Today I’m having problems because my science isn’t working and I don’t know why. Obviously when science isn’t working it’s time to try something different, but what?
The question is, is the problem that my protocol doesn’t work (change the protocol!) or is the problem that I am unable to do the protocol right (how could I fix this?). I don’t know the answer and it’s really making me stressed.
So I’ll instead write an incomprehensible poem
油危
冬天
总统说
“穿毛衣”
I know a guy who, after the Dobbs decision (which overturned Roe v Wade this year), said that red states that ban abortion need to be boycotted (this was not an uncommon suggestion in Liberal spaces). I asked him yesterday what he was up to and he said “oh, just watching the World Cup in Qatar.”. It’s very easy to call for boycotts of things you’d never pay for anyway. if you have no interest in going to Arkansas then you can call for a boycott of Arkansas and feel smug that you’re standing up for human rights. But it’s much harder to obey a boycott for something you like, if the World Cup we’re being held in Arkansas then I know millions of pro-choice pro-LGBT people who would put their morals aside just to watch.
I will not be watching this year’s World Cup. But with how may people I know who will be watching, people who called for boycotts just earlier this year, it’s become clear to me that those calls for boycotts were purely performative, with zero moral backing behind them.
If you follow the Tech industry, you know that everyone’s always searching for the Next Big Thing, and if you remember my series on The American Challenge, you might remember that I talked about how that book badly missed on some of its predictions of what The Next Big Thing would actually be. This got me thinking, what do I think the Next Big Thing is? What do I think will be the next trillion-dollar industry, the type of thing countries will want to focus on and people will want to invest in, things like semiconductors and computers in the 80s, mass-built automobiles in the 1910s, or trains in the 1800s. The kind of thing that will change the way we do everything, and if you have a chance to get in at the ground floor you’ll be kicking yourself in 20 years if you don’t take it.
To start with, I’ll talk about others’ predictions.
I’ve heard some people talk about Cloud Computing as the Next Big Thing, but it’s hard to tell if it’s truly Next or if it’s more of a continuation of the Current Big Thing. Like, would it make sense to separate the internet revolution from the computer revolution? Both happened concurrently, the first couldn’t have happened without the second and the second was truly skyrocketted by the first. So how does Cloud Computing fit into all this, it’s already a trillion dollar industry with the largest tech companies in the world all throwing money into it, and even if I can’t explain how it works personally I can definitely see that others are talking about it as a revolution. But again it feels hard to tease it apart from computers and internet as a whole, and it doesn’t seem like we’re on the ground floor anymore. Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have all put so much money into their cloud infrastructure that I don’t see any small fries really taking pieces off of them. I’d say Cloud Computing is the current Big Thing.
But that’s mostly semantics, I’ve also heard people say 3D printing is the Next Big Thing. The University of Nottingham for instance has a department that wants to be able to 3D print a smartphone, circuitry and all, using just metal and plastics as inputs. The ability to mass-produce using 3D printing has long been a holy grail of the field, and the ability to custom manufacture pretty much anything by just fiddling with a computer model would certainly be a game-changer. But 3D printing has so many technological limitations that I still wonder if it will truly take off, most glaringly, 3D printed items tend to not work well out of the printer, and fall apart quickly even if they do, which is a big barrier for mass-production. Ultimately I just wonder if 3D printing will be something more like Supersonic Travel was in the 70s, something that was seen as the mass-market future but was in fact relegated to only specialized roles while more boring “old fashioned” things kept their market share.
The Internet of Things is something I’ve never really gotten the hype for. There are certain applications where having a device always connected to the wifi seems like it could be value added, but most of the hype seems to be marketers trying to see a subscription service for a device that used be be a one-time purchase, or from unrealistic promises that don’t fix the Oracle Problem (ie suppose you give you machine a wifi connection so it can always tell you when certain conditions are met, but will you necessarily trust that your machine is giving you good data or will you have to double check each time anyway, negating the benefits of having the wifi in your machine). Frankly, I don’t want anything in my house to be connected to the wifi unless I expect or need to play Youtube on it.
Another Next Big Thing could be the DNA/protein revolution. The Human Genome Project was a massive success, as was the development of modern Mass spectrometry, and a huge amount of modern biochemistry couldn’t exist without these techniques. Our ability to read the sequence of any protein or piece of DNA we want to, and to alter them in any way we please, have definitely given us a leg up in fighting genetic diseases and engineering proteins for a number of different purposes. In theory, biochemistry can let us create proteins to do just about any job that ordinary chemistry does, only faster and better. This includes highly speculative roles like uranium enrichment and carbon capture to even humdrum every day roles like plastic production. The ability to use genetics and proteomics to both cure our diseases and for industrial purposes is certainly enticing, but I’m still not sure the technology is there or will be there soon. Without getting too jargon-y, proteins can only do their job if they have the correct shape, and our ability to create any shape we want is not fully developed. When you change a single piece of a protein, it can have enormous effects on the protein’s structure and function, and it’s often difficult to even test these effects. Some people have told me that “genes and proteins are the next coding language” but until it’s as easy to test a protein as it is to test a program, I’m not sure that’s true.
