It is Labor Day here in the US, and the inimitable Mark Steyn, as usual, hits the nail on the head in a delightful column extolling the virtues of capitalism and the purblind idiocy of the hard left:
The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers’ solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.
The new received wisdom — forcefully articulated by, among others, Maude Barlow’s Council of Canadians at the laugh-a-minute 2002 Johannesburg “Earth Summit” — is that the masses themselves are the problem. To the irritation of their self-appointed spokespersons, the oppressed masses refuse to stay oppressed. If they were still down in the basement chained to the great turbines, all would be well. But, instead, they insist on moving out of their tenements, getting homes with non-communal bathrooms, giving up the trolley car, putting a deposit down on a Honda Civic and driving to the mall. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about with that kind of high-end consumerist lifestyle, things were fine: That was “sustainable” prosperity.
There’s no such thing as “sustainable” development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped ’em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won’t notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We’re not animals, and it’s a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth’s most valuable resource is us.
The whole article is a wonderfully wicked skewering of modern-day tribunes of the oppressed. I will confirm from personal experience Mark’s observation that speaking with a trade unionist is a disorienting experience. Bare, unvarnished Marxism/Leninism is still on display, with much talk about oppression of workers and the evils of capitalism. Mind you, the average union worker is more likely to be oppressed by the credit card debt he ran up buying a new boat and widescreen TV than by his boss, but nevermind…
Mind you, the average union worker is more likely to be oppressed by the credit card debt he ran up buying a new boat and widescreen TV than by his boss, but nevermind.
Oh, baby, ain’t that the truth. The UAW skilled trade guys I work with are gonna have to have their supervisors come over and wake them up so they can cast off their chains of capitalist oppression in the Uprising of the Masses.
Mark Steyn – Just another natural resource of the west. He’s fab.
Once again Mark Steyn proves what an imbecile he is.
When the oil runs out, we won’t notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time.
40-50 years is the best current estimate before oil, to all intents and purposes, runs out. What exactly are we going to do about this?
Eamon
Steyn an imbecile? I think not. People will:
1. Get serious about working on fusion
2. Stop using inefficient ICEs and start using fuelcells, fuelled with hydrogen produced by cracking water using nuclear power
It really is by no means an insoluble problem.
Metaphorical time bombs don’t explode. As oil gets scarce, it will get more expensive, and other forms of fuel will become economically viable. Hydrogen fuel cells, bio-fuel, solar power, even nuclear power. I read about one plan to pave roads with a material that can gather solar energy.
More will be invested in research into alternatives when it becomes necessary.
You’ve got to love blind faith.
Eamon
Yep, Eamon, despite Paul Ehrlich’s losing bet with Julian Simon, for some reason people still have blind faith in the world running out of commodities. You would think that the Limits to Growth people would learn.
The Greeks knew that entropy would get us in the end. They portrayed that view in the Prometheus myth where, you will recall, the gods chained P. to a cliff for giving mankind fire. Birds ate P’s liver every day and every night it regenerated thanks, one supposes, to some miracle technology.
John Thacker
Of course there are limits to growth. But only if you differentiate, as you should, between growth and development, the one being quantitative and the other qualitative.
Development can continue by all means, but without growth.
Eamon
Theodopoulos
Well said. You can’t shove the market in the face of entropy and expect it to work it’s magic.
Eamon
What on earth (or near earth orbit) are you taking about? The ability to growth is, within the context of the probably evolutionary lifetime of our species, indeed unlimited. In the real world substitution is always possible. Limits to growth are just temporary phases until the next substitute can be developed. Give we are, as a species, unlikely to be around long enough to have to worry about the heat death of the universe, saying ‘entropy means unlimited growth is impossible’ whist technically true, is also as a practicle matter a bit nonsensical.
Most workers don’t belong to a union. Union membership has plummetted thanks to successful unionbusting.
Bread and circuses. Worked for the Romans, works for our plebes.
Working class heroes? You’re all fucking peasants as far as I can see. (So says that [millionaire] commie marxist Lennon)
But we’ve got our broadband and cable TV!
