Why some people are conservative and others liberal

Posted on October 10, 2024 by

Preface. A book review of: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide.

Although Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” was brilliant, it didn’t address that politics must surely go back to the origin of modern humans 300,000 years ago. 

Garcia’s book addresses this, looking at politics from an evolutionary point of view. One finding I thought quite interesting was why women tend to be more liberal and men more conservative as can be seen in the 2024 U.S. election, men favor right-wing extremist Trump 25 points more than women in North Carolina, 19 points more in Michigan, 20 points more in Wisconsin, and 12 points more in  Georgia & Pennsylvania.

“Evolutionary psychology is a field that rests on the understanding that we humans have spent 99% of our history in small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in environments very different from those in which we currently reside. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved.” 

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Book review: Bring the War Home: The white power movement & paramilitary America

Posted on October 7, 2024 by

Preface.  This is a book review of Belew’s “Bring the war home: The white power movement and paramilitary America”.

In hard times in the future, racist white republican groups, many who were or are in the military, could make regions of the country deadly for minorities, liberals, non-Christian religious groups ad so on, forming small armies going home to home to take food, cattle, money, guns, and anything else of value. 

Belew documents how they have far more guns and other weapons than you can possibly imagine from bank robberies, dozens of illegal and often violent crimes, and selling drugs. Above all, stockpiles of weaponry that military men have stolen from where they’re stationed:

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Book review: How Democracies Die

Posted on October 4, 2024 by

Preface.  This is a book review with excerpts from the first half of “How Democracies Die” by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. A few main points:

We tend to think of democracies dying at the hands of men with guns. But democracies may die at the hands of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany.  Or erode slowly, in barely visible steps.  Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.

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Book Review “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean

Posted on September 29, 2024 by

Preface.

This is a book review of “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean.

It is the best book I’ve read in explaining the history of conservatism and authoritarianism. Almost a year before Trump was elected in 2016, Politico wrote that “…the one trait that predicts a Trump voter is not race, income, or education: it’s authoritarianism. Because of the prevalence of authoritarians in the American electorate found in twice as many Republicans as democrats, it’s likely  that Trump’s fan base will continue to grow. Political pollsters have missed this key component of Trump’s support because they simply don’t include questions about authoritarianism in their polls…”

Easley (2021) summarized research showing much higher rates of Americans being right-wing authoritarian (RWA), 26% of them, than other democracies: Twice as high as in Europe, Australia, and Canada.  RWA beliefs include believing voter fraud determined the 2020 election, that Capitol rioters were defending the government, and that masks and vaccines are not crucial for stopping COVID-19. High-RWA tended to be older, right-leaning, and rural with less college education. This is hard to change since studies have been done that show this tendency may be very genetic. Twin studies show this tendency ranges from 10 to 25%.

And this article found that men who strongly believed in the culturally definition of masculinity predicted who voted for Trump, a trait also associated with racism, sexism, less trust of government, and xenophobia.

Right-wing religious groups are the Republican party, with 82% of white evangelical protestants voting for him and 74% of Pentecostals.  So did 63% of Hispanic protestants and 61% of white Catholics, and 58% of white non-evangelical protestants. The groups who overwhelmingly vote Democratic are atheists, agnostics, Jewish Americans, black protestants, and religiously unaffiliated Americans.

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Book review of “The Power Worshippers. Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism”

Posted on September 24, 2024 by

Preface.  One of the many items I found of interest in this book “The Power Worshippers” was that it wasn’t until 1979, six years after Roe v Wade, that conservative activists seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a way to deny President Jimmy Carter because he was threatening to tax religious segregated (racist) schools.  

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Fox news estranges millions of families and instills hate and fear in its cult members

Posted on September 22, 2024 by

Preface.  This is a book review that has key excerpts of “Foxocracy”, by Tobin Smith, who worked at Fox for 14 years and was friends with Roger Ailes as well as the staff that decided what the propaganda of the day would be. He learned all about the psychology behind the show, including using techniques of Nazi propaganda.

What’s most alarming is that millions of families have been torn apart when members have gone down the Foxhole. It is addictive, because like World Wrestling Entertainment, the right-wing newscasters win every time against purposefully chosen much weaker liberal punching-bags.  It’s a good feeling for the majority of fox viewers, many of them among the 54% of America’s working poor who are barely getting by. 

