HI KRIS,DOES PEAK OIL TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE KNOWN UNTAPPED OIL FIELDS WORLD WIDE??
DO YOU THINK THERE IS ANYTHING WORTHWHILE ABOUT BOYCOTTING ONE COMPANY LIKE MOBILE/EXXON? UNTIL THEY INVEST IN ALTERNATIVE MEANS?
ARE ELECTRIC BIKES LEGAL IN YOUR STATE? I FOUND OUT THEY ARE ILLEGAL IN N.Y.S. WAS THINKIN OFBUYING ONE ANYWAY AND STARTING A TEST CASE. HOE YOU ARE WELL RON
My time frame is by 2010, i. e., pretty soon. This is just semi-educated guess as to when “serious” effects will start to manifest, though depending on your definition of “serious” that time could vary. I have no special information, I just read TheOilDrum.com like everyone else.
How to prepare? Who knows? The best response could be learning how to grow more vegetables, or going to your friendly local church/sangha/synagogue/etc., or political action. We can guess the initial impact (price of oil goes up!), but we don’t know how everyone else will react to this. I am cautiously optimistic that awareness will win out over non-awareness or wrong-awareness. So I’d say, spread that information far and wide. No one person has all the answers, because we have to reconstruct everything.
Keith
P. S. Ron: yes, “peak oil” takes into account known untapped oil fields, check out aspo-usa.com and check out Chris Skrebowski’s talk at Houston conference. No, boycotting just one oil company won’t — boycotting them all might, though! Electric bikes are apparently legal in Colorado and sales are going up.
I’m guessing a number of very visible signs will start appearing in the next four to five years.
Where I live, in the UK, everyone is so happy because we are spending 12 billion pounds on the Olympics in four years time. My question is, will there be another city willing and able to spend that kind of cash for a oil-intensive event in a post-peak world? I think that will tell us an awful lot about where we are.
I’ve read some about Peak Oil and I’ve written a bit about Peak Oil (a very little bit) on my own blog.
Ron’s response (and questions) is (are) representative of most people’s. First, have you read the background on the term “Peak Oil”? If not, look up King Hubbert as he was the one who coined the term and first generated the charts highlighting Peak Oil for the United States (his prediction was in 1956 and it was that the US would reach peak oil in or around 1970).
Global peak oil does take into account both known and unknown untapped fields. The estimates look at the total probable fossil fuel deposits that there ever were.
As an aside, there is no point boycotting one particular oil company. If you want to have any effect on the mechanics of marketing crude oil products, you must boycott them all. You must curtail your use of fossil fuels. Everyone must do this.
What’s the point of an electric bike? What’s wrong with just peddling the thing?
But, to the question posed: What is my timeframe for peak oil and what are the implications for me?
I used to be quite worried about peak oil and what it might mean to me and my family. The “experts” figured peak oil would/will occur between 2005 and 2010. We’ve already seen that our supply chain is fragile; Katrina in ‘05 and the crude oil price spike of July ‘08 kind of tell us that fossil fuels are not going to ever be as cheap as they were again. Rapid run up in prices will tend to curtail demand and so there will be periodic slumps in price. Since I have no hope of manipulating the crude oil markets, I have learned to simply accept that this is the way it is now. I can afford to continue operating the vehicles that I own and I have no plans to get more fuel efficient ones. In the worst case scenario, I don’t have any problems going back to horse drawn wagons. By the time things get that dire, everyone will be doing it. In the meantime there are enterprises engaged in trying to work out solutions to these transportation issues and, as long as they have the fossil fuels or other energy to build these things, they may come up with a replacement to the conventional car and truck.
The other significant issue is, of course, the heating and lighting of the home. I have a much older house but over the last ten years or so I have been doing renovations and upgrades to improve its energy efficiency. Ultimately, though, I want to build a new house that is solar powered and uses geo-thermal energy as well. We need to re-think the way we heat, cool and light our homes in anticipation of the end of the fossil fuel age. I think off the grid is best. That way we are not at the whim of or servants to the “energy companies”.