40-50 years has been the estimate since the eventies, although it’s fluctuated far lower. The reasons being (1) it takes no account of technological improvements in oil drillng (2) it takes no account of the operation of the price mechanism. Oil shale is plentiful, it’s just too expensive to bother with. If the supply of petroleum goes down, the price will rise, and oil shale bcomes profitable, as does biodiesel. And so forth.
Oh and BTW, there is no limit to growth. Point upward. What you are pointing at is a VERY large amount of real estate, resources, and freebie energy just waiting to be used.
I can never quite figure out what it is we proles would be expected to accomplish if we didn’t have our broadband and our cable TV. Like, if I weren’t sitting here watching the Star Trek marathon on Spike and surfing the internet, I’d be…what? Writing the Great American Novel? Discovering the cure to Parkinson’s Disease in my garage? Carving colorful native animals out of local hand-quarried styrofoam? Taking up billhooks and pitchforks and marching on City Hall?
What exactly do you think the bread and circuses are distracting us from?
Eamon,
I clearly recall very earnest predictions in the 1970’s that the oil supply would run out in ‘twenty to thirty years’ i.e. about now.
S. Weasel – Hand-quarried styrofoam! Funny!
David – Yes, I remember those predictions as well. During the illustrious administration of that great thinker Jimmy Carter, weren’t they? I was living in the US at the time and I seem to remember him giving out little tips that you shouldn’t stand in front of your refrigerator with the door open deciding what to snack on because it wasted precious energy. Hey! Maybe that’s why we’ve got some gas left over today! We all listened to Jimmuh and stopped lollygaggin’ in front of the open fridge trying to decide if there was enough jalapeno Cheese Whizz to make a plate of nachos.
The problem with Marx is that he doesn’t really overcome the problem of ruthless laissez faire capitalists: both treat *people* as *units of production.* A person knows when he or she is being treated as a unit.
I much prefer Groucho to Karl.
Speaking of bread and circuses, a friend told me that she is chained by her hubby’s union to facepainting at the union Labor Day fest. (The town kept the pool open and maintained past season closing for the fest, at local taxpayer expense.) She was told to paint faces if she wants her hubby to keep his job. She was also told what political candidate signs to display in her yard, and it’s checked daily by another union wife whose mandated duty is to drive around and check the signs. The signchecker knocked on the door one day and told her to wipe the grass cuttings off the sign (that got there from lawnmowing). Apparently, hubby trading his lifespan and health to be a coal miner isn’t enough of a commitment. He must be union, she must paint faces, they must display Demoprole candidate yard signs and vote Demoprole.
Disclosure: I am a registered Demoprole because my area is heavily Demoprole and our state has closed primaries. I am a union rep too, but our union doesn’t micromanage our Labor Day activities, yard signs, and voting. Our college system faculty and staff are just trying to defend ourselves against a hostile central administration turning us into migrant higher ed field workers.
Verity,
“I was living in the US at the time and I seem to remember him giving out little tips that you shouldn’t stand in front of your refrigerator with the door open deciding what to snack on because it wasted precious energy.”
Priceless! All manifestations of the same ‘zero-sum’ mentality of course.
David
You might want to check that. Most predictions in the seventies claimed that oil production would peak and then go into decline in the first years of the 21st century. That is now coming to pass.
Perry
In the real world substitution is always possible.
The correct phrase is “theoretically possible”. Big difference.
Julian
Oil shale is plentiful, it’s just too expensive to bother with.
Not true. It has proved impossible to extract usable oil from shale so far. Sand oil is feasible but it won’t produce any significant amount of oil.
Elizabeth – I hope she painted hammers and sickles on those dear little faces.
Eamon,
Well, if you have a source reference, I’d be delighted to read it. I can only say that I clearly remember all the dire prognostications (widely believed as well) that we would ‘run out of oil’ by end of the 20th Century. Not happening.
Is oil production in decline? I don’t believe it is. I believe that the Iraqis are still sitting on several hundred years worth of supply and there are mind-bogglingly large but as yet untapped fields in Central Asia, Russia and Alaska among other places.
How many more fields have yet to be discovered?
Mr. de Havilland gives the best defense of the “fuck it, burn it” thesis I have read recently.
What my Greek friends had in mind was “hubris” of course…that deadly attitude that we are godlike in our powers. Such an attitude is inevitably punished.
