Message-ID: <00aa01bdc47d$51a58500$b34afea9@jay98> Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 06:38:33 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:j@QMAIL.COM> Subject: Global Warming? Who Cares? To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Whether global warming is caused by burning fossils fuel or not, our energy strategy for the next several decades must be the same: alternate energy to the max.FIVE YEARS LEFT! Global oil production is expected to "peak" in about five years [1], and when it does, our world is going to change forever.
Oil is the most important form of energy we use, making up about 38 percent of the world energy supply. No other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractablility, transportability, versatility and cost. These are the qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source in the industrialized world in the middle of this century, and these qualities are as relevant today as they were then.
As far as I know, no study shows that the US economy could be run on solar technologies. Here's one that shows it can't: http://dieoff.com/page84.htm .
ENERGY BASICS We use up or "waste" energy in systems that supply energy -- such as oil-fired power plants. Energy is wasted when exploring for oil, building the machinery to mine the oil, mining the oil, building and operating the power plant, building power lines to transmit the energy, decommissioning the plant, and so on. The difference between the amount of energy generated and the amount of energy wasted is known as the "energy profit".
By definition, energy "sources" must produce more energy than they consume -- must produce a profit -- otherwise they are called "sinks".
We presently mine our fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. The most concentrated and most accessible fuel is mined first, thereafter more and more energy is required to mine and refine poorer and poorer quality fuels. It has been estimated that by 2005, it will require more energy to look for and mine domestic oil than the amount of energy recovered. In other words, it won't make energy sense to look for new oil in the US after 2005, because we will spend more energy than we will recover.
WHAT NEXT? During the next hundred years, the energy profit for fossil fuel plants (oil, gas, and coal) will become negative. It is fundamentally impossible to provide a constant level of energy while aggregate energy profit drops. Keeping the production of goods and services at current levels will require more energy than we now generate. To have more energy in the future means that energy must be diverted now from non-energy sectors of the economy into energy generation. In other words, once oil production peaks, the world will experience declining standards-of-living (as measured by per-capita energy consumption) for, at an absolute minimum, the following 20 to 30 years (that's the optimistic scenario).
What economists have been calling the "Valhalla Economy" is already falling apart: what was Asian miracle, is now the Asian nightmare. I suspect the economic collapse is due to declining natural resource quality. When resource quality is defined in terms of energy investment, the record clearly shows that quality is declining across almost the entire spectrum of resources. From 1972 to 1982, the fraction of GDP allocated to natural resource extraction grew from four percent to ten percent.
Joseph Tainter has studied about two dozen collapsed civilizations and found they collapse when they become too complex for their energy base. [2] Gever et al., has calculated that if we wait until the oil peak before starting a crash program in alternate energy systems, net energy could drop to 30% of present values before starting to climb again. [ see the graph on http://dieoff.com/page143.htm ]
Does anyone think that our so-called civilization can survive a 70% cut in energy production?
Jay -- www.dieoff.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
[1] Cheap oil: enjoy it while it lasts, by Howard Banks. Forbes Magazine, June 15, 1998 http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0615/6112084a.htm
Energy apocalypse looms as the world runs out of oil, by Peter Beaumont and John Hooper. The Observer, Sunday July 26, 1998 http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/7/26/13026.html
The End of Cheap Oil, by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère. Scientific American, March 1998 http://dieoff.com/page140.htm
[2] Complexity, Problem Solving, and Sustainable Societies, by Joseph A. Tainter, 1996 http://dieoff.com/page134.htm http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559635037