The Trump WWE fans don’t care if the game is rigged, they know WWE is rigged, but are addicted to the fuzzy warm feelings they get when their team wins.  So they don’t mind being fooled by Fox. Top that off with a large percentage of Fox viewers being evangelists who believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.  Who could possibly be easier to fool?  They don’t want facts. They don’t care about facts, they are cult members who will likely never snap out of it because they don’t want to.

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Book review of “Deer Hunting with Jesus” Best book on why people vote for Trump

Posted on September 18, 2024 by

Preface. This is a book review of Joe Bageant’s 2008 Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. Joe Bageant grew up in poor, conservative Winchester Virginia, which is like tens of thousands of other small towns in America. He is one of the few who escaped and got a college education.  When he retired there in 1999, he knew hundreds of people, and gives readers a visceral, gut-level understanding of what life is like in Republican bible-belt territory. He paints vivid portraits of the locals he knows and cares about, the feudal economics that keep them poor, how Christian fundamentalism is woven into their lives, and why they vote against their own interests.  And he is quite funny.

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Climate Change crisis caused by Population growth – duh

Posted on September 15, 2024 by

Preface.  Duh!

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, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

UGC (2024) Population Growth. Understanding Climate Change, University of California, Berkeley

Population growth is the increase in the number of humans on Earth. For most of human history our population size was relatively stable. But with innovation and industrialization, energy, food, water, and medical care became more available and reliable. Consequently, global human population rapidly increased, and continues to do so, with dramatic impacts on global climate and ecosystems. We will need technological and social innovation to help us support the world’s population as we adapt to and mitigate climate and environmental changes.

Human population growth impacts the Earth system in a variety of ways, including:

  • Increasing the extraction of resources from the environment. These resources include fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal), minerals, trees, water, and wildlife, especially in the oceans. The process of removing resources, in turn, often releases pollutants and waste that reduce air and water quality, and harm the health of humans and other species.
  • Increasing the burning of fossil fuels for energy to generate electricity, and to power transportation (for example, cars and planes) and industrial processes.
  • Increase in freshwater use for drinking, agriculture, recreation, and industrial processes. Freshwater is extracted from lakes, rivers, the ground, and man-made reservoirs.
  • Increasing ecological impacts on environments. Forests and other habitats are disturbed or destroyed to construct urban areas including the construction of homes, businesses, and roads to accommodate growing populations. Additionally, as populations increase, more land is used for agricultural activities to grow crops and support livestock. This, in turn, can decrease species populations, geographicranges, biodiversity, and alter interactions among organisms.
  • Increasing fishing and hunting, which reduces species populations of the exploited species. Fishing and hunting can also indirectly increase numbers of species that are not fished or hunted if more resources become available for the species that remain in the ecosystem.
  • Increasing the transport of invasive species, either intentionally or by accident, as people travel and import and export supplies. Urbanization also creates disturbed environments where invasive species often thrive and outcompete native species. For example, many invasive plant species thrive along strips of land next to roads and highways.
  • The transmission of diseases. Humans living in densely populated areas can rapidly spread diseases within and among populations. Additionally, because transportation has become easier and more frequent, diseases can spread quickly to new regions.

***

Linden E (2022) The Climate Challenge of the World’s Population Hitting 8 Billion. Time magazine.

Global population surpassed 8 billion this week, a shocking milestone because back in the 1990s this threshold was not expected to be breached until 2050. Whether you’re a dour Malthusian or a technological optimist, one thing is undeniable: The 2.7 billion people added to global population since 1990 makes the task of averting a climate catastrophe vastly more challenging than it was when global warming first arose as a mainstream concern.

Getting to zero net emissions in 1990—when fossil fuels were putting 22.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) into the atmosphere—was hard enough. Now, we have to eliminate those emissions along with roughly 14 billion tons of annual GHG emissions resulting from population growth.

One of actions to take is family planning, which until now has been largely absent from the conversation around global warming. Most of the expected 2 billion people will be born in the poorer nations. These nations burn fewer fossil fuels, but all aspire to raise their standard of living, which, given today’s energy mix, means more GHG emissions per capita. Even without economic growth, that population increase would mean roughly four billion additional metric tons of CO2 going into the atmosphere each year. That’s about a 10% increase, and, as of today, the world has never been able to voluntarily reduce annual emissions.

Population should be part of climate discussions, but I cannot remember a time when family planning has been featured in international efforts. Yes, it’s a hot button topic in many of the emerging nations, many of which take affront when the rich nations ask them to stabilize their numbers. But its absence from the agenda from last week’s COP27 is a tell that the Congress of Parties process is not a serious effort to really tackle the risk of climate change.