Finally, outer space. Will the next trillion dollar company be a space company and not a tech company? I’d love that to be true, but I’m not sure. The best argument I’ve heard for the economic viability of space colonies was actually a really dumb and technical one. If you assume that there is already people living on both the Moon and on Earth, then in theory it is cheaper to ship anything from the Moon to the Earth, versus shipping something from the Earth to the Moon (due to differing gravity and atmospheric drag effects). If we then assume that economies of scale can be harnessed to make producing things on the Moon and producing things on Earth cost almost the same amount, then any company that moves its production from the Earth to the Moon has a comparative advantage that cannot be taken away, and it can service both the population on the Moon and the population on Earth more cheaply. Thus a Moon colony should be (economically) self-sustaining once it reaches a certain size. There are of course a hell of a lot of assumptions with this plan, and some of them are even bad assumptions, but this is genuinely the only compelling argument I’ve heard for colonizing space other than the Tsiolkovsky argument, which isn’t much more of an argument than but I WANT it to happen.
So what is the Next Big Thing? Honestly I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone does at this point. That was one thing I kept thinking about while reading The American Challenge. JJSS and people like him seemed to think that the best way to run a country was to foresee what would be the “Next Big Thing” and then invest in it. But JJSS’s predictions on The Next Big Thing were 1/3 or 1/4 depending on how you wanted to score him, and frankly redirecting national budgets into government projects with all the bureaucratic inertia and election-cycle-thinking that comes with them just seems like a terrible idea. Better to let the free market create a virtuous cycle where the good ideas win and the bad ideas lose, rather than create a government system that can be handcuffed by political or interest-group concerns to throw good money after bad and ignore successes in favor of prestigious failures. I don’t know what the Next Big Thing is, but what do you think? Feel free to comment below.
Over this past week, Twitter has gotten weird. Reports flying that Musk fired literally everybody, that there’s no engineers managing the servers, that he demanded everyone work 80 hours or quit and most of them quit. Forgive me for not posting sources but most of this is ultimately unsourced info from social media anyway. Regardless, people on Twitter are tweeting up a storm about how this is The End of Twitter and how they’ll all move to Facebook or Instagram or Mastodon when Twitter inevitably goes down for good. I don’t think that’s going to happen, at least not for another year or more.
Twitter may lose some of userbase as its billionaire owner continues to go crazy, but I highly doubt it will be replaced all at once, or even in the next year, or so and for a few reasons:
When MySpace lost the battle to Facebook, it was a true battle between two platforms that did mostly the same thing. Both were neck and neck in terms of usercount and both focused on very similar styles of content and posting. Twitter doesn’t have that problem, Facebook and Instagram are nothing like Twitter in terms of its microblogging content or its ability to spread content to every corner of the userbase by latching onto its trending topics. And Mastodon has a tiny fraction of the total usersbase, if it continues to grow every year and Twitter loses half its userbase every year, then in around 5 years they’ll be neck and neck like Myspace and Facebook were in 2008. Until I see a sustained long-term trend of that nature, I’m not ready to proclaim that This Is The Death Of Twitter.
Twitter gives institutions something that they really really want, the ability to spread their message easily to all its users at almost no cost. There’s a good reason that Justin Trudeau, his holiness The Pope, and the People’s Daily (most read newspaper in China) all have official active accounts on twitter. Most would never be caught dead on Reddit in an official capacity, and Facebook/Instagram/other sites don’t allow them to reach every user in the way that Twitter does. Even if everyone with a net worth under 1 million dollars left Twitter TODAY, the site would likely continue on the inertia from Institutions for quite some time, as they would find tweeting something and having it get picked up by other institutions (especially newspapers) would still be a great way to get their viewpoint out into the wider world. Institutions don’t change rapidly, and even if Twitter does die it could take years for many institutions to migrate off of it. And the key is that as long as those institutions remain on Twitter, Twitter will still have value to many different users. Users who like to troll politicians’ comments, or bloggers/journalists looking to keep up with what the institutions are putting out, these people will stay on Twitter as long as the institutions stay on Twitter. So even if you start posting your dog pictures solely to Instagram, I doubt the Washington Post newsroom will abandon Twitter any time soon.
People like to see billionaires as unaccountable god-kings creating or destroying everything in their path. This is partly because that is the image most billionaires cultivate and partly because they are certainly held less accountable than those of us who work for a living. But Musk isn’t the sole proprietor of Twitter, or even the sole proprietor of Musk Enterprises. There are a legion of accountants, lawyers, and investors who check and double check his every move. It seems strange that a man flaunts both the SEC and slander laws is being checked and double checked, but the very fact that he has never been punished for what he’s done is a testament to the work of his lawyers, accountants, and investors. These intermediaries act as a moderating influence on Musk the auteur CEO and so will likely ensure that no matter what he does the bills will keep getting paid and the lights will stay on at Twitter Enterprises.
Twitter has already been integrated into just about everything imaginable. I only have a Twitter handle (@streamsofconsc) to tweet out my daily blog posts. But WordPress (and basically every other posting software) has made it super easy to link your Twitter handle to your blog and auto-post everything you do with no added work necessary. Mastodon isn’t integrated into this ecosystem and probably won’t be any time soon.
This is a bit personal, but I’ve predicted the downfall of Musk before myself. I was part of the Musk hate-culture in r/enoughmuskspam for a fair bit, and fell easily into the echo chamber which pushed a narrative where Musk was constantly on the edge of destruction. I eventually got out, but it made me realize how easily hatred and castigation get amplified in such an echo chamber. Twitter is currently a strong echo chamber declaring the death of the platform and the End of Musk, and since there’s no social benefit to going against the grain, the most hyperbolic and outrageous claims of destruction are shared and amplified. This reminds me all too much of the patterns I saw with the hate-culture surrounding previous Musk ventures, and it makes me skeptical about people’s claims for this one.