I watched your interview with James Howard Kunstler. I first heard of him when “The Long Emergency” came out and I read that. I followed that up with some of his earlier books on urban design, planning and zoning. He has written some interesting stuff. Of course, there’s a whole host of books out there on various topics. And reading them will make one crazy or depressed or both.
At the end of the day, the answer is to know how to survive, how to do for yourself and not become a casualty if or when our “modern” society falls apart.
I really love your site and your videos. I thought the piece in which you asked people “What do you know about PO” was the greatest - and the most alarming.
I get my information on the PO time frame from The Oil Drum, from things I hear from Jean LaHerrere and Richard Heinberg. Based on production data it’s pretty clear that world petroleum production is on the “bumpy plateau” right now. So the question for me is how long the plateau will last. I wish I knew. Someone has predicted that the plateau would last about ten years, and we’re about four years into it already.
I’m hoping that we’ll muddle along for another five years so my two sons can graduate from college. But because supplies are so tight and producers don’t have any excess capacity in the wings, any little interruptions in the supply can cause big increases in the price of petroleum, with attendant increases in economic hardship.
I hope we have five years before the food production and distribution systems start having significant problems. I hope we have five years before financial declines cause my job to disappear. I hope I have five years to figure out how to heat my house without natural gas and electricity. Maybe I’ll get those five years, but I don’t think we can count on ten of them.
I think we’d better be learning how to garden and getting our insulation in order.
J Wolfman on
August 29th, 2008 12:58 am
Hi Kris… Thanks for your videos and attention to this subject. Love that theme tune.
On a personal note, in your next video or soon, can you give us a clear close-up of that tattoo on your bicep? Tell us what it is…?
These Crash Courses http://www.chrismartenson.com/peak_oil
have fantastic, easy to understand explanations on everything from paper money to Peak Oil. They are well worth the time to watch. His graphs/charts make it look like we have been at an oil plateau for a few years and if it does not tic up soon, we appear to be in Peak now.
Ciao,
JW
Dave-O on
September 5th, 2008 4:15 pm
Kris,
Keep up the discussion! Getting the word out, and getting people to think, talk, and act is the only thing that can help us now.
Some sources tell wild stories about abiotic oil, replenishing wells, etc. but it’s all wishfull thinking. Even if oil was limitless and wells refilled, we can no longer find it or pump it out of the ground fast enough for everyone to get as much as they think they need.
While I’m convinced that we are in the peak right now, and it is a bumpy plateau, our actions will determine how long that plateau lasts, and how steep the decline is. It we were to keep on truckin’ like its 1999 the end will be very near and the drop will be precipitous. I’m optimistic we are getting on the right track: you can’t buy a Prius, they are all sold out; you can’t sell a used SUV, nobody wants them.
Jared Diamond described our current state of affairs as a horse race with an uncertain outcome. While JD was talking about environmental destruction, the same image applies to peak oil. Will the “oil starved armageddon” horse win, or the “new energy diet” horse pull through to the finish? The race is too close to tell.
Windmills are going up, LED’s are in use everywhere, farmers are learning to preserve their soil, organic and local food is more common, people are driving less, smaller cars are becoming more popular…
Oil is starting or renewing conflicts, folks turn on the AC because they are too lazy to open a window, people are pouring money into bad investments, too few seem to know what peak oil is, people who should know better tell us our American lifestyle is “non-negotiable”…
I think the peak is here and now, but the plunge is the big unknown: slow or fast? Economic forces are encouraging people to use less oil, prolonging the bumpy plateau and making the decline less noticable. Hopefully we will adapt as we go, and there will not be any major shock. I think we will suffer from “creeping normalicy” in the near term. As gas get more expensive crazy concepts like carpooling and 4-10 work weeks will become the norm, and these fuel saving habits will help slow the downward trend. If it is all slow enough we can recreate our society to live on less energy one step at a time and grow into our new reality.
How am I adapting? Reading a lot, starting a garden, reducing our use of water, electricity, propane, and gasoline, keeping the sweaters on and the thermostat down, energy efficient appliances, etc. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on my energy use for most of my adult life out of thrift, but lately I feel a much greater sense of urgency.
