I would argue arithmetic is founded in logic, not the reverse. It's foolish to believe mathematics are anything more natural than an invention predicated on logical notions.
In cases like the article posted on the discussion of energy, it's hard to make cases without numbers. I admit that I hadn't read the article when I initially posted. I should also add that I didn't downvote your comment.
You can make all the navel-gazing syllogism you want with pure logic, but if you want to make conclusions about the real world then in many cases (like the domain under discussion) you're going to need to involve math.
I'll try - to me, it's the difference between qualifying and quantifying. For instance, buying a new car when the one I own is facing serious problems is logical, but it may not make sense if I don't have the ability to pay for a new one. Math would be needed here to fully express that notion.
I don't want to get metaphysical here, but this is starting to meld into something a little too abstract.
An argument doesn't need to make perfect sense in order to make sense. With math you might try to make it perfect, but even mathematical projections can be guesswork. With a certain level of uncertainty, it's not about the math. And when you're looking toward the future, you're mostly using theories. Maybe the theories don't become clear until they've proven themselves, but we can still understand them, because you can have a reasonable amount of uncertainty and still make sense.
Example: "We want to survive. Survival requires sustainability by definition. Therefore, we must have sustainability". True, but rather useless without going into what sustainability means numerically.
So one of my employees comes to me and says: assuming we can get widget X for a price of $y (or less), and do so consistently for time t, we can use some method to manfacture our frobulators, and still meet our price point, but get more long-term profit, because some TCO concerns. This is perfectly logical, but doesn't make sense given that the price of X this week is $y+1.
More complicated: if we know the price or X varies between $y+2 and $y-1 in a random walk, can we find a way to capitalize on the 50% of states that meet the $y or less requirement. My employee does not know the price characteristics for X, so he presents the idea. I know that we cannot capitalize (from doing analysis of the price of X based on doing the arithmetic). So what my employee suggests is completely logical and reasonable, it just makes no sense, given the result of the arithmetic.
A major omission of his energy analysis is the concept of Energy-returned on Energy-invested or EROEI. EROEI simply means how much energy it takes to produce a give unit of energy. Taking this into account provides a much more meaningful analysis than just looking at simple reserve and consumption numbers.
For example, it doesn't matter how many billions of barrels I might have in a field if each barrel takes 2 barrels to extract(except as perhaps a chemical feedstock).
It's absolutely meaningless to take theoretical oil reserves and simply dividing them by currently yearly consumption and concluding that we have hundreds of years to go.
The easy oil has been extracted and all that is left is the hard stuff. Even Saudi Arabia is drilling wells that sit under a mile of water.
McCarthy mentions extracting uranium from seawater for christsake! That is really crazy.
Also, it doesn't matter if all of our energy problems could be solved by building a million nuclear plants if the building of them takes so much capital no one can afford it. Again EROEI for nuclear is negative until the plants actually start producing electric.
And it doesn't matter if we have tons of electric if all of our transportation infrastructure requires oil products. Converting all of that infrastructure is going to take lots of capital and energy.
Check out theoildrum.com for lots of good energy articles.
Plutonium is not cheap. Uranium is not cheap. Redundant safety systems are not cheap. Pressure proof concrete vessels are not cheap. Industrial grade power turbines, also not cheap. The list goes on and on.
A lot of that expense is redundant safety systems, inspections, etc. Which cost is born because of regulation.
Whether regulations like that are a problem or a solution is a source of endless debate depending on your political position. But given recent events in Japan, it is clear that we are headed for more regulation, not less.
A lot of people would hope that. However all available evidence suggests that people will and do cut corners until they get burned. And companies that refuse to do so will find themselves becoming less profitable than their less scrupulous competitors.
The result is public pressure for regulation.
Unfortunately economic theory and practice show that once an industry has come under regulation it becomes their priority to get control of that regulation. This process is called "regulatory capture" and inevitably succeeds. Once it has succeeded, the protections erode and the regulatory scheme is used to create barriers to entry for competitors. See the recent financial crisis for an example of this.
Depending on your politics you are likely to think that one of these failure modes is a bigger deal than the other.
The choice is often between a shaky regulatory structure and a melee between profit and common good. I usually prefer to take a chance on regulation unless someone comes up with a better option.
