As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline
Carbon sequestration, wind, solar, geo-engineering, and other remedies are trivial compared to the effect declining fossil fuels will have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The natural rate of decline today is 8.5%, exponentially increasing, and offset by 4%, so the gap will continue to grow wider, with petroleum eventually decreasing by 6% and more a year in the future.
- Peak oil: “It’s the flows, stupid!” Energy abundance depends entirely on the RATE of energy flow
- Global oil discovered 7.7 times less than consumption in 2019
- Giant oil field decline rates and peak oil
Climate change is also a symptom of overpopulation and overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity. If family planning became the green new deal, there would be a chance for all problems to be reduced in severity. “Renewables” are certainly not a solution since transportation and manufacturing can’t be electrified or run on anything else (see Chapter 6 and 9 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).
Climate models developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show a range of greenhouse gas trajectories. The worst-case IPCC scenario is Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5. This predicts a rise of temperature by 5°C, and this is the scenario you read about daily in the newspapers as being the most likely “business as usual” future. But lately many scientists think around 3 °C (RCP 4.5 to RCP 6) is more likely (Hausfather and Peters 2020).
Geologists have a far more optimistic outlook. Using realistic fossil fuel reserves in climate models, they predict an outcome from RCP 2.6 to RCP 4.5 (Doose 2004; Kharecha and Hansen 2008; Brecha 2008; Nel 2011; Chiari and Zecca 2011; Ward et al. 2011, 2012; Höök and Tang 2013; Mohr et al. 2015; Capellán-Pérez et al. 2016; Murray 2016; Wang et al. 2017).
The IPCC scenarios do not model fossil fuels at all, since their assumption is that we will be burning fossil fuels, at exponentially increasing amounts until 2400. The IPCC RCP 8.5 hothouse world scenario assumes a fivefold increase in coal use by 2100 (Ritchie and Dowlatabadi 2017), even though coal production may have peaked, or will soon (see chapter 6 of “Life After Fossil Fuels”).
So rather than becoming crisply well-done, perhaps we’ll scrape by with a medium rare sunburn.
And if oil did peak in 2018 (EIA 2018), then perhaps IPCC RCP 2.6 is the most likely outcome with a temperature increase of up to 2.3°C. Still, the consequences of climate change are locked in and severe: sea level rise, extreme weather reducing crop production, and tipping points that may push climate towards RCP 4.5 and a temperature rise of up to 3.2°C.
On the other hand, if oil is about to decline, then the ocean and land will start to absorb CO2. About 50% will be removed in 30 years, another 30% within a few centuries, and the last 20% will remain for many thousands of years (Solomon et al. 2007).
Pesticide dependent industrial monoculture agriculture will be replaced with organic agriculture
(Books about Agriculture, other posts on agriculture)
Pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and other agricultural poisons are made out of oil. Like antibiotics we are running out of effective chemicals, since pests develop resistance on average within five years, while it takes ten years or more to develop a new pesticide. And so ecologically destructive:
Natural gas fertilizer will be replaced with compost
At least four billion of us are alive due to fertilizer (ammonia) (Fisher 2001; Smil 2004; Stewart et al. 2005; Erisman et al. 2008).
Natural gas fertilizer is the main reason population exploded from 1.6 to 7.8 billion people today with the consequent loss of biodiversity, aquifer depletion, climate change, topsoil erosion, deforestation, pollution, and every other existential threat that you can think of. What problem wouldn’t be better with fewer people?
But fertilizer releases greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), with a global warming potential 300 times greater than carbon dioxide. Agriculture is responsible for 73% of N2O emissions (EIA 2011). N2O is also the largest destroyer of stratospheric ozone as well (Ravishankara et al. 2009), which shields plants and animals from the damaging ultraviolet light (UVB) that reduces crop productivity while increasing susceptibility to disease. Worst of all, UVB harms phytoplankton at the bottom of the ocean food web, which produces half of all oxygen and are the main absorbers of CO2, by sequestering it on the ocean floor after dying. Nitrogen runoff accelerates eutrophication and dead zones and increases water treatment costs.
Fertilizer also harms the soil ecosystem. A balanced diet for soil organisms is about 20 parts carbon to one part nitrogen. Too much nitrogen and too little carbon starves and eventually kills them. The helpful functions microbes perform for plants, such as defending crops from pests and diseases, also are lost, so farmers add even more fertilizer and pesticides.
Robots and AI will not take over
What energy could robots be built with and run on after fossils? Where will their materials come from? The mineral ores with the highest concentrations are gone. The remaining crummy, low concentration ores take far more energy to process at a time when energy is declining. Not that a robot overthrow was ever an issue. The human cortex is 600 billion times more complicated than any artificial network. The code to simulate the human brain would require hundreds of trillions of lines of code inevitably riddled with trillions of errors (Kasan 2011).
No need to worry about Space Aliens Invading
As Sir Fred Hoyle (1964) wrote “With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.”
Yes, there will be a hangover, but a simpler world has much to offer
One way to cope with the end of the Petroleum Party is to be thankful for what you have, which will be especially hard for those alive today. But future generations will have never known anything else and perhaps someday our brief two centuries of fossil fuels will become mythology and we who lived then Gods & Goddesses who flew in the sky above the clouds. Kansas pioneers survived and thrived despite locusts, foods, droughts, illness, and more (Stratton 1982). There are thousands of books about survival in hard times. History offers many lessons about how we can reinvent our way of life and find joy and meaning in simpler lives. So do many websites devoted to making the transition from fossil fuels to a simpler past, such as transitionus.org, postcarbon.org, resilience.org, energyandourfuture.org, and simplicityinstitute.org. Check out energyskeptic.com categories “What To Do” and “Books”. Also, see the last four pages of the German military peak oil study in this reference (BTC 2010). Day & Hall’s (2016) “America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions” will clue you in to the highest carrying capacity places to live given climate change and energy decline.
Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Women in ecology Podcasts: WGBH, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity, Index of best energyskeptic posts
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References (see Chapter 33 of Life After Fossil Fuels for a longer discussion of this topic)
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