Any suggestions out there for energy advocacy? If we installed an offshore windmill on every site they say we should put up an offshore oil rig, we’d be heading in the right direction.
My hope is that soon, before it is too late, enough people will make enough changes so that we can ease into a new energy diet (basket of renewable energy sources and super efficient energy use) and avoid catastrophe. Your videos are helping turn heads and getting people to listen.
Another thing that helps me sleep (and dream) at night is the thought that a lot of stuff that has been tossed in the garbage over the years will have a chance to come back, like tall ships, small cities, canals, trolly lines, local agriculture, mom and pop businesses, etc.
dan combs on
September 14th, 2008 5:49 pm
Kris,
I love what you’re doing. Thanks for doing it. We are essentially sitting on the peak right now. Peak light sweet is several years behind us. Peak crude only is probably a couple of years back. Much of what is counted as “oil” now includes natural gas liquids, tar sands and things like that. Folks need to learn about Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) to grok that those ‘unconventional’ sources provide us with very little net energy (that’s the energy left over after the energy consumed by extraction and processing), which, of course, is what we have become utterly reliant upon for our ‘non-negotiable’ way of life. What gets most reported is ‘total liquids’, which includes all of the above plus biofuels. Ethanol is probably an energy loser (negative EROEI) and at best is about 1.3:1, whereas crude in the early days returned 100:1. So while it may appear that ‘oil production’ is still increasing, in reality, the net energy available to fuel society is already in the early stages of decline. As Dave-O said above, the big question is how fast will the plunge be. When EROEI is factored in, the plunge will be more fast than slow. Estimates on gross decline of crude extraction range from 2-8%. That may not sound like a lot, but 7% cuts available oil in half in ten years. Yikes!
So, Kris, keep on doin’ what yer doin’, and educate folks a bit on EROEI. Also, I point folks in the direction of 3 sources for our overall predicament, of which peak oil is but one critical symptom - Al Bartlett on exponential growth, http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461 ; William Catton’s book “Overshoot”, and the documentary What a Way to Go, Life at the End of Empire, http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/
Best to us all,
Dan C
aka clifman @ TOD
jp on
September 21st, 2008 3:33 pm
Hey -
Time frame - that’s the thing that drives me nuts…as in, a finite resource that runs a world economy - not just here, but almost everywhere. So…if this resource is finite, it makes good sense to me that “intelligent” people - in control, stop what they’re doing otherwise and figure out damned quick how to stretch this finite resource….by conservation, limitation, using whatever methods, until such time as we can figure out how to shift the way we do things, in order to not hit the wall (as in world economies tanking because they don’t (or won’t) work in any other model._
Make sense? It does to me.
Otherwise - time frame? - Living life in a kind of choked existentially-dreaded subliminal anxiety over how quick things change….in a way, we’re already used to that with all the teckie-toyed, new improved, “post” modernistic slavery to change anyway.
Try to imagine an order of things that saw three generations grow up and grow old all using just about the same kind of tools, implements, and basic standard gear with which they lived their lives. Recognizable icons to both you and your grandparents. Makes one pause………………
But hey - even if the media and all the rest of our social institutions seem to be barely whispering a breath about all of this - people are still talking anyhow, bless them.
And when people talk, the wheels are still turning…..(even if the powertrain shuts down for lack of gas…) Different wheels.
For me - it’s been a real gas (pardon the pun) finding out how the hell we got here, and why. It’s when and where and how all the ideologies and philosophies collide, that makes a free society kinda sparkle.
And last - time frame (*yuk*)….as if the difference between 2012 and 2025 makes a rat’s ass any cuter…
all that fuss and bother going on in the higher halls and in certain clandestine boardrooms, over a few piddly little years (when the stuff took eons to grow).
Well.
It always makes me think of the classic credit card maxi-dance. Borrow a little over here……….and stick it over there, my dear.
It all comes due and overdue in the end.
If our little planet had a sense of humor, I think it would be laughing all the way to Andromeda, right about now, don’tcha think?