Sometimes the third option of going to an industry and asking them to do something does work, but not always. I'd always try it first, but it's not always going to work, and the consequences of inaction can be pretty bad.
Actually, they are, given the amount of energy that they contain.
> Redundant safety systems are not cheap. Pressure proof concrete vessels are not cheap. Industrial grade power turbines, also not cheap. The list goes on and on.
This line of "thinking" tells us to buy our dump trunks from Tonka, because Tonka's trucks are far less expensive than Caterpillars. (BTW - those items are a small fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. Add in the rest of what it takes to make power, safely control the plant, AND verify that you're doing so, and you're still at a small fraction of the cost of a plant.)
One can't make sensible decisions by looking at costs xor benefits in isolation.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, as your guess was exactly right. The regulatory system for nuclear power (in the US, anyway) is incredibly screwed up, in ways too numerous to list. Just the delays from the bottlenecked building approval process can cause plant construction to run up billions of dollars in loan interest while they're waiting for the red tape to clear.
China is currently building CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same capacity. These are not meltdown-prone clunkers; they are upgraded versions of French designs with a good safety record. They're also starting a buildup of Westinghouse AP1000 plants, built to the usual western standards of safety and redundancy, and they're doing it a lot cheaper than the US and Europe. We see similar things in South Korea, which gets a large portion of its energy from nuclear plants, and is now beginning to export them.
Considering how much safer nuclear power is than coal, paranoid regulations are actually making us quite a bit less safe by crippling our ability to build nuclear plants.
>And it doesn't matter if we have tons of electric if all of our transportation infrastructure requires oil products. Converting all of that infrastructure is going to take lots of capital and energy.
I don't think biofuel represents a viable long-term solution, but butanol is practically ideal when it comes to the search for a short-term transition fuel. It runs in ordinary modern engines without modification, and vehicles from the '90s have been successfully run on 100% butanol without issue.
We use petroleum to fuel our cars not because it's a good source of energy, but because it's a good means to store energy (it has high specific energy, by volume and by mass), which is very important for cars. It will still be important even when producing a gallon of petroleum takes more energy than the said gallon contains.
EROEI of less than 1 doesn't mean that oil extraction is unfeasible, not at all. For example, every accumulator currently produced has EROEI of 0 (it has 0 energy before charging and it takes non-zero energy to produce it), and each charging of it has EROEI of less than 1. And it's still economically feasible.
I think you misunderstand the concept of EROEI. Oil extraction requires large energy inputs. This energy is currently supplied entirely by fossil fuels, and is probably not substitutable in the near future.
Given this constraint, aggregate EROEI even approaching 1 means insufficient oil to fuel exploration/extraction activities and power infrastructure, and that's just fundamental economics. Add to that the fact that large-scale integrated projects, such as oil field development, require enormous capital and human resources, which in turn rely on economic and political stability, which in turn rely on stable and plentiful energy inputs... I'm sure you can see the problem here.
Accumulators (e.g. batteries) are not primary energy sources like fossil fuels are; EROEI does not apply to them like it does to energy production.
> This energy is currently supplied entirely by fossil fuels, and is probably not substitutable in the near future
[citation needed], and [citation needed]. There are electric drilling rigs out there, pumping the oil out is often performed by electric pumps, and pumping water / gas in doesn't, AFAICS, require specifically fossil fuel power. I don't see anything than couldn't be done with electricity, coal, natural gas or whatever else.
So where do you think an oil platform gets its electric power? Solar panels? Or do you think they string a power line from the shore?
Where do you think Saudi Arabia gets the gigawatts needed to run its oil fields? How much of their electricity comes from oil and nat gas? I'll give you a hint; it rhymes with "all of it".
How do you think Suncor extracts oil from oil sands? Lots of squeezing?
Where do you think Pemex gets the electricity for the giant pumps that pressurize their gulf fields (and the nitrogen that they pump)?
Observe that natural gas is subject to the same economics as oil. Where the two are substitutable, low project EROEI can be flirted with. However, also observe that extraction of nat gas is largely coincident with that of oil, both geographically and industrially. They usually come from the same fields, often the same wells.
