Peak Everything?
reason.com
reason.com
The universe (and even the earth) is pretty big. There's plenty of time, if we keep expanding.
Which is, indeed, the conclusion of the linked article as well.
Timescales matter here. If we're going to run out of a "finite" resource in 10 billion years vs. 1,000 years or 10 years it makes all the difference in the actions you take.
Also, when something is "harder to get" it may mean merely that we haven't developed the technology to extract it yet. Aluminum used to be more precious than Gold because it was "harder to get" than Gold, though it was not scarce. And today Aluminum metal is far from scarce and far from expensive.
It is estimated that about 10 million hectares a year is lost (the size of the state of Indiana), 30% of the arable land in the last 40 years. 1mm of topsoil lost takes about 20 years to replace. The United States is losing soil 10 times faster -- and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster -- than the natural replenishment rate.
It's a feedback system since good land produces lots of organic matter. Once eroded away, it's extremely difficult to restore. I have a hard time figuring out how we could avoid serious troubles in this area in the not too distant future. Some years ago there was a big push in North American to improve farm practices (stop burning straw, reduction or elimination of tillage, etc). That helped a lot but developing countries have not or cannot adopt such practices.
By the way, what's so bad about burning straw? Or is it just that composting straw gives more soil?
In the 1930's drought (the dirty thirties, the Dust Bowl) soil drifted in the wind like snow. North America had a worse drought in the late 1980's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Drought_of_1988) but erosion was not really a problem due to much improved farming practices. Crop yield during the late 1980's drought were also much higher than in the 1930's because the new farming practice was much better at preserving soil moisture. That said, it was still not a fun time to be a farmer.
E.g. the improvements in farming that eventually lead to the industrial revolution in England are rarely looked at.
In particular, it takes a bit more than the spirit of innovation to move the developed world from a depleting energy source to a more renewable energy source.
For example, it's not like oil is going to disappear overnight. When gas prices get up to 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 dollars a gallon... at some point, people are definitely going to start buying electric cars. Same goes for trucks, ships, everything else that uses oil. But innovation to make alternatives available isn't going to happen until market forces make it profitable.
And "640K should be enough for anyone," right? The idea that something will never 'run out' is usually predicated on the assumption that consumption levels will remain the same (or at least only increase linearly rather than exponentially).
Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands, methane clathrates, etc. is unlikely to take peak hydrocarbon arguments seriously, there's just too much of the stuff. Ultimately the peak oil argument comes back to a visceral hatred of petroleum and a wish to see a world without it, but wishes aren't reality.
Wrong, all it takes is that the demand grows above the discoveries rate. If I remember correctly, demand to discoveries ratio was about 4:1 in the last decade. (and demand is to go even higher as emergent countries create middle classes that aspire to follow the American dream)
> Secondly, there must be no advances in technologies in extraction or refinement.
That is irrelevant. Efficiencies can only buy you more time. Every grade school kid knows fossil fuels are non renewable resources. We could debate whether the Peak Oil is one year, or one decade or one century away, but this is something that will eventually happen.
> Thirdly, there must be no advances in technologies to convert different hydrocarbon sources into others.
This is frankly foolish! It takes energy to transform materials from one "format" to another, and it takes serious energy to do that at an industrial scale. Specially, if you want to take low concentrated energy sources and make then highly concentrated, you will waste most of it away! (while screwing the environment on unprecedented scales) There is a good reason the Nazis tried an all-in and attacked Russia. They could not afford to keep converting coal into synthetic oil for much longer!
> Anyone who's looked at the numbers for reserves of coal, tar sands...
One thing that has to be said about this, is that the good stuff is already gone. Clearly, there is plenty of cheap, dirty, low yield fossil fuels around. But the sweet crude, the one that yielded 100:1 returns on energy invested, was burned during the economic expansion of the 20th century.
This is not to say that we are doomed, and that we are back to the dark ages (when I see the stupidity around in Facebook, I sometimes think we are indeed, but it clearly has nothing to do with peak oil). The catch is that we need to recognize that our whole civilization is built over a non renewable resource, and we have to use whatever we have left of it in an strategic way (which I think may last for the 21st century, give or take). It would be nice to make the jump now that we have still some capacity for retooling, than later on when we have less so.