HI KRIS,DOES PEAK OIL TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE KNOWN UNTAPPED OIL FIELDS WORLD WIDE??
DO YOU THINK THERE IS ANYTHING WORTHWHILE ABOUT BOYCOTTING ONE COMPANY LIKE MOBILE/EXXON? UNTIL THEY INVEST IN ALTERNATIVE MEANS?
ARE ELECTRIC BIKES LEGAL IN YOUR STATE? I FOUND OUT THEY ARE ILLEGAL IN N.Y.S. WAS THINKIN OFBUYING ONE ANYWAY AND STARTING A TEST CASE. HOE YOU ARE WELL RON
Hi,
My time frame is by 2010, i. e., pretty soon. This is just semi-educated guess as to when “serious” effects will start to manifest, though depending on your definition of “serious” that time could vary. I have no special information, I just read TheOilDrum.com like everyone else.
How to prepare? Who knows? The best response could be learning how to grow more vegetables, or going to your friendly local church/sangha/synagogue/etc., or political action. We can guess the initial impact (price of oil goes up!), but we don’t know how everyone else will react to this. I am cautiously optimistic that awareness will win out over non-awareness or wrong-awareness. So I’d say, spread that information far and wide. No one person has all the answers, because we have to reconstruct everything.
Keith
P. S. Ron: yes, “peak oil” takes into account known untapped oil fields, check out aspo-usa.com and check out Chris Skrebowski’s talk at Houston conference. No, boycotting just one oil company won’t — boycotting them all might, though! Electric bikes are apparently legal in Colorado and sales are going up.
Hi Kris
Love your video clips.
Very hard question re.timeframes,
I’m guessing a number of very visible signs will start appearing in the next four to five years.
Where I live, in the UK, everyone is so happy because we are spending 12 billion pounds on the Olympics in four years time. My question is, will there be another city willing and able to spend that kind of cash for a oil-intensive event in a post-peak world? I think that will tell us an awful lot about where we are.
I’ve read some about Peak Oil and I’ve written a bit about Peak Oil (a very little bit) on my own blog.
Ron’s response (and questions) is (are) representative of most people’s. First, have you read the background on the term “Peak Oil”? If not, look up King Hubbert as he was the one who coined the term and first generated the charts highlighting Peak Oil for the United States (his prediction was in 1956 and it was that the US would reach peak oil in or around 1970).
Global peak oil does take into account both known and unknown untapped fields. The estimates look at the total probable fossil fuel deposits that there ever were.
As an aside, there is no point boycotting one particular oil company. If you want to have any effect on the mechanics of marketing crude oil products, you must boycott them all. You must curtail your use of fossil fuels. Everyone must do this.
What’s the point of an electric bike? What’s wrong with just peddling the thing?
But, to the question posed: What is my timeframe for peak oil and what are the implications for me?
I used to be quite worried about peak oil and what it might mean to me and my family. The “experts” figured peak oil would/will occur between 2005 and 2010. We’ve already seen that our supply chain is fragile; Katrina in ‘05 and the crude oil price spike of July ‘08 kind of tell us that fossil fuels are not going to ever be as cheap as they were again. Rapid run up in prices will tend to curtail demand and so there will be periodic slumps in price. Since I have no hope of manipulating the crude oil markets, I have learned to simply accept that this is the way it is now. I can afford to continue operating the vehicles that I own and I have no plans to get more fuel efficient ones. In the worst case scenario, I don’t have any problems going back to horse drawn wagons. By the time things get that dire, everyone will be doing it. In the meantime there are enterprises engaged in trying to work out solutions to these transportation issues and, as long as they have the fossil fuels or other energy to build these things, they may come up with a replacement to the conventional car and truck.
The other significant issue is, of course, the heating and lighting of the home. I have a much older house but over the last ten years or so I have been doing renovations and upgrades to improve its energy efficiency. Ultimately, though, I want to build a new house that is solar powered and uses geo-thermal energy as well. We need to re-think the way we heat, cool and light our homes in anticipation of the end of the fossil fuel age. I think off the grid is best. That way we are not at the whim of or servants to the “energy companies”.
