She pointed out that the central idea of Armageddon, Judgement Day or the end of everything is largely common to most societies. If you look at the core of the philosophical concept and strip away any religious parts, it doesn't normally imply the end of all humans. But for you as an individual, the distinction is moot if your village is burned down and everyone killed or sold into slavery.
I think this concept represents a fundamental fear which most humans go to great length to reduce the risk of. Lots of potential doomsday scenarios can be viewed with this lens. It doesn't mean that the risk being discussed is non-existent, but mitigating measures will most likely reduce the risk and impact dramatically.
The fundamental logic of peak oil is sound, even though a bell curve is not appropriate when considering the global economic consequences: at some point any finite resource must run out, exponential growth always means the last half of a finite quantity is consumed in one doubling period. It’s not a law of nature that alternative tech will appear just at the right time, and in one sense we got lucky with alternative oils and renewables. To the extent that one can talk of “making our own luck”, I expect at least some of the people who developed all those solutions did so out of a fear of peak oil.
The same thing, but now with 7 billion+ people. It's a lot of deforestation just to feed all these campfires.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2018-08-global-forest-loss-years-offse...
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/06/study-finds-chinas-new-for...
reforestation is booming, not to discount how devastated green heavy regions like the amazon are
Right now oil prices are still at 75 dollars a barrel. That’s still much higher than before we hit peak conventional oil. It could be one reason we never really recovered from 2008.
It seems to me that we are stuck in an “oil price strait jacket”. Demand keeps rising until the price shoots up and then goes down hard but making a lot more oil isn’t feasible either. We could be in a long slow energy stagnation. This is evident in the amount oil imported into Europe for eg.
Shale oil has probably saved us from an outright disaster.
The difference between peak oil and shale oil is the EROI which is very bad (between 1 and 2) compared to conventional (20 to 50). This would make it absolutely useless as an energy source, except we also get free Nat. gas out of it.
Once the EROI on all our fossil energy sources gets below 1 we won't be able to use any, despite some of it still being in the ground.
A better analogy than peak wheat would be: this is like peak fish except we now have better bottom trawling fishing nets, and electric pulse fishing to be able to get the last remaining fish out there.
As technology increases with oil extraction and alternate energy sources come into play, the peak oil scenario will likely not be realized.
No transition. Energy usage is stacking up. Globally, renewable energy sources are built in addition to fossil energy sources. See source below - compare relative vs. absolute :
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
Peak oil doesn't care that the relative share of oil as an energy source is decreasing (which is true) . It's the global number of oil barrels extracted out of the ground that matters.
Today from a cursory google, oil prices per barrel are over 70$.
Fortunately for our society we subsidized it to survive this brief period.
So it is and so it does. And while it does, empires collapse, species go extinct...
That being said, I'm a doomer but because AI.
Take the US, for instance. The constitution has been in force since 1789. That's 222 years. You don't get to 222 years by not being stable. If the Civil War and the 1960s didn't destroy the US, it's pretty stable.
And yet... we have historical examples of civilizations collapsing. When it happens, it often happens fast (or at least slowly, and then fast). It seems unwise to say that it can't happen to us.
And, sure, social norms can be flexible. Not all problems can be fixed by changing social norms, though. Like, say, drought causing food shortages. Flexible social norms aren't going to solve that; they're just going to lead to looting becoming acceptable.
And there’s value in questioning our (often unexamined) beliefs. But taking it too seriously, thinking that you’ve got it figured out and that others are fools for not listening to you — well… Maybe you would have predicted the meteor to the dinosaurs, and maybe they would’ve been fools for not listening, but there was also very little any of them could have done to change the outcome.
Pick your favorite civilization collapse story. What would you have done, at that time, to change it?
One could argue “at least I would’ve seen it coming.” That’s true; be informed. But I object to the idea that everyone is generally foolish for not taking these concerns seriously. The concerns are mistaken far more than they’re correct.
In the end I think we overestimate the effects collapse. Look at much of Europe over the 19th and 20th centuries. Unbelievable levels of suffering and many millions needlessly died over those 200 years. But for most life just went on.
The consequences are predictable, and they should be avoidable and unnecessary.
For most of the population there is no downside in avoiding them, any more than there was in mitigating Y2K or making seatbelts compulsory.
This isn't mythology we're talking about, but science.
It's not possible to comment on this topic credibly without being aware of this.
As for "flexible social norms" - there was an attempted coup in the US, South Africa is on fire, Brazil is literally on fire, and the UK is opening up to Delta having apparently persuaded itself that 50,000 cases and 500 hospital admissions a day aren't a problem.
And we're not even close to being done yet.
Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
> It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
> It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
Now your argument is fundamentally different, and more reasonable.
> Suffice to say, yes, civilizations collapse. But that isn’t really the point. Everybody dies, but if you claim each day that one specific person is going to die of X, you’ll be mistaken more times than not. I see the same pattern in most collapse theories.