>"I don't see anything than couldn't be done with electricity, coal, natural gas or whatever else."
There is a difference between possibility and feasibility. Ask Transocean when they'll start selling coal-powered semi-subs.
Your Saudi example is especially unconvincing. Of course they get their electricity from oil now; why wouldn't they, when oil is so cheap and abundant there? Duh. Oil costs them, what, $10 to extract a barrel now? They would be fools to use anything more expensive to produce electricity. That doesn't mean they won't get their electricity elsewhere when it's economically unfeasible to use oil for that.
More or less the same applies to other examples, actually.
> Ask Transocean when they'll start selling coal-powered semi-subs
Whoa, where did that come from? Shelf drilling is a capital expense, it's not recurring costs. Whatever logic is there in EROEI argument, it doesn't apply here. Ask Transocean what share of their operating costs is fuel, and if they give a damn about fuel costs rising ten-fold.
>"That doesn't mean they won't get their electricity elsewhere when it's economically infeasible to use oil for that."
Again, possibility vs. feasibility. You talk about capital costs... what do you imagine it will cost to convert a significant share of Saudi Arabia's generating capacity to nuclear, for example. How likely is that to happen politically? And if the day comes that oil is so expensive that an Arab nation is actually considering going nuclear, how financially feasible will a nuclear program be? Remember, big construction projects drink a lot of diesel.
>"Shelf drilling is a capital expense, it's not recurring costs."
It's more accurate to say that platform drilling incurs massive up-front capital investment, as well as intense ongoing maintenance. Remember, we're not just talking about running the platform; we're talking about operating pipelines, refineries, etc. The large capital cost is part of the problem -- see my earlier comment about large integrated projects. But really, for EROEI purposes it doesn't matter when the money is spent; over its lifetime, an oil extraction project will consume a given amount of energy. That energy input comes overwhelmingly from oil and nat gas, and will continue to do so until the day we start seeing solar/nuclear/coal-powered rigs appear.
I'm disappointed that you dismiss uranium extraction from seawater as absurd without any argument. There's a recently-tested process which uses a treated polyethylene mesh to absorb uranium from seawater at a cost that would be more expensive than current uranium costs, but still well within the reasonable price range, and its energy inputs are small compared to the amount of energy you can get out of uranium, as it is an exceptionally energy-dense material.
(By the way, regarding the capital costs of building nuclear plants, it's possible to build current-generation nuclear plants in bulk for capital costs comparable to those of coal plants, and there are designs for fourth-generation plants that would have significantly lower capital costs. The issue here is not insurmountable.)
His underlying assumption is that if we raise everyone's standard of living, population will stabilize permanently. It is true that raising people's standard of living drops population growth - typically to below the replacement level. But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution.
> But anyone who thinks that this effect will last for billions, millions, or even thousands of years has failed to understand evolution.
Oh really? Evolution selects for survival, period. (Actually, survival selects for certain kinds of evolution.) Where is it written that survival implies over-population.
No. Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. This is a local optimization that is not the same as long-term survival. In fact there are lots of examples of species going down evolutionary dead ends where eventually they get wiped out.
Thanks to the miracle of exponential growth, a successful trait that is possessed by a small fraction of the population will spread like a cancer until it dominates the population.
In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. And it will be successful in a surprisingly short time. To take a simple model, suppose that we have a recessive allele that is 1% of the gene pool. (So 1.99% of the population carries the recessive, but only 0.01% of the population expresses it.) Suppose that people without it just replace themselves, while people with it expressed have twice as many kids. At first the trait will be utterly invisible. But in under 100 generations it will completely dominate the population. That is only a few thousand years.
> Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants.
Nope.
Survival selects for genes that have enough descendants. One way to have "enough" is "lots", but it doesn't necessarily work and isn't necessary.
> In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful.
Nope - lots of kids is neither necessary nor sufficient. The key metric is "do your kids have kids, rinse and repeat." Too many kids can break that, as can too few.
All else being equal, in an environment like our own where survival is easy, generally the more kids the merrier.
Modern economics and birth control have created pressures against reproducing that we have never faced in our evolutionary history. Our species has not yet evolved a response to it. Once we have evolved a response to it, I would predict exponential growth rate until we exhaust available resources.