I don’t think Twitter will go down because Musk fired too many of the people doing server maintenance. I don’t think Twitter will be replaced by Mastodon within the next few years. I don’t think Musk will be charged with market manipulation or treason for how he’s purchases a major avenue of public speech and trashed it. And I don’t think the people who are declaring the death of Twitter today will ever look back and admit they were wrong (if they are indeed proven wrong) any more than the people who declared the death of Tesla back in 2018 or the peak-oilers of the early 2000s. I think most people will either forget entirely or will claim that they were “early, but not wrong,” eternally pushing back their predicted death-date as they get more and more wrong by the year.
I may be wrong on this, and I’ll try to revisit this post in a year or so to either give my mea culpa or to declare how much smarter I am than everyone, but at this point I’d happily take the gamble that Twitter won’t be dying any time soon.
As I continue The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg, I’m struck most of all by his lack of creativity. When thinking about the future, most of us should be able to conjure up some ideas of how the world could be a modestly better place to live. Cars will become electric so no more filling up with gas, telework will get more common and we can all work from home, over 400 clinical trials are currently trials are currently studying Alzheimer’s disease, maybe one of them will cure it. These are all things that could change our society for the better and would contribute to economic growth. More efficient cars mean transportation is cheaper and so people can partake in more of it, in a very real way the supply of transportation will be increased, leading to an increase in GDP and a decrease in prices. And this is true of pretty much all technological advancements, technology is supposed to be deflationary, growing our economy while reducing prices. Yet Richard Heinberg doesn’t really see how technology could ever improve our lives from his lofty vantage point of 2011
We may be able to further improve the functionality of the Microsoft Office software package, the speed of transactions on the computer, computer storage capacity, or the number of sites available on the internet. Yet on many of these development trajectories we will face a point when the value of yet another improvement will be lower than its cost to the consumer
Yeah let me stop you right there Rick. If the cost is greater than the utility, then the product is unprofitable and it fails. Like the Nimslo Camera or the Quibi streaming platform, the world of tech is littered with big fails where product designers make something that consumers don’t buy. Yet here’s the secret Rick, if people do buy it then it is adding value to their lives greater than the price they pay for it. Richard Heinberg wants to paint a picture where our ever improving technology isn’t actually bringing any net good to consumers, yet by definition it IS otherwise the consumers just wouldn’t buy it. Consumers aren’t brainwashed automatons (as much as marketers wish they were) you can’t force them to buy something they don’t want. And consumers over the years have proven very willing to turn up their nose at goods and services which bring them less value than what they cost.
He continues:
At this point, further product “improvements” will be driven almost solely by aesthetic considerations […] for many consumer products this stage was reached decades ago.
Damn Rick, you’re right, the only reason people buy iPhones instead of old rotary-dialers is because of the aesthetics, not because you can access the whole world at the touch of a screen. And TVs, who needs a big plasma TV? Hell life was better in black and white anyway! And don’t get me started on ovens, pots, and dishware, sure these modern fancy kitchen appliances are less likely to burn your house down or leach carcinogens into your food, but is that really worth the cost?
If it sounds like I’m mocking Richard Heinberg it’s because I am. I diagnose him with a terminal lack of creativity, and an inability to see the improvements in life happening all around him. Every year consumer products, not just our electronics but our cookware, our houseware, our vehicles, they all continue to improve and become more safe, more efficient, and more useful. But Rick can’t understand why Microsoft Office became a subscription service and so questions whether technological improvement is even possible. Here’s a thought Rick: maybe you aren’t the target market for improving technology? Maybe you’d be happier with a typewriter and a sundial and thus don’t represent the average consumer? I can tell you that as a scientist, modern Microsoft Office is WAY better for me than what we had a decade ago. Since all my programs and files are on the cloud, I can sit down at any computer anywhere in the world and do my work. I don’t need to lug a PC everywhere I go, I can sit down at any PC and get to work. I can also collaborate easily with people anywhere on earth because all our files are in the cloud so we can work on them together instead of editing on our local machines and then sending versions back and forth through email.
My job has become immeasurably easier since Richard Heinberg wrote his book in 2011, the increased utility from technological advances like computer software, computer hardware, and internet communication have made me more productive and a hell of a lot more happy. Technology has worked great for me and I’m glad to pay for the privilege of it. Rick can stick to his sundials if he really thinks technology peaked in the past.
FTX is in the news for both the enormity of its bankruptcy and the moral bankruptcy of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. Before even reading the news I knew in general how FTX went bankrupt, because it’s the same way every crypto ponzi scheme, sorry crypto “exchange” goes bankrupt. Here’s how it always happens.
Someone creates a whole bunch of magic beans, a billion in fact, then sells one of the beans to a sucker for a dollar. Their billion beans are now worth 1 billion dollars, because the most recent sale multiplied by the total number of items must be the fair value of them all, right? With net assets of 1 billion dollars, you can start doing some real financial malfeasance. You can take out big loans (using beans as collateral) or trade your beans for someone else’s beans, since you’re both playing a game where you pretend these beans have value. This gives you cashflow (although most of your “cash” is just other people’s beans) and the ability to pretend you’re running a business.
