Quote from: James J SkachHence, no Apocalypse as was put forth in the OP....

Not for humans, anyways, or at least the wealthy humans in the world.  Your prediction is depressingly accurate, I'm afraid, James J. Skach.

Quote from: RPGPundit;208143Maybe I'm just feeling pissed off at the fact that I'm paying hundreds of dollars more for my airline ticket, but really: the price of oil isn't going to go back down. I mean, it might dip a little, but it won't go back down below 100, and even if some compensatory actions cause the price to dip a bit, sooner or later it will keep rising, and will only ever keep rising.

$62 a barrel as of today, and OPEC is cutting production in order to boost prices.

Funny old world. And by funny I mean not really all that funny.

Quote from: ticopelp;260271$62 a barrel as of today, and OPEC is cutting production in order to boost prices.

Funny old world. And by funny I mean not really all that funny.

Yeah, price reductions from a global economic meltdown aren't exactly a good thing...

Economies depress, prices for commodities drop - or some commodities, anyway.

It's why it's unwise to make bold predictions of where prices will be so many days or months or years from now. Too often people just make a graph of what's been happening recently and assume the trend will continue forever. "Oooh, that's a nice neat line, obviously it's an eternal rule." During a boom everyone thinks the boom will last forever, during a bust everyone thinks the world's going to end. People don't like to look at the fundamentals.

There's a story that a turkey was once wondering if his owner cared for him or not, so he decided to start weighing his food. Sure enough, every day he was fed more than the last. So he drew a pretty graph showing his food consumption going up forever, and concluded that his owner cared for him very deeply. Until one day he got a surprise, and became a data point on someone else's consumption graph.

The turkey didn't look at the fundamentals, at what was really happening, he just looked at the numbers on his graph.

And what's really happening is as I described many times earlier: much of the market chaos is trading in things which don't exist and have no relation to real productivity, so is inherently unstable and messy.

And fossil fuels are the one resource which when we use them, they're gone forever - because we burn them. So at some point there'll be less than we want, and after that there'll be less than we need. Other resources can be regrown or reused, but they're still finite, and there's still less than we want - but not less than we need. That's why we can have more than enough food to feed the world, but not enough to feed the world to obesity and the world's fuel tanks.

Thus the sensible thing to do is stop burning fossil fuels, and to bring our wants down somewhat closer to our needs - not a bare minimum sort of lifestyle, just heaps less wasteful.

And not to be worried by the day-to-day fluctuations of a panicky market, a bunch of people who think every boom will last forever, and every bust will doom the world.

Even so, the trend over the course of the last few decades has really only ever been rising, any downward adjustments have been temporary at best.
Still, I guess OPEC was right that the ridiculously high prices from a few months back was more due to speculation than scarcity. Nevertheless, I think it is just a harbinger of something that is inevitable.

RPGpundit

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;260334Thus the sensible thing to do is stop burning fossil fuels, and to bring our wants down somewhat closer to our needs - not a bare minimum sort of lifestyle, just heaps less wasteful.
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I find this one supremely funny every time I read it or hear it from some environmentalist type.

It sums up like so : "Well, one day, maybe soon, we're gonna run out of gas so we should just quit using it now."

Brilliant.  See, I can agree, clearly and easily, with the first part (one day, maybe soon, we are gonna run out....), that's beyond self evident now, and has been obvious to anyone with half a brain for... well... a long time.

Its the jump to the second part that is seriously lacking. Lets put it in some other contexts.

"Well, I'm stuck in a cave and my flashlight is gonna run out of batteries eventually, maybe soon... so I should just stop using it now."

"Well, the fridge is getting low on food. We should just stop eating until we get back to the store and restock it. Yeah..."

"Well, my shoes are looking a little ragged. Maybe I should stop walking until I get some new ones."




Its stupid.  We have a resource. We are using, even to an extent DEPENDENT upon that resource. Just  because its finite doesn't mean we try to go cold turkey.  You just get smarter about how you use it. You make more conservative meals, use the flashlight for orientation only, you tape your shoes up and start saving for the next pair.

The one potentially good thing out of the recent price 'crisis' is that people are honestly starting to focus on finding real alternatives, on ways to reduce consumption. Doing it stupidly and looking at the wrong problems and solutions, certainly, but at least they are looking again.

But that STILL doesn't mean we just stop pumping and go back to skinning our neighbors for clothes....

