Fossile Fuel Endgame... If We Run Out Is It Really So Bad?

[SunlitZelkova]

1 hour ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

Can we please not get into heated conversations about peak oil because it won't end well

Heated conversations about peak oil won’t end well? I see what you did there!

(I of course understand you were being serious too lol)

[miklkit]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

To be Mad Max they need petrol.

And what are they doing?  Fighting over it, and how did they get whittled down to just a few scattered survivors?  By fighting over it. 

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, darthgently said:

.  Imagine one of the ecoterror groups that considers humanity a disease on the planet playing with viruses.  They discuss such things with a straight face.  They don't have to have millions of followers, just a few whacko virologists and/or molecular biologists, the ability to understand and acquire scientific papers, and a few million dollars in lab equipment

So, it's possible to restrict the smartphone and other consumer electronics due to sanctions, but impossible to control DNA sequencers? Well...

4 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

We have a natural hunger for <...> violence and greediness.

Every species has, and the humans are the kindest among them, because they are the only species having morale and ethics. Others just eat each other alive.

It's a part of the negative loopback keeping the system stable. Equilibrium of greedy and aggressive entities.

4 hours ago, Superluminal Gremlin said:

When the "cheap" oil goes, and the price of oil skyrockets, many extremely important industries will have a greatly reduced capacity, like mainly the automotive and transport.

They will just switch to nukes and electricity, and forcedly reduce the consumption.
The deuterium  is endless.

1 hour ago, miklkit said:

And what are they doing?  Fighting over it, and how did they get whittled down to just a few scattered survivors?  By fighting over it. 

Mad Max is fantasy.

IRL they would just turn to the synthetic petrol made out of coal, like Germany did.

But then no faery tale would be filmed.

[darthgently]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

So, it's possible to restrict the smartphone and other consumer electronics due to sanctions, but impossible to control DNA sequencers? Well...

Nuclear non-proliferation worked so well, right?   There is traditional breeding also, doesn't have to be molecular.   Anyway, it is a threat that intelligence agencies take seriously so I figure I will also

[farmerben]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

Mad Max is fantasy.

IRL they would just turn to the synthetic petrol made out of coal, like Germany did.

But then no faery tale would be filmed.

It's a heat intensive process which releases about double the CO2 of regular petrol.  

[kerbiloid]

45 minutes ago, farmerben said:

It's a heat intensive process which releases about double the CO2 of regular petrol.  

Not that MadMaxing needs a lot of petrol.

And the WWII times are known not for the carbon footprint and global warming.

[farmerben]

The main reason it's so inefficient is you need 1000 degree steam, which if provided by a nuclear reactor would bring the net CO2 level down considerably.  

[Kerbart]

On 11/10/2022 at 2:11 AM, KSK said:

That would be nice but instead I fully expect BP and their ilk to carry on making a fat profit by selling the dwindling amounts of readily available oil at ever increasing prices and then demand subsidies (or just smile and pocket the offered subsidies when they're deemed politically necessary) to start extracting the harder to reach stuff.

We tend to think of historical processes, not in the least due to misleading terms like “Industrial Revolution” as moments in time, and not gradual transition.  In the same way, future history books will probably state that “the automotive industry introduced electric cars around 2010,” and the casual reader will imagine that by 2011 ICE's were no longer in use. Instead what we see is “more of one, less of the other” as years progress.

“The last oil” will in similar fashion not be extracted in a televised event with a countdown timer, but as @KSK correctly points out, as supplies start to dwindle and new wells get gradually but continuously more expensive to develop and exploit, prices will just increasingly rise.

That, in turn, will (a) make alternative sources relatively more attractive and (b) as the market for those alternative sources grows, likely drive prices of those sources even further down. One can argue that for the production of electricity, solar power and wind energy have already reached that tipping point and are moving from “tree hugger” status to “economic viable choice”

There are many people who say they will never buy an electric car. As certain economies start outlawing the sale of ICE cars around 2030-2040, they might even resort to buying 3 or 4 of them as to have a lifetime supply — only to discover that by 2050, as demand has dropped, gasoline is very hard to find and is now $50 per gallon as it's a niche product that no longer has a massive supply chain to support it.

In short, we’re not going to see a “now what?!” world, but rather a gradual transition into a post-oil society.

[tomf]

2 hours ago, Laikanaut said:

90s people believed the millennium bug would end computers, a

Like everyone involved in IT I find this meme deeply irritating. There was a problem with potentially serious consequences, people took it seriously, a lot of people worked very hard and the problem was averted.

If only that could be said for the other crises affecting mankind.

[Nuke]

if we were to run out now, it would be disastrous. but we are not running out now.  we should be leveling up our nuclear technology in the mean time because a finite resource will run out eventually. there are plenty of funds going to both fission and fusion so thats good. then when we do run out, we can transition to a replacement. i also do not expect a 100% replacement. 

