[ExI] energy modelling

Rafal Smigrodzki rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com
Tue May 31 01:40:07 UTC 2011


On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 10:54:58PM +0100, Anders Sandberg wrote:
>> Nice essay, but it suffers from the usual peak oil flaw of focusing on
>> Hubbert peak curves. Basically, successful retrodictions do not prove
>> that a methodology is good at predictions. I made a simple example to
>> show the problem with the method:
>>
>> http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2011/05/why_i_dont_trust_hubbert_peak_arguments.html
>>
>> Basically, you can't trust the prediction until you are almost at the
>
> The problem is that some predictions have harsher outcomes than
> others, so we can't treat the caviar peak the same way as the
> fossil peak.

### But oil has cheap substitutes, so there is hardly any downside to
its running out. Synfuels from coal provide a technological ceiling on
the price of gasoline, and the only reason for higher prices would be
purely social, e.g. mass environmentalist hysteria.

We are not running out of energy, by a long shot. We might be running
out of common sense.

Rafal



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