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I just checked wikipedia and that seems to be the standard usage of the term as well. I'm all for telling society to fuck off and using language your own way, though I think you should be explicit about how you're not using the standard definition when you do.
I can agree that a lot of rhetoric is unclear or potentially misleading - I think global warming and climate change aren't terribly good labels for the phenomenon they're describing either.
Oil and coal are not perfectly interchangeable. Oil has a much higher energy density and is much better suited for large vehicles (like farming equipment). Coal similarly doesn't provide as many of the important byproducts that petroleum does. You can get around this by throwing more energy at the problem, but that makes the exhaustion issue worse. We do have a lot more coal, but coal isn't as useful a fuel, and if you replace an appreciable fraction of oil consumption with coal consumption then those stockpiles aren't going to last nearly as long.
My position is neither of those - we should be moving away from coal AND oil because our current rate of usage is obscenely high, and we're pointlessly wasting vast amounts of both. There's nothing we're currently aware of that will replace them, and I believe that's why we should place a big emphasis on conservation and avoiding wastes of energy. The uranium amount doesn't matter until we can get sustainably profitable nuclear power (i.e. it has an EROEI high enough to justify its existence), which we currently cannot do.
We are burning a non-renewable resource in order to inefficiently generate enough food calories to support current population levels. If we were not burning non-renewable energy sources at a breakneck pace, we would not be able to support the level of population we currently have, which is why I think that we are, by definition, above that carrying capacity. Each extra bit of population increases the rate at which we're burning those fuels as well! That said, I don't think there's enough political will for a real solution here, which is why I'm expecting nature to have her say (and she has a very consistent rejoinder for animals that outgrow the ability of their environment to support them).
Why is climate change not a good descriptor? What would you suggest instead?
I actually don't have a suggestion - this is a big problem and I don't have an answer for it. The reason I don't like climate change is that it doesn't really convey much information about the problem. The climate changes for all sorts of normal, natural reasons through time (it went through plenty of changes before humans even showed up on the scene) - volcanic eruptions, solar activity, floods, etc. When environmentalists talk about global warming and climate change, they're talking about a much more specific phenomenon - human activity releasing greenhouse gases being the biggest. There's a very specific process taking place here that's having consequences on the world which are already starting to arrive, and while climate change does describe what's happening, it also describes things like the Hekla 3 eruption or the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Climate change makes it sound like some inevitable and unavoidable fact of life, and while "climate change" is indeed something that's going to happen no matter what, human activity contributing to the greenhouse effect is something that people can actively take steps in their life to try and reduce.
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You don't think nuclear would become "sustainably profitable" if it was nuclear or starvation?
If I had a "choice" between getting blood from a stone and starving to death, my circumstances wouldn't make the stone any more likely to bleed if I crushed it. If nuclear power can successfully give us electricity too cheap to meter, then great - that'd be a wonderful thing. But that has yet to be demonstrated at scale and I have seen no indications that this is going to change anytime soon. Nuclear power is great in a lot of ways, and it's the best power source we have for nuclear submarines/aircraft carriers, but it doesn't seem like you can profitably and sustainably scale it up to the point that you'd run a modern economy with it.
Do you not consider France a modern economy?
The French nuclear system is currently at an unsustainable level of debt and is on the verge of being nationalised because it can't make enough money to keep itself going. The state of the French nuclear energy system is something I have previously brought up in discussions on these topics as evidence for my point.
To the extent that nuclear is uncompetitive, it's uncompetitive because cheaper options exist. You're arguing that the cheaper options are going to cease to exist. I'm sceptical, but assuming you're right, then nuclear will no longer be uncompetitive.
France doesn't demonstrate that nuclear is cost-competitive with natural biofuels - it isn't. But it does demonstrate that a modern economy can run on nuclear if the money is there. And again, the money will be there if there aren't better and cheaper options available.
So this implies to me that the worst case scenario of us depleting our natural biofuel resources is we switch to nuclear resources and become like France - energy is somewhat more expensive, but it's still there, and we continue to be able to feed a large population rather than collapsing into mass starvation.
No, it is uncompetitive because it cannot generate enough power to pay for itself and all the infrastructure (physical, social and human) required to support it. I think this is the big disagreement between us and I'm not sure there's a way to answer it conclusively from here.
If I have a failing, uncompetitive business, I can keep it going as long as I shovel money in from some other, more profitable business (like maintaining a colonial empire in Africa). That doesn't mean that the failing, uncompetitive business is suddenly sustainable or could serve as the basis for a productive economy. It doesn't matter how much money you throw into this particular pit when it just isn't capable of supporting itself! There are potential benefits from arbitrage through time(if you build a machine that takes in 100 calories of energy and spits out 95 over twenty years, that could actually be a great deal if you think the price of energy is about to double), but that doesn't make it usable as a basis for society.
With what resources? When the oil runs out, how are you going to build this gigantic, nation-wide network of nuclear power plants? The math on exactly when you'd have to start building them in order to avoid an economic catastrophe has already been done, and the answer was 1970.
Energy is one component of modern petroleum-based agriculture, but not the only one. The most common types of fertiliser, which are required for modern petroleum-based agriculture, are in fact derived from oil - as are a lot of modern pesticides. You don't need those things when practicing more modern organic farming techniques (one of the benefits of farming techniques that don't need petroleum is that you can keep doing them when you run out of petroleum), but those farming technologies aren't able to match up to the yield of petroleum-based agriculture. Where's the oil for all this fertiliser going to come from when you're already nationalising all petroleum for use in the construction of your nation-wide grid of nuclear power plants?
It's easy to settle if you think about it logically for a second.
Why can't nuclear generate enough power to pay for itself? Because the price is too low.
Why is the price too low? Is it because we don't really want or need electricity? Or is it because we can get it more cheaply elsewhere? Clearly the latter.
There's no magical law of nature that fixes the price of electricity at the current level. It's supply and demand - and that means that as supply from natural biofuels drops, we move further up the demand curve and the price rises, which in turn makes other energy sources competitive. It's basic economics.
And no, we aren't in some mad scramble against time to switch to nuclear. We have centuries worth of coal.
Actually, I don't think this is basic at all. Energy is such a fundamental part of the economy that increases in the cost of energy effectively act as a tax for all other economic activity, and there are vanishingly few sectors of the economy that are unaffected by shifts in the price of petroleum. There are petroleum derivatives in almost all modern technology, petroleum is used for transportation and extraction of resources, used to make soil more fertile, etc. What this means is that when you switch from incredibly cheap energy (oil/coal) to expensive energy (nuclear) you're applying additional overhead to all economic activity. Given the repeated failure of nuclear power generation to turn a profit, it remains an open question whether or not nuclear power would be able to provide enough energy overhead to sustain a modern industrial civilisation. But of course that runs into another problem...
Nuclear reactors are built with petroleum-powered construction equipment, use petroleum-derived components and are powered with fuel that is extracted via large mining vehicles running on petroleum, all the while being supplied by a transportation network based on petroleum. The price of oil is in fact a factor in the price of nuclear power, and as the price of oil rises the price of nuclear power will rise with it as only some of the necessary petroleum inputs can be replaced with coal or other sources of power. There simply is no known and usable power source that has the energy-density or broad swathe of additional uses and benefits brought by petroleum, and we're going to need that replacement to come online very quickly. And again, I don't think time is the correct metric to use here - will it really last that long if we're also replacing most of our petroleum usage with it as well?
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