SteveB
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
What do you plan to do about it, V.? I will not go gentle into that nightmare and will instead do all I can to help elect Jill Stein in November. Three months. It’s the least I can do.
Ken, there was an article a month or so ago (maybe Ilargi included it) that reported that shale companies had increased efficiencies such that extraction (not production–yes, where did that confusion come in?) has increased recently. But then does that just shorten the life of the well without increasing the output?
Greenpa hangs his hat on claims of “new” that don’t exist. The only use of “new” is applied to the study cited. Old guy crankiness? Just the usual unquestioned judgment? Whatever.
Nicole, hearing Gail refer to declining prices in one or two of her comments sparked a thought: might it be more useful to refer to declining profits rather than declining prices, since that’s where the spiraling impact occurs: with the businesses?
Thanks for the tough love, Nicole. The hand wringing around markets and even energy just loses its appeal when put up against personal survival choices relative to those of others, which in most cases will be neighbors and other acquaintances, not “them” (i.e., the vilified “other” of choice).
sangell51, there’s the solution space, and there’s the wishful thinking space. Your comment clearly occupies the latter. That’s why you “really don’t see”.
I’m looking forward to Part 5, though I have a general idea of what it will include, based on past readings and viewings of Nicole’s thinking.
The subject of this analysis is not civilization but exchange-based civilization. Trust in trading partners, for example, only matters when trade and trust are concepts in turn based on the concept of exchange. Ignoring or overlooking the fact that human expansion didn’t happen in a vacuum, but rather in a society (unique among species) which, through that belief, ubiquitously and perpetually encouraged not only consumption but overconsumption, closes the analysis to possibilities within the solution space. While one might argue (or simply believe) that humans can’t or won’t end the current dominant-cultural belief in the concept of exchange that has fueled our expansion, it can’t be known. Therefore, absent clear indications that exploring that option (preferably in tandem with obviously necessary localization efforts, based on a permaculture design approach, as I’m sure Nicole will continue to advocate) would make matters worse, people would deprive themselves the possibility of a less-stressful and less-painful future by dismissing it out of hand.
Looking at it again, the wording “gross production must rise by a factor of ten” is ambiguous. It would have been clearer to say something like ‘energy invested must rise by a factor of ten in order to maintain gross energy returned’.
rudolfc, you need to subtract the 1000 in your first example from both values, then compare the remainders. 10 is 10 times 1, which is the amount that Nicole was referring to, not the total energy use. I don’t follow where your 1053 comes from in your second example. Typo? 1000 divided by 20 is 50. 1000 divided by 2 is 500. The difference is again a factor of ten.
Markets, Prof, aren’t natural themselves. So your “only solution” misses the no-market, no-economy, no-exchange option of ending the belief in the concept of exchange and the corollary use of money (or gold, Golden Oxen). It’s simple, yet beyond most people’s money-think ingrained minds. Until it’s not.
Not hubris but rationality and rationalization–aka, money-think–masquerading as logic. It’s an epidemic.
“I’m wondering how it ever got to this. How did the capacity for critical thinking disappear from the field of economics?”
Silly! It was BORN that way!
Farrell’s doing a bit of fear-mongering in his piece. We don’t need to feed people who don’t exist. He could learn something from Daniel Quinn.
Ilargi, I don’t think it’s that “George’s words show us that we could do much better than we do, but we don’t want to.” The incentives of money use are simply too strong to be held at bay for long. This is like so many other local approaches (e.g., local currencies) that have a short half-life. Someone, somewhere, somehow will be motivated to stamp it out in order to increase their own profit. The proof is today’s system. Or even the system as it stood 30, 40, or even 70 years ago. To whatever extent this can be reenacted, I certainly wouldn’t oppose it. Whether it would be as viable in a world of declining energy is an interesting question. Ultimately, though, it’s still a strategy for how to play the game rather than how to end the game.
At this degree of scale, V. Arnold, things take time to play out. Patience. Be thankful you’ve had some more time to prepare. Maybe an extra growing season this past year? If you’re in the US it would be a great time to unload a gas guzzler while gas prices are still low and before people catch on that it’s not a good thing after all. Of course, that would stick someone else with that albatross. When it gets started, though, and that’ll be any day now, it’s going to be rip roaring for a solid year or more.
I don’t have an answer to your question, skintnick. With respect to any change in monetary systems (note: plural), the omnipresent challenge is the “widespread” aspect. Even widespread isn’t enough. It would need to be total, global, and that’s sitting on the lap of impossible. There is no global currency, and so all governments would have a say. That’s a dead end. The only viable choice is that of individuals, who are apart from governments, to end the global use of money and exchange if a critical mass of them decide that they’d prefer to live without them. By definition of critical mass, no government or corporate efforts could stop it.
Some know what they’re talking about. It’s just that we won’t know until things have played out. In the meantime one might look back at who was right back in 2000 and 2007 if it matters.
Maybe Amaral-Rogers is overstating the impact on wild bees (after all, how could she possibly know about all of England and Wales?), but who knows.
The information you track here gets ever more ominous, Ilargi. Amazingly, you’re not even making it up, just pointing to it. 😉
I’m thinking oil (WTI) will bottom around $26. That would put it near an 82% drop from the top, right? I won’t ask if you’ve started a pool.