It's a lot easier to discuss things with people when they address what you've actually said, rather than some bullshit they made up.

If your torch is running low, you should not turn it off now, but use its light to find wood or pitch or whatever, find an alternative light source. If the fridge is low on food, grab a snack and go out right now and get more. If youre shoes are ragged, the next walk you should do is to the shop or cobblers to get more or repair them.

When resources are running low, you don't wander around using the last of them and then sit there hungry, cold and in the dark. You get your fucking arse moving to find the alternatives. Because that's what we're doing now, just running down the last resources without doing very much at all to replace them.

I've never said we should go cold turkey. "Stop" does not mean exclusively "stop right now, absolutely completely dead." If your car goes head-on into a tree at 150km/hr you have stopped, but if you brake from 150km/hr to zero over a minute you have also stopped. It's only your assumption that I meant the former, and assumptions come from prejudices. Set those aside, and address what the person's said.

I've never said we should go cold turkey. Nor has any prominent environmentalist. Just that we should burn less today, and burn less tomorrow, so that eventually we burn none at all. And while burning less fossil fuels, we build up other energy generation and consumption methods.

I've also said that this will mean a reduction in total energy use, and a change in our Western lifestyles - but that our lives will not overall be less pleasant. The Swedes and Icelanders use twice as much electricity as us in the US and Australia, and do not have substantially better lives; the Danes, Germans and French use two-thirds as much, and do not have substantially worse lives.

So there's at least a factor of three difference in electricity use without making any substantial difference to quality of life. The same goes for our other energy use. Obviously there's a lot of room to move there, we can change a lot of things without making lives much happier or more miserable.

Quote from: SpikeThe one potentially good thing out of the recent price 'crisis' is that people are honestly starting to focus on finding real alternatives, on ways to reduce consumption.

I don't see that as a good thing. Because if high prices make them seek alternatives, low prices make them forget them - until the next round of high prices. So that there's no progress, it's just a yo-yo thing. Success will come from sustained effort, not little dribs and drabs. I mean, the yo-yo of prices happens from at most one financial quarter to another, but things like wind farms and railways are planned and built over years. So the plan which seemed great simply because of $150 oil in July 2008 seems like a crap idea with $75 oil in September 2008.

There has to be something driving people beyond the day-to-day yo-yoing of prices.

It's my hope that one day oil will be cheap because people just don't want the stuff.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;260364It's my hope that one day oil will be cheap because people just don't want the stuff.

Oil is actually a fantastic resource for all sorts of things beyond burning it. It's a shame that all those plastics we could make are going up in smoke, for instance.

Sure, but

• plastics is only 4% of world oil demand. That'd be about 3.5Mbbl/day compared to today's 87Mbbl/day (or around 83Mbbl/day in a year or two, depending on how the financial collapse plays out).
• Even if we used ten times as much plastics, that's still only 35Mbbl/day.
• Factor in recycling the materials with about a 10% loss during process, and an equal amount of plain old waste, and annual demand would be just 7Mbbl/day.

That's bugger all. If we didn't burn it, the stuff would be cheap. Just imagine burning our rpg books after every game session. Madness.

We're pretty wasteful about what we make with plastic too: bags and six-packs and shit that are really horrific sorts of plastic and are apparently helping to fuck up the environment even more; they've theorized that in some countries 100% of all their birds have plastic in their stomachs.

RPGpundit

Oh, definitely. But in principle all plastics are entirely recyclable. Some plastics would have to be stopped and substituted, but really there's nothing plastics do today that can't be done by entirely recyclable versions. This still costs energy, but the materials themselves needn't be lost.

It's like food - 25-40% of it in the West is simply thrown away. If that all went to compost, returned to the land, then it wouldn't matter. If it goes to landfill then the materials are essentially lost.

So it's as you say, Pundit, the problem is that we throw things "away" rather than reusing or recycling them. In this way plastics become like most oil, gone forever. In principle we can "mine" landfills, and some very poor people in Asia and Africa do that already. But it's not really possible without ruining lives, because the materials are all mixed up, it's Cancer City in those places. The stuff needs to be separated out and recycled before it gets all mixed up.

But of course even if we did just chuck it all away, it'd only be a very small part of our current oil consumption, and if we weren't burning the rest then oil would be very cheap and last us a very much longer time.