Population growth is the elephant in the room for climate change, but it is also the elephant in the room for ecological issues such as tropical deforestation, desertification, the extinction crisis, the destabilizing of earth’s life support systems on land and in the oceans; demographic issues such as involuntary migration, fresh water, and food insecurity; and political issues such as civil unrest and state failure. Slowing population growth will reduce pressures on all of these issues and threats.

Population growth is a fraught issue. In the last few decades, a major driver to limit family size has been the demographic shift towards urban areas. In cities, additional kids become a liability because of the higher costs of housing and food. This shows that people can change attitudes towards family size quite rapidly, given incentives and access to family planning. For governments, the incentive should be the prospect of a climate Hell if population continues to increase by several hundred million people every decade. Many emerging nations have made great strides in lowering infant mortality, but, all too often efforts on maternal and infant health are not coupled with access to family planning, which is one reason why human numbers surpassed 8 billion two decades ahead of schedule.

Laubichler M (2022) Population growth, climate change create an ‘Anthropocene engine’ that’s changing the planet. Salon.com

BMJ (2021) Human population growth is the root cause of climate change. British Medical Journal. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n2386 

Behind a paywall for me, but I found this summary: “”Human population growth is the root cause of climate change” is a 2021 letter and comment in The BMJ by Jonathan Austen. The letter argues that population growth and increased consumption are the main causes of climate change. It suggests that population growth could be addressed through financial incentives for smaller families and free access to contraception. The letter also claims that population stability would lead to less deforestation and construction, which would have a significant impact on climate change”.

(2024)  South Carolina’s population growth creates climate crisis, says environmental scientist

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — South Carolina is growing, but not all growth is good. At least that is what Leon Kolankiewicz, an environmental scientist with NumbersUSA and lead author of “From Sea to Sprawling Sea,” an environmental impact study that explores how U.S. population growth has driven rural land loss across four decades, said.

“You are making it very difficult to achieve your climate goals by increasing the number of energy consumers, it just doesn’t work”. From 1982 to 2017, 35 years, South Carolina lost 2,126 square miles to what Kolankiewicz described as urban sprawl – the loss of rural land to urbanized development.  “This pace of development, rural land loss, is accelerating,” Kolankiewicz said. “So that, quite understandably, has a lot of South Carolinians concerned or even upset.

Though politicians, including Gov. Henry McMaster, have praised South Carolina’s population growth, and paraded it around as proof of a “booming” economy, environmentalists like Kolankiewicz are concerned that urban sprawl, brought about by an increase in population, can steer areas like the Palmetto State – and the United States – into an existential crisis. “We face an issue of how human beings are going to live when there are 330 million of us in this country,” Kolankiewicz said. “We can’t keep doing that. It is unsustainable. You’re robbing Peter to pay Paul. Losing rural lands to urban sprawl can cripple the environment. Wildlife loses natural grazing land, farmers lose farmland and deforestation only adds to dramatic drops in air quality,” Kolankiewicz explained.

In his study, he contends that even if the loss of habitat and farmland continues at the lower rate of the 2002 to 2017 period, the average destruction of 1,200 square miles per year across the United States would be unsustainable for a country that desires the continued capability of food independence and stewardship of the animal and plant life currently living within its borders. “You can’t have growth in any object or entity in a finite system,” Kolankiewicz said. “Neither the United States, the biosphere, nor the world as a whole was growing in terms of resources to accommodate ever-increasing human demands.”

Kolankiwicz, who also wrote:

***

Scientific American (2009) Does Population Growth Impact Climate Change? Does the rate at which people are reproducing need to be controlled to save the environment?

No doubt human population growth is a major contributor to global warming, given that humans use fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles. More people means more demand for oil, gas, coal and other fuels mined or drilled from below the Earth’s surface that, when burned, spew enough carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere to trap warm air inside like a greenhouse.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during the course of the 20th century. (Think about it: It took all of time for population to reach 1.6 billion; then it shot to 6.1 billion over just 100 years.) During that time emissions of CO2, the leading greenhouse gas, grew 12-fold. And with worldwide population expected to surpass nine billion over the next 50 years, environmentalists and others are worried about the ability of the planet to withstand the added load of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on ecosystems down below.