Ate, Eris, the Erinyes…Harpies by myriad. You have been warned.
Eek! We’re running out of italics!
Soon we’ll be at the mercy of the Organization of Italic Exporting Countries!
See! We just ran out!
Eek! We’re running out of italics!
Soon we’ll be at the mercy of the Organization of Italic Exporting Countries!
See! We just ran out!
Have Eamon and Theodopoulos traded in their cars for rickshaws yet? If not, why not? Not that it would do much good if we all did that, anyway, if one sincerely rejects the power of human invention and the free market, combined, to come up with alternatives to oil. If you really believe the oil is disappearing and the Great Darkness is likely to descend, surely it’s time to slaughter your family then stick your head in the gas oven Whoops! I mean hang yourself using a rope made from a sustainable sisal crop.
Me, I want more nukes, preferably of the fusion variety.
There is a new gas drilling rig four miles from my mother’s house: the first one anyone has ever seen in this neck of the woods. They’re going down 7700 feet, and one of the crew told me: “This is not exploratory. We know there is gas down there and we’re going to get it.”
In the past week, a geophysical team went up & down the road in front of Mom’s house, banging away with ultrasound gear. The exploration lease was signed a couple of years ago. If they actually drill out there, the royalties could easily work out to many thousands of dollars per acre, per month, and Mom owns a hair less than twenty-five acres.
I sincerely hope you people are running out of energy resources, because I know there are people working to solve the problem. And for the inestimable benefit of energy delivered, you’re going to build my mother a lovely new home.
“All hail the Great Feast of Ostentatious Consumption.”
That’s what I always say.
I suppose it is inevitable that we will run out of oil, but that simply means other sources of energy will become more economical than oil, which really is fairly cheap. Personally, I can’t wait until we run out of oil, and I hope it happens in my lifetime.
There are people I know who have been waiting for decades for the price of baseload electricity to start climbing so they can make a bloody fortune designing and building Solar Power Satellites in Geosync orbit. Solar cell efficiency and processing technology has improved enormously; I’ve friends (if you haven’t noticed) who are working on making access to space actually feasible (the government will *NEVER* succeed at it); the plans have basically been on the shelf for 25 years.
It’s 1364 W/m^2 out there, every day all day until old Sol spreads its’ envelope in a warm red embrace and brings the Earth’s biosphere to a finale.
Of course our descendants will have left for the stars a few billion years before that…
David Carr writes:
“Eamon,
Well, if you have a source reference, I’d be delighted to read it. I can only say that I clearly remember all the dire prognostications (widely believed as well) that we would ‘run out of oil’ by end of the 20th Century. Not happening.”
I can vouch for that. Indeed, some evil-minded soul had given a chemistry teacher at my school a copy of the, then newly published, Silent Spring (which more or less gives away my age, but so it goes). You’d have thought the bugger had seen God. He rapidly mutated into becoming one of the first “Greens”.
Yes, I recall it well. No oil by the millennium. No gas, either…
Like all such hostages to fortune, it proved to be utter rot.
A related Mises.org article worth reading. It may be about natural gas, but the fundamentals are the same.
Marxist/socialist thought was a reaction, and has always been reactionary, to the emphasis placed on the individual by the political and economic ideas of the Enlightenmnet. It acquired a veneer of modernism because it promoted violent revolution against a group of archaic autocracies in Europe, none of which practised anything which could be called capitalism.
We have had a century of experience with the socialist experiment around the world, in several different countries with varying degrees of development.
The slaughterhouses of the former Soviet Union and the antecedent of the current Chinese regime have been completely exposed, and the millions upon millions who were killed by these regimes thoroughly documented. The millions more dead, or fleeing for their lives from the other Asian “worker’s paradises”, are common knowledge.
In the land of the “Glorious and Dear Leaders”, they are now eating their children. This is the most eloquent statement of the true nature of socialism that could ever be made.
Even the much touted “Fabian” socialists of Northern Europe have started looking for ways to dismantle the edifice that has led them to near bankrupcy, both economic and social, in spite of the revenue from the North Sea oil deposits that seemed, for a while, as if they might save the day.
