I remember through the 1970s, we were meant to run out of oil, soon. In fact, as long as I can remember we have been running out of oil, soon.
Instead, oversupply is such that the benchmark for US oil fell below zero for the first time ever a couple of days ago. That is, the share market suggested oil couldn’t even be given away because it was in such oversupply.
There is no shortage of oil despite more than 7.6 billion people on planet Earth, and so many vehicles powered by it.
Prices have collapsed, because despite all the pumping from ‘Mother Earth’ since I was a child, there is still more. Because of the pandemic, global demand, not supply, has fallen dramatically. In fact, the worldwide supply glut has created a worldwide shortage of storage space for oil.
The headlines read:
Oil futures collapsed to below zero for the first time ever
Yet still we have movies by famous Americans claiming an imminent shortage because:
Too many human beings are using too much, too fast …
That’s according to the latest Michael Moore movie entitled ‘Planet of the Humans’, released earlier this week, which was about the same time oil couldn’t be given away.
The movie is long and a bit tedious and laments our so-called ‘addiction’ to not only oil, but also coal. Yet it is different, because it also effectively shows up ‘renewables’ as something of a scam, if their objective is long term energy security and sustainability.
Surprisingly for Moore, the movie looks beyond the popular to explain that whether solar panels or wind turbines: both are built using ‘fossil fuel’ infrastructure.
In the movie, Moore interviews a technician who explains how silicon is mined and then processed in very hot furnaces with coal. And that this is what solar panels are actually made of – silicon and coal!
The qualities of cement and steel consumed in the construction of a single wind turbine are also detailed.
The new Michael Moore movie also shows us electric cars fuelled by a power grid based on 95% coal.
So, is electricity from coal better than oil, and how could we possibly still have any of either of them? Since I was a young girl at the beach, these type of documentaries have explained we are running out of both.
I am also reminded of how the prices of various natural resources has tended down over the past few decades. It was in the early 1980s that Julian Simon famously betted Paul Ehrlich that the price of Cooper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten would fall. And they have.
Julian Simon explains why in his book The Ultimate Resource published in 1981. Yet back in the early 1980s, and still today, the conventional wisdom has claimed we would all be undone by resource scarcity. Simon explains that our notions of increasing resource-scarcity ignores the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices because of innovation.
Another book, ‘The Future and Its Enemies’ written by Virgina Postrel and published in 1999 puts more context around the notion of innovation. Interestingly Postrel explains why government regulation may only be a problem when it limits innovation. Further, Postrel suggests notions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ in politics are some what meaningless. She suggests the more significant battles will be between the values of a type of person she refers to as the ‘dynamists’ versus the ‘statists’. Quoting from an interview some time ago:
In the book, I talk about the sort of core values of dynamists versus stasists. The core values of dynamists are – it’s really about learning. It’s about discovery. The idea is we don’t really know the best way of doing whatever, and that requires a lot of experimentation, trial and error learning, competition, criticism. It’s a messy process, but it’s the process through which we discover better ways of doing things, whether that’s in business, technology, or the way we live our everyday lives.
On the stasis side, there’s sort of two competing or two complementary ideas rather. One is the ideal of stability – that the good society is the society that doesn’t change. And the other, which I associate with sort of technocratic stasis, is the idea of control – that someone needs to be in charge to set us on the right path and to decide centrally what that will be.
How might this pandemic show the need for regulation and cohesion, while allowing innovation?
That oil prices are at unprecedented lows must be upsetting established world orders? I hope so. Then again, I’m a dynamist.
It is a fact that there has never been so many people on planet Earth and that we live during a time of great wealth but also great uncertainty. Our times perhaps provide unique opportunities for both Postrel’s dynamists and also the technocratic stasis.
In Australia and around the world, how much have our values changed in just the last two months? And yet we have perhaps more social cohesion, at least here in Australia? And many are looking for new rules of engagement, to provide some certainty.