Once you’re trading beans, you tell suckers (retail investors) that your business is profitable and they should invest. Not by buying stocks in your company on the stock market, that’s a mug’s game. Stocks actually have value and are regulated by the government, no we’re in the business of beans. You tell people that to invest in your beans they just have to hand you over some of their dollars and in exchange you’ll give them beans. You tell them that the beans are interest payments on the dollars they’ve deposited with you, and since you’re still claiming the beans have value these suckers can then trade the beans amongst themselves. You then take those dollars they deposited and gamble them away on over-leveraged stock and crypto bets, all while pretending you’re the Wolf of Wall Street.
As long as people keep giving you dollars in exchange for beans, the scheme is solvent. The beans cost you nothing and you can print as many as you like. If a few people want to exchange their beans for dollars again, well that’s OK too because you’ve still got a big pot of dollars that you haven’t lost yet, so you can give them back their dollars and take back your beans to maintain the illusion of solvency. Your beans are your main asset remember, they’re what you are selling to raise money, they’re what is underwriting all your loans, so people need to believe that the beans have value and the best way to maintain that lie is to always be willing to buy back beans at the current market price.
It seems like the magic of a flywheel, once you spin it up it keeps going and going forever. As more and more people see your company as being profitable, more and more will want to buy your beans to “invest” in you. And when they invest, you give them all the beans they could ever ask for. As long as you keep buying back beans, fear of missing out (FOMO) will drive many investors to throw more and more money at you, driving up the price of your beans and making your company seem like a can’t lose bet. But nothing lasts forever, entropy will eventually slow down a flywheel and risky bets will eventually end a crypto exchange. There’s always some trigger, whether it be too many bad bets, a collapse in the price of bitcoin (which is probably one of your main “assets” after your magic beans) or you or an employee just steals everything and runs. But eventually people will start to catch on that you’re probably insolvent, and they’ll want their money back.
The reason FTX was insolvent is the same reason every crypto “exchange” is insolvent, there is absolutely no profit to be made in doing what they claim to do which is hold people’s money and always be willing to give it back. There is zero profit in doing this, banks write loans using depositor’s funds because that’s the only way to make a profit, and for the same reason exchanges gamble with depositor’s money because that’s the only way they make a profit. But banks are highly regulated to prevent insolvency and stupid bets, whereas crypto exchanges just aren’t. So eventually all exchanges make stupid bets and go insolvent, while most banks don’t.
So insolvency, it’s just a fancy word meaning people want their money back and you don’t have it. You gambled it all away and now all you have are magic beans, magic beans which only have value because you’ve been claiming you’d always buy them back at the market price. So the price of your beans collapse once people learn what’s up and that you no longer have the money to support your beans. Everyone tries to get their money out but you’re broke and can’t give it to them, then the people you took loans from realize you can’t pay them back either. As long as the numbers were going up, people kept buying beans from you and you could use more and more deposits to pay back your loans and keep up the fascade, now you can’t so you’ve got no choice but to default on those loans. And those loans and other obligations were underwritten with beans, which are now worthless as you won’t buy them back from anybody.
This above scenario is more or less how every crypto collapse has operated, plus or minus a few cases of an insider just taking all the money and leaving. They always issue their own coin because it’s an easy way to create the illusion of assets, they always take deposits and gamble them because it’s the only way to make money, and their balance sheet is always nothing but crypto so when the price of crypto goes down, they collapse under the weight of their own coins. Sam Bankman-Fried isn’t the first crypto scammer (although he does have the most appropriate name for one), he’s just the biggest one so far.
After I wrote my post on theoildrum.com, I found that one of its writers, Gail Tverberg, is still highly active in the blogosphere at here website ourfiniteworld.com. I therefore reached out to her by email to ask some questions regarding her time at theoildrum.com and her time since then. I felt the conversation was enlightening, so I have (hopefully with her permission) copied our email conversation here in hopes others can learn as well
Dear Gail Tverberg,
I’m a biology researcher, a blogger on wordpress, and a sometimes internet historian. I’ve recently found the blog theoildrum.com, which I think is a fascinating window into the time when Peak Oil was more talked about. I personally remember watching An Inconvenient Truth in school and being taught in class about Global Warming and Peak Oil on the same day. I can remember walking out of school being very scared for the future thinking about how we could make earth entirely uninhabitable through oil.
Yet while Global Warming is still talked about, Peak Oil has faded from view, despite the work put in by you and the others at theoildrum.com. I was wondering if I could ask just a few questions about your work there just so I could get to know your feelings about all this. And I was wondering also if I could put my questions and your answers together on my blog, streamsofconsciousness.blog. I’ve already written a tiny bit on what I found on your blog, but I’d like to know more.
1. How big/popular was theoildrum.com when you were part of the team there? I remember Peak Oil being a topic of conversation during my school years, but I wasn’t on the internet as much so I don’t know where it was talked about. Was there a large amount of web traffic coming to theoildrum.com?
2. How popular/common was the viewpoint of theoildrum.com regarding Peak Oil? Did you get a lot of pushback? As I said, I learned about Peak Oil in school but I don’t know how much it was in the public consciousness at the time.
3. Did your views evolve during your time at theoildrum.com? The blog was active from around 2005-2013, though I confess I cannot find exactly when you worked there, did your views on Peak Oil change and shift over time or did you feel that events continued to prove your thesis correct?
4. I have read some of your current blog, ourfiniteworld.com, and I’m interested in your current views. Are they much the same as when you worked at theoildrum.com, or have they changed since then?
