Glenn Morton" <glennmorton@entouch.net> 05/18/04 10:51 PM wrote;
We interupt this program for the Quote for the day. The Wall Street
Journal is a bit overly pessimistic also:
"Through most of the 20th century, the major petroleum companies
focused on exploring for oil and natural gas. But the age of 'elephant'
strikes is over. There has been just one great find in the past 30
years: the 1999 discovery of Kashagan, a field off Kazakhstan in the
Caspian Sea. Today, the oil fields in the Western oil majors'
traditional strongholds--Alaska, the North Sea, and Texas--are in
decline. Most of the world's untapped reserves are in the hands of
state-owned oil companies in the Middle East.
[snip]
Just so you know the incredible diversity of opinion that exists on this
topic look below at two recent documents written about oil depletion.
Note that Glenn Morton has a middle of the road view here compared to
these two guys.
A six page article that makes some astonishing claims by an emeritus MIT
economist who specialized in oil economics
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n1/v27n1-1.pdf
Spring 2004 issue
The Real Oil Problem
By M. A. Adelman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
An excerpt;
There is not, and never has been, an oil crisis or gap. Oil reserves
are not
dwindling. The Middle East does not have and has never had any "oil
weapon." The
real problem we face over oil dates from after 1970: a strong but
clumsy
monopoly of mostly Middle Eastern exporters cooperating as OPEC. The
biggest
exporters have acted in concert to limit supply and thus raise oil
price -
possibly too high even for their own good. The output levels they
establish by
trial-and-error are very unstable. OPEC has damaged the world economy,
not by
malice, but because its members cannot help but do so.
[Read the entire paper on Acrobat Reader. "This is all a myth" is the
way Adelman ends his article. He says that although some places like
Texas have experienced a decrease in oil, the global supplies will not
experience this.]
Then two pieces by Jay Hanson who has been writing about oil depletion
for many years and has a site:
HOW COULD IT BE OTHERWISE?
What becomes of the surplus of human life?
It is either, 1st. destroyed by infanticide,
as among the Chinese and Lacedemonians; or 2d.
it is stifled or starved, as among other
nations whose population is commensurate to
its food; or 3d. it is consumed by wars and
endemic diseases; or 4th. it overflows, by
emigration, to places where a surplus of food
is attainable. -- James Madison, 1791
For want of a nail the shoe is lost, for want
of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a
horse the rider is lost.
Worldwide, more than 10 million hectares of agricultural land are
abandoned
annually because of serious soil degradation. During the last 40 years,
about 30 percent of total world arable land was abandoned because it
was no
longer productive. About half of the current arable land now in
cultivation
will be unsuitable for food production by the middle of the
twenty-first
century. [34]
Within the first decade of the 21'st century, industrial activity will
rise
high enough for it to seriously degrade land fertility. This will occur
because of contamination by heavy metals and persistent chemicals,
climate
change, salinization, topsoil loss, falling water tables, and increased
levels of ultraviolet radiation from a diminished ozone layer.
Global oil production will peak soon and the spike in oil prices will
quickly exacerbate other major problems facing industrial agriculture.
Food
grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging
and
delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for
every
calorie of solar energy. It has been estimated that about four percent
of
the nation's energy budget is used to grow food, while about 10 to 13
percent is needed to put it on our plates. In other words, a staggering
total of 17 percent of America's energy budget is consumed by
agriculture!
[35]
By 2040, we would need to triple the global food supply in order to
meet the
basic food needs of the eleven billion people who are expected to be
alive.
But doing so would require a 1,000 percent increase in the total energy
expended in food production. [36] But the depletion of oil will make it
physically impossible -- thus economically impossible -- to provide
enough
net energy to agriculture: "A recent review of the future prospects of
all
alternatives has been published. The summary conclusion reached is that
there is no known complete substitute for petroleum in its many and
varied
uses." [37] Global food production will drop to a fraction of today's
numbers: "If the fertilizers, partial irrigation [in part provided by
oil
energy], and pesticides were withdrawn, corn yields, for example, would
drop
from 130 bushels per acre to about 30 bushels." [38] Obviously, death
certificates have already been issued for billions of unsuspecting
people.