Developed countries consume the lion’s share of fossil fuels. The United States, for example, contains just five percent of world population, yet contributes a quarter of total CO2 output. But while population growth is stagnant or dropping in most developed countries (except for the U.S., due to immigration), it is rising rapidly in quickly industrializing developing nations. According to the United Nations Population Fund, fast-growing developing countries (like China and India) will contribute more than half of global CO2 emissions by 2050, leading some to wonder if all of the efforts being made to curb U.S. emissions will be erased by other countries’ adoption of our long held over-consumptive ways.

“Population, global warming and consumption patterns are inextricably linked in their collective global environmental impact,” reports the Global Population and Environment Program at the non-profit Sierra Club. “As developing countries’ contribution to global emissions grows, population size and growth rates will become significant factors in magnifying the impacts of global warming.”

According to the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit environmental think tank, the overriding challenges facing our global civilization are to curtail climate change and slow population growth. “Success on these two fronts would make other challenges, such as reversing the deforestation of Earth, stabilizing water tables, and protecting plant and animal diversity, much more manageable,” reports the group. “If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an ecosystem on Earth that we can save.”

CONTACTS: United Nations Population Fund, www.unfpa.org; Sierra Club’s Global Population and Environment Program, www.sierraclub.org/population; Worldwatch Institute, www.worldwatch.org.

 

Posted in Climate Change, David Korowicz, Overpopulation, Population | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Book review of “Democracy in Chains”, the history of how extremist Republicans stealthily stole our Democracy

Posted on September 9, 2024 by

Preface.  I can’t do justice to this book in a book review (so buy it), especially the history of how the right-wing libertarians came to be so powerful, their huge influence on congress, the judiciary, and laws enacted, and how this was done with great stealth.  At the heart of what they want to do is change the U.S. Constitution, in ways that would benefit the super rich and harm everyone else.  They’d do this by putting even more locks and bolts on it to any change.

As it is, the Constitution already has a lot of locks. It restrains what the people can do to a degree not seen in any other democratic nation.  It has too many checks and balances, veto power, and vast power is given to rural states, which tend to be conservative, by giving them more votes to them than populous states.  For instance, consider that Wyoming and California both have 2 senators, but California is 70 times more populated, so a vote in California has 70 times less weight than a Wyoming resident’s vote.

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Net Energy Cliff & the Collapse of Civilization

Posted on September 6, 2024 by
Energy Clifffigure 1. The remaining oil is poor quality, and the energy to get this often remote oil so great that more and more energy (blue) goes into oil production itself, leaving far less — the grey area — available to fuel the rest of civilization. Source: 22 June 2009. David Murphy. The Net Hubbert Curve: What Does It Mean? theoildrum.

It is possible there will be a cliff, but not necessarily from the oil fields, but for non-geological reasons such as financial crashes, wars, and more that are listed in this post.

Geologically it may be a bit of a cliff and decline rapidly as the conventional oil is drained and unconventional heavy oil and deep sea oil flow at much slower rates.

Also, the harder the oil is to get, the more energy goes into obtaining the oil, leaving less energy for the rest of societies needs, throwing the social order into chaos which further reduces oil production. Climate change floods and hurricanes will be disabling or ruining refineries which are so expensive to build that none have been for 50 years now

Still though, maybe not as dramatic as figure 1. You decide. Various issues are listed below.

Related:

Stuart McMillen 2017 Diminishing returns: understanding ‘net energy’ and ‘EROEI’. 

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, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

Diminishing returns: understanding ‘net energy’ and ‘EROEI’

Oil is the master resource that makes all other activities and goods possible, including coal, natural, gas, transportation, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and 500,000 products made from petroleum, using fossils to manufacture them. Such as plastics.

Before plateauing in 2006, the world production of conventional petroleum grew exponentially at 6.6% per year between 1880 and 1970.  Although Hubbert drew symmetric rising and falling production curves, the declining side may be steeper than a bell curve, because the heroic measures we’re taking now to keep production high (i.e. infill drilling, horizontal wells, enhanced oil recovery methods, etc.), may arrest decline for a while, but once decline begins, it will be more precipitous because we extracted oil for NOW that would have been available LATER (Patzek 2007).

The cliff could be financial. Clearly you can’t “grow” the economy without increasing supplies of energy. GDP and oil production are almost perfectly correlated. You can print all the money or create all the credit you want, but try stuffing paper bills down your gas tank and see how far you go.  Our financial system depends on endless growth to pay back debt, so when it crashes, there’s less credit available to finance new exploration and drilling, which guarantees an oil crisis further down the line.