As long as the rules created by the technocrats are clear, and there is still incentive, there is perhaps potential for great innovation: for us to innovate our way out of this pandemic. It should be possible through trial and error, spontaneous adjustment, and adaptation – even if we can’t travel, or party, or watch sport. In fact, there may be more time for thinking.
It is a fact that we can still innovate for a new and different future, and that the best things in life will still be free, even if the movie-makers keep telling us that we are running out of oil, soon.
In Noosa where I live, the sun is still shining, and it shines for everyone.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
You’ve barely aged since your youth.
As for Moore’s sudden revelations of the facts makes one wonder how those so blind to the obvious have ever been allowed to flourish for so long. One can but hope that Moore’s Law will come to fruition after this Moore has publicly disgraced those prominent con men, and dare I say, con women in the EU.
I’ve read that some economic ignoramuses are laughing at the demise of the oil price in the belief that it will inspire more green energy. Obviously, they have little, or no idea in fact, that the high oil prices only gave their green dreams a tiny sparkle of life, all be it that they still need taxpayers’ money to make their dreams come true.
> “My little sister and I enjoying the sunshine in Noosa back in the 1970”
Nobody’s that young !!
I’ve had sufficient time over the last few days to extract the core of Moore’s new film.
Yes, it’s too long and full of statements of the bleeding obvious that he pretends are relatively unknown facts and aspects of energy supply.
Yet it is so blackly pointed from the viewpoint of the zealous green optimist that I suggest the film will very quickly become base material for the memory hole.
I did enjoy McKibben grubbing around the question of 350.org’s funding sources. Similarly, Al Gore’s joint ventures with Middle East oil producers produced amusing verbal fantasies from him. And Moore even made a good joke: Gore joined with Sachman’s Blood to form a company called (Moore): Blood and Gore.
Finally, the film depressed me, yet again, on the issue of my own children’s optimism and enthusiasm. I have tried not to destroy their natural enthusiasm for improvement and of course they joined the green wave with most of their cohorts, albeit with some scepticism. The lies they have been constantly fed, and exposed by Moore’s film, will hurt them when they do understand it. As an example, the segment on the Earth Day concert disturbs me for them.
” Yet it is different, because it also effectively shows up ‘renewables’ as something of a scam, if their objective is long term energy security and sustainability.”
The #1 objective/KPI of ‘renewables’ is to prevent apocalyptic global warming aka climate change, climate disruption, emergency, droughts, floods, cyclones, hurricanes etc.
Energy security, and the golden calf of green belief, sustainability, are a distant second and unachievable without “returning to stable climate.”
Of course, no amount of solar panels can prevent anything, least of all “return the planet to a stable climate.”
Question: When we we ever see a Solar or Wind Powered plant making themselves! Answer: Never, because it can’t be done; FossilFuels are always needed at some stage(s) of any manufacturing, on top of that the portability of especially Diesel & Petrol make them uniquely useful for humans.
Thank you, Jennifer. I have not, as of yet, read Virgina Postrel’s ‘The Future and Its Enemies’, and I appreciate your introduction of it and the overview of dynamists and stasists.
Also, your comments about Michael Moore’s YouTube video–“The movie is long and a bit tedious and laments our so-called ‘addiction’ to not only oil, but also coal.”–will likely keep me from watching it.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
Just filing this link here:
https://stopthesethings.com/2020/04/24/jobs-freeze-americas-wind-solar-industries-crushed-by-covid-19-100000-sacked/
And a comment in its thread: “The law of unintended consequences. Morrison (Australian PM) collapses our economy to ward off a virus and eliminates a bunch of parasites at the same time.”
There has been some insight comment on the thread following a link to this post at one of my Facebook pages, including relevant comment from Prof David South who won a bet against Julian Simon. The cheque was written by Simon to South for US$1,000 on 27th March 1997.
https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.marohasy
Also, thanks so much to Charles Rotter for reposting this at WUWT:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/24/not-running-out-of-oil-or-sunshine/
And the thread includes a link to this great article:
https://insuspectterrane.com/2016/05/25/the-petroleum-age-has-just-begun/
Some text worth quoting:
“… over the many intervening years since then, the actual known reserves have increased, even though production did peak at that time and that volume remained the top for many following years.