[miklkit]

13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

 

Mad Max is fantasy.

IRL they would just turn to the synthetic petrol made out of coal, like Germany did.

But then no faery tale would be filmed.

History says otherwise.  There has never been a peaceful time in human history.

It would be great to see a peaceful transition to other energy sources, but based on history that is a faery tale.

[Nuke]

1 hour ago, tomf said:

Like everyone involved in IT I find this meme deeply irritating. There was a problem with potentially serious consequences, people took it seriously, a lot of people worked very hard and the problem was averted.

If only that could be said for the other crises affecting mankind.

the y2k bug mostly affected minicomputers which were old by '90s standards. machines like the vax i got to play around on back in high school. our school district was still using it to store their grades, and let the computer science students use it to learn c. all command line text over terminal. a '90s server could have done the same job, but why buy something expensive when you have something expensive that does the same job? to make matters worse a lot of these minicomputers were proprietary with a lot of their software written in archaic languages that were not suitable for porting. so if you were a cobal or fortran programmer back in the 90s you could have reaped a fortune in y2k contract work. 

but people are stupid and thought it would affect their pcs. people just assumed that all computers had the bug and proceeded to panic. i dont think anything windows or linux based would have had this problem (though database software is a different matter). the hype was real. actually modern problems are a good parallel. you got lots of people working on fusion, on fission, on renewables, electric cars, etc. yet still its hyped to doomsday proportions. i see college students protesting about this stuff, makes me wonder why they dont use their energy to learn the engineering to solve the problems instead.  

and of course after writing that i poceed to xkcd and im greeted with this. 

too soon. lol. 

Edited November 11, 2022 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

10 hours ago, Nuke said:

but people are stupid and thought it would affect their pcs. people just assumed that all computers had the bug and proceeded to panic. i dont think anything windows or linux based would have had this problem

CMOS/BIOS of PC needed to be manually switched on a half of computers.

Also several very old ones (of two hundred) had to be dismissed.

(I.e. to be used for anything but relevant dates.)

[tomf]

1 hour ago, Laikanaut said:

According to wikipedia (and my own memory of the time) very little damage was done, despite people preparing for the world to end.

You seem to have missed my point entirely. Little damage was done because people worked hard to ensure that the problem was fixed in time.

The media might have posted some silly stories but that is what they always do.

The bug is so often used as an example of "experts cry wolf" when really it is an example of "grown ups identify a problem and work together to fix it instead of squabbling like children, denying the problem exists and trying to blame someone else"

[kerbiloid]

The problems with hardware were minimal.

The problem was with that software where the developers were using short date formats, because nobody was looking that far.
Though, as we were moving from local data files to SQL server, this was not a problem but a motivation to drop such software.

It took several months of talks and several days of action (almost only because some computers were locked and users were absent.)

Edited November 13, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Gargamel]

1 hour ago, Laikanaut said:

According to wikipedia (and my own memory of the time) very little damage was done, despite people preparing for the world to end.

I expect it will be the same with fossil fuels.

Using Wikipedia as an argument against people with first and second hand knowledge is slightly worse than the old saying “The plural of anecdote is not data”.   
 

There was a massive behind the scenes effort to fix the problems before they reared their heads.   A couple of my college roommates made small fortunes fixing the issues.   The reason it is downplayed so heavily now is due to the efforts of IT professionals like @tomf, my roommates, and others.   They did such an amazing job that the problem was neutralized. 
 

Unlike now, where there is an active campaign against switching to renewable sources, the efforts of many are thwarted by the greed of the few, and we’re all going to punished for it.   

[Superluminal Gremlin]

On 11/11/2022 at 12:31 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

Heated conversations about peak oil won’t end well?

i didn't see that

 

 

[Nuke]

humanity will end not with a bang but with a whimper.

[Gargamel]

4 hours ago, Laikanaut said:

But claiming that the American or western experience applies equally to everyone across the globe (regardless of how few computers are being used in their country) seems like sound logic to you?

I do believe the corollary of this defeats your own argument.  

[razark]

48 minutes ago, Laikanaut said:

Not really, because it makes no difference to me what happens to America.

 

[Spacescifi]

30 minutes ago, razark said:

 

And what America both does and does not do often has a domino effect on other parts of the world.

 

Whether anyone likes it or not America is very influential, but less so on places it could care less about lol.

[kerbiloid]

8 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Using Wikipedia as an argument against people with first and second hand knowledge is slightly worse than the old saying “The plural of anecdote is not data”.   

I'm one of those first hand people, our IT department (and two side jobs) had fixed the 2k problem on a whim, and that was a real-time 24/7 transport company.