It's this love of fire we have... Prometheus worship, one blogger I know calls it. "Can't burn oil? How about gas? Fry oil? Ethanol? Hydrogen? MUST BURN STUFF!"

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;260508It's like food - 25-40% of it in the West is simply thrown away.

Citation?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;260364It's a lot easier to discuss things with people when they address what you've actually said, rather than some bullshit they made up.
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The word "Stop" has a pretty clear definition in my book, Jimmy. Amazingly enough, one that is shared with quite a large number of people.

Amazingly enough, it doesn't mean "slow down" or "take it easy, mate" it means 'cease all such activity'.

Its all well and good that after I point out the absurdity of saying 'stop' in this situation that you present a more reasonable position. Some folks call that changing goal posts, but whatever flips your switch man.

Quote from: RPGPundit;260498We're pretty wasteful about what we make with plastic too: bags and six-packs and shit that are really horrific sorts of plastic and are apparently helping to fuck up the environment even more; they've theorized that in some countries 100% of all their birds have plastic in their stomachs.

Ideally the world could switch to those new biodegrabable plastics for crap like that, then it wouldn't be an issue anymore.  Granted, we have to get that to become economically possible, first.

I will say this, my local chain grocery store has really made a strong effort to get people to use re-usable bags lately.  And it's working.  I'd say at least 20% of the customers are now using them, if not more.

CavScout, you should discover the wonders of google, there are many articles about food waste, both scholarly and casual.

The information for the West comes from looking at what shows up in people's bins sent to landfill, and comparing that with the total weight of food sold in shops. That for the Third World is much rougher.

See for example this article [pdf, 2.4Mb], which is from a Stockholm Water Institute, and tells us that in the Third World they lose 25% or more of their food grown (more of fruit and vegetables, less of grains) to spoilage because they lack proper ways to store and process it - it rots or is eaten by vermin in the fields. But once it gets out of the fields and into sacks or tins then little of it is wasted.

Whereas in the West, the losses come mostly at the store and in the home. Fruit and vegie shops, butchers and fishmongers - and of course restaurants - throw away vast amounts of food, since they'd rather have too much and then throw away excess, passing costs on to the customer, than turn away customers saying, "we've run out." (This will be familiar to anyone who's worked in food retailing, the hospitality industry, or who's been homeless and hungry.) And in the home about a quarter of food gets binned.

A more informal article in the NYT is here, and you can use that for further research. For example, they write,

   "In 1997, in one of the few studies of food waste, the Department of Agriculture estimated that two years before, 96.4 billion pounds of the 356 billion pounds of edible food in the United States was never eaten."
So then we toodle off to usda.gov and they have a helpful search button. Type in "how much food is wasted", and the first link is one-page pdf press release about their study, telling us that

   "over 96 billion pounds of food is discarded each year"

in the US. The third link is another press release in txt format, saying,
   "More than one-fourth of all the food produced in the United States is wasted, according to a new USDA study, the first of its kind in 20 years to examine and quantify food loss."The study, conducted by USDA's Economic Research Service, found that in 1995 about 96 billion pounds of food, or 27 percent of the 356 billion pounds of the food available for human consumption in the United States, were lost at the retail, consumer and food service levels."
So on going to the original source, the USDA, we find that the NYT didn't make up their figures - it's always best to check. Looking around here and there among blogs and blog collection sites we find that "27%" becomes "over a quarter" and sometimes "30%" or even "a third".

Here Down Under figures given for our waste vary a lot, from 15-40%.

This UK report claims one-third of all food is discared there. The average household there discards 18% its food, but families with children discard 27%. The other 15% of average waste comes from shops and restaurants.

A certain amount of waste is unavoidable. In our own household we average 5-10% of what we buy ending up in the compost. Some days you're just not that hungry, and anyway some food "waste" is not that edible - potato peelings, that sort of thing.

Likewise, you can't really help it that your car is idling at the traffic lights, and it would be tedious and stupid to turn the lights and tv off when you leave the loungeroom to take a piss, coming back within three minutes. But we don't really need to drive a mile to work or the shops, to have the engine running while we're pulled over talking on our mobile, to have the airconditioning or heating on when we're not at home, set to a temperature which requires a change of clothes if we go outside - and so on.

There are tremendous amounts of waste in the system, and most of it is easily avoidable. Luckily, I am time-rich so can waste some of it doing research for lazy people.