There are many reasons for this apparent discrepancy, not the least of which is increased fuel efficiency in transportation which has improved continually since the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo.enhanced recovery
Another reason is better and better oil and gas recovery techniques including secondary recovery techniques applied to oil and gas fields which were on the decline already but which were rejuvenated.
This in no way invalidates King Hubbert’s prediction which was based on the engineering capabilities of 1956 – not 1986, or 1996, or even 2006, and on a fundamental premise in the understanding of petroleum geology, which has since been made an obsolete consideration in oil and gas recoverability.
Hubbert knew that a ‘reserve’ is the proven, recoverable volume of a resource, and in the case of petroleum refers to the recoverable volume of oil or gas from the total volume within a reservoir. At the time of his prediction the best that technology could achieve was about 30% of the total known resource in the reservoirs. By the 1970s, enhanced recovery methods had increased ‘reserves’ (not the resources) and extended the lives of those same reservoirs that Hubbert had predicted would begin to deplete by 1970 with the result that production would continue for decades – which it did.
That seemingly rosy picture of increased reserves through technology notwithstanding, oil and gas producers, by 2006 knew that the reservoirs were, indeed, and finally, becoming depleted and, as energy providers, they were looking at after-oil strategies….
Now fast-forward one decade to 2016. The petroleum industry is completely different than it was a decade earlier; the global geopolitical framework which had prevailed over the previous 50 years has been turned on its head; the entire outlook for the world’s energy and economic future is now better than ever. To the benefit of all humanity, abundant, affordable energy, the very cornerstone of modern (post-1750) civilization will continue into the next century, at least, with no need for expensive alternative, and unreliable energy sources.
This change of fortune has proven to be the scourge of the very active and long-lived anti-capitalistic cabal of civilization haters currently operating under the naive slogan: ‘Leave it in the Ground’, and, particularly, of that most willfully ignorant and vile of the various species of post-modern environmental activists – the fractivist. [end of quote]
“I remember through the 1970s, we were meant to run out of oil, soon. In fact, as long as I can remember we have been running out of oil, soon.”
One would assume that a lady old enough to remember the end of the 1970’s should remember the 1980’s as a decade that got off with a bang as the Energy Crisis morphed into the Oil Glut.
Even the most idiotic of post-modern environmentalists have opposite numbers in the broad spectrum of idiocracy, and you , alas , seem to be gunning for a place among them.
****
Russell,
Thanks for your comment.
During the 1970s, I progressed from age 7 to 17, with most of that time spent at a Presbyterian all-girls boarding school. I was basically accepting, or at least trying to be accepting, of their news and their stories.
It is the case that through the 1980s I was first at University and then in Africa, and my daughter was born at the end of that decade. That was a very different decade for me.
I was free of the institution and exploring the world for myself.
I was busy with natural history, extraordinary adventures to the most remote locations, and falling in and out of love.
But tell me: what might I believe if I had been born a decade later and believed the mainstream news from that period?
Cheers, Jennifer
Hi Jen,
I watched that through and it basically came to some conclusions that I’ve been banging on about for years.
Such as calling the most “manufactured” and environmentally nasty products, with very minute operational lives, “renewables”. The name ironically fits them, as they do need constant renewal.
I am once again recalled to Ben Elton’s “This Other Eden”, with the goodies and baddies all in partnership, behind the curtain of lies.
Hi Bob Tisdale, watch it mate. If you’re like me , you will be very surprised at the SCALE of some sins.
Yes we’re not going to run out of oil. As I see it, real “oil” is actually a compound that seeps out from deep in the core of the earth. As this compound travels upwards, it is contaminated by organic matter and because of this, the compound is considered as fossil fuel. Yes I do understand that coal, peat etc. are from fossilized remains of vegetative matter but real oil is light brown or dark yellow, and contains very little impurities like sulphur, oxides and other metallic particles etc. As long as earth exist, this girl will be around but if we tapped much more than it ozzes out naturally, then production will be slower.