More on Impending Doom

A while back I wrote a couple of articles on energy, with a particular emphasis on transportation, so it’s probably time for me to follow up on those.  The question remains: what will the world look like when fossil fuels become prohibitively expensive if no alternative is found?  I’ve had a lot of feedback contesting the central thesis of my previous articles which was it is highly unlikely that there is any foreseeable alternative which can replace the system cheap oil allows us to operate.  Like hydrogen, I think the viability of biofuel/solar electric etc economics will fade with continued system analysis (with biofuel the first to die, methinks).  Don’t get me wrong, biofuels/electrics etc almost certainly will play a part in the future world, but they cannot replace the current oil-based system.  I still think I’m right and the correspondents I mentioned are wrong, so we’ve agreed to wait ten years and see what happens!

So, if I am right, is it just going to cost more to drop the kids at school in 2020?  Well, no… the end of cheap oil threatens the entire global economic system.  Conventional economics determines that unless we have continuous economic growth things are very grim indeed.  For this to occur more people have to consume more (of something) and since the industrial revolution this buy more/breed more has continued pretty much unchecked.  A lot of this growth has been on the back of cheap supplies of energy which is used in producing/growing goods and moving them around.  Oil allows economic growth, but it also can retard it as well.  As the economy heats up more oil is consumed and the price rises and this price rise eventually chokes off the economic growth.  Oil then falls in price (but never to the original level you might have noticed) and the economy picks up again.  And so proceed ad infinitum. 

As oil continues to rise in price, eventually we’ll need to take a serious look at the doctrine of continuous economic growth because it is, by definition, unsustainable (I hate to use that word because it is thrown around cheaply a lot these days, mainly by marketers trying to get you to consume something.   Nothing is really sustainable - entropy gets added every time for every thing).  We need to adjust the system we live in to make our resources last longer and as long as economic growth is the bottom line, I can’t see that happening.

In the future you’ll definitely travel around less (no more long weekends in Sydney) and you’ll live more locally.  Much of what you consume (especially food) will be produced more locally also.  There will be less of a marketing drive (no pun intended) to get you to buy the latest gadget which only makes you want the next gadget more.  There is no reason to fear this future, in fact I think it could be quite pleasant. 

There is an alternative which my father favours: he calls it the elephant in the green house.  It goes like this: we live in a green house with an elephant which feeds relentlessly on the diminishing vegetation therein.  The elephant eats, and shits, and the shit just keeps on piling up in the greenhouse.  There is nothing we can do to control the elephant.  Our own efforts to preserve the vegetation by not eating as much ourselves make a small difference, but not much.  The elephant's ringpiece continues to produce copious quantities of foul muck.  I’ll get flayed for this, but perhaps we should just gorge ourselves and hope we get fat enough to be floating relatively highly on the sea of shit when the elephant eventually drowns…

The next 20 years and your SUV Part II

Did you get the impression from my last post that I've got a bee in my bonnet about cars and oil and carbon dioxide and trains and planes etc etc etc.  You'd be right, it does worry me.  Global warming is nasty, but to be honest it's just a distraction from the real issue which is the reality that we're going to need to radically alter almost every aspect of the way we live to survive the end of cheap oil, but I'll get to that.

In my last post I gave the hydrogen economy a going over.  Hydrogen doesn't work because the overall system doesn't work.  In order to run cars on hydrogen we need to expend huge amounts of energy on producing and storing the hydrogen, when we could just use that energy more directly.  This, along with various technical inconveniences, causes me to seriously doubt the feasibility of the whole concept.

Hang on a second, you might be thinking, oil isn't going to run out anytime soon, is it?  Well, you'd be right.  There is plenty of oil out there but there is a problem with it.  The oil reserves which are easy to get at are rapidly depleting meaning the oil companies are having to scratch around looking for more oil in the most inconvenient of places.  The classic example is the oil sands in Canada where relatively crappy oil is mixed in with huge amounts of... well... sand.  Sure, they can get the oil out of the sand, but it only becomes economic to do so when the price at the pump is really high.  You'll have noticed a particular Brazilian oil company is scouting around in NZ waters for oil.  There is probably some there but I bet it ain't cheap to get it.