Very informative and well presented. Thanks, Euan, and Ilargi for sharing it here.
The “Demand driven” arrow in Figure 12 confused me briefly until I realized it indicates the direction of price/production due to declining demand.
Any sense of how long production plateaus last? Looks like it was going on 10 years in the NA before the shale boom. What about Europe and any other areas that have since declined? Can we anticipate FSR and OPEC having longer plateaus or in the same range (or shorter?)?
Continuing on your reply to my first question from yesterday, Ilargi (thanks for that and the other response), I can imagine war posturing building up in the near term but not getting carried out before oil prices shoot up again in the latter part of the year to early 2016. Governments generally move slowly, which would point to war actions not starting until late 2016 or into 2017, on the tail end of the market crash and well into the deeper economic depression. Or do you see an individual leader with the power to act more quickly (rashly?) than that?
Two questions for you, Ilargi.
1. What’s the logic—or illogic—of going to war because of falling oil profits?
2. Did Turkmenistan really devalue their currency? That is, was it an actual choice?Those US-under-30-households net worth numbers are pretty meaningless given the housing bubble in 2007 (and prior). Must be some YUPPIE couples out there really raking it in to keep it that high. I’m actually surprised the average isn’t negative at this point, but maybe that’s a year off yet.
National level generosity probably just trends with social mood. We’re at peak optimism in the US. Don’t know about those other countries.
The apparent premise that nations, and governments, would be the change-makers makes this whole exercise a distraction from what’s much more likely to result in change: finance, technology, economics, and geology, roughly in that order. I’d put politics somewhere below religion in the list of significant drivers of change in this area.
I had been wondering along the lines of JMG’s piece with regard to the net energy of oil extracted since 2005. Anyone know of an attempt to quantify it in those terms?
The logic of the Mises Inst. piece breaks down where they equate “unease” with “the possibility of poverty”. Kind of like how we think ourselves into believing that money is necessary when it isn’t. Until we stop just going along with the illogic, we’ll continue to keep going along with it.
Good catch, Dr. Diablo. To refine it further, I think it would be more accurate to say that you can’t declare war on a thing (or place). War is on people. What do you think?
Rapala, all prices/valuations rise or fall not in continuous fashion but with adjustments along the way. The dollar appears to have finished a large upward wave, so a 10% correction (or more) is a reasonable call at this stage. After that the larger upward trend will resume.
Good points, ninjin and Jb. It seems that they wouldn’t be able to afford it, Jb, which is what Nicole has predicted. So is it more realistic that the supply curve will move further to the left and the demand curve only slightly and briefly shifts to the right over the next two years?
I think Euan and Roger have pretty solid assessments. The one thing I wonder about with regard to Scenario 2 in particular (though it would apply in general) is whether the supply curve would permanently (inflexibly) go more vertical above the demand curve each time the demand curve drops and some production capacity is permanently lost. At the very least wouldn’t it be more vertical than the 2014 curve? I don’t know if Euan doesn’t give enough weight to the financial (as opposed to economic) factors or if the supply curve really is somewhat flexible in that regard. What do you think, Ilargi?
It might be interesting to look back at 2007-2009 to see what occurred. Of course, the shale boom has been a big factor since then. If that was a one-time phenomenon, the supply curve would become fixed in an even more permanently vertical slope to the right of the demand curve as that shifts lower (to the left). Or could shale come back from the dead? Isn’t that an even bigger question than what will OPEC do?
As usual, your litany of news items—the Lewis and Das pieces in particular, this time—demonstrate the absurdity and futility (i.e., insanity) of our cultural choice to rely on money and exchange.
From the CMI article: “Consumer spending for goods was also reported to be growing 0.27% in this report…”
Interesting how they (or are they the BEA’s words?), like Bloomberg’s and the widespread use of “unexpectedly” that you noted, just can’t bring themselves to (accurately) use the past tense about “growth”.
Contrast that with the comments on gasoline prices which “were plunging” and “fell”. No problem with the past tense when it comes to what’s often referred to as “negative growth”.
Also, am I mistaken that “negative territory” for inflation should be referred to as deflation rather than “dis-inflation”, or are they the confused ones on that?
Kunstler might have a wider readership if he could just back off calling it “evil”. It’s confusion, nothing more, and it involves people—confused people.
I like that you end with some good news.
The production increase trend of the past 3 1/2 years (in blue) seems to have hit a wall. Or might it be a cliff?
“And in that light, I don’t see how or why the $30 oil I talked about yesterday would be all that far-fetched, given that China has driven most of the world’s growth expectations over the past decade or so, and that it seems to have very little chance of living up to those expectations. Even if for no other reason than because the rest of the world stopped growing.”
A step in the direction of determining the likelihood of $30 oil would be to drill down to the use of oil in the Chinese economy for that recent “growth” relative to coal, uranium, and natural gas use. I suspect that they’ve burned through a lot of diesel but not so much gasoline that it will make the difference between $70 oil and $30 oil (or at least not between $55 and $30, as I’ve commented earlier, I think on the TAE FB page). I wonder if most of the drop in energy use fall within the electricity-generation sector that relies on those other fuels. While the diesel use will likely drop off, perhaps dramatically, will the gasoline use? Meanwhile, the transportation use in the rest of the world isn’t likely to drop very sharply, though it will (continue to) drop.