Besides financial limits, there are political limits, such as wars over remaining resources. Now there’s the true existential threat, nuclear wars over the remaining oil. You preppers might think you have enough stuff, but a nuclear winter lasts for 10 years and knocks the ozone way back — you’ll also need 10 years of sunscreen and for crop yields to rise, since plants are damaged by UV also.

About 75% of the remaining oil is in OPEC nations, many unstable or near war-torn countries.

Most arctic oil is a RESOURCE that is not going to save us as you can see in my Arctic posts here.

Hubbert thought nuclear energy would fill in for fossil fuels

Gail Tverberg at ourfiniteworld writes “Hubbert only made his forecast of a symmetric downslope in the context of another energy source fully replacing oil or fossil fuels, even before the start of the decline. For example, looking at his 1956 paper, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, we see nuclear taking over before the fossil fuel decline”.

The Power of Exponential Growth: Every 10 years we have burned more oil than all previous decades.

exponential 7pct oil needed

Another way of looking at this is what systems ecologists call Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). In the USA in 1930 an “investment” of the energy in 1 barrel of oil produced another 100 barrels of oil, or an EROEI of 100:1.   That left 99 other barrels to use to build roads, bridges, factories, homes, libraries, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, railroads, cars, buses, trucks, computers, toys, refrigerators – any object you can think of, and 500,000 products use petroleum as a feedstock (see point #6).  By 1970 EROEI was down to 30:1 and in 2000 it was 11:1 in the United States.

Charles A. S. Hall, who has studied EROEI for most of his career and published in Science and other top peer-reviewed journals, believes that society needs an EROEI of at least 12 to 14:1 to maintain our current level of civilization.

Because we got the easy oil first, we have used up 73% of the net energy that will ever be available, since the remaining half of the reserves require so much energy to extract.

Some other reasons why the cliff may even be steeper

It’s not our oil

About 80% of the good, high quality, cheap oil is in the Middle East. The U.S. has just 2% of reserves, but no worries, with thousands of nuclear weapons the Middle East will be eager to fork over their oil to America, though there are eight other nuclear nations who will also be demanding oil too. If the Sunnis and Shia nations aren’t at war with each other. The refineries and other extraction infrastructure there are easy targets for terrorists as well.

Export Land Model

Oil producing countries are using more and more of their own (declining) oil as population and industry grows within their own nation, and they too need to use more and more energy to get at their difficult oil.  This results in a similar chart to the net energy cliff — suddenly there will hardly be any oil to buy on the world markets.  See Jeffrey Brown’s article “The Export Capacity Index” (one of his statistics is that at the current rate of increasing imports of oil in India and China, these 2 countries alone would be importing 100% of available oil within 18 years).

Technology

As we improve our technology to get at the remaining oil, we make the cliff on the other side even steeper as we get oil now that would have been available to future generations.

Investments won’t be made because the payback times will lengthen

Since what remains is increasingly difficult and expensive to find, develop and extract, investment payback periods lengthen, eventually to impossibly long periods, or to periods that approach the useful life of the capital investment (effectively the same limit in the financial dimension as is an EROEI of 1). Which means it doesn’t matter how much might theoretically be underground, the only thing that matters is how much is actually going to be economically feasible to recover, and that is going to be considerably less than 100% of what might be theoretically and technically possible to recover.

Energy is becoming impossibly expensive, as you can see in these photos of The Tallest structure ever moved by Mankind, a Norwegian natural gas offshore platform.

Exponential growth of population

This makes whatever oil we have left last even less long.

Less oil obtained than could have been

Projects maximize a return on investment over a return of every last drop of possible oil.  Making money is so important that a lot of offshore Gulf oil that could have been obtained if extracted more slowly remains in the ground to wastefully get it out as fast as possible to make a profit because that’s how our financial system operates: short-term gratification.  But hey!  That’s less carbon dioxide and global warming, so in a totally unintended orgy of insatiable greed the “there are no limits to growth” billionaires have ironically helped save the planet.

Flow Rate: An 8% or higher decline rate is likely

Breaking news in 2024: Exxon declared oil was declining at 15% — though less with investment (Exxon).  According to the IEA, the world decline rate is 8.5% offset 4% by Enhanced Oil Recovery (which takes energy). Hook says oil will decline by 0.015 a year when all oil is decline for the giant oil fields, but at higher rates for smaller fields. Especially fracked oil at 80% over 3 years.    That’s too fast for civilization to cope with.

Welcome to net zero!  Great news since so many think that climate change is the ONLY problem.