The other problem is that soaring demand (especially in Asia and the middle-East) is pushing prices up.  Economists will try and reassure you that increasing demand will result in increased supply which will stabilise prices, but this theory assumes resources are unlimited which for oil is simply not the case (in my opinion, economists have a lot to answer for, but I'll attack them more rigorously at a later date).  Increased demand and the inability to pump oil out of the ground at an increasing rate (something called 'peak oil' which you may have heard of), along with the rapid depletion of readily accessible oil reserves means one thing: continuously rising prices.  And the consequence are beyond just the cost of filling up your gas tank because the world economy, and the paradigm of economic growth, relies entirely on cheap oil as I'll get around to explaining one of these days.

Let's take another example of propulsion touted to replace the oil-sucking internal combustion engine: the electric car.  The biggest problem is exactly the same as for the hydrogen car: you've still go to get the energy to charge your battery from somewhere and, like it or not, most of the world's electricity is generated from burning hydrocarbons so you're unlikely to reduce carbon emissions.  Even if we do find another source to charge up our batteries, we've still got to have batteries in the first place.  Batteries are made from materials which themselves are limited in supply and the chances of replacing the world's car fleet with electric versions are very small indeed.

Biofuels are something I know less about, but to my knowledge they need to be heavily subsidised to make them even remotely economic.  Growing feedstock for biofuel also displaces food crops and I, for one, will be none too happy if I have to go hungry so some tool can rumble around in his SUV (I use the masculine advisedly - only a male can feel insecure enough to drive one).  Biofuels also have lower energy densities than conventional fuels, so that 5% ethanol/petrol mix is probably leaving you every so slightly short changed.

So, assuming there is no viable replacement for fossil fuels (and I happen to think that assumption is pretty good) then what will happen in the future to transportation?  Being pessimistic, I used to think the Mad Max option would be the one humanity would "choose" but I've started to feel slightly more optimistic. I think a gradual reversion to the NZ lifestyle in the 1950s might be on the cards.  People aren't going to give up their cars in a hurry, but gradually people will adjust their lifestyles to use them less*.  Cars will also begin to look different.  They'll get smaller and lighter for a start since most of the fuel we burn is spent carrying the car around, rather than its contents.  It's possible that some of these will be electric or run on biofuels, but I'm picking this will be limited, and I don't give hydrogen much hope at all.  You'll also fly a lot less (which is concerning for those of us in the aviation industry who think too much about these things, but just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean you can't accept it which a lot of people seem to have a problem with).  Trains, buses and other forms of terrestrial public transport will become more widely used, which is why it would be sensible to start investing in public transport infrastructure now rather than chucking more money at roading (as an aside, and I like asides, why is it that people find it acceptable to chuck millions of dollars at roading which generates no direct revenue, yet it would be unacceptable for a state-owned rail company to run at a loss?).  The lifestyle changes you'll have to make don't end at transport, but I'll talk about those another time.

I think I've rambled for too long and been less coherent than normal, so I'll leave it there, but I welcome your comments and abuse.


*With fuel at $2.20 per litre I've already started to do this.  I probably use about 50 litres of fuel per month, at least in my car.  This doesn't count the multitudinous litres I no doubt consume indirectly to support my hedonistic and opulent western lifestyle (incidentally the very lifestyle being coveted by the entire world population, give or take the membership of the Taliban and even they're keen on the Toyota Hilux apparently).  It also doesn't count many hundreds of litres I'll burn on my way to Asia and back later this year.  Let's say fuel hits $10 per litre ("Absurd" I hear you scoff?  Well, in my late teens petrol was something like 70c per litre, so I wouldn't call an increase of  five times over the next 10 years crazy): I'd be spending something like $6000 per year and most people would be spending a hell of a lot more.  You'd think twice about driving too far.