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... this is exactly what most of us mean.
There's plenty of energy. But there are also plenty of problems in its development and exploitation. And if we can't do it fast enough, a lot of people are going to die. The "Liberty Tree", as the metaphor in your sig quote is often called, will be watered bountifully. But not in the cause of Liberty, but because of lack of planning. Lack of foresight. Stupidity.
How fast can we replace half of our petroleum use with coal, let alone the relatively inefficient version of nuclear fission we now use? Because once we fall off the Oil Plateau (a.k.a. "Peak Oil"), we'll be facing a decline in excess of 5% per year. But don't forget, we also have an historical 2-3% increase in total energy demand each year. That's a potentially 8% per year shortfall until our economy starts to collapse, which is likely to happen quickly. A 5% yearly shortfall will take us to the half-way point in 14 years; at 8%, it's nine years; and if the fall-off is very rapid (due to abuse of water-injection technology for recovering oil), a 10% per year drop-off leaves us at 50% in seven years. And the loss of oil-based energy could happen more quickly than that. The world's oil allowance would shrink back half a century in a decade -- but the population will be between 6.5 and 8 billion when this happens, not the 3 billion of 1960.
We'll still have plenty of oil, but it will just become increasingly difficult to recover. We'll have to get cracking building those coal plants and nuclear reactors, but the economy will be hosed. How, then, will we recruit and pay the labor force we need?
Most of us here, even the anti-nuclear faction, are well-educated about the dynamics of the situation. We are facing a shortfall that will hit us so quickly that it could easily cause rapid economic disintegration, political chaos, and mass death if agriculture takes a severe hit. That's a threat, but not a promise. The promise is that we'll scream bloody murder before that day arrives. We are doing it now.
On the other hand, we have no interest in being proven "right". We modern Cassandras have been warning about this era since the 1970s; Hubbert from the late 1950s until the month he died. In the past half-decade or so, we've been pretty successful, and it took no additional doom-crying to make the case. In 1998, both the Ghawar and the Cantrell oil fields seemed bottomless; today, each are producing only due to water injection, and the water cut is far outpacing the recovered oil. This practice could easily render the fields useless, leaving the remaining oil out of reach, deep under layers of brine and lighter oil fractions.
As late as 2002, Iraq was "known" to be sitting on 300 million to 3 billion barrels of oil -- today, 100 million is the wildly optimistic max. And precious little of that is flowing at all due to the evolving civil war in Iraq. For a few years, so-called "abiotic" oil seemed to be the miraculous fix, but the (valuable) work of the abioticists has been shown to have been twisted and abused for political cover.
So, yes, the idea is to scare the decision-makers into action, if that's what it takes -- and the "crazy" predictions of Heinberg and Deffeyes and Laherrere et al. don't seem so wild any more. Small changes in supply and demand now drive price changes of over 50% in natural gas and oil markets, just as predicted. It is quite likely that oil is going to cost $100/bbl within the next year or two -- perhaps as soon as this autumn, given another harsh hurricane season and/or continued incompetence on the part of the Bush administration.
Yes, even scaring them to the point of convincing them that industrial civilization could collapse. It's not crazy; it's precautionary, and if we do nothing, it will happen. The stakes are high enough to justify a little paranoia. We should have started developing large-scale renewable energy technology, AND high-reliability, decreased-risk nuclear reactors, back in the 1970s; instead, in 1980, we elected a dolt who had more sarcastic quips than functioning brain cells, who derailed what modest progress had been made.
Given the usual inertia of the business and governmental communities, they would prefer to deal with this along a leisurely time line; spend several years crafting the financial instruments and engineering the tax structure, then slowly replacing infrastructure at about 5% per annum in an easily-controlled, amortizable, tax-favored sequence, monetizing 30-year notes, and making sure the thousands of corporations set up to siphon the money into the pockets of the Favored are well-protected. But we don't have that kind of time. BP seems to be the only big company aware of the problem, which is an amazing turn-around for BP, and which we can't expect to happen with the other companies until the price of oil is so high that it chokes off its own demand.
Worst of all, the oil reserve data reports have been "massaged" for nearly two decades now, usually to "prove" more recoverable reserves than there really were. Are we at Peak Oil, a few years away from it, on a plateau (as I personally believe we are), or already on the way down? With accurate accounting a thing of the quaint past, we don't know, we can't know, and we won't know.
When the drop-off happens, it will be fast, painful, and destructive.
You write as if the required changes will happen easily and naturally. Well, with enough time, they would. But we don't have "enough time" any more. Now, we have to move quickly, especially since we don't know exactly how much oil we can depend on and for how long. If we wait until the economy is a smoking ruin, we won't be able to marshall the resources make those changes at all without some significant fascism -- and if we wait until we don't have enough food for our people, civilization will only remain as isolated city-states.
The "worst-case scenario" is pretty bad. Imagine the Nazi Holocaust and its effect on the Jews of Europe -- then multiply that by 1000. That's six gigadeaths. That would happen within a generation of the cessation of all large-scale agriculture.
But I am an optimist. I am sure we can avoid this, but our leaders are frighteningly lacking in motivation. So, talk of gigadeaths and the collapse of industrial society and the loss of human civilization are perfectly rational. If we had stayed on track, we would be facing a period of mild austerity and some modest government-initiative public works projects. As it is, the belt's going to need several new notches on the narrow side, and we may have several decades of a new kind of corporate socialism to muddle through.
We're crazy, Odin, all of us -- crazy like foxes. We want to survive, and if the inertia of our leaders prevails, we won't. Let the arrogant conservatives of the next generation call us liars; survival will be worth it.
We avoided World War Three and survived to watch Terminator movies; the Queer community rallied and reversed the growth of AIDS; I believe we'll survive the coming transitional era as if we hit a speed bump, not a drop off a cliff. (And incidentally, both world war and AIDS remain threats, if less imminent, so this is no time to slack off of our efforts.) We can likewise avoid the kind of energy gap that could plunge 8,000 years of human progress into darkness.
But if we think that calling "bullshit" will make it go away -- we will be the ones going away, instead.
--p!
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