I watched your interview with James Howard Kunstler. I first heard of him when “The Long Emergency” came out and I read that. I followed that up with some of his earlier books on urban design, planning and zoning. He has written some interesting stuff. Of course, there’s a whole host of books out there on various topics. And reading them will make one crazy or depressed or both.
At the end of the day, the answer is to know how to survive, how to do for yourself and not become a casualty if or when our “modern” society falls apart.
Cheers!
Hi, Kris,
I really love your site and your videos. I thought the piece in which you asked people “What do you know about PO” was the greatest - and the most alarming.
I get my information on the PO time frame from The Oil Drum, from things I hear from Jean LaHerrere and Richard Heinberg. Based on production data it’s pretty clear that world petroleum production is on the “bumpy plateau” right now. So the question for me is how long the plateau will last. I wish I knew. Someone has predicted that the plateau would last about ten years, and we’re about four years into it already.
I’m hoping that we’ll muddle along for another five years so my two sons can graduate from college. But because supplies are so tight and producers don’t have any excess capacity in the wings, any little interruptions in the supply can cause big increases in the price of petroleum, with attendant increases in economic hardship.
I hope we have five years before the food production and distribution systems start having significant problems. I hope we have five years before financial declines cause my job to disappear. I hope I have five years to figure out how to heat my house without natural gas and electricity. Maybe I’ll get those five years, but I don’t think we can count on ten of them.
I think we’d better be learning how to garden and getting our insulation in order.
Hi Kris… Thanks for your videos and attention to this subject. Love that theme tune.
On a personal note, in your next video or soon, can you give us a clear close-up of that tattoo on your bicep? Tell us what it is…?
These Crash Courses http://www.chrismartenson.com/peak_oil
have fantastic, easy to understand explanations on everything from paper money to Peak Oil. They are well worth the time to watch. His graphs/charts make it look like we have been at an oil plateau for a few years and if it does not tic up soon, we appear to be in Peak now.
Ciao,
JW
Kris,
Keep up the discussion! Getting the word out, and getting people to think, talk, and act is the only thing that can help us now.
Some sources tell wild stories about abiotic oil, replenishing wells, etc. but it’s all wishfull thinking. Even if oil was limitless and wells refilled, we can no longer find it or pump it out of the ground fast enough for everyone to get as much as they think they need.
While I’m convinced that we are in the peak right now, and it is a bumpy plateau, our actions will determine how long that plateau lasts, and how steep the decline is. It we were to keep on truckin’ like its 1999 the end will be very near and the drop will be precipitous. I’m optimistic we are getting on the right track: you can’t buy a Prius, they are all sold out; you can’t sell a used SUV, nobody wants them.
Jared Diamond described our current state of affairs as a horse race with an uncertain outcome. While JD was talking about environmental destruction, the same image applies to peak oil. Will the “oil starved armageddon” horse win, or the “new energy diet” horse pull through to the finish? The race is too close to tell.
Windmills are going up, LED’s are in use everywhere, farmers are learning to preserve their soil, organic and local food is more common, people are driving less, smaller cars are becoming more popular…
Oil is starting or renewing conflicts, folks turn on the AC because they are too lazy to open a window, people are pouring money into bad investments, too few seem to know what peak oil is, people who should know better tell us our American lifestyle is “non-negotiable”…
I think the peak is here and now, but the plunge is the big unknown: slow or fast? Economic forces are encouraging people to use less oil, prolonging the bumpy plateau and making the decline less noticable. Hopefully we will adapt as we go, and there will not be any major shock. I think we will suffer from “creeping normalicy” in the near term. As gas get more expensive crazy concepts like carpooling and 4-10 work weeks will become the norm, and these fuel saving habits will help slow the downward trend. If it is all slow enough we can recreate our society to live on less energy one step at a time and grow into our new reality.
How am I adapting? Reading a lot, starting a garden, reducing our use of water, electricity, propane, and gasoline, keeping the sweaters on and the thermostat down, energy efficient appliances, etc. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on my energy use for most of my adult life out of thrift, but lately I feel a much greater sense of urgency.
