Glen, >From a whole systems view 'peak oil' is part of 'peak everything'. 'Peak everything' is also synonymous with 'diminishing returns', or 'natural complications' or 'limits of development'. I think with the present collapse there is now more time to worry about global warming, sort of, and certainly less money. Thinking about whether growing as fast as we possibly can until we run into something to stop us means running into what will stop us as hard as we possibly can, may be more important.
The phenomenon of natural limits is really about how our economic system as a whole can substitute nearly anything for nearly anything, and so... equalizes the resource pressures on everything. That's a very telling principle when you learn how to apply it. That's why the increasing difficulty of finding new core resources; food, fuel, water, space of every kind, is happening simultaneously. The problem with limits is *never* (well 'almost' never) the quantity. It's really the complications and the resulting increases in unit costs, their declining material ROI's. You can always find more resources for more effort, but there is a price level where there is no profit in it. You can cross that unexpectedly, say due to unexpected new complications, and trigger market flight. If you look at the commodities curve, for example, you see we first had a 20% per year increase in raw material costs for food and energy, for the past 6 years, and now have a collapse. You could ask why the physical system didn't respond to create supply to lower the price. There was some 'sticking point' and then the speculators jumped in because the needed increasing supplies were not materializing. Maybe the whole system reached the point where the physical complications reduced the total physical return on investment too far. http://www.synapse9.com/issues/92-08Commodities2-sm.pdf or .jpg That idea is not proved by the graph, just suggested. What is provable is that persistent declining ROI's (like how much water the effort to get water uses) as we now see for all resources will eventually cross the whole system profitability thresholds. Whether people see them coming or can explain it is not the first question. You just 'half answer' it at first, asking whether the kind of effect we should see fits the general picture of what we are seeing. Phil Henshaw > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella > Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:36 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come > > Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM: > > http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ > > I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a > pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal, > ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels. I'm still too > ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are > [a]biogenic. > > But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would > affect "peak oil"? On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep > sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of > oil > we can exploit would rise significantly. (And much of the peak oil > problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the > oil.) But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will > eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction > technology. > > Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged > regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic? > > (I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance > ... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate > change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for > now, anyway.) > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College > lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
