First time I seriously started reading about peak oil was in 2006-7. Seemed like everyone online was talking about it with gas prices going up. I started to really worry, was seriously thinking of replacing my car with a moped. Future did seem pretty bleak, it was an attractive theory to consider, seemed to resonate with the facts.
The crack in the dam for me was when I started reading about all the discussions of peak coal decades and decades earlier. Obviously we didn't move off coal in the 1850s-1910s due to mass shortages. So what happened? And how are current arguments for peak oil trying to improve, and avoid the old mistakes?
But the arguments weren't new. They were just the same, "this thing is finite and we're currently using it."
Where do these arguments come from, why are people so passionate about them?
I started to realize humanity has a really strong pessimism bias. I remember making that suggestion to a friend of mine, pumping gas some Saturday. I mentioned that maybe this whole peak oil thing was overblown. And he pointed to the pump and said, "Yeah, but you don't seriously think we're ever going to see gas slip below $4 a gallon again. That's pretty damning evidence right in front of you."
I said I guess not... only for gas to slip to the $2s shortly after and stay there for years. Meanwhile, consumption for vehicles itself seemed to be peaking.[0]
> oil is limited and not renewable, so peak oil is inevitable long term, period
This is the basic, prima facie case for all "peak X" arguments. Seems reasonable. So if there's a fallacy or bias floating around in here, where is it?
I think there are a few missteps. My biggest concern is how we jump from "finite" to "will inevitably be exhausted [on a time horizon that matters]."
There are lots of things that are technically finite but in no practical danger of exhaustion on timescales we should care about.
- There is currently a fixed amount of accessible uranium in the ground. By the time we use it all, the tectonic plates will have shifted such to reveal new deposits, that's the scale we're talking about.
- There's a fixed amount of energy in the moon-Earth orbital system, and tidal power (and to some extent wind power) exhausts some of it every time we use it to generate energy. I'm not worried about the moon crashing into the Earth.
- There are a fixed number of accessible diamonds, but our technology and skill at extracting them keeps outpacing our ability to use them all, so cartels have formed to artificially inflate the price.[1]
- Humanity keeps building new skyscrapers, but there are a fixed number of hectares on which we could build skyscrapers. And yet I'm not worried about South Dakota ever filling up with people and looking anything like Coruscant.
What's missing from the analysis then?
Scale, for one. I was shocked when I first read that we could store a thousand years of all American garbage in a landfill that would be only around 35 miles square, in a country with hundreds of millions of square miles of empty space.[2]
Maybe a bit of calculus as well. To know when a thing will be exhausted, we have to calculate the burn rate, the rate of innovation, and feedback systems like pricing that can alter outcomes. It's not sufficient to just jump to "there's only a fixed amount of X on Earth, therefore, soon no more X." That skips like eight steps in the analysis. Some of these are impossible to precisely estimate, but that's not an excuse for simply omitting any placeholder values from the analysis.
If we look at historical examples of resources that humanity extensively relied on, we find things like animal fats for light, literal horse power for locomotion, wool for clothing. A lot of animal products in that list.
We displaced all those things really rapidly, not because they were exhausted, but because we found something better. Electricity, combustion, cotton. But those aren't one-flip stories. The history of artificial light is a great example, we progressively moved from technology to technology, decreasing the work it takes to artificially light a room by stupendous orders of magnitude from one iteration to the next.[3]
It's reasonable to extrapolate then that we're going to do something similar for oil. But how? Where will these ideas come from? Well, we can already see the seeds planted for that in electrification of vehicles and continuing efficiency gains for renewables. Most of the leaps in efficiencies are black swan events though thta no one saw coming. Other times they're simply dedicated improvements to efficiency through applying existing knowledge, like Borlaug's green revolution in agriculture.[4]
Even though these are unexpected or seem pedestrian at first glance, this class of innovation keeps happening and leading to revolutionary changes. Maybe we'll still use oil for some things, just like we use kerosene and wood fired cooking when camping. It's contribution to humanity is primed to drastically change though, and not because of some apocalyptic moment where we suddenly can't find any more.
> hacks like fracking
Fracking is an interesting test case in the history of oil, not for what it reveals about innovation, but for what it revealed about the abundance of oil. At $4 a gallon, we assumed oil was scarce, that the middle east was running out. At $2 a gallon, well, it gets more complicated. Kleptocratic authoritiarians are indeed struggling to get the same returns they once had. Saudi Arabia has shown it is more than capable of producing at this price. Some analysis suggests Saudi Arabia would be capable of enduring $10 per barrel for extended periods.[5] There is so much easy oil in Saudi Arabia it's pretty unfathomable.
But on the tech more broadly, I worry this is moving the goalposts. The way we avert peak anything is through new technologies. It'd be like saying, "see, we were right to predict peak kerosene--it was only because of the inevitability of peak kerosene society resorted to 'hacks' like the invention of the modern electrical grid!"
I'm pulling a lot here from Jane Brox's history of artificial light, Brilliant, but if you look at other "history of tech" books[7][8][9][10][11] you get the same universal takeaway -- we systemically underestimate the compounding power of human ingenuity, or how massively small innovations will impact the course of things.
[Cont.]