None of this has any effect at all on the mind of the true believer. The statist view, utterly closed to evidence or testimony, still looks at Castro’s prison island and sees—universal literacy. The hundreds of thousands who have thrown themselves into the sea to escape are dismissed. All that matters is keeping the faith alive, regardless of how many lives are consumed in the process.
Just as the faithful of the Adventist movement can explain the repeated failures of the predictions for the end of the world as “miscalculations”, so the devotees of socialism can explain away the corpses as the result of mistakes in following the “plan”. Marx is good, they chant, you just haven’t done it right.
As my faith says, “Mene Mene, Tekel Upharsin”. It is time to read the writing on the wall.
Eamon, and others discussing the exhaustion of crude reserves-
In 1982, I visited an elderly geologist with a Shell subsidiary in Lafayette Louisiana. I was trying to sell a geologic database that I had spent the previous year developing. After I and an associate had made our pitch, he took us over to an old linen map on a spring-loaded roller – the kind that used to hang in schoolrooms. This one covered South Louisiana in 1″=8000′ scale. It was intricately contoured in pencil. To give you an idea of its antiquity: Linen blueline media had been unavailable for over a decade at that time. He had been updating that map since WWII.
After he let us look at it for a few minutes, he said that he had mapped every well in South Louisiana, and every trap. He defied us to find one prospect worth drilling on that map. He said that if we could he would think about buying our data. We couldn’t.
In the years after, I was away from South Louisiana – working other areas. In spite of that, I am aware of at least three TCF -(trillion cubic foot)- discoveries that have been made by a shrinking, crippled domestic US oil and gas industry in the area he had condemned. As we walked out on the street that day, my associate, an older wiser geologist, remarked that ” I can see why Shell keeps him in a subsidary where he can’t infect the younger geologists”.
If you have any familiarity with the oil business, you have probably heard the maxim of Wallace Pratt, one of our early pioneers: “Oil is found in the Minds of Men”. Lately it hasn’t been quoted as often as it used to be. It is still true however. That old Shell geologist had used up the resources of his mind. It showed on his map.
Eamon is right about there being an article on oil running out. It was by M. King Hubbert in about 1967. He predicted the hump of production being reached about 1975 or so. I can’t give you an exact date because I haven’t bothered to read it and don’t intend to waste the time. Hubbert is exactly right about the exhaustion of oil IN THE KIND OF TRAPS THAT WE HAVE THOUGHT TO LOOK FOR TO DATE. So what? If you cannot conceive of any other kind of accumulation, or any other way to search for them, assuming you have a knowledge of basic petroleum geology, then you are mentally unsuited to be an oil finder. Your “Mind of a Man” happens not to be the right kind. It is probably a perfectly serviceable mind otherwise, but you shouldn’t try to advise people about oil supplies.
I assume that last statement will offend some of the ‘experts’ out there, so let me give you some factoids to support my implication that there is plenty of oil to be found.
My numbers may be a bit off but they should be right by at least their order of magnitude:
1. Ghawar Field, the giant field between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia contains about 300 times the known North American reserves.
2. The Eagleford Shale, an Upper Cretaceous black shale that old drillers in the 1930’s called the ‘fish scale shale’ after the fossil scales in the cuttings, is an acknowledged source bed for many of the lower Texas Gulf coast reservoirs. The Eagleford still contains an estimated 100 to 300 times the oil reserves of the Middle East. (Not counting THEIR source beds!)
Oil is relatively cheap (compare it to bottled water) because nature has concentrated it in reservoirs that we can sometimes locate. There is still much more left in the source rocks and a huge amount that has already been sourced and migrated out to traps. Have we found them all? I doubt it. If you only look at what we have already found or what we can still find in the type of traps that we have already thought of, then you are looking at a dwindling resource. If instead, you look at what potentially could be out there, well, you have no real idea of what you will think of next year or in five years, but the number is obviously very different. (By the way, the Eagleford is only one of many source beds. Most of them are below current drilling depths where they are in the crude oil generation “window” of pressure and temperature. But we are drilling deeper all the time. There may be completely different types of oil traps in our future.) (Also by the way-These are not “oil shales”. Those are completely different shallow shales that can be cooked to extract oil. A different ball game entirely.)
