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
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Hi Glen, Regarding the Thomas Gold book, I have been urged not to take it seriously by geologists I trust. I also do not have the expertise to enable an informed opinion of my own. They seem to suggest, however, that Gold purposely ignores (a lot of) evidence that works in favor of the conventional (post-colonization of land by plants origin) view rather than his own. His thesis apparently was given a hearing in the community for a while some time ago, and when he simply ignored questions about other evidence rather than answering them, the community finally got tired of him. So he did what any of us would do: publish it in a book. We have also had a lot of people through the Institute, and I have seen some up at LANL, to talk about peak oil. Apart from one oil-industry spokesman at a LANL meeting, none of them has expressed a serious reservation about the peak oil extraction rate estimates's being roughly right. The issue being that the energetic costs of extraction (no matter how they come to be priced) become limiting on the value of getting to oil, considerably before even the currently estimated reserves are fully exhausted. I have the Gold book, too, and need to read it at some point, because there may still be correct claims about the pervasiveness of bacterial and archaeal life well into the crust, which I would care about for other reasons. Eric 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
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
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
[FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
Did you know that 8 out of 10 from the biggest companies of the world live from oil or oil-consuming products? I think the true crisis is still to come, see http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ -J. 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
Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
You really have to wonder in a complexity science forum why taking on endless multiplying complications, as a standard planning concept, would not be quickly brought into question. The opening statement in on that CAS webpage is: Forget the financial crisis, the true global economic crisis will come in the next ten years. The end of cheap oil and the beginning of climate change are the first warning signs. We wont be able to stop increasing oil prices in the long term. And we wont be able to stop climate change and global warming. That's only true if the phrase true global economic crisis assumes we don't realize the error in endlessly multiplying the size and complexity of the system. Even without any physical resource limits of any kind the compounding complexity of continual growth makes any system completely unmanageable. You get learning demands that exceed the possible range of learning responses for the parts not changing. We're supposed to have learned by seeing the exploding complexity of the financial schemes as the core problem in the recent collapse. The central cause of that complexity was that they were built to maintain financial system growth in the absence of similar physical system growth. We should learn from experience. The problem of collapse is not with the pins that prick our bubbles but the pumps that pump them to the point of bursting. Phil Henshaw -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 10:25 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come Did you know that 8 out of 10 from the biggest companies of the world live from oil or oil-consuming products? I think the true crisis is still to come, see http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/ -J. 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