Any suggestions out there for energy advocacy? If we installed an offshore windmill on every site they say we should put up an offshore oil rig, we’d be heading in the right direction.
My hope is that soon, before it is too late, enough people will make enough changes so that we can ease into a new energy diet (basket of renewable energy sources and super efficient energy use) and avoid catastrophe. Your videos are helping turn heads and getting people to listen.
Another thing that helps me sleep (and dream) at night is the thought that a lot of stuff that has been tossed in the garbage over the years will have a chance to come back, like tall ships, small cities, canals, trolly lines, local agriculture, mom and pop businesses, etc.
Kris,
I love what you’re doing. Thanks for doing it. We are essentially sitting on the peak right now. Peak light sweet is several years behind us. Peak crude only is probably a couple of years back. Much of what is counted as “oil” now includes natural gas liquids, tar sands and things like that. Folks need to learn about Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) to grok that those ‘unconventional’ sources provide us with very little net energy (that’s the energy left over after the energy consumed by extraction and processing), which, of course, is what we have become utterly reliant upon for our ‘non-negotiable’ way of life. What gets most reported is ‘total liquids’, which includes all of the above plus biofuels. Ethanol is probably an energy loser (negative EROEI) and at best is about 1.3:1, whereas crude in the early days returned 100:1. So while it may appear that ‘oil production’ is still increasing, in reality, the net energy available to fuel society is already in the early stages of decline. As Dave-O said above, the big question is how fast will the plunge be. When EROEI is factored in, the plunge will be more fast than slow. Estimates on gross decline of crude extraction range from 2-8%. That may not sound like a lot, but 7% cuts available oil in half in ten years. Yikes!
So, Kris, keep on doin’ what yer doin’, and educate folks a bit on EROEI. Also, I point folks in the direction of 3 sources for our overall predicament, of which peak oil is but one critical symptom - Al Bartlett on exponential growth, http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461 ; William Catton’s book “Overshoot”, and the documentary What a Way to Go, Life at the End of Empire, http://www.whatawaytogomovie.com/
Best to us all,
Dan C
aka clifman @ TOD
Hey -
Time frame - that’s the thing that drives me nuts…as in, a finite resource that runs a world economy - not just here, but almost everywhere. So…if this resource is finite, it makes good sense to me that “intelligent” people - in control, stop what they’re doing otherwise and figure out damned quick how to stretch this finite resource….by conservation, limitation, using whatever methods, until such time as we can figure out how to shift the way we do things, in order to not hit the wall (as in world economies tanking because they don’t (or won’t) work in any other model._
Make sense? It does to me.
Otherwise - time frame? - Living life in a kind of choked existentially-dreaded subliminal anxiety over how quick things change….in a way, we’re already used to that with all the teckie-toyed, new improved, “post” modernistic slavery to change anyway.
Try to imagine an order of things that saw three generations grow up and grow old all using just about the same kind of tools, implements, and basic standard gear with which they lived their lives. Recognizable icons to both you and your grandparents. Makes one pause………………
But hey - even if the media and all the rest of our social institutions seem to be barely whispering a breath about all of this - people are still talking anyhow, bless them.
And when people talk, the wheels are still turning…..(even if the powertrain shuts down for lack of gas…) Different wheels.
For me - it’s been a real gas (pardon the pun) finding out how the hell we got here, and why. It’s when and where and how all the ideologies and philosophies collide, that makes a free society kinda sparkle.
And last - time frame (*yuk*)….as if the difference between 2012 and 2025 makes a rat’s ass any cuter…
all that fuss and bother going on in the higher halls and in certain clandestine boardrooms, over a few piddly little years (when the stuff took eons to grow).
Well.
It always makes me think of the classic credit card maxi-dance. Borrow a little over here……….and stick it over there, my dear.
It all comes due and overdue in the end.
If our little planet had a sense of humor, I think it would be laughing all the way to Andromeda, right about now, don’tcha think?
cheers,
jp