Peak Oil News and Message Boards

Its the time scale, humans have a real tough time dealing with time, our lives are so short, these plays are so long.

Limits To Growth may have been on about the right track.

Yet maybe not.

Be grateful for those errors, you probably dont want to exoerience the down side.

It's more like a long emergency, and that's for the 29 pct of the world population that earn $10 or more daily.

ralfy wrote:It's more like a long emergency, and that's for the 29 pct of the world population that earn $10 or more daily.

Yeah. and Kunstler as it turns out didn't know any more about peak than you did back then, you LATOC groupie. Have you talked to Matt about his inside astrology scoop as to why he got it so wrong?

My original account was created in 2004 and I'm happier than shit that my predictions didn't materialize!

I didn't think I'd live to the hard part, but hoped I would be able to help my kids learn some self sufficiency. My WAG was 2010-15 for peak, some period of plateau as we threw money at new conventional production, x-heavy, shale, turkey guts, burning food... then decline at some point with a long painful degrowth. I hoped for but wasn't confident in RE, conservation, government, human behavior.

Really lots of that happened or is happening, admittedly not in the exact manner I imagined. "Peak demand" behind GW is all the rage, I studied GW as much as was possible before we bugged out in 2003 but didn't expect it to gain as much of an audience—and denial-cult—as it has. GW mitigation IS PO mitigation for the most part so it's fine by me.

But exactly what happened between 2000-2014 is exactly what was predicted: high demand and limited supply created high price, prompting conservation, perhaps contributing to the recession and certainly slowing the recovery. Oil price only came down because fracking increased supply. Look at the trajectory, without LTO you can eyeball the trend as well as me.



No doubt fracking was the "something" that the cornies said "they'd" think of, and I did disparage LTO, didn't expect it to do what it did. Turns out it gave RE and EV and battery tech maybe just enough time to mature. But you gotta wonder how repeatable that Hail Mary equation is?

Love that cartoon. In would occasionally see something like that in design drawings, prepared by supposed engineers. Usually some unlabeled box in a flow diagram. I would despairingly call it a “miracle box”, where the miracle happens.

More to your essential point I get the feeling that Limits To Growth was unnervingly accurate and that we are on the cusp of all those projection curves breaking bad. We are just starting to see the steady state lines waver, grow uncertain. Over the next few years those trends will stabilize.

Most if this is just gut feeling, somewhat informed by Covid and our response to it, but also by the likes of the WEF and their Great Reset initiative (whatever that is). There is a global instability, unease. As if we sense the nearing end and are nervous anticipating the unthinkable.

No graphs, just my personal sense of the matter. Could he al BS, I ay live to know.

From what I remember, demand destruction in EU, US, and JP was offset by increased demand for the rest of the world, and even while oil price was swinging up and down. In any event, demand continued rising to almost 100 Mbd. Back in 2005, they thought it'd reach 115 Mbd by 2015 due to robust economic growth and could be met because problems are above-ground.

In short, the world was saved from economic crisis due to lack of oil through economic crisis due to rising debt.

Newfie wrote:More to your essential point I get the feeling that Limits To Growth was unnervingly accurate and that we are on the cusp of all those projection curves breaking bad. We are just starting to see the steady state lines waver, grow uncertain. Over the next few years those trends will stabilize.

Most if this is just gut feeling, somewhat informed by Covid and our response to it, but also by the likes of the WEF and their Great Reset initiative (whatever that is). There is a global instability, unease. As if we sense the nearing end and are nervous anticipating the unthinkable.

No graphs, just my personal sense of the matter. Could he al BS, I ay live to know.

I have always been a LTG fan, Population Bomb and all that, it makes such sense intuitively. Only the last 10 years or so have I mellowed and let the crystal ball rest a little. It is like waiting on peak oil, every perturbation, from KSA tweets to Russian elections to the weather next week affects production, it is a roller coaster.

One thing I'll say, the economies of the world are more and more interdependent. Seems like that in itself will affect the commodity super-cycle, perhaps amplifying the peaks and troughs of both supply and price. And as they always say, depletion never sleeps, so some production trough in the future we may find is not a trough at all, but the first leg of decline.

Pops wrote:

Newfie wrote:More to your essential point I get the feeling that Limits To Growth was unnervingly accurate and that we are on the cusp of all those projection curves breaking bad. We are just starting to see the steady state lines waver, grow uncertain. Over the next few years those trends will stabilize.

Most if this is just gut feeling, somewhat informed by Covid and our response to it, but also by the likes of the WEF and their Great Reset initiative (whatever that is). There is a global instability, unease. As if we sense the nearing end and are nervous anticipating the unthinkable.

No graphs, just my personal sense of the matter. Could he al BS, I ay live to know.

I have always been a LTG fan, Population Bomb and all that, it makes such sense intuitively. Only the last 10 years or so have I mellowed and let the crystal ball rest a little. It is like waiting on peak oil, every perturbation, from KSA tweets to Russian elections to the weather next week affects production, it is a roller coaster.

One thing I'll say, the economies of the world are more and more interdependent. Seems like that in itself will affect the commodity super-cycle, perhaps amplifying the peaks and troughs of both supply and price. And as they always say, depletion never sleeps, so some production trough in the future we may find is not a trough at all, but the first leg of decline.

I agree with both of you on this. I really liked Pops expression "Prepare for anything, including nothing." That describes my approach to life to a T. By the way, Pops, that is a beautiful house you are working on. Those ceilings must be like 12' high and that fireplace looked really nice, too.

FWIW

Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic

By Dennis Meadows, co-author of Limits to Growth:The 30-Year Update. It has been adapted for the web

Forty-eight years ago I led an 18-month study at MIT on the causes and consequences of growth in population and material production on the planet earth through the year 2100. “If the present growth trends … continue unchanged” we concluded, “the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.”

To illustrate this conclusion, we published a set of 13 scenarios generated by World3, the computer model built by my team. In those scenarios major global indices, such as industrial output per capita, typically stopped growing and began to decline between 2015 and 2050.

The current epidemic does not prove we were right.

When climate scientists are asked if a particular storm proves their theory of climate change, they point out that a model of long-term continuous change can not predict, nor be corroborated by a short-term discrete event. There have always been catastrophic storms. But, the climatologists point out, increasingly frequent and violent storms are consistent with the climate change thesis.

World3 is a model of continuous interactions between population, resources, and capital over the long term. In the context of 200 years, the COVID-19 pandemic is a short-term, discrete event. There have always been plagues, but increasingly frequent and violent epidemics are consistent with the limits to growth thesis.

There are two main causative links.

more

https://www.chelseagreen.com/2020/limit ... -epidemic/

JuanP wrote:By the way, Pops, that is a beautiful house you are working on. Those ceilings must be like 12' high and that fireplace looked really nice, too.

Thanks!