This may not happen in 10 generations or 20. But in 1000 generations, our species will have adapted and reached a crisis.
The only way I see of "evolving a response to it" is selecting for baby-crazed women who are basically addicted to the hormonal changes of childbirth and rearing. Men would already be happy to impregnate women as much as possible, if they didn't have to stick around or pay child support.
And you think that selection process is not going on?
Anyways there are other possible responses. There is a strong correlation between being religious and having lots of kids. Therefore genes that incline one towards being religious are positively correlated with kids.
Another is a trait of failing to worry about future consequences. (Now you'll really be thinking about Idiocracy.)
Complex traits like these are part nurture and part nature. But to the extent that they are nature, there is evolutionary pressure for them to spread.
Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants.
Actually, it selects for different things in different environments.
r-strategists, that leave as much offspring as possible starting as early in life as possible survive well in unstable environments. Heaps of offspring is being produce, but only a small percentage survive to reproduce.
In stable, predictable environments, however, K-strategists thrive. They leave less offspring, but care for them long enough and good enough so that most of the offspring survive. Think species like humans, whales, elephants etc.
No, evolution always selects for the same goal. There are different strategies for attaining that goal, and in different environments those strategies work out differently. But the goal is always the same - do you many generations later have lots of descendants with the gene?
For a good laugh? Certainly. On the other hand, such delusion coming from this guy (probably a genius otherwise) is painful to see. He still completely lives in the illusion that energy is free and will remain so.
Actually, the claim that it will is the one not currently supported by evidence. The UN currently estimates the peak of world population will be 9.22 billion in 2075, followed by a general decline, assuming current trends [1]. Now, I'd like to think we continue to extend lifespan, but birth rates are dropping. Against all (first-order) biology, when humans become wealthier, they have fewer children, and this result is very robust now, not just the aberration of one particular culture.
[1]: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor... , second paragraph of the executive summary. Oh, and I'm just quoting the 9.22; I think that's an absurd number of significant digits but one should quote sources as directly as possible.
to last billions of years. You yourself think that projecting the tens of millions place 64 years in the future is an absurd number of significant digits. How many significant digits do you think is appropriate in a time frame 100M years longer? Even the UN itself only purports to project population trends until 2300, which is far short of a billion years, as hubristic as it is.
Also, the UN projections have some unjustified assumptions. From page 7, under section C:
>Over the long run,
total fertility is projected to settle at 1.85 children
per woman in each country—in between the current rate for Northern America (which is just below replacement level) and the rate for Europe (which is currently well below). This figure is somewhat arbitrary
In the longer run they expect the growth rate of all countries to stabilize at 0:
>The eventually similar growth between more
developed and less developed regions is produced
by similar long-range assumptions, especially the
assumptions that fertility will fall in all countries
below replacement (in the medium scenario) and
rebound to replacement after a period largely
similar across countries of a century or so. Starting their fertility declines later, less developed
regions will reach low fertility levels after more
developed regions but also stay at these levels
until a later date.
Of course population stabilizes at a rate not too much higher than the present rate if you assume fertility rates converge around the replacement level. Garbage in, garbage out.
This is a bunch of standard issue cornucopian gee-whizery. I can't help but notice that nowhere in this article does he cite so much as one, single, solitary number or statistic to back up any of his claims.
Here is essentially how this entire page read, for me:
"Q: Will we ever run out of resources?"
"A: No, of course not, that's silly!"
My personal favorite: If global warming is a problem, why, then, we can just reverse it!
> Here is essentially how this entire page read, for me: "Q: Will we ever run out of resources?" "A: No, of course not, that's silly!"
Well, then you need to read better. For instance, he estimates that nuclear and solar energy will last us 5 billion years. If he's wrong by a factor of 1000 that's still 5 million years which is not too bad.
The estimates of 5 billion (or 5 million) years ignores the potential side effects of widespread distribution of the current generation of fissionable fuels and the level of political will required to develop an infrastructure for coping with these potentials.
In other words, if one is inclined to ignore issues of this magnitude, why bother mentioning nuclear at all when no less questionable assumptions about relevant factors would allow a similar projection based on solar energy alone?
