[extropy-chat] Priorities: Longevity, food or viruses?

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Harvey Newstrom <mail at harveynewstrom.com> wrote:
> Mike Lorrey wrote,
> > If these claims were true (and these 
> > same claims were being made in the 70's) then today we should 
> > be paying $80/barrel for oil and rationing one car per 
> > family. Didn't happen then, won't happen now, won't happen in 
> > the future.
> 
> This is not necessarily true, Mike, although it's not necessarily
> false either.
> 
> I think most people, even conservatives, estimate running out of oil
> sometime this century.  Whether it is 20 or 60 years, we still are in
> the century that runs out of oil.  

No, we are not. Look, I've talked to the geologists, not the
politicians. The 20-60 year figure only applies to oil recoverable at a
profit given current market prices with today's technology. 

As technology advances, you get three effects: 
a) resource utilization efficiency increases. Light bulbs produce more
light for fewer watts, heaters heat more with fewer liters of fuel,
cars go farther on less gas, it takes less energy to produce a given
dollar of GDP.
b) resource recovery efficiency increases. Drilling gets cheaper, so
you can drill deeper on the same amount of money. With other
technologies you can pump more oil out of a given location (like with
CO2 counter pumping).
c) alternatives. Wind energy is now commercially competetive with
fossil fuels. Solar power will reach that point in the next decade. As
more utilization of these alternatives occurs, growth in consumption of
oil is mitigated. 

While this one factor (c) luddites like and yap about, they
consistently ignore (a) and (b) in their doom and gloom scenarios like
the paper cited. They even DISLIKE efficiency, just like the hate
energy sources that could end the oil problem, like nuclear power.
Jeremy Rifkin is quoted as saying that "it is efficiency that is
killing the planet."

These two factors make more reserves available at todays prices over
time as technology advances. Then you have inflation.

As the economy expands and the money supply inflates, oil prices grow
in current day dollars (albiet at rates below overall inflation as per
the reasons above) but not in real dollars, more expensive to recover
reserves become commercially feasible.

The paper Robert referenced is a bait and switch job by luddites. It
firstly totally ignores advances in technology as luddites have always
done since Malthus. It secondly tries to claim that the 20 year supply
is ALL the oil there is, NOT just that commercially recoverable at the
present time. 

Geologists who know this area of geology will tell you we have
somewhere between 200-300 years of oil in the ground THAT WE KNOW OF.
We have no idea what oil may lie deeper, what oil may lie in areas that
have yet to be explored for oil. Oil explorers are even, in many cases,
finding oil even where geological theory claims it should not be present.

=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
                                       - Gen. John Stark
"Fascists are objectively pro-pacifist..."
                                       - Mike Lorrey
Do not label me, I am an ism of one...
Sado-Mikeyism: http://mikeysoft.zblogger.com

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