Wasn't the Irish Famine was primarily due to potato blight, not increasing population?

It's pretty bad when potato crops fail when that's all you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And then those darn Brits start shipping off what potatoes you do have to feed themselves.

It's almost like you didn't read the link to find out why the Irish have historically been pissed at the English for it.

Ideally if the market were all-knowing and people had perfect insight on the future, the futures market would be pretty damn stable. But it's that humans are not perfect and are often wrong that these pain points happen. But until we find a way to make humans not be wrong, having humans have their skin on the line by making their predictions is going to minimize who is wrong by giving huge incentives in being right. A politician that is wrong pays nowhere near as much as an investor who is wrong (sometimes the politician even benefits). A politician who is right gets nowhere near the benefit of an investor who is right. Those who vote for the politician have some skin in the game, but nothing close to an investor who must bet with his own money, and if he is wrong, he loses his investment. A voter gets an equal vote no matter how much he has to risk, no matter what he has to lose or gain, and how uniformed he is. There is little incentive for a voter to put the time and effort into being right on this.

So yeah, there will be shocks and people will be wrong, and there will be malinvestment. Just less than there otherwise would be. Until a better system is figured out or we get omniscient robot overlords telling us what to do, its the best we got.

you're comparing apples to something not at all like apples here

unban jiggs noobs

BTW most of the Jiggs hate does not come from him saying "yo, we gonna run out of oil". Everyone knows that at some point, we won't be able to get out as much as we have in the past. Even if we can, it becomes more expensive to get it out, which is also bad.

The problem with Jiggs is saying "OMG THE WORLD WILL END ONCE IT DROPS OFF!" When we hate on Jiggs, he assumes it's for the first claim (which is fairly obvious to anyone, just a matter of when is up for debate), while the second claim is what gets him the hate.

There are still vast supplies of natural gas and coal, both of which can power automobiles. I doubt coal will ever be allowed to in the U.S. given environmental concerns, but NG already powers a number of vehicles.

Biofuels have mostly been a disappointment, but you never know.

The economy of coal powered automobiles is horrible compared to straight up oil. To turn the coal into something that drives a vehicle means costs that consumers are going to have to bear that presently dont exist even with oil circa $100 a barrel.

Its amazing how much this trope is put forward. Its not that oil runs out, its the cost, purely the cost, it will achieve when it achieves a certain degree of scarcity, any alternatives that presently exist do so at a still painful cost horizon.

Of course innovation can change this.

Right, in its present it is. There is also little money in this because coal and more specifically CTL isn't very easy on the environment, and its not clear that this will ever be allowed. It isn't cost effective with even $100 oil, but its a technology that is possible and potentially promising if oil reaches unprecedented prices, defeating an "OMG-you might want to consider purchasing a bunker and a 20 yr supply of dry food" alarmism.

I notice you didn't mention natural gas, which is of course already used widely in larger transportation vehicles (buses) and is becoming more common in vehicles that use tons of gasoline. Not price competitive with oil at the moment for most personal vehicles (at least an after market transformation isn't, afaik) though unfortunately the EPA has made it quite burdensome to attain a license to convert vehicles to NG.

LNG is super common in Korea for cars. I'm sure there are other countries it is common too. Converting to those vehicles won't be terribly painful.

Not to mention efficiency gains in transmissions and engines...

Hybrids, EVs and H-powered cars will get better as battery technology improves as well.

Like all malthusian catastrophe predictions before peak oil, price sensitivities and technology aren't well accounted for.

In fairness, Jiggs never actually says the world will end. He just strongly insinuates that it will, while refusing to concretely say so out of fear of being proven wrong.

If you do not agree that something undefined and vaguely "bad" will happen, to some undefined degree of significance, then you're playing the NOTHING TO SEE HERE!! card, and deserve to be chastised.

Also, to be fair to Jiggs, people troll the **** out of him constantly and use personal attacks, so he is understandably grumpy sometimes imo.