Another factor in the attack of Germany on the Soviet Union was that both countries had quite insane leaders..
I don't think this is true, and your argument ignores how expensive many of the technologies you cite are, like coal gassification, which has been available for decades but isn't used because of the cost. The question isn't only about reserves, but about how expensive those reserves are to access (and what kinds of environmental damage access will cause).
And oil prices have, in real terms, gone steadily upwards through a boom and bust cycle: prices rise stratospherically, then crash, then find a new trading point higher than the previous trading point. For more on that, see Christopher Steiner's $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better: http://jseliger.com/2009/08/21/20-per-gallon . Note that I don't believe the provocative claim in the title, but he provides a lot of useful historical data.
And this argument mostly ignores the environmental cost of oil, both in terms of extraction and in terms of consumption. And in terms of the massive wealthy transfers from the West to charming places like Saudi Arabia that do a great job of churning out people who become terrorists and ideologies that are repressive. If the price of oil goes up—and it almost certainly will—the latter dynamic will only get stronger.
People who cite peak oil aren't doing it because they have "a visceral hated of petroleum," especially if visceral refers to inward feelings rather than the intellect: they have rational concerns about the world in which we live. Those concerns might be misguided, but they might not be, and time will, as usual, be the judge.
Wow!
I'm sure we could do vastly more recycling, use alternatives for some things, improve efficiency, develop magical new technologies, etc, etc... but almost no-one I've spoken to about this appreciates just how terrifyingly rapidly we're approaching these limits. If we run out of available mine-able Zinc & Copper in 30 years - which is quite possible - what then? Do we have enough time to switch to coping strategies? Will that be a smooth ride? It seems to me that the front of the train has already hit the buffers, but we've still got our foot on the gas pedal, back here in the cab.
Most of the useful mineral resources on Earth are only available in vanishingly tiny quantities elsewhere in the solar system. We currently do almost no recycling of anything, compared to our consumption. The human population is huge, growing in number, affluence and resource usage per capita. We're on course to run out of the minerals required to run our economy & infrastructure within most of our lifetimes.
Nice infographic with some estimated timescales for various resources: http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/2605120...
The Greatest Shortcoming of the Human Race is our inability to understand the exponential function: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
I'm not being alarmist - sometimes things are actually alarming.
Of course coping may not be easy in the first place.
This problem will only become worse as concentrated energy sources are used up, and we move on to more diffuse sources with lower EROEIs, but expect to have the same surplusses we had in the 1990s.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fusions-fal...
Anyone interested in fusion power really ought to read that article. The main thrust of the article is: a) even if you build the reactor, how do you capture the energy - which is mostly emitted in the form of neutrons - and b) where are you going to get the tritium from. Currently the answer to both questions is 'don't know'.
Yes, unless we figure out the knowledge required to synthesize these elements, recapture them, or develop substitutes.
Knowledge has a habit of disrupting what otherwise looks like a zero-sum game.
And human innovation is driven by population. In a small town, there may not be enough people interested in computers to even form a club; in a big city, you can find enough interested, talented people to form a business many times over. The explosion in wealth generated by large populations is not something to be discarded lightly.
First is lost to space second is actually destroyed. Most other elements can be recycled.
Arguably genetic/linguistic diversity might also count. Because the rate of creation of new species and languages is slower than the rate of their destruction.
And finally total useful energy supply of the universe.
Also, as it turns out operation of nuclear reactors generates Helium (an alpha particle is a Helium nucleus). Realistically we're not running out of Helium, there are lots of sources for it.
Anyway, Man made production of Helium is no where near our current usage levels. Granted, if the world total energy supply was generated by fusion the numbers would be closer.
Meanwhile, by 2000, the consumption of helium within the U.S. had risen to above 15 million kg per year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Extraction_and_use
Energy density by mass (MJ/kg) Deuterium-tritium fusion = 337,000,000 MJ /kg, total worldwide energy consumption was 474 exajoules (474×10^18 J) = 1,406,528.19 kilograms / extraction efficiency.
You are probably right about genetic and linguistic diversity. Though we can also do with less, if necessary.
I am not sure about the useful energy supply of the universe. I suspect its true, but we probably do not know whether the universe at large behave like a thermodynamically closed system.
I wonder when we will reach "peak peak-resource stories"?