I hope your current work is going well, and I thank you very much for any answers you can give me. Have a pleasant day!
And Gail’s response:
Dear Anonymous,
Thanks for writing. I am glad someone is interested in TheOilDrum.com.
As background, you need to understand that there are really three quite different theories of what our problem is.
A. Peak oil (as well as Peak natural gas and Peak Coal). According to this theory, the growth of the economy is limited by fossil fuel use. Oil, coal, and natural gas are all quite separate. The amount available is limited by technology and something called “Energy Return on Energy Invested.” At some point, if EROEI gets too low extraction stops. In any field, extraction naturally peaks and declines. Low EROEI makes it impossibly to add a huge amount of additional energy supply.
Demand is believed to be pretty much unlimited. People will keep “demanding” more fossil fuels. Price will keep rising, to get all resources out that can be technologically extracted. While oil will deplete first, coal and natural gas can continue afterward. In fact, wind, solar, and other energy types can reasonably substitute in the future if their EROEIs are high enough.
The economy will keep going on much as before, after “peak oil,” as the transition is made to other fuels. While running out is sort of a problem, rising prices, substitution, and conservation are likely to “save the day.”
“Preppers” can likely continue in the future, as they live today, if they adequately plan ahead.
B. Global warming / climate change is closely related to Peak Oil theory, but without EROEI limiting what can be extracted.
Global warming morphed into “climate change” when it became clear that the changes that are occurring are not all in the direction of an increase in temperature.
Under Climate Change theory, there is a very large amount of fossil fuels available for possible future extraction. For example, the UK has an enormous amount of coal for possible use, far under the North Sea. With rising prices or improving technology, perhaps someone might get the benefit of buying this coal.
Under this theory, it is imperative that people make every effort to stop fossil fuel extraction, because it will not stop by itself. Instead, it will cause huge temperature changes. Humans and their use of fossil fuels seem to be a big part of what has caused the higher temperature changes that we have been seeing to date.
This has become a major political cause.
C. Gail Tverberg’s Physics and History-Based Theory of Overshoot and Collapse
Our economy is a physics-based system. In fact, it is a “dissipative structure,” just as the human body is a dissipative structure. It requires a mix of energy types, of the right kinds, in the right quantities, or it will collapse, just as a human body requires somewhat the right mixture of foods, in the right quantity, or it will collapse. In fact, even if the economy gets the right mixture of energy types, it will still tend in the direction of overshoot and collapse, just as humans will die at the end of their normal lifetimes.
In the case of economies, one of the usual limiting factors for energy products is diminishing returns, because the easiest to extract energy supples are removed first. In fact, this same kind of problem occurs for fresh water supplies and minerals of all kinds, indulging copper and lithium. Population, however, continues to grow, so that energy per capita starts falling. With less energy per capita, it becomes impossible to grow enough food for the rising population. Other types of goods and services become more scarce as well.
We know that with humans, a small drop in food supply can temporarily be tolerated (but the population will tend to lose weigh), but a bigger long-term drop cannot. People will become more susceptible to disease and may die.
With economies, the financial system is one system that is likely to be particularly stressed by a smaller supply of energy products. With a falling supply of energy products, ever-fewer goods and services can be made. Thus, supply lines are likely to break. Empty shelves in stores are likely to be a problem. Fewer and fewer airline flights will be offered. Fewer and fewer jobs that pay well will be available. It will become increasingly difficult to make repairs to electricity transmission lines after storms, so lack of electricity will become a major problem.
Financial systems will be stressed because these are based on the assumption of ever-lasting growth. People take out loans assuming that they will have a job that will pay well in the future. This is likely not to be the case. Businesses take out loans assuming that they will sell an increasing quantity of goods and services. Debt defaults will become a problem. Share prices are likely to fall.
It is quite possible that inadequate energy supply will never be recognized as the source of collapse, because governments and educational institutions can never tell people what the problem is. Partly, the problem is difficult to understand. (My brief description here misses a whole lot.) The problem of inadequate supply of goods and services is likely to manifest itself as increased fighting among countries. It may manifest itself as over concern about illnesses that, in previous times, would have quickly evolved themselves down to very high frequency, low severity events that mostly removed a few ailing elderly people. (Keeping people inside is a way to artificially reduce the “demand” for goods and services.)
A likely outcome of inadequate energy supply is that financial systems will fail. Governments will fail. People are likely to find that the money in their bank accounts can’t really buy goods and services. The situation could look like a Weimar Germany situation, with a huge amount of money trying to buy goods that really aren’t there, or it could look like many people being cut out of the competition for buying for goods in the first place, by pensions being cancelled and money in bank accounts now longer being available. In this case, it is as if debt defaults wiped out the value of bank accounts. Fields will produce less, because machinery used to plant and harvest crops will fall into dis-repair from lack of spare parts, or lack of fuel.
The expected outcome is that a large share of the human population may die. In fact, most species have historically become extinct. This may occur with humans, as well. On the other hand, humans and pre-humans lived through ice ages, so they may live through a financial collapse, as well as any change in climate. In a finite world, the climate is always changing. It is hubris on our part, to think that we can somehow make the climate do what we want it to. It will continue to change. In some ways of thinking, the timing is getting close to the correct timing for another ice age.