Just distributed the workplaces between the IT staff, relaxedly walked to everyone and set up the CMOS and system settings.

Several (less than five) very old computers had the clock "hard-coded", and didn't allow to save the time settings.
So, they were replaced with less old ones (by bying several new ones for the best people, and shifting down the others), and used in the janitor department and storehouse.

Also some DOS programs had been finally killed and replaced with their Windows analogs.

The problem was completely forgotten in a week after the New Year.

8 hours ago, Gargamel said:

There was a massive behind the scenes effort to fix the problems before they reared their heads.   A couple of my college roommates made small fortunes fixing the issues.   The reason it is downplayed so heavily now is due to the efforts of IT professionals like @tomf, my roommates, and others.   They did such an amazing job that the problem was neutralized. 

Because US had started the computerization much earlier, so by the 2 000 it was full of obsolete computer junk and old programs for it.

While the ex-USSR was just starting, and its computer park was much younger and more relevant.

Another bright example: the COBOL language.
While the poor dear 'Murican IT staff keeps suffering from this nightmare legacy of the dark old times, the ex-USSR just skipped it (mostly together with other dinosaur horrors like PL/I, Ada, Modula, etc.), and feels happy with much more developed development tools.

A one fun more.
Periodically watching for reasons some photos and videos from California small shops, I was shocked that they were still using CRT monitors a decade after we dropped the last of them.
Currently I know only one place where such monitor is really used for server, and that company is very... economical.

Also, while in 1990s the Americans had to pay for software and keep using it until it's finally agonizing, this problem was not relevant in ex-USSR till 2006 (when the campaign of software legalization started), so nobody cared of that non-existing trouble. To use the newest software version just find it.
The current events and sanctions tend to revive that good old tradition in near future.

Sometimes it's bad to be rich.

8 hours ago, Laikanaut said:

I'm also unfamiliar with this "campaign against renewables," and suspect it's more of an American phenomenon, as the problems that exist here are quite different, and partly a result of over-adoption of renewable sources.

+1

8 hours ago, Laikanaut said:

It might be more accurate to say that the end of fossil fuels could cause a collapse in your country's economy

I doubt that US can get out of fossil fuel at all. Australia as well. The British, German, and Polish coal mines also look not depleted.

And a lot of resources can be saved by the coming robotization, unification, and virtualization of the life space.

So, that's the pro-renewables campaign looks somewhat slyly.

2 hours ago, Laikanaut said:

Not really, because it makes no difference to me what happens to America.

Seattle. In any case we need Seattle for KSP-2.

54 minutes ago, Spacescifi said:

And what America both does and does not do often has a domino effect on other parts of the world.

Most part of that domino is caused just because everyone is using available tools.
If the tools are American, why not.

Edited November 14, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

renewables are nice as technology goes, but a solution to global climate issues they are not. especially here in the us where people take 3 hot showers a day, keep their heater on 80 in the winter and 50 in the summer (freedom units of course), drive everywhere in big suvs (my siblings seem to live in their cars more than their homes) and then pat themselves on the back for buying a tesla while the coal fire plant churns away. i dont think lack of renewables is the issue. to fix this you either need to go big with nuclear so this way of life is sustainable, or plaster every acre of a dead world with solar panels and wind turbines. 

Edited November 15, 2022 by Nuke

[Vanamonde]

Please avoid getting into nationalistic rivalries.

[magnemoe]

On 11/10/2022 at 12:34 AM, Gargamel said:

There was a BP memo about 10 years ago, once hosted on their main website, since removed about 5 years ago (and Yes, I personally saw it), that estimated that there was about 40 years worth of easily obtainable (including fracking) petroleum still available to us.    Once that supply is gone, the cost of oil will skyrocket as the extraction costs also skyrocket.    So even if you don't believe in the anthropomorphic effect on the climate through the burning of fossil fuels, then at the very least let's try to get our infrastructure in place to avoid that price crunch.   There's a lot of stuff made from oil, just not fuel, and it'd be nice if we can keep oil cheap enough to not bring around the fall of civilization. 

The market crash in '08 caused oil futures to plummet, just about halving prices, and they continued on a downward trend until the pandemic hit, which caused a huge drop, then spike due to supply chain.  

https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-chart

It might well be retracted because if much older studies was true we ran out of oil over 30 years ago and this was pointed out. 
Now the limited oil agenda is pushed from multiple sources. They who want fear clicks: politicians, journalists and influences  , oil companies who want to open new areas to drilling, at least offshore its decades from you start searching to you start production.  Environmentalists who want us to move away from oil (oil industry might help here)

The oil industry is pretty weirs in that it based on decades long term investments but if the oil price fall because of some predictable reasons its all gloom, or then something interrupt it short time you want to incest in mega projects.  Still not as insane as Hollywood. Not to start talking about crypto.