[dbruning]

"I quit wondering about the validity of imminent peak oil in 2008. I saw that the financial crisis had more to do with irresponsibility than energy. "

Would you agree Rune, to be fair, that a big chunk of the mis-management and irresponsibility was from the type of economists whose opinion you are currently promoting?

The economists that are making claims about areas that are not their field of specialty....and considering how badly they screwed the pooch on the field that IS their specialty, surely you can see why their opinion on things they know less about might not be taken as gospel?

Personally their assurances do nothing to make me less concerned regarding what I see as a real problem. I'm not surprised others may feel the same.

I'll give you that we will do our very best to burn every scrap of combustible material we can get our hands on. That just feeds another worry.

[Rune]

"I quit wondering about the validity of imminent peak oil in 2008. I saw that the financial crisis had more to do with irresponsibility than energy. "

Would you agree Rune, to be fair, that a big chunk of the mis-management and irresponsibility whose opinion you are currently promoting?

No. David Stockman has always blamed irresponsble politicians on both sides of the aisle - and The FED - for the financial meltdown He has been disillusioned with the system ever since he was Reagan's budget director. He gets high praise from the likes of Lew Rockwell.

The reason I bought his book is that it is a work of historical analysis. I haven't gotten to it yet though. Got a big reading list. So far as I know he has not mentioned energy scarcity as any kind of primary reason for what happened in 2008.

If you go to Amazon and tpe in "economic history 2008 financial crisis", you get a whole bunch of books authors attempting to explain the historical underpinnings of it. None of them talks about energy prices (from reading the reviews of readers).

[Rune]

There must be 12 or 15 books on Amazon that explain the 2008 financial crisis one way or another. None of them talks about energy costs as a contributant.

Even if you search for "oil prices" you don't find any books that have that thesis.

I would like to read one called "Understanding Oil Prices" but I am not going to pay $35 for it. In that book, judging by the summary, one also gets the idea that futures markets and elite finance has been irresponsible. Supply/Demand as a factor in oil prices in this book are said NOT to be rimary reasons why the price of oil is where it is and why it has been so volatile.

You would think that, given the supposed critical importance of such a thesis, that there would be at least ONE book there that blames the 2008 financial crisis on oil prices and shrinking supply. I mean, come on, its been 5 years. Many, many people have had a long, long time to think about it and do the research.

None of them blames oil.

[Rune]

Wasn't Richard Heinberg one of the authors of "High Noon For Natural Gas"?

[Rune]

Peak Snake Oil: Richard Heinberg and his predictions

Peak Oil guru Richard Heinberg has a new book out on fracking: Snake Oil: How Fracking’s False Promise of Plenty Imperils Our Future.

Disclaimer: I have not read it, and, while curious, have no plans to in the near future, so am basing this on a couple of reviews.

I have however read some of his other books, notably The Party’s Over (2003) and Powerdown (2004), two of the most influential books of the Peak Oil movement from the past decade or so.

Apparently, Heinberg argues in his latest offering that shale gas- which has gone from zero to supplying 40% of US gas in the past 10 years -is just hype, a bubble that will burst soon, leaving society worse off (because of increasing dependence on fossil fuels and consequent climate change) than if we had never exploited it in the first place.

Let’s see what he said about fracking in his earlier books:

Nothing. Not a word. There is no mention in either about the potential of shale gas. Heinberg, who is now predicting the imminent demise of shale gas, completely missed the biggest shake up in the energy world since nuclear power, even as it emerged at the very same time he was writing his predictions of the collapse of industrial society due to peak oil (shale gas started to become economic in the US in 2003, the same year The Party’s Over was published).

In The Party’s Over Heinberg writes:

US natural gas production has been in decline for years….
The public got its first hint of a natural gas supply problem in the latter months of 2000, when the wellhead price shot up by 400%. This was a more dramatic energy price increase than even the oil spikes of the 1970s…
There are disturbing signs that rates of natural gas extraction in North America will soon start on an inexorable downhill slope perhaps within a few months or at most a few years. When that happens we may well see a fairly rapid crash in production rather than the slow ramp-down anticipated for oil

In Powerdown, published the following year, he writes:

Nevertheless, while nearly everyone is upset about the shortages and high prices, it is surprising how seldom one hears or reads the word that most clearly sums up the cause of the dilemma- depletion.
The nub of the issue is that North America has passed its peak in natural gas production. US production peaked in 1971, but the country managed to maintain a fairly flat production curve until the end of the 1990s by steeply increasing investment in exploration and recovery. By 2002, the US was importing 15% of its gas from Canada; meanwhile, Mexico- which had been exporting gas north of the border- had begun importing gas from the US. In 2003 it became clear that Canada’s production was also in decline.