There has been doomsday climate hysteria, but usually not in the scientific community, and in my experience it is most often found in derisive and mocking tabloid headlines, somewhat similar to your original argument.
Yet here we are. Maybe it’s not so fragile after all?
Historically, people always have, and sometimes they've succeeded. The Cuban Missile Crisis is maybe a good example of this. During that era, there was a widespread feeling that we were dangerously close to nuclear war. Surely that sense of danger was a critical part of the reason cooler heads prevailed in the end.
No there wasn’t. A rowdy protest is not “an attempted coup”. All actual institutions behaved according to the law.
Here's a list:
* Breaking into congress
* Carrying flags representing a rival (dead) government
* While wearing tactical gear, some carrying blunt objects, handcuffs, mace
* Stealing computers and documents
* Searching for congresspeople
* Killing a police officer, beating others
Not to mention they were doing it while Congress was meant to be counting electoral votes.
What else do you need to make it a coup attempt? Is competence a requirement?
Sticking pins in a voodoo doll isn't attempted murder, no matter how seriously you believe it will kill the person.
So how would that event in the US have succeeded in overthrowing the government? What would the next steps have been? Even if they killed everyone in the building, would the rest of the government/military/courts/etc. agree to follow orders from the new kings? Why?
By the way, they didn't kill that police officer. It turned out later that he died of natural causes. Be careful of fake embellishments of real news.
Here's how it would work:
The process for electing the president is that states certify their electoral college votes in what's known as the Certificate of the Vote. On 1/6 the certificates are counted and objections are raised. It takes one Senator and one Representative to raise an objection in writing, and Republicans had planned on objecting to Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan at least. Objections are settled by voting in the House and Senate. Each chamber gets a vote, and if they agree the objection is sustained and the votes discarded. If they are split or disagree, the objection is overturned. Democrats had a majority in the House while Republicans had a majority in the Senate, so this would have went in favor of Joe Biden.
To succeed then, the Republicans needed to get outside of the regular Constitutional order. Their main objective on 1/6 was to delay the certification past that day. There is no precedent for this. At first Trump wanted Pence to simply refuse to certify the vote and then force the GOP friendly states to "recertify" their results. Trump only needed a few states to recertify to win. But Pence refused to do this, hence the chants of "Hang Mike Pence".
However, the invasion of the Capitol gave new life to this idea of recertification. The hope here was that if the proceedings were disrupted, we were in uncharted Constitutional territory. This would have given additional time for Trump to try and twist the arm of the various states, as he had been doing before 1/6 to the states of Arizona and Georgia (at least).
Once the states recertified their votes, they would have reconvened the Congress and VP to certify the election. This puts the Democrats in a tough spot. They could have let the "recertified" results stand, in which case Trump would win. Or they could object. If they did, then the Republicans could also object. This would throw the recertified votes out.
But here's the catch. If no candidate has 270 electoral college votes after the counting, then the matter is put before the House, but not in the normal way. Instead, each state delegation gets 1 vote, for a total of 50, with 26 to win. State delegations are decided by the states, and Republicans would have a 26-23 majority in this scenario (PA would have tied, if they don't agree their vote doesn't count). The House would then vote for Trump, and he could have been President despite losing the popular vote and the electoral college.
There's a lot that needed to go right for Trump for this to work, and that's why it didn't. But it went a lot further than it should have, and definitely broke a 240 year streak of peaceful transitions of power in the US. In fact, it seems like the only reason the vote was able to be certified on 1/6 is because Mike Pence refused to leave the Capitol with the Secret Service. Had he left with them when they wanted him to, the proceedings would have been delayed indefinitely.
Analogies aside, if you don't think it was an attempted coup... what would it have made it one? I'm legitimately curious (I don't think incompetence is an excuse, and courts usually don't either).
Thanks for pointing out the disparity about Sicknick. To anyone else who isn't aware... the autopsy determined he died from a stroke the day after. These people still assaulted police officers to gain access to the Capitol.
USA funds several media outlets so that they publish a precisely mixed mash of truth and lies. People mindlessly consume the mash and start to get a feeling they live in an imperfect society that can be very easily improved ("just get rid of your current president and you'll start living awesome life the same moment! it's so easy, folks! no other effort required").
Then they start publishing a real recipes for starting a turmoil (via figures like notoriously known Navalny).
Then, when the coup fails, USA start pressuring: "It's an agression against democracy! It was a peaceful protest! Sanctions! Sanctions! Sanctions!" (if the coup succeeds, the only result is that people start living in worse conditions - check Arab Spring countries or any other country where color revolution succeeded - they're doing much worse economically and in all other areas of life, including "democracy").
When the protest which was much milder happened in the US itself, it's suddenly "totally different thing".
BTW, just this week mercenaries from USA trained in USA killed president of Haiti.
What a bunch of hypocrites...
The US has certainly inflicted coups abroad, and I also disagree with those... but I suspect you weren't commenting to get my opinion on the matter.
Oh is this referring to the so called "insurection"? That was like a mild protest compared to other recent ones.