Oil Chokepoints

And the problem isn’t just geological. There are several critical areas of the world where the flow of oil could be stopped by war or terrorism.

Wars, cyber-attacks, nuclear war, social chaos

By 2024, if not sooner, the unequal distribution of the remaining oil, starvation generated riots and pillaging, and collapsing economies have triggered war(s), massive migrations, and social chaos.

Shale oil and natural gas can not prevent the cliff.  Martin Payne explains: “shale oil plays give us a temporary reprieve from what Bob Hirsch called the severe consequences of not taking enough action proactively with respect to peak oil. Without unconventional oil, what we wind up with is essentially Hubbert’s cliff instead of a Hubbert’s rounded peak”. But this won’t last: “Conventional oil–which was found in huge quantities, in giant fields in the 40’s and 50’s – well those giant fields had huge reserves and high porosities and permeabilities – meaning they would flow at very high rates for decades. This is in contrast to a relative few shale oil plays which have very low porosity and perm and which must be hydraulically fractured to flow. Conventional oil is just a different animal than unconventional oil; some unconventional oil wells have high initial rates of production, but all of these wells have high decline rates. Hubbert anticipated a lot of incremental efforts by the industry to make the right-hand or decline side of his curve a more gradual curve rather than a sharp drop (Andrews)

If any of these wars involve nuclear bombs, then at least a billion people will die.

The unrest has certainly curtailed the ability of oil companies to drill.

Even farmers may stop growing crops once city residents and roaming militias harvest whatever is grown (i.e. Africa as described in Parenti’s “Tropic of Chaos: Climate change and the new geography of violence).

Cyberattacks from China, Russia, and elsewhere have brought the electric grid down in the USA to prevent US military forces for trying to grab the remaining Saudi and Iraqi oil –the armed forces will be too busy trying to maintain order in the USA to venture abroad — nor could they go even if they wanted to, because Chinese and Russian drone attacks will have destroyed all of the United State oil refineries, and we have retaliated against them, so they won’t be able to refine oil either).  We’ve also cyberattacked their electric grids.  Most major cities have no sewage treatment or clean water. Nuclear power plants are melting down.

There’s no substitute for oil  

First of all, whatever replaced oil would need a new distribution system of hundreds of thousands of new service stations.  Billions of new vehicles.  Pipes if a liquid.  Biomass does not scale up.  Well what am I doing, my books and this website explain why.

The thing is though — China started building LNG stations for their road trucks 30 years ago, and now 25% of their truck fleet is natural gas run. BUT, not farm tractors, excavators, mining haul trucks, logging, and the myriad other types of trucks out there.

Coal — why it can’t easily subsitute for oil

“Peak is dead” and the future of oil supply:

Steve Andrews (ASPO):  You mention in your paper that natural gas liquids can’t fully substitute for crude oil because they contain about a third less energy per unit volume and only one-third of that volume can be blended into transportation fuel.  In terms of the dominant use of crude oil—in the transportation sector—how significant is the ongoing increase in NGLs vs. the plateau in crude oil?

Richard G. Miller: The role of NGLs is a bit curious.  You can run a car on it if you want, but it’s not a drop-in substitute for liquid oil.  You can convert vehicle engines in fleets to run on liquefied gas; it’s probably better thought of as a fleet fuel.  But it’s not a substitute for oil for my car.  By and large, raising NGL production is not a substitution to making up a loss of liquid crude.

The only way I can see this being prevented or the end of oil delayed a few years, is if a government has already developed effective bio-weapons and doesn’t care if their own population suffers as well.

I feel crazy to have just written this very dire paragraph with just a few of the potential consequences, but the “shark-fin” curve made me do it!

Even though I’ve been reading and writing about peak everything since 2001, and the rise and fall of civilizations for 40 years, it is hard for me to believe a crash could happen so fast.  It is hard to believe there could ever be a time that isn’t just like now.  That there could ever be a time when I can’t hop into my car and drive 10,000 miles.

I can imagine the future all too well, but it is so hard to believe it.

Believe it.

References

Andrews, Steve. 29 July 2013. Interview with Martin Payne—Is Peak Oil Dead? ASPO-USA Peak Oil Review.

Exxon (2024) ExxonMobil Global Outlook. Executive Summary.   https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/sustainability-and-reports/global-outlook/executive-summary

Patzek, T. 2007 How can we outlive our way of life? 20th round table on sustainable development of fuels, OECD headquarters.

 

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