Such a troll in a position of power here, ignoring what you can't spin. You usually only cover about 20% of my posts.

Ah well. Back to it.

Production of what? Goods and services? How is it not? I had little doubt you'd scoff at whatever metric was presented. It's what you guys do as you dance around the problem at hand. Manufacturing numbers are nearly impossible to quantify as most indexes don't to account for monetary devaluation and inflation in costs of production. No? Meanwhile, the BDI measures shipping rates and international demand for raw goods. What's better, it has no cash flowing through it, and as such, is a far more transparent indicator of the world's economic vitality.

Here we are:



And before you ignorantly say "more ships tho!!!" louder and louder, look at the export rates of China and Japan. How low will they go? In Germany, industrial output has declined to the lowest levels since 2009, as have factory orders.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...2009-in-august

Oh wait, does that not count because you set the parameters as "since 2010?" LOL ... I forgot how delusional you are.

Set the conditions for your own incredulity all you like. You've already been proven wrong about peak oil many months ago. It's just that you're too locked into economic group think to even see it.

Like I said, you're just another fat, happy American, insulated (for now) from the creep of depletion as the global economy gets less and less bang for its buck with every passing year.

To deep-thinking people like you, the Arab Spring is about nothing more than Islam vs. secularism; food inflation is about nothing more than speculators and drought; drought has nothing to do with fracking or climate change; climate change has nothing to do with the harvesting of ever dirtier hydro-carbons; and dirtier hydro-carbons (and all the rest of it) are no indication of peak oil.

To deep-thinking people like you, if the affects of global net energy decline can't be felt overnight for you here in the most powerful country in the world, it's clearly not happening at all anywhere in the world. Nevermind the billions of people who ARE feeling it.

Deep.

Legions of geologists, hydrologists, physicists and other scientists all declare the biosphere we live in has finally reached hard natural limits long ago predicted. It's only cultists of economics, and those paid by them, who insist otherwise.

Mmmkay pumpkin. You do that.

Unfortunately, your "above it all" front doesn't seem to be supported by your rapacious practice of trolling in my wake EVERY time I post. You've yet to ignore me, so you're not really fooling anyone. It's clear it's interesting to you. It's also clear you're learning as you go along, while keeping a brave face as a skeptic. Or is that a "subjective" term?

Prices go up = peak earrllllllllll

Prices go down = peak earllllllll

When a hooker gets a sore vagina from not being properly lubricated....

Jiggs you are seriously the biggest troll of them all.

you need to:

1) gain a firmer grasp of what constitutes a troll ... certainly as it applies on a message board
2) take a looooooooooooooooong look in the mirror

Is 2030 supposed to be a long time from now?

No one said that it was AFAIK

I'm just not getting the controversy here. I guess jiggs made some dire predictions because he didn't anticipate the crash in 2008 or the fracking boom in 2010.

The Gulf States have 460B barrels proven reserves of relatively easy oil, which is enough for current worldwide demand for about 14 years.

Even if they don't find more, they could delay their peak until they get close to running out if they want.

Our dependence on fossil fuels would be hard to overstate it. We basically live off of it by eating it as it is the main ingredient in fertilizer.

And yet you did it!

Sorry, sort of kidding. But I think it is fairly easy to overstate our dependence (Jiggs actually does all through this thread). A lot of our usage of oil is unnecessary and so the amount we use still responds to the price - meaning that as oil actually gets scarcer it gets more expensive and we reduce usage and find alternatives.

All while still fertilizing our fields and growing food.

We eat natural gas more than oil.

I wouldn't expect mass starvation, but a technology miracle might not save us from negative effects. The agriculture boom was based on fossil fuels, unsustainable development and disregard for environmental consequences, not brilliant science.

The answer, I think, is lower productivity, more labor intensive agricultural and more expensive food.

I don't know how exactly standard of living is measured. In as much as it is based on our growing home sizes, population of areas without water in areas uninhabitable without considerable air conditioning, and a boggling amount of waste in buying massive amounts of cheap disposable crap, I think not being able to poke a hole in the ground and have cheap dirty energy gush out might have an impact.

Does conserving = reduction in standard of living?

Actually you need to. You filled up the economics subforum with peak earrllllll awhile back and got yourself 86'd from it. You have no earthly idea about how to form a hypothesis and test it, but are 100% positive of something existing, and then shoving it in everyone's faces. You are almost as bad as those Jehovah's Witnesses that come door to door.

So, yea, you are a troll.

Consider my 'oil' use a poor choice of words where I meant to represent fossil fuels.

I saw you make the "The agriculture boom was based on fossil fuels, unsustainable development and disregard for environmental consequences, not brilliant science." claim in another thread and almost commented.

