish these projects don't get all hyped out of the proportion - as the public will become jaded when reality repeatedly doesn't meet expectations.

We put a few men on the Moon, briefly, and yet we still have problems. Funny how that works.

Where's our customised medicine? Holidays in space? Supersonic scramjet travel? Smart houses? Self-driving cars? Robot servants? 10 hour working week? Internet as heads-up display in your sunglasses? Paperless office? AI? Resurrection of extinct species?

How about a solution to peak oil?

I don't mind the overhyping of a science project so much as all the carrying on about stuff that could look laughably irrelevant in as little as five years as the world drives off the peak oil cliff.

If all those physicists were working on, say, quantum dot solar cells, we might have economies able to support high energy physics research in the coming decades.

The sheer blithering ignorance of what the real immediate problem is, even among some of the world's smartest people, is more frightening than almost anything else that comes to mind.

Comment #175703 by auralblip:

While this is just another experiment, I would say that if they get answers to even one of the issues they are investigating it will enrich our understanding of the universe, isn't that worth it?

If the collapse of industrial civilization was not potential and imminent, we might have the luxury of entertaining such questions.

If even the medium-case scenario of peak oil turns out to be correct (never mind the worst case), we'll be looking back at almost everything we spent money on that didn't produce renewable energy as a catastrophically unacceptable opportunity cost.

Of course the Iraq war probably squanders more investment capital in one week than all of physics gets in what, a year?

23. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Comment #175698 by Teratornis on May 5, 2008 at 10:36 pm

Comment #175684 by NakedCelt:

For what it's worth, I agree with Teratorn. "Oil oil oil oil oil oil oil oil" is a perfectly reasonable description of current global economics.

What it's worth - I believe it is worth more than anything else we can say about Islam.

Islam was not much of a problem for the West when the Saudis rode camels.

It isn't possible to speak coherently about the current "clash of civilizations" without mentioning the black liquid which is fueling the clash.

It's all about oil.

24. Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Comment #175696 by Teratornis on May 5, 2008 at 10:22 pm

Comment #175677 by annabanana:

No, when a politician decries "foreign oil," that is clearly a euphemism for "Islam."

I don't think this is entirely true. It would benefit the US to be completely energy-independent in many ways. Assuming the energy is a renewable source (which is what we are aiming for), it will be beneficial to the environment (presumably, depending on how this energy source is processed, what pollutants it emits, etc).

Renewable energy is not necessarily what George W. Bush is aiming for when he says we need to allow Exxon et al. to drill in ANWR, but your point is valid to some degree. Energy is a huge incredibly complex topic, allowing any number of ways for people to focus on various aspects of it to avoid thinking about whichever aspects they consider unpleasant.

For example, there is about 100 times as much publicity right now for global warming as there is for peak oil. As difficult as it is to think about global warming, a lot of people are capable of thinking about it, perhaps because they are able to think it's mostly a problem of drowning the polar bears, and any threat to them personally from global warming is probably decades off. They can think about the polar bears, instead of thinking about the Saudi Arabians pumping billions of the petrodollars we throw at them into promoting the spread of their fanatical brand of Islam.

Peak oil is quite different. The wolf of peak oil is clawing at the door right now. Thanks to the incompetence of our governments and most of our citizens, the world is almost completely unprepared for an unexpected peaking and subsequent decline of world oil extraction. There is no plan B.

Here is my wager. I wager that in five years, the topic of peak oil will dominate our discourse. It will be hard for people to talk about anything else. If the Internet is still functioning by then (and I dearly hope it will be), I will try to be here to tell everyone "I told you so." (Gloating may be one of the few remaining pleasures by then.)

Already, for example, airlines around the world are bleeding red ink and cutting back their flights. Airlines are like canaries in the coal mine, analogous to the poorest billion people in the Third World who are getting priced out of their subsistence diet