In fact, the economy is set up to expect change and to adapt to change in the climate and in the availability of resources. It is a self-organizing system in which all species of plants and animals have more offspring than they need to replace themselves. The expectation is that “survival of the best adapted” will fix any problem that takes place. While some offspring may die, the survivors will be better adapted to the changing conditions. If humans remain, they will move to habitable places and again flourish and multiply until they again reach a population bottleneck. At that point, population is likely to again collapse.
Now, to try to answer your questions:
On Nov 11, 2022, at 8:00 AM, User Name <theusernamewhichismine@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Gail Tverberg,
I’m a biology researcher, a blogger on wordpress, and a sometimes internet historian. I’ve recently found the blog theoildrum.com, which I think is a fascinating window into the time when Peak Oil was more talked about. I personally remember watching An Inconvenient Truth in school and being taught in class about Global Warming and Peak Oil on the same day. I can remember walking out of school being very scared for the future thinking about how we could make earth entirely uninhabitable through oil.
I have never been a Peak Oil theorist. Quite a few of the writers at The Oil Drum were very much interested in Peak Oil theory, but a variety of different theories were discussed. I was not well liked at The Oil Drum because the theory I was talking about was very different from theirs. It was much more financial in nature. It didn’t end up with a “happily ever after” stories for survivalists growing their own crops.
Yet while Global Warming is still talked about, Peak Oil has faded from view, despite the work put in by you and the others at theoildrum.com. I was wondering if I could ask just a few questions about your work there just so I could get to know your feelings about all this. And I was wondering also if I could put my questions and your answers together on my blog, streamsofconsciousness.blog. I’ve already written a tiny bit on what I found on your blog,
I would caution you to be careful in the comparisons you make. There is “oil” and there are “liquids.” It is not fair to compare “oil’” to “liquids.” The various organizations try to confuse people as much as possible by adding in more and more, close-to-worthless products into the “liquids” category. They do this, to avoid showing that the “good stuff” is running out. What we are left with is a mix that doesn’t doesn’t meet the needs of society. You seem to have missed this point in the post you link to.
but I’d like to know more.
1. How big/popular was theoildrum.com when you were part of the team there?
The number of subscribers was a little over 20,000. The number of subscribers to Our Finite World is also something over 20,000 now. Articles were copied over on other sites, both OFW now and TOD then. My theories don’t make it into popular discussion, because they are not easily summarized on the back of a napkin. Also, no politician would ever want this story to get widely distributed. Educational institutions want the fiction to be given that “of course,” there will jobs for students in the future that will pay well. While there may be energy problems, they are easily solvable energy problems.
I remember Peak Oil being a topic of conversation during my school years, but I wasn’t on the internet as much so I don’t know where it was talked about. Was there a large amount of web traffic coming to theoildrum.com?
2. How popular/common was the viewpoint of theoildrum.com regarding Peak Oil? Did you get a lot of pushback? As I said, I learned about Peak Oil in school but I don’t know how much it was in the public consciousness at the time.
Both Peak Oil and Climate Change theory depend on a high price of oil (and coal and natural gas) allowing huge amounts of these types of energy to be extracted. I am very doubtful that this is the case. We are now reaching affordability limits on fossil fuels of all kinds. The problem is that the price cannot rise high enough to get the resources that look like they are in the ground, to be extracted, out. This has been Russia’s big problem. It needs a higher price than it was getting from Europe to make the extraction of its natural gas sufficiently profitable. In fact, coal and oil have had much the same problem. People who developed the EROEI theory left out the need for adequate tax revenue for governments, among other things.
Once the price of oil dropped back down in late 2008, and growing oil (or liquids) seemed to be available, the Peak Oil theory disappeared from discussion. Peak oilers had “cried wolf” too often.
I was talking about financial problems associated with energy limits from the beginning. My theory keeps growing and expanding, as I learned more about the real nature of the problem.
3. Did your views evolve during your time at theoildrum.com? The blog was active from around 2005-2013, though I confess I cannot find exactly when you worked there, did your views on Peak Oil change and shift over time or did you feel that events continued to prove your thesis correct?
I started writing my blog OurFiniteWorld.com in March 2007. In fact, I wrote all my articles on that site, until August, 2007. Sometime shortly after I started writing articles on OFW, TOD asked my permission to copy some of them over onto its website. Not long after, they wanted me to be a regular staff member, and somewhat later they wanted me to be an Editor. Other staff members were mostly college professors or graduate students. I was the only person who did not have a full time job doing something else, so I ended up doing a whole lot at TheOilDrum, between September 2007 and October 2010, including a lot of duties as Editor or the site.
I wrote only at TOD (not OFW) between September 2007 and October 2010. There was a lot of conflict at The Oil Drum. The two people who started the site came from pretty much opposite perspectives. “Heading Out” was a professor of coal mining technology at a university in Missouri. He thought perhaps coal could replace declining oil supply. “Prof. Goose” was a political science professor from a university in Colorado, interested particularly in preventing climate change. Leanan (a woman) (who linked to articles every day) also came from a climate change perspective. Several staff members were interested in modeling exactly how oil supply might run out.
TOD staff members coming from one perspective were very protective of their particular perspective. There were commenters who would push back in argument with respect to articles written, but there was also quite a bit of conflict among staff members.
