The true crisis is still to come

[Jochen Fromm-4]

Did you know that 8 out of 10 from the biggest
companies of the world live from oil or oil-consuming
products? I think the true crisis is still to come, see

http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/

-J.


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[Phil Henshaw-2]

You really have to wonder in a complexity science forum why taking on
endless multiplying complications, as a standard planning concept, would not
be quickly brought into question.   The opening statement in on that CAS
webpage is:

Forget the financial crisis, the true global economic crisis will come in
the next ten years. The end of cheap oil and the beginning of climate change
are the first warning signs. We won’t be able to stop increasing oil prices
in the long term. And we won’t be able to stop climate change and global
warming.

That's only true if the phrase "true global economic crisis" assumes we
don't realize the error in endlessly multiplying the size and complexity of
the system.  Even without any physical resource limits of any kind the
compounding complexity of continual growth makes any system completely
unmanageable.  You get learning demands that exceed the possible range of
learning responses for the parts not changing.   We're supposed to have
learned by seeing the exploding complexity of the financial schemes as the
core problem in the recent collapse.   The central cause of that complexity
was that they were built to maintain financial system growth in the absence
of similar physical system growth.   We should learn from experience.   The
problem of collapse is not with the pins that prick our bubbles but the
pumps that pump them to the point of bursting.

Phil Henshaw  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
> Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 10:25 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
>
> Did you know that 8 out of 10 from the biggest
> companies of the world live from oil or oil-consuming
> products? I think the true crisis is still to come, see
>
> http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/
>
> -J.
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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[glen ep ropella]

Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM:
> http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/

I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a
pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal,
...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels.  I'm still too
ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are [a]biogenic.

But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would
affect "peak oil"?  On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep
sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of oil
we can exploit would rise significantly.  (And much of the peak oil
problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the
oil.)  But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will
eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction
technology.

Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged
regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic?

(I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance
... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate
change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for
now, anyway.)

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com


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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Glen,

Regarding the Thomas Gold book, I have been urged not to take it
seriously by geologists I trust.  I also do not have the expertise to
enable an informed opinion of my own.  They seem to suggest, however,
that Gold purposely ignores (a lot of) evidence that works in favor of
the conventional (post-colonization of land by plants origin) view
rather than his own.  His thesis apparently was given a hearing in the
community for a while some time ago, and when he simply ignored
questions about other evidence rather than answering them, the
community finally got tired of him.  So he did what any of us would
do: publish it in a book.

We have also had a lot of people through the Institute, and I have
seen some up at LANL, to talk about peak oil.  Apart from one
oil-industry spokesman at a LANL meeting, none of them has expressed a
serious reservation about the peak oil extraction rate estimates's
being roughly right.  The issue being that the energetic costs of
extraction (no matter how they come to be priced) become limiting on
the value of getting to oil, considerably before even the currently
estimated reserves are "fully" exhausted.

I have the Gold book, too, and need to read it at some point, because
there may still be correct claims about the pervasiveness of bacterial
and archaeal life well into the crust, which I would care about for
other reasons.

Eric



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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Glen,
>From a whole systems view 'peak oil' is part of 'peak everything'.   'Peak
everything' is also synonymous with 'diminishing returns', or 'natural
complications' or 'limits of development'.  I think with the present
collapse there is now more time to worry about global warming, sort of, and
certainly less money.   Thinking about whether growing as fast as we
possibly can until we run into something to stop us means running into what
will stop us as hard as we possibly can, may be more important.

The phenomenon of natural limits is really about how our economic system as
a whole can substitute nearly anything for nearly anything, and so...
equalizes the resource pressures on everything.  That's a very telling
principle when you learn how to apply it.   That's why the increasing
difficulty of finding new core resources; food, fuel, water, space of every
kind, is happening simultaneously.  

The problem with limits is *never* (well 'almost' never) the quantity.  It's
really the complications and the resulting increases in unit costs, their
declining material ROI's.   You can always find more resources for more
effort, but there is a price level where there is no profit in it.  You can
cross that unexpectedly, say due to unexpected new complications, and
trigger market flight.  

If you look at the commodities curve, for example, you see we first had a
20% per year increase in raw material costs for food and energy, for the
past 6 years, and now have a collapse.   You could ask why the physical
system didn't respond to create supply to lower the price.  There was some
'sticking point' and then the speculators jumped in because the needed
increasing supplies were not materializing.   Maybe the whole system reached
the point where the physical complications reduced the total physical return
on investment too far.  
http://www.synapse9.com/issues/92-08Commodities2-sm.pdf or .jpg

That idea is not proved by the graph, just suggested.  What is provable is
that persistent declining ROI's (like how much water the effort to get water
uses) as we now see for all resources will eventually cross the whole system
profitability thresholds.  Whether people see them coming or can explain it
is not the first question.   You just 'half answer' it at first, asking
whether the kind of effect we should see fits the general picture of what we
are seeing.

Phil Henshaw  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On
> Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella
> Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 2:36 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The true crisis is still to come
>
> Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM:
> > http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/
>
> I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a
> pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal,
> ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels.  I'm still too
> ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are
> [a]biogenic.
>
> But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would
> affect "peak oil"?  On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep
> sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of
> oil
> we can exploit would rise significantly.  (And much of the peak oil
> problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the
> oil.)  But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will
> eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction
> technology.
>
> Does that mean that the peak oil argument is essentially unchanged
> regardless of whether the hydrocarbons are primordial or biogenic?
>
> (I know it's reductionist of me... I'll say a few Hail Marys in penance
> ... but I'd like to separate the peak oil issue from the global climate
> change issue and focus solely on peak oil and the origins of oil... for
> now, anyway.)
>
> --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

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[Russell Standish]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 11:36:19AM -0700, glen e. p. ropella wrote:

> Thus spake Jochen Fromm circa 10/26/2008 07:25 AM:
> > http://blog.cas-group.net/2008/10/the-true-crisis-is-still-to-come/
>
> I'm currently reading "The Deep Hot Biosphere" and Gold presents a
> pretty persuasive argument that the hydrocarbons (oil, methane, coal,
> ...) we burn for energy are not (mostly) fossil fuels.  I'm still too
> ignorant to have my own opinion on whether the hydrocarbons are [a]biogenic.
>
> But I wonder how you guys think abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons would
> affect "peak oil"?  On the one hand, if oil is percolating up from deep
> sources, although still finite, the estimates of the total amount of oil
> we can exploit would rise significantly.  (And much of the peak oil
> problem would be solvable through new technologies for getting at the
> oil.)  But on the other hand, our burn rate, being exponential, will
> eventually outpace production rates, despite advances in extraction
> technology.
>

One of the interesting thoughts I had about Thomas Gold's theory was
that supposedly all of the oxygen in the atmosphere is biogenic. For
every oxygen molecule floating around in the atmosphere, a carbon atom
must be locked up somewhere, presumably mostly as hydrocarbons. The
other main biogenic carbon store are carbonates, but these have 3
oxygen atoms attached to each carbon atom.

So there is a very real question - where did all the carbon go? Being
buried in the mantle seems very likely by subduction, so suddenly
Thomas Gold's theory of hydrocarbons becoming trapped under ancient
shield crusts looks plausible. The only thing he'd be wrong on is the
issue of it being abiotic in origin.

As to using the stuff up for fuel, assuming we ever found it, that
would be the height of irresponsibility. We do not want to go back to
a reducing atmosphere like Venus or Mars. Life as we know it, would
simply cease to be.

--

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