Well, we also have 5 million/billion years to deal with those problems. Our descendents, if they are still using nuclear power, will be no dumber and less capable than we are of solving problems, and probably a great deal more so. If nothing else, "blast it into space" is likely to be feasible within our lifetimes. (And not just "leave it in orbit", but drop it somewhere where it won't be a problem anymore. Space is full of such places; space arguably is nothing but such places. Space is big.)
Besides, what massive problems are you worried about? On that timescale, radioactive waste just dissipates. It doesn't build up over millions of years. If it could build up over that time scale, it wouldn't be "radioactive" in the first place.
One of the potential issues which accompanies nuclear power is the "what descendents?" issue. Sterility and infertility and death are known side effects of exposure to common fissionable materials and their byproducts. One need not even consider the potential consequences of deliberate human activities designed to harm people or fulfill religious prophesy.
In other words, it's not so much the last 4.99999 billion years that's a concern as the 1000 years which must precede them.
Er, that's why you don't go around exposing people to high-level radioactive waste. You stick it in a cooling pool to let the really nasty isotopes decay, then store it with radiation shielding. If you want to get really fancy, and have enough excess neutrons, you can even get rid of worst of the waste by turning it into something else.
On the list of existential threats, mass radiation poisoning really doesn't rate very high in likelihood.
PU-239 has a half life of 24k years. Or to put it in perspective, if the Neanderthals had been using it, we would be running the risk of stumbling over cooling pools where significant quantities of nasty isotopes were still decaying - assuming anyone could build a cooling pool with a 24,000 year service life.
The half lives of U235 and U233 are significantly longer (approx. an order of magnitude).
I'm sorry, but that's so stupid I don't even know where to start. Radiation isn't a magical malevolent force. Your fears are so disconnected from the real world, you might as well be worried about aliens eating you for breakfast.
Of course radiation isn't magical - however the lack of political will is real. Among nations generating high level nuclear waste, there is an almost complete lack of progress toward long term storage - the politics around Yucca Mountain are typical, not the exception. As for the potential use of high-level nuclear waste for purposes other than the benevolent generation of energy, it is hardly necessary to point to the current level of security which nuclear nations strive to maintain around facilities storing such material.
Your entire argument rests upon the premise that the people of the future (aka "our descendents") will discover and implement some technofix - my fear is that they will also have to discover and implement a different political system to do so. I will admit that, perhaps, Heinlein's vision of a technocratic government upon whose creation your argument depends is logically possible, no matter how unlikely it appears given the current state of the world.
Technofix? It's based on physics. On long time scales, radioactive waste doesn't build up. It decays. It's what it does. It is literally impossible to have a hundred-thousand-year-old pile of nuclear waste.
We are also stipulating that they are still using nuclear power if we are talking about continuing to generate waste for that long. The window where they manage to use nuclear power for five million years, along with maintaining all of the associated infrastructure for mining, extracting, purifying, etc, and all the associated economic activity necessary to support any society that has that ability, but are somehow too stupid to solve the problem after many centuries, is an awfully narrow one.
You're the one expecting civilization to fly through a bizarrely small window, not me.
63 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadGeez all the downvotes for a statement that isn't even controversial?
You can make all the navel-gazing syllogism you want with pure logic, but if you want to make conclusions about the real world then in many cases (like the domain under discussion) you're going to need to involve math.
I'm not being a jerk, but could you please give me an example of something logical that doesn't make sense?
An argument doesn't need to make perfect sense in order to make sense. With math you might try to make it perfect, but even mathematical projections can be guesswork. With a certain level of uncertainty, it's not about the math. And when you're looking toward the future, you're mostly using theories. Maybe the theories don't become clear until they've proven themselves, but we can still understand them, because you can have a reasonable amount of uncertainty and still make sense.
Some wiggles are noses.
Therefore, some wiggles are frozzle.
More complicated: if we know the price or X varies between $y+2 and $y-1 in a random walk, can we find a way to capitalize on the 50% of states that meet the $y or less requirement. My employee does not know the price characteristics for X, so he presents the idea. I know that we cannot capitalize (from doing analysis of the price of X based on doing the arithmetic). So what my employee suggests is completely logical and reasonable, it just makes no sense, given the result of the arithmetic.
