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The energy transition, with a discussion of peak oil. Low TFR and population aging. Mass migration, populism, social media.
The experts were just so wrong about peak oil, weren't they?
Not only did the world not reach peak oil in the late 2000s as predicted, but US production grew so much it is now 30% above its prior 1970 peak.
I'll venture that we really will reach peak oil in the next decade, but not because of lack of supply (we are discovering oil faster than we are burning it), but because of lack of demand.
We never ran out after all.
Kind of. The increasing and more volatile price of oil motivated the development of fracking technologies, which have a higher upfront cost but about the same marginal cost as previous wells, allow previously unexploitable fields to be made exploitable, and allow wells to be turned on and off with macroeconomic realities. So increasing prices signalled need, and the technology was developed to fill that need.
Which is probably a good estimate for the trend that will occur in other domains of resource exploitation, as long as we allow price signalling to work.
As a side note, it looks like gasoline prices are almost monotonically decreasing when adjusted for inflation. I suspect this is because the price of energy is basically what sets the value of the dollar. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/gasoline-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/
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There's an author I like (David Mitchell) whose novels are all loosely connected and part of the same universe.
His first big hit and arguably his opus, Cloud Atlas, had a section set in a post-apocalyptic earth. Within the book, the end of industrial civilisation comes about due to peak oil. In 2004 when the book was written this wasn't an unreasonable thing for someone like Mitchell to believe.
Unfortunately, since all his books are within the same universe, he then revisited how the end of civilisation came about in his 2014 book The Bone Clocks.
This leads to the situation where the characters watch civilisation die around them in the 2050s because they are running out of diesel.
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The big thing that the environmentalists got wrong is that it's basically impossible to run out of a resource. Nothing that we extract gets annihilated.
The resource simply gets more and more expensive, in the worst case, or you find new ways to extract it more efficiently, in the best case (as what happened to oil). And in the worst case, the higher prices lead to development of substitutes and more efficient usages - as always, high prices are the cure to high prices.
To be fair to peak-oilers their argument was always that peak is different from running out and the danger is what oil getting more and more expensive would cause to the global economy and society.
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This seems like saying the same thing in more words (not always a bad idea!).
Assume that technological progress will not gift us Pareto-optimal replacements for anything that we need more of. In that case, the different between ‘running out’ of something and ‘no longer being able to do many tasks that require it because it’s too expensive and there’s no good replacement’ is essentially semantic.
That's kind of assuming the conclusion. The fact is that high prices incentivize finding substitutes for lower value applications of expensive commodities.
It is assuming the conclusion, that’s what I mean. The peak oil argument is that we were given a limited gift of irreplaceable resources and we’re splurging it all on junk. The tech optimist argument is that we can basically use as much stuff as we want (indeed more is better) and if there are supply problems we’ll find a way.
Obviously, in the former view, you will eventually run out of everything that is not self-replacing. In the latter, you can never run out of anything. But the existence of appropriate substitutes is a factor beyond our control.
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