What convinced me that there’s something real about peak oil predictions were Chris Martenson’s interviews of professionals in the field who don’t believe what Martenson says; i.e., these skeptics believe that other sources of energy will be found. It was precisely the arguments presented by Martenson and the very friendly discussions in his programs with the skeptics what convinced me that those who debated him were wrong.
For beginners to the debate see Chris Martenson’s 45-minute Crash Course:
Some energy researchers are fearing that, by the end of the century, 5 billion humans will die of unnatural deaths (malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil war, etc.). These surplus of humans are the direct result of a deranged use of oil reservoirs.
If you believe in social entropy you know that when a System disintegrates another system starts to integrate at the same time. The best example that occurs to me is the city of Constantinople, which flourished when Europe fell into utter chaos, with native Europeans becoming very few by the sixth century.
Something similar will probably happen in our century.
4 replies on “Total and unconditional energy devolution”
The idea that oil and natural gas will run out in the not too distant future is predicated on the belief in the West that oil and natural gas derive from organic debris laid down in ancient forests more than 100 million years ago.
However, the Russians rejected this belief for the source of oil and natural gas back in the 1960s.
Here are two quotes from something I wrote on this subject roughly a decade ago:
“professor Thomas Gold has debunked this belief that oil, natural gas, and black coal derive from buried organic debris (Gold, Thomas. The Deep Hot Biosphere. Copernicus, New York, 1999)”
…
“This idea that buried organic debris is not the source of oil, natural gas, and black coal, did not begin with Thomas Gold, since in large part he is only echoing what was already the consensus opinion in Russia since the 1960s, which has guided for decades their successful oil-exploration efforts in rock strata that the organic-debris theory claims should have no oil.”
Not really.
To clarify: it’s based on the estimated reserves. A wrong origin theory would only matter if it substantially changed the reserves of high-quality oil available.
Kurt,
You are talking about abiotic origin theory. There is strong abioticism, which says that oil keeps gushing up to replenish oil wells. No one believes in strong abioticism. There is weak abioticism, which says wells replenish in geological time. Some people believe in that.
But it boils down to this — even if abiotic origin theory is true, it won’t fix our problem. It’s a lot easier to get oil from oil wells. Why are we doing shale oil and tar sands then? That is far more costly in terms of materials, EROEI and manpower required.
There’s still going to be oil extracted. It just won’t be enough to maintain a perpetually growing economy.
When the economy can no longer grow, then it will contract. As the economy contracts, we all will have to make other arrangements.
Our culture of political correctness and multicult is dependent on a perpetually growing economy to keep everyone bribed and cowed. To pay the paychecks of the paycheck liberals, so they enforce multicult. Multicult and PC are very high maintenance ideologies. In a contracting economy, they will wither on the vine and die.
White people will be free again! We may be poor, we may not have office jobs, we may toil in the fields, but we’ll be free! We will be free to say a discouraging word about race mixing! Who’s going to stop us? THe local cops, with no paychecks? Ha! No.
Multicult is predicated on a perpetually growing economy. White people go along with it because they assume a perpetually growing pie, rather than a zero sum pie.
Once Whites realize it’s a zero sum pie, they will get very angry at immigration and refugees and welfare recipients et cetera.