The oil industry has a severe mind problem. Michael Jennings has some trenchant Thoughts on Hollywood’s Lousy Summer in Samizdata today. One of his points, that the movie industry has been taken over by MBAs could apply as just as well to the oil industry. They are in love with prospects with statistically predictable outcomes. If you think about it -as they apparently do not- those are prospects just like the ones we have already been drilling. Innovative prospects won’t lend themselves to statistics because there is no history on which to base the numbers. Of course, for any particular type of prospect, there is a limited number. And it will show in decreasing new reserve sizes even as success rates increase, if you don’t drill anything else.
Doug,
Brilliant! That was absolutly facinating. You took an incredibly complex subject, and stripped it down to its nutshell.
You’ve just taught me a lot–though I had to read it twice.
Thanks.
Doug
Hubbert predicted the hump of production in “america” would peak in the 70s, not worldwide, as someone might infer from your post.
That leaves the question. Did it peak in America during the seventies or not? Answer. Yes.
Your insistence that there are other sources and we will find more yet is true. But you will only push back the problem by a few years. Because the problems with oil consumption will not come when it has run out.
They will arrive when “peak” production has passed and nothing that you have written indicates that this is not approaching.
Eamon
“You can’t shove the market in the face of entropy and expect it to work it’s magic.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of this. True cosmic entropy and heat death is billions of years in the future – who knows what we will have evolved into, and what we will be able to accomplish, by that time?
In the short term, I will place my bets on human ingenuity every time to beat temporary resource shortages – our local form of entropy. Life and intelligence are anti-entropic activities. The market is, in part, simply a mechanism for coordinating and maximizng the application of intelligence to resource problems.
Intelligence is, essentially, an unlimited resource for all practical concerns; this means that resource problems are, in principle, solvable. Ultimately, of course, we may have to go into space to get the resources we want, but if so, so be it.
As Mark Steyn points out, we as a species have overcome numerous resource shortages in the past, and there is every reason to believe we can do so in the future. The problem with most energy sources isn’t that they are inadequate, it is that they are too hard to control (think nuclear, sub-nuclear, quantum).
Eamon-
I realize that I am contradicting a lot of ‘Authorities’ with impressive academic credentials, M King Hubbert included. For that matter, I am contradicting a lot of influential people in the oil and gas industry too.
My justification is that I can and have created exploration prospects. The overwhelming majority of the experts predicting early exhaustion have never done so and have no idea of how it is done. This includes a surprisingly large number of oil company managers.
My point about oil being found first in human minds was an absolutely literal and serious one. I was not being poetic or metaphorical. That is where you have to look to see if future reserves are growing or shrinking. In the history of oil and gas production there have been multiple humps of production. They are superseded when someone finds an innovative way to find or produce oil, a new, previously unknown kind of place to look for it or a new province that has been overlooked. Then a new hump is climbed and usually descended partway as the newer concepts mature and age. The whole history has been one of continually ‘pushing back the problem for a few years’ – and then a few years more, and a few years more….
My example of the source rocks was meant to indicate the enormous potential amounts of oil and gas that still remain. I don’t know where they are or how to get them out at the moment, but I and, I hope, a few others are certainly thinking hard about that. In the past, we concentrated on reservoirs nearer the surface. With deeper drilling we can start thinking about tapping the much larger sources where the reservoired oil originated. When that, or some other innovation happens, Hubbert’s fears will be just as unfounded as those of the 19th century experts who worried about the impending shortages first of whale oil and later of coal oil and kerosene, which turned out to be trivial in the face of an unexpected flood of 20th century petroleum.
Even if Hubbert is right, and production – American or worldwide makes no ultimate difference – is peaking before beginning a decline, why is the cause blindly assumed to have nothing to do with economic or sociological/industrial factors? Auto prices have gone up by several multiples over the last few decades. No one blames that on a shortage of steel or rubber. We can see human cause and effect clearly. Oil exploration is an intensely creative mental process. That being the case, overlooking human factors is sheer naive blindness.
Doug
Next time just answer the question instead of avoiding it.
