Peak Oil DOOM!

[oldhorseman]

DOOM IN REVIEW

LATOC... I like to backronym it as Life And The Ongoing Collapse, but originally it was Life After The Oil Crash.  Coined by Matt Savinar for his website about a decade ago, the term was a reference to Peak Oil and the resultant end of the world as we knew it.



Matt eventually burned-out on the topic, taking down the site and its once highly-active forum.  But some of his well-researched and documented writing on the subject survives in archived snapshot form HERE.

I'll try to cover the high points in simple terms...

Petroleum is awesome stuff!

A cider jug of refined petroleum can safely move you, your family, and a good bit of luggage, in climate-controlled comfort, farther in a matter of minutes than you could walk in days.  Petroleum can be made into containers lighter and more durable than glass, rubber tougher and longer-lasting than the tree-sap original, and about a million other things we find useful every day.  It can be transported through pipes, stored in tanks.  As a fuel, it is incredibly concentrated power that can be handled with reasonable safety, but converted to heat, light, electrical, or kinetic energy with reliable, practical, relatively lightweight apparatus.

We're utterly dependent on petroleum.

As awesome as petroleum is, there's little wonder that Mankind adapted his population, technology, economy, and civilization to an ever-expanding petroleum supply within a century of figuring out how to exploit it.

Look around.  Almost everything you have, wear, eat, or use is made from, produced by power of, or shipped to you in vehicles fueled by petroleum.  Our modern world is built on petroleum.  All that coal power we use?  Mined by petroleum-powered equipment, shipped to power plants in diesel powered trains.  All the coal miners and power plant workers get to work every day in gasoline powered cars.  All the power line maintenance trucks run on gasoline and diesel.  Even our nuclear and hydro-electric power is made possible by petroleum.



You pretty much eat converted petroleum, folks.

Petroleum has changed the nature of our lives.  Before automobiles, people didn't live dozens of miles from their workplaces and hundreds of miles from the sources of their food.  Before petroleum-enabled industrial agriculture and transport, there was no way 300+ Million Americans and over 7 Billion people worldwide could be supported.

There are no really viable alternatives to conventional petroleum.

Despite what you may have seen on Captain Planet, sweet, light crude is a unique and irreplaceable resource.  Sure, you can run a car on used french-fry oil.  But there's not enough of that to begin to replace petroleum.  Biofuels ultimately consume more fossil fuel resources in their creation than they replace, and cut into essential food production in the process.  Most of the alternative energy sources require massive petroleum input in their implementation and maintenance, and still can't match petroleum for power concentration and versatility of application.

And no, there aren't a zillion barrels of oil under the Rockies, Alaska, or just off the coast that those darned hippies just won't let us have.  In terms of overall cost-to-recovery, this shale, sludge, and tar doesn't remotely compare to the conventional petroleum the modern world is built upon.  And, even if it were correct, the Abiotic Oil theory wouldn't really change anything.

Peak Oil.

It wasn't too long after Man began seriously exploiting petroleum that oil men observed that oil fields had a life-cycle.  From discovery, through the addition of more wells, the field would produce an increasing amount of crude as time went-by...  Until maximum production for that field was achieved.  After that, increasing effort was required to extract an ever-decreasing amount of petroleum.

Click to view

In the 1950s, Shell Oil geologist M. King Hubbert theorized that the same sort of production bell curve could be applied to national and global resource recovery.  He calculated that the U.S. would achieve peak production around 1970.  And it did. Not coincidentally, this was followed by over a decade of economic recessions, industrial exodus, the default of the American dollar into a full-on fiat currency, and increasing entanglement of the U.S. and Middle East.

Hubbert's model originally put Global Peak Oil near the end of the 20th Century, but this was delayed by the North Sea discoveries (the last really major new petroleum reserves ever found) and slower than anticipated increase in consumption due to intentional conservation and recession-induced reduction of activity.  So Peak Oil was pushed down the road a handful of years.

By 2005, when LATOC went online, Peak Oil was imminent.  Many were the people who read Matt's pages, checked-out his links, then came into the forum in UTTER PANIC, as the world was about to end, and they desperately wanted to know what to do about it.

Where's the Kaboom?!

Although some of us always predicted otherwise, there seems to have been an expectation of a BIG EVENT in regard to Peak Oil.  Like the President was going to finally be forced to make a public announcement about it on TV, followed by the grid shutting-down, and every gas station closing-up overnight.  And Mutant Zombie Bikers.  Let's not forget those guys.



Then Peak Oil came.  Global petroleum production started to decline...

LOST and American Idol stayed on the air.  The ATMs kept working.  National attention turned to which of Team Blue Jackass' affirmative action candidates (the "black" guy who could read a teleprompter, or the "feminist" icon who rode a man's coat-tails into the national spotlight?) would get to take-on Team Red Pachyderm's "We're pretty much just gonna sit this one out" place-holder.



GOP picked him because they didn't want to scare anyone.

Then, instead of the production decline slipping into an increasingly steep plummet, reported oil production started increasing again!  Oil prices dropped from their record highs.  So Peak Oil kinda' dropped off the radar, even among Doomers.

Not so fast, Mojo!

Peak Oil didn't really go away.  From the beginning, many predicted a "bumpy plateau" rather than a sharp peak.  A speed-wobble into a stair-step collapse rather than a sudden crash.  It's just that these concepts didn't resonate as well with Doomers as the whole mushroom clouds and overnight apocalypse scenarios did.

You see, Peak Oil is a Prime Mover. And Prime Movers often aren't as obvious as the things they move.  The approach of Peak Oil gave us the US/Middle Eastern wars, 9-11, and a massive economic recession which reduced oil consumption, allowing a few years' slack production to enable the following bump in the plateau.  Meanwhile, there was a re-defining of terms allowing increasing (albeit negative real EROI) unconventional "liquids" to pad the reported production.  Hey, the Peak could be decades away...  If we stay in a continuous state of austerity/recession and don't mind strip-mining and poisoning half the world trying to squeeze enough pseudo-petroleum out to limp along that much longer.

Never mind the technicality and semantics of the precise timing of "Peak Oil"...  The fact is that we used to be able to get great gushers of sweet, light crude just by poking a pipe into the ground in Pennsylvania or Texas.  We were swimming in so much of the black gold that we had to go out of our way to invent uses for the stuff!



Now we're fighting endless wars in godforsaken sandpits that just happen to have some oil under them, trying to suck-up petroleum from below Davey Jones' Locker, and resorting to desperate alchemy to get something akin to oil from tar, shale, and even corn fields.  And, despite it all, falling well short of the production growth needed to put the Cornucopian economy back on-track.

It doesn't matter what the IEA or the hairspray folks on the news say.  This IS Peak Oil, folks. Peak Oil is the Prime Mover.  The reason for the austerity, constant recessions.  The OWS and Tea Party.  The growing Police/Welfare State.  The zombification of the masses through drugging, mass media, and digital distractions.  The abandonment of infrastructure.  The frantic efforts to prop-up the economy with tidal-waves of freshly "printed" fiat Federal Reserve Notes...

The major players in the know are aware of the Peak, and are shoring-up their positions accordingly.  The masses sense something is wrong, and are alternately seeking psychological escape or going a bit schizophrenic.

Peak Oil is the underlying, geological reality that no politician, economic reform, social movement, or great awakening can resolve.  It is why Cornucopia is truly doomed.



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