For example, it doesn't matter how many billions of barrels I might have in a field if each barrel takes 2 barrels to extract(except as perhaps a chemical feedstock).
It's absolutely meaningless to take theoretical oil reserves and simply dividing them by currently yearly consumption and concluding that we have hundreds of years to go.
The easy oil has been extracted and all that is left is the hard stuff. Even Saudi Arabia is drilling wells that sit under a mile of water.
McCarthy mentions extracting uranium from seawater for christsake! That is really crazy.
Also, it doesn't matter if all of our energy problems could be solved by building a million nuclear plants if the building of them takes so much capital no one can afford it. Again EROEI for nuclear is negative until the plants actually start producing electric.
And it doesn't matter if we have tons of electric if all of our transportation infrastructure requires oil products. Converting all of that infrastructure is going to take lots of capital and energy.
Check out theoildrum.com for lots of good energy articles.
Plutonium is not cheap. Uranium is not cheap. Redundant safety systems are not cheap. Pressure proof concrete vessels are not cheap. Industrial grade power turbines, also not cheap. The list goes on and on.
Whether regulations like that are a problem or a solution is a source of endless debate depending on your political position. But given recent events in Japan, it is clear that we are headed for more regulation, not less.
The result is public pressure for regulation.
Unfortunately economic theory and practice show that once an industry has come under regulation it becomes their priority to get control of that regulation. This process is called "regulatory capture" and inevitably succeeds. Once it has succeeded, the protections erode and the regulatory scheme is used to create barriers to entry for competitors. See the recent financial crisis for an example of this.
Depending on your politics you are likely to think that one of these failure modes is a bigger deal than the other.
Sometimes the third option of going to an industry and asking them to do something does work, but not always. I'd always try it first, but it's not always going to work, and the consequences of inaction can be pretty bad.
Actually, they are, given the amount of energy that they contain.
> Redundant safety systems are not cheap. Pressure proof concrete vessels are not cheap. Industrial grade power turbines, also not cheap. The list goes on and on.
This line of "thinking" tells us to buy our dump trunks from Tonka, because Tonka's trucks are far less expensive than Caterpillars. (BTW - those items are a small fraction of the cost of a nuclear power plant. Add in the rest of what it takes to make power, safely control the plant, AND verify that you're doing so, and you're still at a small fraction of the cost of a plant.)
One can't make sensible decisions by looking at costs xor benefits in isolation.
China is currently building CPR1000 plants cheaper than coal plants of the same capacity. These are not meltdown-prone clunkers; they are upgraded versions of French designs with a good safety record. They're also starting a buildup of Westinghouse AP1000 plants, built to the usual western standards of safety and redundancy, and they're doing it a lot cheaper than the US and Europe. We see similar things in South Korea, which gets a large portion of its energy from nuclear plants, and is now beginning to export them.
Considering how much safer nuclear power is than coal, paranoid regulations are actually making us quite a bit less safe by crippling our ability to build nuclear plants.
I don't think biofuel represents a viable long-term solution, but butanol is practically ideal when it comes to the search for a short-term transition fuel. It runs in ordinary modern engines without modification, and vehicles from the '90s have been successfully run on 100% butanol without issue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butanol_fuel http://nabc.cals.cornell.edu/pubs/nabc_19/NABC19_5Plenary2_R...
For the long-term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Variations_...
EROEI of less than 1 doesn't mean that oil extraction is unfeasible, not at all. For example, every accumulator currently produced has EROEI of 0 (it has 0 energy before charging and it takes non-zero energy to produce it), and each charging of it has EROEI of less than 1. And it's still economically feasible.
Given this constraint, aggregate EROEI even approaching 1 means insufficient oil to fuel exploration/extraction activities and power infrastructure, and that's just fundamental economics. Add to that the fact that large-scale integrated projects, such as oil field development, require enormous capital and human resources, which in turn rely on economic and political stability, which in turn rely on stable and plentiful energy inputs... I'm sure you can see the problem here.
Accumulators (e.g. batteries) are not primary energy sources like fossil fuels are; EROEI does not apply to them like it does to energy production.