This is a common problem. Someone who is an expert at one area fails to see how it fits into the big picture. Someone who is an expert on global warming will fail to see how technology or innovation could mitigate it or reverse it. Of course you also have the incentive of it being better to have something be a crisis than not a big deal which is almost the exact opposite of the incentives of someone trying to solve problems, where there are strong incentives to make things that would otherwise be crises become minor roadblocks.

I think Jiggs over bakes the pie, but I think alot more people under cook it.

The counter to this is that many parts of the world are in a resource constrained state. Look at what is going on in the middle east, haiti, etc... The numbers of people might not be falling, but their increases are absorbing all the economic gains leading to crisis.

lol wut? Resource constrained state? WTF does that mean? What state doesn't have constrained resources?

I meant lots of starving people.

Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting Jiggs eventual contributions to this thread.

max you're making absolutely no sense atm.

You claimed that energy shortages won't lead to a Malthusian collapse. My claim is that energy prices at even today's level are too high to provide a painless transition to an alternative.

For example, I have read that the Rwandan genocide could be considered malthusian in nature.

http://www.ditext.com/diamond/10.html

I think similar food shortages in Libya and Egypt are one reason for the turmoil in those countries.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ling-food.html

If higher oil prices is leading to higher food prices, more unrest will follow. I think one reason you haven't seen trouble in Saudi Arabia is because they are still flush with cash from the large amount of oil and can afford to give their citizens goodies.

The demand for a better energy source is there. We just haven't found it. Oil at $100/bbl is causing plenty of problems now.

Actually, I undercook the pie. Trust me on that one.

Shocking. ... A renowned Austrian School of economics disciple is granted a video platform to spew half-truth, asserting that market solution makes resource depletion moot -- the latter of which is a condition he doesn't really deny, instead merely insists it won't be a problem because "that's how it's always been." :rocker:

Horwitz wouldn't last 2 min. at a debate podium across from anyone of the caliber of a Howard Kunstler, Jeff Rubin, or Richard Heinberg on the topic of energy. This is a man who actually says with a straight face:

"Government can only spend what it takes from the private sector one way or another, either through taxation, borrowing, or the redistribution effects of inflation. For every dollar that government spends, there is one less dollar being spent somewhere else in the economy..."

So you can see his Straussian rhetorical fairly clearly.

He uses two examples in his presentation, one largely irrelevant (copper), and the other willfully mis-characterized (U.S. oil reserves).

The copper claim was valid, until you remember that copper isn't burned and can almost always be recycled. Further, the global economy isn't utterly based upon copper.

Then he attempted to pass off a sourceless "fact" that U.S. reserves have "grown" to over 1 trillion barrels. Presumably, he's trying to conflate heavy unconventional, technically recoverable oil-burnt-from-rock with light, sweet crude (a popular new tactic). It's light crude that has always returned 20-100 units for every 1 unit expended, a ratio which our empire is built upon. Apples to oranges much, Mr. Horwitz? How about just sourcing your graphic rather than pretend your viewing audience all just obediently laps this nonsense up? Or just be honest by admitting that the majority of that "reserve growth" is stuff that returns a paltry 3:1 ratio, at best.

This goofiness is really no different than how the establishment mis-represented and ostracized the findings of the world famous "Limits to Growth" report from the 1970s as put forth by some "crazies" at MIT.

"Look! Growth continued! Peak didn't happen, so you're wrong!" ...

Unfortunately, anyone who's ever actually read "Limits to Growth" knows the Club of Rome wasn't wrong at all, as it predicted a peak of world fossil fuel energy production for the first decade of THIS century (which looks quite accurate)... Not the 1980s, as LtG's desperate detractors tried to spin.

Cassandra's curse: how "The Limits to Growth" was demonized

Free marketeers are hard-wired to pump this ruse and pretend global oil depletion isn't real, or isn't a real problem, despite all the symptoms unfolding around the world as we speak. They're pathological about it, even. This is why they're essentially enemies of mankind.

