> There’s some possibility we hit peak oil last year, but it’s going to be less about running out of oil and more about the shifting economics of energy production. Less “we’re running out of oil” and more “renewables are so damned cheap”.
Which is good, because then hopefully some oil will be left over to bootstrap advanced civilization if the need arises. Otherwise things might stagnate at pre-industrial levels, or spend a long time lingering in a slave-powered semi-industrial state (where you have human power growing fuel for a small elite's technology, which consequently advances slowly).
I have never understood this meme of "without oil we'll return to pre-industrial society", it seems like a pretty self serving narrative created by the oil and gas industry.
In reality human history is littered with energy crises. At various times and places society has faced risks due to insufficient energy. Before the industrial revolution, deforestation represented a risk in some places, as did over-whaling for oil. Rather than just returning to slave labor to power everything, we found new energy sources and kept developing new technology. In the past this involved coal and eventually oil, but going forward this could easily be renewables or nuclear. Pretending that the lack of oil exploitation means the end of industrial society is a very myopic view of human society and technology production.
> I have never understood this meme of "without oil we'll return to pre-industrial society", it seems like a pretty self serving narrative created by the oil and gas industry.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is fossil fuels may be required for the transition from a pre-industrial society to an industrial society that can do everything with renewable energy. We're towards the tail end of that transition, but it took a hundred+ years of fossil fuel use to get there. If there aren't any fossil fuels left, it may be impossible to make that transition again (say after a nuclear war that destroys the power grid and battery manufacturing/supply chains).
Ah, that's very different from what I thought you were saying.
I think in theory that makes sense, but I doubt that it's practically a concern. I think in practice any situation where you're tapping the last bits of oil in order to re-boot a technical base, then I very much doubt that the planet would remain habitable long enough for that society to boot strap a new technical base and solve the problems created by burning the last of the oil. I think in such a scenario humanity is probably doomed.
> I think in practice any situation where you're tapping the last bits of oil in order to re-boot a technical base, then I very much doubt that the planet would remain habitable long enough for that society to boot strap a new technical base and solve the problems created by burning the last of the oil.
I feel like you're thinking about climate change there and focusing too much on it. IIRC, even a global, full-scale nuclear war wouldn't render the planet uninhabitable. Billions would die, but some people with the skills to survive would make it through. I can think of other, more speculative collapse scenarios.
The current models basically say that if we burnt all of the oil, we’d turn our planet into Venus with runaway warming. I don’t think that’s the path we’re on now, but I think that would be the path we’d land on if we were bootstrapping another society with the oil we left behind at the end of this century.
And that’s presuming there’s enough of it left to bootstrap. We’ve wasted a lot of it to get to the point where solar and nuclear exist, whether we could replicate that with what will be left is unclear to me. There’s certainly not a lot of good coal left, for example. We burnt most of it in the 19th century, and a new industrial revolution would have to make do with the subpar stuff we’ve left behind.
> Within current models of the runaway greenhouse effect, carbon dioxide (especially anthropogenic carbon dioxide) does not seem capable of providing the necessary insulation for Earth to reach the Simpson–Nakajima limit.[7][8]
> Debate remains, however, on whether carbon dioxide can push surface temperatures towards the moist greenhouse limit.[24][25] Climate scientist John Houghton has written that "[there] is no possibility of [Venus's] runaway greenhouse conditions occurring on the Earth".[26] The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has also stated that "a 'runaway greenhouse effect'—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities."[27] However, climatologist James Hansen disagrees. In his Storms of My Grandchildren he says that burning coal and mining oil sands will result in runaway greenhouse on Earth.[28] A re-evaluation in 2013 of the effect of water vapor in the climate models showed that James Hansen's outcome would require ten times the amount of CO2 we could release from burning all the oil, coal, and natural gas in Earth's crust.[24]
Which is good, because then hopefully some oil will be left over to bootstrap advanced civilization if the need arises. Otherwise things might stagnate at pre-industrial levels, or spend a long time lingering in a slave-powered semi-industrial state (where you have human power growing fuel for a small elite's technology, which consequently advances slowly).