Instead of these dire apocalyptic predictions, the advent of shale gas in the US lead to a collapse in prices, a surge in production and now serious plans to invest huge sums to retrofit LNG import terminals to be used for export.

Not only that, but the 1971 peak in production has now been exceeded, apparently in defiance of the Peak-Oil Laws of Gravity:



Does shale gas involve huge investment, thousands of wells, environmental costs and dislocation of communities? Absolutely, yes all of these things (though mainly hugely exaggerated by activists)- but so does any extractive industry have a cost. For the most part, the benefits of cheap energy outweigh the problems; gas is a low-carbon fossil fuel and, unlike wind and solar, energy-dense enough to deliver energy where it is needed and displace coal and even oil in transport (Liquified Natural gas) as is happening in some US cities where buses are being converted to run on LNG.

According to this review, which claims the book is “unbiased”, Heinberg has now revised his predictions of Peak Gas production in the US-

The evidence shows that in less than 50 years, shale gas will peak and the decline will be quick and dramatic, leaving society unprepared.

Fifty years is a looooong time in the world of energy. The shale revolution- new techniques of high-pressure fracking combined with multiple horizontal drilling- blew Heinberg’s earlier predictions out of the water, rendering them obsolete even as he was publishing his Tomes of Doom. Now he is being more cautious it seems, leaving plenty of time to publish many more failed predictions before being proved so spectacularly wrong again.

Over the next 50 years, we can surely expect further improvements in drilling technology, allowing the access to even larger volumes of gas hitherto considered too expensive or inaccessible. The Japanese are even seriously expecting commercial production of methane hydrates from the sea floor around their coasts  within just 10 years.

We can also expect of course developments in nuclear power, and yes renewables as well over that time scale. What is not likely to happen is that the world will sit back and twiddle its thumbs while draining the last of its currently recoverable resources.

This is how the world works: far from the Peak Oil view of a bucket of known resources being drained by more and more straws sucking them out, the size of the bucket is unknown and continually expands with new technology.

Will Richard Heinberg ever learn?

[Rune]

Try this Econobrowser. James Hamilton will fract you deep denial.

Econobrowser is a blog. You could probably find a blog that attributes the 2008 financial crisis to timewaves prophecied by the Mayans.

The point is, The Great Recession was an important economic debacle. All sorts of people with different points-of-view have pointed blaming fingers at all sorts of other people for causing the crisis- or at Human Nature itself.

There are a few dozen books available on Amazon that attempt to explain the crisis -- as one would expect, since the 2008 debacle was such a big deal.

But NONE of these books attribute the crisis to energy scarcity or the peaking of oil.

And there is no reason why these myriad economics analysts and authors should exclude energy from the mix of economic factors causing the crisis - since, before 2008, there were plenty of peak oil books you could purchase on Amazon. It's not as if oil is treated as some sort of big economics secret. And if the argument blaming oil had merit, PLENTY of people would buy the thing.

Come on! It's been 5 years! SOMEONE with respectable credentials and wide economics/financial credibility ought to have had plenty of time to analyze the subject properly and determine that Peak Oil was the culprit. There has been plenty of time for someone to write a book blaming oil scarcity and high cost for 2008.

But no one has!

[Rune]

I went to Amazon and searched "2008 financial crisis" and counted the number of different books explaining the crisis or explaining some important aspect of it - such as the bailout of AIG or something directly related to the crisis.

I got to 59 before I encountered one that had to do with the effect of the 2008 crisis ON the oil industry - the exact causative reverse. That was on the 8th or 9th page. A couple of listings down from that I saw one mentioning chemtrails, so I stopped counting.

You just don't see the word "oil" or "energy" or anything like that in any of the many titles listed. They all have to do with "greed", "hubris", gross financial and economic irresponsibility or downright organized criminality by high financiers and politicians on both sides of the aisle .

Out of all those books, not ONE blames oil peaking or energy scarcity and high costs for setting off the debacle. It's just a non-issue.