They'll remain this way until events get so ominous that even a trade war begins, and even then they'll just switch to something else equally ridiculous that attempts to pin it all on some new isolated demon of the week (communists, terror, leftists, enrivos, etc. etc.). Perhaps we'll find out soon when the Chinese start their Treasury-bill sell-off. These Friedmanites will do whatever they have to do to avoid having to cave on an issue they've been denying will ever come to fruition. They have far too much invested in the argument at this point. They do this because the reality of resource depletion completely undermines their "consume-everything" flat earth utopia.

Technology and innovation are clearly factors that have thus-far mitigated resource depletion to varying degrees. No one denies that. The point is that this supply-demand gap grows with each passing year. You not only need to make up for dying existing capacity, but you also have to make up for exponential demand growth (see Chindia). As Dr. Albert Bartlett reminds us, every ten years, you need to find and provide as much new fossil fuel energy than has been used in all of history before said decade. Technology will not sustain that level of growth. It is WAY behind that 10-year hockey stick, and nothing is even remotely ready to take its place. There is no substitute for light crude, and there won't be any time soon.

Whenever a person trots out a new story about technological advances in regards to energy production, and feigns the "ha ha! see?" tactic ... always be skeptical. Ask him how long before said process is expected to be commercially viable and produced on a mass scale? If the source doesn't cover that aspect, it's obvious why. The answer is quite usually "decades." ... Sure, we can look to 2050 and insist technological advances will allow for 75% recovery rates and that reserve growth will soar! Whether or not that's even accurate, it's still assuming that the necessary investment will even be there in this new era of perpetual recession, and that the average consumer can even afford the new price point for the product at all.

I'm having the same back and forth on another forum with a poster who insists fission technology is the answer to everything. Essentially mini star creation, fission is the "technology of the future,"... and always will be. It was the silly basis behind Stone's "Wall Street 2." Any fluffy story you read on fission technology, if it talks about time frame at all, admits it's 30+ years from fruition for producing even a small fraction of mankind's energy needs, ... provided the necessary annual billions upon billions of dollars are poured into it all along the way.

Meanwhile, peak is here now. Nevermind 2050.

Look what is happening in the world. Are we still pretending all these nations are imploding because of a liquidity crisis and food inflation due to our mortgage bubble? LOL.

100% correct. This is as much about time as it is about dwindling supply and rising demand.

There is no margin for error anymore. That's because there is no elasticity in oil production anymore due to dying capacity up against soaring demand. Even the perception of minor supply disruption has the markets in a panic. Claims of spare capacity easing fears have died out. Even the Saudis can't guarantee pumping more when needed. They used to come to the world's rescue (see Suez, Iran v. Iraq, Gulf Wars, etc.). They can't any more.

Of course, as oil prices rise, so do food prices -- another symptom that flat-earthers deny is happening, or is a real problem. Never mind, of course that:

*The price of corn has doubled over the last six months.
*The price of wheat has more than doubled over the past year.
*The price of soybeans is up about 50% since last June.
*The price of cotton has more than doubled over the past year.
*The commodity price of orange juice has doubled since 2009.
*The price of sugar is the highest it has been in 30 years.

Horwitz happy analysis doesn't seem to cover the food/oil price symbiosis. But, turning to the proper page of the Chicago School handbook, handed out to all loyal followers, the food crisis must just be a result of Barney Frank, Jimmy Carter and that "liberal" mortgage policy here in America. Nothing deeper.

Jiggs: you seem to mainly address the "technologic advancement" argument and not the "futures market" argument. If oil prices are going to skyrocket, why aren't you making a killing in futures? Or if there's some personal reason, why aren't futures markets accurate?

Takes money to make money. Any poker player should know that.

Right now, my modest savings will not be risked in an unstable, volatile market.

Maybe you should spend the time you dedicate to discussing peak oil to earn extra money to invest in futures

Also,

Oh, I grind the small-to-mid-stakes tables while I post.

You?

Besides, once oil reaches a certain price point, people are increasingly going to be unable to buy it anyway.