Peak Oil was predicting a very real phenomenon, but it hasn't happened yet (oil, being finite, will have this happen eventually).
The broader hypothesized 'Peak Oil' phenomenon wherein the decline in oil production causes enormous societal upheaval and possibly the collapse of industrial civilization will almost certainly not happen, because as it turns out the reserves of relatively easy to extract oil are pretty large, plus a large amount of additional reserves (shale, tar sands, etc) become economical to extract at a relatively small increase in price. Add in the fact that electric cars will probably do away with most of the market for oil over the next couple of decades, and it's likely that, by the time we run out of oil, it will have been used only as an input for various industrial processes for a couple of centuries.
And of course, this was the same argument used against the 'Peak Oil' idea when it was a big thing, it's just come into better focus with the passage of time.
That's true only if you define Peak Oil so unusually as to make it true. The concept behind Peak Oil is that in the (near [1]) future, the available supply of oil will fail to meet the total demand for it, and then we'll be stuck in a world where there is forever an inability to get the necessary oil. In this model, it's great to be an oil supermajor holding one of the last great reserves of oil--you can basically charge what you want for it, and so it's worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to get it.
An alternative model for the future is that the demand for oil peaks before the supply is. In this model, that same oil supermajor is now in a terrible position, and shelling out hundred of billions of dollars for new reserves is a stupid idea. In essence, from a planning perspective, this is the exact opposite of what Peak Oil predicts.
The current trends seem to indicate that it's the second scenario that is going to come true, not the former situation. Combined with the fact that more specific predictions about when it will happen have continuously failed to come true, it's hard to find much about Peak Oil thati sactually correct.
[1] The imminence of the catastrophe of peak oil is usually highlighted by its prophets, but it has been generally less assumed by planners working under its assumption, so it's debatable to what degree the imminence is a critical prediction of the theory. Whatever the case, nearly every single prediction of when the peak would occur has already been passed without that peak having happened.
Peak oil, is correct is some sort of technical sense, but continues to be consistently misforecast due to underestimating both technical innovation and exploration. Cost-effective reserves grew much faster than depletion, and now we also have alternatives and increased efficiencies that have reduced/flatlined consumption even as feasible capacity continues to increase. That doesn't mean there isn't some finite limit (and even if there wasn't, that we wouldn't want to limit CO2 regardless) but that the modeling process is just too simple.
To provide some context, I think it is worth quoting this article[0] from February:
> In a Thursday statement, the fossil fuel giant [Shell] said its “oil production peaked in 2019,” and that we can now expect it to decline gradually by 1 or 2% per year. Shell also said its total carbon emissions peaked in 2018 at 1.7 gigatonnes.
[0] https://gizmodo.com/shell-says-it-has-reached-peak-oil-produ...
The 'Peak Oil' hypothesis was that all the wells would run dry without good alternatives and society would be trapped between a rock and a hard place because of that. Again, not necessarily for better, humans figured out more technologically advanced ways to extract oil to avoid this outcome (fracking and tar sands).
This was literally never it. Peak Oil never had anything to say about the pumping capacity of oil, it was about the expansion of supply relative to demand.
That "preppers" decided this meant immediate societal collapse is there and your problem with comprehension.
Are you suggesting that oil is not finite??? Or that we have an easy replacement at hand contrary to the people that says otherwise such as in the "Planet of The humans" documentary?
Climate change won't make humanity extinct and the planet will not notice it happening. But you will definitely notice your life being dominated by trying to get the government to pay out on your house (aka life savings) which was destroyed in a wildfire after the insurance company went bankrupt from a "black swan" event.
And by the way, that wildfire may have been caused by Global Warming, the the house price (that's actually what is bankrupting you) is really not because of this collapse.
Anyway, the conclusion is that we should focus on adapting faster and better. I'm not sure if playing doom is helpful.
Same problem with coastal real estate: your house is now uninsurable against flood, and then gets flooded and is destroyed - what do you do?
Take a recent disaster: say as a resident you believe the Miami condo you lived in was structurally unsound, but the management does not: what do you do?
"Adapt" means quite different things at different scales, and you currently live in the "oh, yeah its a big more expensive" part of that. But no middle class person can afford to straight lose the value of their house if they own it.
In all these cases you're alive, you probably have running water, food and power. But you're poorer - by a lot, and your quality of life is reduced. You "adapted".
Move. Our difficulty to move is a new phenomenon and isn't created by any of the variables on those simulations.
It’s an illusion. The world goes ‘round.
It’s the same thing humans have done for a hundred thousand years: sit around a campfire telling ghost stories.
As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s fine to enjoy it. But I think it’s a mistake to get too into the idea that civilization is fragile. As the pandemic showed, social norms are flexible when they are required to be.
EDIT: I’ll listen to this presentation, maybe, but the first minute is already looking pretty bad. It’s a guy on stage telling a ghost story. He even opens up with “you’re young, so the tendency is to say ‘doesn’t scare me! Doesn’t scare me!’”
Let’s see what his conclusions are.