The dependence of industrial agriculture on fossil fuels, the declining
fertility of the land, and the positive feedbacks imposed by declining
net
energy will force the economy to divert much more investment into the
agriculture and energy sectors as part of a desperate attempt to
maintain
agricultural output. Government budgets must also decline in real terms
as
greater and greater fractions of the economy are diverted into the
resource
sectors.
As resource quality and land fertility continue to fall, society will
be
forced to allocate more and more capital to the agriculture and
resource
sectors, otherwise the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would
restrict
production still more -- it's circular, there is no way to avoid the
positive feedback. Ultimately, industrial capacity will decline rapidly
taking with it the service and agricultural sectors, which depend upon
industrial inputs.
Constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, the availability of
life-supporting resources will go into a permanent, steep decline.
In less than 20 years, the self-regulating market system will have "run
out
of gas" and vanished. With the market system gone, the ruling elites
will
fall back on the good old-fashioned means of control: a police state.
In
the US alone, 200 million guns in private ownership guarantee that this
police state will quickly devolve into rebellion and anarchy.
If the anarchy scenario were to reach its natural conclusion, the
global
elites would be eliminated by the angry masses. Those who managed to
escape
would die more miserably than the poor since they are unsuited for
day-to-day survival because they lived their lives like queen bees.
But when the above scenario seems inevitable, the elites will simply
depopulate most of the planet with a bioweapon. [39] When the time
comes,
it will be the only logical solution to their problem. It's a
first-strike
tactic that leaves the built-infrastructure and other species in place
and
allows the elites to perpetuate their own genes into the foreseeable
future:
"War is a male reproductive strategy. All that is needed for the
strategy
to evolve, is that aggressors fight and win more often than they lose".
[40]
The global genocide will be rationalized as a second chance for
humanity --
a new Garden of Eden -- a new Genesis. The temptation will prove
irresistible:
"Strangelove said, 'Offhand, I should say
that in addition to the factors of youth,
health, sexual fertility, intelligence,
and a cross section of necessary skills,
it would be absolutely vital that our top
government and military men be included,
to foster and impart the required principles
of leadership and tradition.'
"The arrow had not missed its mark, and around
the table there was an outbreak of sober,
nodding heads. Attention was concentrated
more than ever on Doctor Strangelove.
"Strangelove went on. 'Naturally they would
breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much
time and little to do. With the proper
breeding techniques, and starting with a ratio
of, say, ten women to each man, I should
estimate the progeny of the original group of
two hundred thousand would emerge a hundred
years later as well over a hundred million...'"
How could it be otherwise?
[ references in http://www.dieoff.com/page185.htm ]
I have been thinking about this all day, and here is another view of
the future:
The inevitable global reduction of net energy -- and the inevitable
collapse of the global economy -- will cause country after country to
become "overpopulated" (here I mean insufficient resources for
population). "Overpopulation" will cause a rise a nationalism and
aggression. The countries that feel that they are able, will invent
excuses to attack other countries and seize resources (Hitler did it
for that reason, and we just did it for that reason). These large
country wars will continue for a number of years.
At some point, the larger countries will have insufficient resources
to remain together and will splinter into smaller units. These
smaller units that feel that they are able, will invent excuses to
attack other small units and seize resources. This process will
continue but the ability to make war decrease.
As these large and small wars occur, many millions or billions of
civilians will be killed and displaced. Starving people will kill
and eat anything they can find (including each other). Freezing
people will burn everything they can find. I expect that virtually
all standing forests will be cut for fuel (e.g., Haiti) and virtually
all wild animals will be killed and eaten (e.g., Zimbabwe). In
short, the life support system we inherited 10,000 years ago will be
gone.
The dioxin load from burning plastics will be horrendous! All dumps
will be abandoned and leak into the groundwater. Abandoned nuclear
plants and waste sites (e.g., Hanford) will experience chemical
explosions -- and some may melt down -- as maintenance is universally
forgotten.
Any country with nuclear weapons will be likely to use them as
country after country disintegrates -- especially after Russian
nationalists come to power and Islamic Fundamentalists take Pakistan
(it's just a matter of time).
I believe the foregoing scenarios are consistent with thermodynamics,
evolution theory, and history.
Received on Wed May 19 15:36:41 2004
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