[citation needed], and [citation needed]. There are electric drilling rigs out there, pumping the oil out is often performed by electric pumps, and pumping water / gas in doesn't, AFAICS, require specifically fossil fuel power. I don't see anything than couldn't be done with electricity, coal, natural gas or whatever else.
Where do you think Saudi Arabia gets the gigawatts needed to run its oil fields? How much of their electricity comes from oil and nat gas? I'll give you a hint; it rhymes with "all of it".
How do you think Suncor extracts oil from oil sands? Lots of squeezing?
Where do you think Pemex gets the electricity for the giant pumps that pressurize their gulf fields (and the nitrogen that they pump)?
Observe that natural gas is subject to the same economics as oil. Where the two are substitutable, low project EROEI can be flirted with. However, also observe that extraction of nat gas is largely coincident with that of oil, both geographically and industrially. They usually come from the same fields, often the same wells.
>"I don't see anything than couldn't be done with electricity, coal, natural gas or whatever else."
There is a difference between possibility and feasibility. Ask Transocean when they'll start selling coal-powered semi-subs.
More or less the same applies to other examples, actually.
> Ask Transocean when they'll start selling coal-powered semi-subs
Whoa, where did that come from? Shelf drilling is a capital expense, it's not recurring costs. Whatever logic is there in EROEI argument, it doesn't apply here. Ask Transocean what share of their operating costs is fuel, and if they give a damn about fuel costs rising ten-fold.
Again, possibility vs. feasibility. You talk about capital costs... what do you imagine it will cost to convert a significant share of Saudi Arabia's generating capacity to nuclear, for example. How likely is that to happen politically? And if the day comes that oil is so expensive that an Arab nation is actually considering going nuclear, how financially feasible will a nuclear program be? Remember, big construction projects drink a lot of diesel.
>"Shelf drilling is a capital expense, it's not recurring costs."
It's more accurate to say that platform drilling incurs massive up-front capital investment, as well as intense ongoing maintenance. Remember, we're not just talking about running the platform; we're talking about operating pipelines, refineries, etc. The large capital cost is part of the problem -- see my earlier comment about large integrated projects. But really, for EROEI purposes it doesn't matter when the money is spent; over its lifetime, an oil extraction project will consume a given amount of energy. That energy input comes overwhelmingly from oil and nat gas, and will continue to do so until the day we start seeing solar/nuclear/coal-powered rigs appear.
(By the way, regarding the capital costs of building nuclear plants, it's possible to build current-generation nuclear plants in bulk for capital costs comparable to those of coal plants, and there are designs for fourth-generation plants that would have significantly lower capital costs. The issue here is not insurmountable.)
Oh really? Evolution selects for survival, period. (Actually, survival selects for certain kinds of evolution.) Where is it written that survival implies over-population.
No. Evolution selects for genes that manage to leave lots of descendants. This is a local optimization that is not the same as long-term survival. In fact there are lots of examples of species going down evolutionary dead ends where eventually they get wiped out.
Thanks to the miracle of exponential growth, a successful trait that is possessed by a small fraction of the population will spread like a cancer until it dominates the population.
In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful. And it will be successful in a surprisingly short time. To take a simple model, suppose that we have a recessive allele that is 1% of the gene pool. (So 1.99% of the population carries the recessive, but only 0.01% of the population expresses it.) Suppose that people without it just replace themselves, while people with it expressed have twice as many kids. At first the trait will be utterly invisible. But in under 100 generations it will completely dominate the population. That is only a few thousand years.
Nope.
Survival selects for genes that have enough descendants. One way to have "enough" is "lots", but it doesn't necessarily work and isn't necessary.
> In the case of humans, any trait that leads to lots of kids despite economic pressures to have few of them is going to be evolutionarily successful.
Nope - lots of kids is neither necessary nor sufficient. The key metric is "do your kids have kids, rinse and repeat." Too many kids can break that, as can too few.
Modern economics and birth control have created pressures against reproducing that we have never faced in our evolutionary history. Our species has not yet evolved a response to it. Once we have evolved a response to it, I would predict exponential growth rate until we exhaust available resources.
This may not happen in 10 generations or 20. But in 1000 generations, our species will have adapted and reached a crisis.