There was a reorganization of TOD in November 2010, which I wrote about in this post. https://ourfiniteworld.com/2010/11/21/changes-planned-to-the-oil-drum/
Basically, some of the other staff members thought that I had too much power. I was deciding what would run, when, to a significant extent. Also, too many of my own posts did not put forth the “correct” peak oil perspective, at least in the view of other staff members. After the reorganization, there would be a staff of six editors, and there would be a vote to see which articles would be accepted. I would go back to writing on OFW, and TOD would copy over only those articles that it agreed with. There would be a paid TOD staff member who would take care of copying over articles from OFW to TOD, as well as performing other duties.
Technically, my titlea didn’t really change at TOD. I was both a Contributor and Editor from whenever I started being an editor (sometime in 2008) until the site ceased operations in 2013. Nate Hagens was an editor as well, but in practice, I ended up doing a whole lot of the day-to-day work, up until the change in November 2010. Nate was more involved with recruiting staff members and keeping peace among the staff. He also was involved with the finances of the site. I was not involved with the finances of the site or with things like potential law suits against the site.
OFW has grown and flourished because I was telling a different story that seems to be right. Neither the Peak Oil theory nor the Climate Change story is really right in my view.
Climate change is a popular story because indirectly, it forces people to figure out what they would do with much less energy supplies. In fact, we are losing energy supplies regardless of what we do because of affordability issues. The climate change story allows people to think that they can voluntarily leave fossil fuels. We are losing access to fossil fuels because of the way the self-organizing system works. The climate change story makes these problems seem modest and solvable. Thus, the climate story is popular with both politicians and educators.
4. I have read some of your current blog, ourfiniteworld.com, and I’m interested in your current views. Are they much the same as when you worked at theoildrum.com, or have they changed since then?
My views are basically the same, with many additions and refinements. I tried to explain a little bit of my current views above. My view of the timing keeps getting moved farther and farther back.
I’m still reading The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg. As a reminder, Heinberg claimed (in 2011) that the world’s economic growth was essentially over, and that in the future any “growth” would be an illusion created by nations fighting over an ever shrinking economic pie. A nation may have a quarter or two of growth, or some prolonged growth as they stole more of the pie from their neighbors, but taken as a whole there was no more economic growth left for the world, largely because Heinberg also thought there was no more oil left for the world. The problem or course is how do you explain China?
It’s a lot easier to brush away claims of “growth” in the Western world, growth has been anemic (although still positive) for the last decade and a half since the Financial Crisis. And although US GDP has growth by 20% or more in that time, most Americans don’t “feel” any different, and so it’s easier for Heinberg to claim (as he does earlier in the book) that this growth is all just an illusion funded by debt. But China is different. Growing their GDP at near double digits for 3 decades straight cannot be easily ignored, and the Chinese middle classes have definitely seen massive changes in their lifestyles as almost anyone today in China can afford more and better stuff than their parents could. Houses are larger, food is more varied, technology is cheaper and easier to get to, China continues to experience massive economic growth, and that’s a difficulty for Heinberg who claims that’s impossible.
The first thing he does is punts, like anyone who doesn’t like the outcomes of China growing economically, Heinberg claims China’s growth is really just a bubble ready to collapse. I’m not about to say that China’s economy is perfect or that it doesn’t contain massive real estate speculation, but I’ve been hearing “China’s economy is a bubble that’s about to collapse” for over a decade now and I’m wondering when people will stop claiming this. A bubble is no longer a bubble is it never pops. China’s economy does experience downturns like everyone else’s, but I haven’t seen any evidence that the whole thing has or will soon collapse, as the world “bubble” would imply.
Heinberg goes on to say that China’s growth is also unsustainable because of falling exports to the West, depleting resources like coal, too many old people with too few young people, and all the other stuff that people have been claiming will implode China any day now. My question for today is: when does this end? If China continues growing at a steady clip, at what point do people update their theories to fit the facts? At what point can we conclude that China’s economy is not a bubble and has the momentum to withstand all the same shocks and stresses as a Western economy? China’s economy has more than doubled since Heinberg wrote his book, and I’m curious to know if he would accept this as disproving his theory or if he’s pushed “the end of growth” date back like so many pushed back “the end of oil.”
Now again, I’m not saying China or its economy is perfect. The Chinese Communist party is a totalitarian nightmare committing genocide in its own boarders and threatening war outside of them, the Chinese economy has vast structural problems that the government papers over, Chinese demographics are not ideal for a growing economy and there is no easy solution to any of these. But I don’t think China is going to collapse any time soon, I don’t think it’s economy is just a bubble, and I think people have been claiming the Chinese Sky is Falling for far too long without ever admitting that they are divorced from the actual facts.
The word for “preach” in English comes from the word “proclaim” in Latin. It did not necessarily have religious connotations in that language, you could proclaim just about anything. And yet today the word “preach” in invariably tied to a specific type of proclamation who’s connotation cannot be separated from the word. “Don’t preach at me,” “he’s preaching to the choir,” preaching connotes a way of speaking that accepts no argument and engenders no debate. What is preached is correct (as believed by the preacher), regardless of whether you like it.
That’s why it’s amusing how many philosophers I’ve seen who are just preachers and not, you know, philosophers. Not all of them mind you, some philosophers are ready willing and able to dive into the weeds of actually proving their conclusions (or at least trying to). But I’ve been to church enough times to know when I’m being preached at, so the proliferation of dime-store philosophers online are to me no more worthwhile than the doomsday preachers on the street corners.
Today’s preacher de jure is whoever the hell wrote this which was linked to me as a “compelling argument” in favor of utilitarianism and effective altruism. It includes this lovely passage:
You know what? This isn’t about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain’s feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn’t even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.