I think its pretty unconvincing. Just off the top of my head: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

Don't have time to get totally into it now, but http://www.resilience.org/stories/20...-dependent-oil

It's not that there was no "contribution" from genetics. (contribution in quotes because it was part of the development of industrial monocrop agriculture that has caused an explosion in unsustainable productivity) That went along with the explosion in fossil fuels used to grow and transport food. On the page for the Green Revolution you'll find the contribution of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which is us eating fossil fuels. Pesticides are also primarily petrochemicals.

Obviously fossil fuels are heavily involved in agriculture right now. But that's not the same as saying that the agriculture boom is based on fossil fuels and not science.

It's also not at all addressing the bigger point that we have a whole hell of a lot of fossil fuels left and there are lots of current uses that can be curtailed or replaced with non fossil-fuel alternatives that wouldn't greatly affect our standard of living.

Energy use per capita in Denmark is less than half the US. So, obviously we can cut back a lot and maintain a good standard of living. I just don't think we can necessarily cruise along without some significant changes.

Natural gas is far from necessary for the haber process. Hydrogen can be produced in various ways if natural gas becomes uneconomical

Denmark also gets more than 1/2 their power from renewables.

Various ways?

Splitting water with a lot of energy - the bulk of which comes from fossil fuels.

Can be produced from waste as well.

I'm not saying whatever doom and gloom Jiggs was talking about was right. But, the situation is relatively urgent. Say whatever crisis in fossil fuels is slow or doesn't happen until 2030 or 2050. It takes pretty urgent action in 2015 to make much of a difference in 2030 or even 2050.

At this point, as far as agriculture is concerned, I'm sure most of you are familiar with all the issues of nitrogen run off and soil depletion and increasing amounts of pesticides needed because of monoculture - and that there are ways to reduce these problems. But, the solutions are not necessarily economical in the short term and they will not be implemented all at once, everywhere.

Now, I expect you liberals are not really taking a big pro-agribusiness oil-industry position and mainly just hate Jiggs.

The basic problem with this thread is that that I think every single person agrees with this statement for some definition of: "a lot", "good standard of living", and "significant changes".

I think many of us feel like "significant changes" covers alternative fuels, better technology (covering both using less and extracting more efficiently), and decreased usage if necessary.

And I think many of us feel like our current economic system will be able to handle that quite easily.

Why is there going to be a crisis? What makes the situation urgent?

Yeah, a lot of threads come down to people arguing about what "a lot" is or something like that. Or, in this case, what is "quite easily."

Aside from the many environmental crises there are right now, fossil fuels are generally going to become more expensive. The demand for fossil fuels is still generally increasing (aside from the recent global recession). The process for replacing fossil fuels without economic shock is going to take a long time; decades.

It takes a long time to build industries, to lower cost of production, and then penetrate a huge market.

But, again, I doubt you are against spending money on renewables or making the fossil fuel industry (and users) pay for their impact on the environment.

One huge source of waste in the US is in home construction. Aside from the ridiculous increases in size while family sizes decrease, the US has generally had extremely crappy insulation. With energy prices relatively higher (from 1946-1973 oil never went above $30/barrel in today's dollars) people will build more efficiently and building codes are more stringent. But, it takes a long time for those changes penetrate a significant part of the housing stock. That's why we should at least act a little bit like it's a crisis now instead of waiting for 2050 and trying to do it all at once.

Totally agreed. But I'm ignoring those in this thread since its not really related to PEAK OIL.

Sure.

And here's where you lost me. Replacing fossil fuels doesn't need to be one big switch that happens at a point in time. It's already happening.

There doesn't need to be a crisis because we have an economic system that naturally reacts to avoid a crisis. Fossil fuels becomes harder and more expensive to extract - we find non fossil-fuel ways of doing things, we find more efficient ways to extract fossil-fuels, we find ways of being more efficient with the fossil-fuels we have now. And so on.

I see no evidence that the depletion of our fossil fuels is at such a rate that we won't be able to have a gradual process (in the medium+ term, there'll definitely be short term bumps) that moves away from them all while improving our overall standard of living.

Edit: Your housing example is an example where I don't see why we need to act like its a crisis*. As it gets more expensive to heat a house people will invest in better insulation. Our economic system is really good at dealing with **** like this (optimally allocating finite resources).

* Again, ignoring environmental factors. Because our economic system is really ****ty at dealing with problems like global warming.

So, what is "acting like it's a crisis"?

For me, I'll say it's doing something that is not immediately economically beneficial. Something that the market alone will not do.

As an example, let's look at the federal income tax credit for solar. When it started in 2005, solar modules cost as little as $3.5/watt. Now they cost as little as $.50/watt. That's not because of some great technological leap. It's because the market was created. (other countries incentives were involved as well)

Home building suffers from some problems that economics alone don't address well. You can build a home more cheaply now that will cost more in the long run. People generally choose cheap now. That may or may not be rational for an individual, but it's a problem for the society and the planet. I would say things like title-24 (energy efficient construction standards in California) are acting a bit like this is a crisis and not just letting the market take care of everything.

...