It's hard not to think of Idiocracy.
Anyways there are other possible responses. There is a strong correlation between being religious and having lots of kids. Therefore genes that incline one towards being religious are positively correlated with kids.
Another is a trait of failing to worry about future consequences. (Now you'll really be thinking about Idiocracy.)
Complex traits like these are part nurture and part nature. But to the extent that they are nature, there is evolutionary pressure for them to spread.
Actually, it selects for different things in different environments.
r-strategists, that leave as much offspring as possible starting as early in life as possible survive well in unstable environments. Heaps of offspring is being produce, but only a small percentage survive to reproduce.
In stable, predictable environments, however, K-strategists thrive. They leave less offspring, but care for them long enough and good enough so that most of the offspring survive. Think species like humans, whales, elephants etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
That's one doubling away from the current population. There's no particular reason to believe population will never exceed 15 billion.
[1]: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/Wor... , second paragraph of the executive summary. Oh, and I'm just quoting the 9.22; I think that's an absurd number of significant digits but one should quote sources as directly as possible.
Also, the UN projections have some unjustified assumptions. From page 7, under section C:
>Over the long run, total fertility is projected to settle at 1.85 children per woman in each country—in between the current rate for Northern America (which is just below replacement level) and the rate for Europe (which is currently well below). This figure is somewhat arbitrary
In the longer run they expect the growth rate of all countries to stabilize at 0:
>The eventually similar growth between more developed and less developed regions is produced by similar long-range assumptions, especially the assumptions that fertility will fall in all countries below replacement (in the medium scenario) and rebound to replacement after a period largely similar across countries of a century or so. Starting their fertility declines later, less developed regions will reach low fertility levels after more developed regions but also stay at these levels until a later date.
Of course population stabilizes at a rate not too much higher than the present rate if you assume fertility rates converge around the replacement level. Garbage in, garbage out.
Here is essentially how this entire page read, for me:
"Q: Will we ever run out of resources?" "A: No, of course not, that's silly!"
My personal favorite: If global warming is a problem, why, then, we can just reverse it!
Of course! Why didn't we think of that before?!?
Well, then you need to read better. For instance, he estimates that nuclear and solar energy will last us 5 billion years. If he's wrong by a factor of 1000 that's still 5 million years which is not too bad.
And there's a whole page of references:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/references.html
PS: I expect that some people will assume I'm in the same "camp" of the author, but I'm just pointing out that the criticism above is unfair.
In other words, if one is inclined to ignore issues of this magnitude, why bother mentioning nuclear at all when no less questionable assumptions about relevant factors would allow a similar projection based on solar energy alone?
Besides, what massive problems are you worried about? On that timescale, radioactive waste just dissipates. It doesn't build up over millions of years. If it could build up over that time scale, it wouldn't be "radioactive" in the first place.
One of the potential issues which accompanies nuclear power is the "what descendents?" issue. Sterility and infertility and death are known side effects of exposure to common fissionable materials and their byproducts. One need not even consider the potential consequences of deliberate human activities designed to harm people or fulfill religious prophesy.
In other words, it's not so much the last 4.99999 billion years that's a concern as the 1000 years which must precede them.
On the list of existential threats, mass radiation poisoning really doesn't rate very high in likelihood.
The half lives of U235 and U233 are significantly longer (approx. an order of magnitude).
The isotopes you get rid of in cooling pools are the highly radioactive ones with short half-lives.
Your entire argument rests upon the premise that the people of the future (aka "our descendents") will discover and implement some technofix - my fear is that they will also have to discover and implement a different political system to do so. I will admit that, perhaps, Heinlein's vision of a technocratic government upon whose creation your argument depends is logically possible, no matter how unlikely it appears given the current state of the world.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_radioactive_waste_ma...]
We are also stipulating that they are still using nuclear power if we are talking about continuing to generate waste for that long. The window where they manage to use nuclear power for five million years, along with maintaining all of the associated infrastructure for mining, extracting, purifying, etc, and all the associated economic activity necessary to support any society that has that ability, but are somehow too stupid to solve the problem after many centuries, is an awfully narrow one.
You're the one expecting civilization to fly through a bizarrely small window, not me.