Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[LordBaal]

I would think the development of many new devices, electronic devices and the migration to large cities increased the curve of consumption. Now that basically no new electric devices are being developed and starting to be widespread (freezers, a/c, electric ovens/ranges, microwaes, tvs and so on) and instead the current ones are being refined and having less consumption (ideally, a huge example is led bulbs vs incandecent ones) the average will be down for a while until it stabilize or unless a new electric device or range of high consume devices is invented/catch up with million of people.

[wierd]

Electric Cars.

[Egan_BW]

Electric cars might be headed that way.

stoopid ninja

[scriver]

Need For Speed has been about electric cars for years

[Il Palazzo]

But electric cars are slated to replace internal combustion ones, while reducing energy consumption per car due to efficiency of large-scale energy production. So they shouldn't induce a sudden upswing in the graphs, and might cause a modest downswing.

[wierd]

Remember, there is no real advantage to funding the R&D to make a more efficient device, if the inefficient device sells well, and there is no shortage of energy to power it.

Most of the "Energy Efficiency!!" research and product development in the US has happened as a direct consequence of hitting peak oil, so that consumer growth can continue despite hitting the roof, energy production wise.

Once energy production becomes possible to increase again, the pressure for efficiency will diminish.  See also, what happened with natural gas entering the market in the 70s, ending the 1960s crunch toward improved efficiency.


Cheap, effective solar (and maybe fusion, if it manages to escape development hell from lack of funding) will do that very thing. Consumption will once again return to exponential curves.


RE: electric cars less energy:

Less energy to operate, but not to maintain. The pipeline to produce and recycle batteries especially, is VERY energy costly.  That needs to be factored into the cost.

[LordBaal]

There is if consumers show preference for more efficient devices.

Also I see is total energy, I guess its all, electricity, cooking gas, gasoline, diesel.... I did forgot electrical car but as it replaces one thing with another...

[Il Palazzo]

has happened as a direct consequence of hitting peak oil

I don't think we've hit peak oil yet. The production keeps increasing. Unless you mean something else I'm thinking of.

[wierd]

Peak oil was reached in ~2010.

[LordBaal]

In Venezuela we did. Lol. We are down to a single drill from 36 or 56 or so...

Also remember that production is shortened to artificialy increase prices by the OPEP.

[Rolan7]

this is from a ways back but meh

There are practical limitations on debt, unless you decide that multi-generational debt in purpetuity is A-OK.

Once a person's debt becomes so great that they can *NEVER* repay it, then that debt effectively vanishes when they die, and humans have a finite lifespan.

So, either you want to champion for eternal wage slavery, of the very real kind-- or you have to accept that there are upper bounds on even abstract things like debt and currency.

The practical limits on debt are entirely proportional. For example with 2% inflation, debt can grow 2% per year and that's still the same in real terms. There's no meaning to the actual number itself.

For example for the USA's $20 trillion in debt and a 2% target inflation rate, then as long as the deficit is less than $400 billion, the debt is in fact shrinking. They talk about balancing the budget i.e. zero dollar deficits, but that's just the show-talk for the dumb folks. Anyone who's ever thought about it at all knows that's not how things work. Inflation wipes out both savings and debt. That's the point of how the system works.

The fact that the total debt can decrease in adjusted dollars in no way justifies such an enormous debt.  Payments on the debt are nearly $400 billion every year, and that money is just lost to us and in the pockets of investors (not counting the 20% that's between branches of the government... this stuff gets complicated).

Someone with credit card debt could make the same argument: If they work enough hours to pay *most* of the interest, but their debt still grows by only 2%, the adjusted value of their debt is holding steady.  As they hemorrhage money for no benefit.

Paying off the *entire* national debt would ruin important government spending for a few decades, guesstimating, and it's not necessary.  But reducing the debt improves our financial situation going forward.  There are also downsides to foreign nations including China holding so much of our debt.  We owe China over a trillion dollars, and we have to respect that debt if we want to trade with the rest of the world (which we literally have to thanks to the globalized economy of cost-cutting).

[Il Palazzo]

img snip

Peak oil was reached in ~2010.

Nope, that's some old predictive scenario you have there. The production was still growing in 2018:
https://transportgeography.org/?page_id=5944

[wierd]

Pushed the date of hitting the ceiling by just 20 years.  Hardly the smoking gun you need.
(new forecasts, especially in light of OPEC's "Lets kill the industry with negative prices!" shenanigans, put peak oil no later than 2040.)


That still does not cause economic consequences of being near the ceiling (if not actually hitting it yet) as being a primary driver of efficiency in the US, as regards consumer engines and electronic devices, to become false.



https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-efficiency-2019

Suggests that increased energy use from increased climate change induced severe weather will further impact the gains obtained from efficient devices, which could further push the energy demand curve.

(which would not have been true, had we listened to the "chicken littles" in the 1910s, and sought out less collateral damage inducing energy sources. But "that wont happen for hundreds of years"-- and all that.)

[Il Palazzo]

Meh. What I'm seeing from those graphs, is that peak oil has been just around the corner in people's predictions for years. And yet, just like fusion, it never comes. Sure, it's likely to happen sometime in the future, and a nearer one rather than farther. Finite resource and all that. But it certainly has not happened yet, and the actual growth of oil production so far seems completely unperturbed by consecutive predictions of when it should stop.

Anyhow, I do think it's a pretty smoky gun for why one shouldn't be going around trying to justify what happened in the past by the world having hit peak oil.

[Maximum Spin]

Meh. What I'm seeing from those graphs, is that peak oil has been just around the corner in people's predictions for years. And yet, just like fusion, it never comes. Sure, it's likely to happen sometime in the future, and a nearer one rather than farther. Finite resource and all that. But it certainly has not happened yet, and the actual growth of oil production so far seems completely unperturbed by consecutive predictions of when it should stop.

Anyhow, I do think it's a pretty smoky gun for why one shouldn't be going around trying to justify what happened in the past by the world having hit peak oil.

The problem with peak oil predictions is that they're all based on the economic and technological status of the time they're written in. We know roughly how much oil is left which should be accessible, and it's "kind of a lot" - not as much as we'd like, more than enough to last past 2040 even at our current growth trends. Peak oil predictions, though, were based on the assumption that even portions of that which we are using now would be infeasible to ever access because oil would become too expensive to be worth using. Instead, we managed to get, for example, deep shale oil and tar-sands oil out so cheaply that the price of oil futures crashed to negative for a little while there. It turned out to be really easy once the motivation existed.

Oil is presumptively finite — I mean, technically the abiogenic theory isn't disproven but nobody should seriously believe it — but we have time to figure out a (nuclear nuclear nuclear) solution.