I’m sure this sounded good as an imaginary debate in the author’s head, “FACTS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS” and all, but it gets to the type of anti-utility preaching that I’m surprised a supposedly utilitarian author is falling into. Anti-utility preaching is what I would define as the type of preaching done not for others but for oneself. Even if you are religious, even if you do think preaching can change people’s minds for the better, there are some preachers who have no desire to do that and just want to feel righteous by screaming at all the “sinners.” These preachers aren’t changing minds, they aren’t being productive in any way, and in fact are clearly driven by vanity, which most Christians and other religions think is a sin. In the same respect, if the utilitarian who wrote the above passage were really serious about changing minds, they should probably have had the self-awareness to realize that this method isn’t effective and is probably just turning more people off of their philosophy because they’re being a dick.
Just for fun, this leads me to a thought experiment: effective altruism of the kind this person is advocating for tries to use a kind of “ethical calculus” to calculate the exact goodness or badness of any action, and thus the correct action is the one that maximizes goodness and minimizes badness. Is it worth mutilating a child in order to perform an experiment which will cure cancer? Add up the goodness and badness of each scenario and find out that yes, that is perfectly valid. Even stranger, is it worth killing one person to cure everyone’s hiccups forever? Strangely enough yes, yes it is, this utilitarian preacher reasons that the tiny amount of badness caused by a hiccup, multiplied by *everyone* is greater than the amount of badness from killing of a single person.
So let’s go a tiny bit further, if we accept that effective altruism is truly the best morality, then it must also be true that goodness is maximized by more and more people becoming effective altruists. This follows logically from the fact that effective altruists are going to be better than other folks at making “the right” choices and therefore increasing goodness and decreasing badness with their actions. So in keeping with the hiccup example above, decreasing the number of effective altruists in the world will decrease the amount of goodness and so there must be some reduction in effective altruists that adds up to being worse than murder on the balance of goodness and badness in the world.
Therefore I can confidently state that by its own logic this article is worse than murder. It tangibly reduced my desire (if there ever was any) to be an effective altruist just so I don’t become associated with people like the writer, and it probably did the same to most people that read it. The author can take a nice warm bask in their own vanity, while feeling happy that they got to preach to the sinners on the internet. No minds were changed, no one was “saved,” but the preacher felt damn good doing it and isn’t that really what’s important?
Final addendum, I just looked it up and it seems Eliezer Yudkowsky was the author of this trash. But I don’t feel like rewriting the above post to include that fact so I’ve tossed it here at the end.
I spoke more with my friend about The End of Growth by Richard Heinberg. As a reminder, the book posits that (after 2011) economic growth is no longer possible in our world. My friend opined that it would be better for everyone if companies were incentivized to focus on sustainability instead of growth.
I think this focus on sustainability is true and necessary, but here’s my thought: sustainability is an economic externality, and if we want it we must make taxes or laws to encourage it. We already do in some cases, my town has a minimum size of lawns for houses, the reason being that we don’t want to tear up all the trees and pave over all the grass in pursuit of houses. The trees and grass are considered an externality, if the housing market had no rules then for many companies it would be more profitable to build bigger homes and more homes on the same size lot, with no trees or grass at all. The grass especially is important however, as rain soaks into it, and if you pave over the grass then that rain just runs downhill to somewhere else. If all of the city was paved over, the lowest elevations would be flooded with every rainstorm. If that happened then one of two things would have to happen: either the city would have to pay billions upgrading the storm drains (essentially privatize profits and socialize loses for the housing industry) or the lower elevation areas would quickly become the poor slums where people had to abandon their flooded houses in every rainstorm.
So we already in some cases make laws dealing with sustainability and externalities, you can’t build whatever you want in a national park because we’ve decided that those need to be sustained for future generations. Now the problem is that not everyone agrees on what is good sustainability and thus what should be taxes or forbidden by law. A coalition of YIMBYs and housing moguls in my city are trying to change the law to eliminate lawn minimums, saying they prevent the construction of more housing. I’d say I agree with them on the balance, but sustainability advocates have their own point: what about all the trees and all the rain? Shouldn’t we have a city that isn’t baked by the sunlight and not flooded in every storm?
To that same point, sustainability taxes/laws have been proposed in many other ways, but they always come with tradeoffs. A carbon tax encourages us not to increase CO2 levels, but what about the working poor who can no longer afford to drive to work? Access to a car is very closely linked to upward mobility, because if you can only work in jobs you can walk or bus to then your options are severely limited. We can also put taxes on plastic to discourage single-use waste that is trashing our oceans, but is taxes on our plastic use worth the hit that would be taken by modern biology and chem labs, some of which are researching the very medicines we needed during the last pandemic and will need again during the next one? Everything in a modern bio or chem lab is single use in order to meet very strict standards of reproducibility by preventing contamination. The lack of single-use plastics would either require us to use more expensive alternatives (single-use glass) or require us to relax our standards (multi-use glass where we accept that molecules and biologics from a previous experiment won’t always be removed by the cleaning process).
Sustainability requires tradeoffs, it’s something we should strive for but we need to understand and be mindful of those tradeoffs. Companies and people will always be pushed by economic forces, if there was a massive carbon tax I wouldn’t own a car, and if there was a single-use plastic tax then my lab might not be have money to function.
Streams of Consciousness 