Eamon
Thank you Doug for the fascinating glimpse into oil exploration, and for one of my favorite quotes of the whole week: “Oil is found in the Minds of Men.” Beautiful.
(It’s a tie with veryretired for the chilling simplicity of his quote, “In the land of the Dear Leader, they are now eating their children,” which even scans in nice 4-syllable lines, the stress on 3.)
Raspberries to Theodopoulos and Eamon for invoking entropy. WTF are you saying, and what it does it have to do with the issue at hand? Um, “S=klnW, therefore the goop in the ground runs out tomorrow?” It seems to me that the concept of entropy is often invoked in a nontechnical (i.e. sloppy) context to salve a psychic need for a kind of atheistic Götterdämmerung. Sorry, but you’re not gonna get satisfaction from physics.
Gomtu
In case you are wondering. The second law of thermodymanics in in effect right now. Not just present at the universal heat death as Perry and others seem to think.
As to what it has to do with the topic. Go look it up. I am past trying to argue rationally about this subject. All I am getting is a sad delusion that you can bootleg entropy by virtue of human ingenuity.
Eamon
Eamon, learn more about entropy before you invoke the concept.
OK Julian
OK Julian, you’re the expert. If it takes more energy to get the oil out of the ground than the oil itself produces, what can the market or human ingenuity do about that.
Thats entropy in effect, in the real world.
Come on Julian, you are obviously totally at home with the concept so enlighten me.
Eamon
This discussion is going into its third day now. Partly because the dispute is over something which is extremely important to me, and partly because I don’t want to be the one to mess up a possible bid for a Samizdata record, I am going to try again.
Eamon, I understood your point to be that you are convinced by the many conventional wisdom claims that US domestic oil reserves have peaked and that we are going to grind to a halt sometime soon as the unavoidable shortages begin to bite into the economy.
You said I should answer the question instead of avoiding it. I think I did. Let me make my answer more explicit:
I believe you are correct that known US oil reserves have reached and passed a peak. I’ll go further than you – I think it is possible that world known reserves may yet reach a peak before too much longer.
We differ in that you think this means necessarily that the amount of remaining undiscovered oil is also very small. I do not. I have tried to make two points: that the volume of reserves that could have been expelled, and in fact may presently be being expelled, from the organic shales that are the source of our existing oil reserves are huge and that there are just as likely to be human reasons as geologic reasons for our current reserve base to have peaked and begun to decline.
As far as the peak and decline are concerned, I think that when economic pressures/rewards get big enough, we will start on a new peak as a result of a new crop of reserves. I have been thinking about an analogy and I think I have one. Imagine a mob of color blind children on a Easter egg hunt. They would find most of the easy blue and yellow ones and as the better hidden ones were more and more slowly discovered, an M. King Hubbert of Easter eggs would be able to plot a hump shaped function of egg reserve depletion. But then one clever child realizes that some of the eggs are invisible against the grass and invents a red egg detector. The hump function just changed. – And the existence of the green eggs is still unsuspected.
Ok Doug
I’ll take your point. There may be more usuable reserves out there, that new technology may find and these may prove not to involve net energy loss. There are however, a lot of ifs and buts and maybes there.
As for the point about human reasons for decline. Once again you are flying in the face of established wisdom. I would be interested to know what you think is really happening.
Eamon
Eamon: “As to what it has to do with the topic. Go look it up.”
<uncloaks> Sigh. I’m a physicist. </uncloaks>
Eamon, you’re not entirely hopeless, (although I would recommend losing the belligerent attitude) you’re just using the wrong model. Think economics, not physics.
Physics doesn’t care if you want to spend 2 ergs in order to get 1 erg. People do it all the time. Its implications, or indeed the implications for the net entropy of the universe of anything we do on Earth (mU/mE~10^30) are negligible.
Now, spending 2 dollars in order to get 1 dollar’s worth of energy… that may cause problems down the road. And this is precisely Doug’s point, as I understand it.
You’re casting an economic argument in scientific terms, and trying to assume the mantle of unchallengeable truth associated with science. I call foul on that, and I suggest that if you recast your thinking in appropriate terms, your ideas will make more sense to you and to others.
I have no desire for a fight, but I do request that if you wish to press your physics point with me, please do so using mathematics.