But, we do!

The cost of solar panels and wind has been going down dramatically over the last couple decades, and is only continuing to do so.

The percentage of electric cars is also increasing.

There is a lot of oil in the ground. It isn't going to run out in the next decade. By which time these technologies will have become even better.

I'm talking about today. What are the current energy cost comparisons? And the new infrastructure itself would need a lot of energy to build... https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/

This was one of the weakest Do The Math entries. Perhaps because it hinged upon human behavior more than physics/math (the author's strengths). The thesis:

In brief, the idea is that once we enter a decline phase in fossil fuel availability — first in petroleum — our growth-based economic system will struggle to cope with a contraction of its very lifeblood. Fuel prices will skyrocket, some individuals and exporting nations will react by hoarding, and energy scarcity will quickly become the new norm. The invisible hand of the market will slap us silly demanding a new energy infrastructure based on non-fossil solutions. But here’s the rub. The construction of that shiny new infrastructure requires not just money, but... energy. And that’s the very commodity in short supply. Will we really be willing to sacrifice additional energy in the short term - effectively steepening the decline - for a long-term energy plan? It’s a trap!

Yes, "we" would be willing to tolerate the use of increasingly scarce fossil energy to build non-fossil energy resources. Because the "we" investing in new non-fossil energy is largely separate from the "we" who worry about paying this month's bills if gasoline prices go up by a dollar a gallon.

Investors care about what consumers want insofar as they see a way to profit by building things that consumers will pay for. Building non-fossil energy projects in a time of high fossil energy costs counts. Depleting their investment capital to temporarily subsidize retail level prices of fossil-derived energy doesn't count. They were never going to offer to do the latter, and even populist politicians (of the American variety) rarely propose seizing wealth to directly subsidize gasoline/electricity/natural gas at the retail level. American politicians have different approaches to making energy cheaper.

There's a relatively small number of countries in the world that directly subsidize fossil fuels at the retail level for large swaths of the population. If this blog entry were written about e.g. India or Egypt I would find the political/institutional problem with higher fossil energy prices plausible as described. But it doesn't describe most of the world's democracies, nor China (for different reasons), nor most other countries.

There's also a lot of countries having a much less laissez-faire attitude regarding energy - I'd even say that the USA is more of an exception...

For instance, in Europe road transportation fuels tend to be heavily taxed - so they have the option of lowering those taxes to amortize any potential oil shocks (but not too long, and at the cost of taking the budget hit - a bit like India/Egypt in the end...)

Even a more centrally coordinated approach is likely to end up in roughly the same place as a laissez-faire market approach: building replacement energy infrastructure faster rather than slower as a reaction to a persistently declining petroleum supply. As long as that happens, the "energy trap" described by Murphy doesn't materialize. A major French response to the first oil crisis in the early 1970s was a government coordinated plan to build nuclear reactors [1].

It's only people pushed toward bad decisions by short-term desperation (weak government leaders facing rioting, individuals too poor to steer market investment decisions) whose behaviors would set up this "energy trap." Market-driven investors and rational governments alike will invest resources into reducing future consumption of an increasingly expensive fuel even if it somewhat exacerbates the immediate problems caused by higher fuel prices.

[1] Building nuclear reactors as a reaction to high oil prices made more sense than may be obvious now. At the time, France actually did produce a lot of electricity by burning oil. Oil-fueled electricity became much less popular after the 1970s except in petro-states and in isolated locations. Surprisingly, Pakistan managed to make the same mistake in the 1990s of building oil-fired electricity plants, which became very expensive to operate less than a decade later.

Ah, but we don't really have "Market-driven investors and rational governments" in the West anymore, not since the 80's :

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-private-equity-should...

And Macron was really an idiot when he thought that asking the poorest people to pay the most for the ecological transition was going to fly...

But isn't this also a symptom of an energy trap - the government itself not having any slack left for long-term planning ?

http://www.lecourrierdesstrateges.fr/2018/11/04/augmentation... (fr)

(Note that, in the end, the above seems to be very similar to issues in Egypt - government balance taking a hit due to less income from fossil fuels - well except that the Egypt issues are more dramatic, being caused by the country becoming a gas importer instead of exporter...)

But... This whole conversation was about peak oil. We don't need all that stuff right now. We only need to build it before we run out of oil.

And I am saying that it is going to take us a much longer time to run out of oil, than it is to build all that new infrastructure. Not because building the infrastructure is easy, but because there is a whole lot of oil in the ground, and therefore we have a lot of time.

IE, people will stop using oil, because the price of solar, ect has gone down, way before we come close to actually running out of oil.

AFAIK, the US tight oil has nearly peaked (and they still aren't profitable !!), and I don't think that there's much additional production capacity left there, though higher prices will certainly help. (The depletion rate is just too great to sustain the production for long...)

I am indeed unsure (and a bit scared) about the potential from oil sands (and maybe shale oil = kerogen).

As you might know, peak oil is not about literally "running out of oil" (and the article I have linked expands on it), and my point is that we are in the very process of hitting peak (conventional+unconventional) oil - actually those attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure might mark this precise point... (or not, but we certainly don't have decades left...)

Ok, but we aren't currently in that process.

The potential oil production capacity of the world has massively increased, because of fracking.

And if oil prices go up, a whole lot of oil in the US and Canada , become immediately profitable to extract.

I think you are severely underestimating how much non conventional oil there is, that we could start extracting, if it became profitable.