Discussion > Post-oil civilisation?
In the sixteenth century, a number of British admirals were worried that supplies of oak for building warships would have run out within one or two hundred years.
I can't think of other examples where the depletion of a resource was foreseen but I'm sure there must have been many.
Martin A
The elephant in the room is not growth or energy use but population increases. It's not a popular issue with greens because it's not something that they can blame on westerners.
And the solution is faster not slower development, developed countries populations are static or reducing immigration excluded, once all countries are developed there will be no more population growth.
Breath of Fresh Air
"Tits with ponytails" - yeah that is about the intellectual level I expect from you. Murphy gives you a physics lesson and you are the dunce in the back row making farting noises under your armpit.
Raff
Michael hart, SandyS
The problem with your Chinese scientists is that research scientists and research engineers are a small group resting on top of an intricate pyramid of 7 billion people. Most of those are kwpt busy trying to keep the pyramid functioning at a cost of 87000 barrels of oil per day.
How long that can last is an open question, but there is a time limit. If a replacement is not found in time the pyramid collapses and the survivors go back to scrabbling in the dirt.
Entropic man
TinyCO2 seems to have upset Raff and I don't think it's the tits with ponytails that did it.
splitpin
A rather silly question, EM, and it is good to see I am not the only one to point that out. On the whole, I think Mike Jackson has it right; we have no way of knowing what innovations there will be in the future, so why try to predict what the conditions will be like in 10 years, never mind when the oil or gas might run out?
For some obscure reason, there is a growing trend of thought that humans have reached the pinnacle of development, and it is going to be all downhill from now on. This thinking has occurred in the past, when the head of the patent office in the 19th century resigned as he felt that everything that could be invented had been invented; and, in AD200, Tertullian wrote: “We are burdensome to the world; the resources are scarcely adequate for us.”
Yet the progress continues unabated; a little over 20 years ago, my first computer (a “palm-top”) had a memory of 8kb, now, my camera has a small chip with a memory of 64Gb. My first desk-top had a 100kb hard-drive (“More than you will ever need,” I was confidently assured), with less than 1kb RAM; while it ran at a hitherto unheard of speed, yet to call it “pedestrian” at present rates would be to insult pedestrians.
On the energy front, engines, however they are fuelled, are becoming more and more efficient – a family car with the 1.5 litre engine of today could knock the pants off the 6, 8 or even 12 litre racing cars of the 1930s, without the driver breaking sweat. Boiler which burned many tonnes of oil or coal (or cubic metres of gas) to heat a home now do the same job with considerably lower consumption – aided, in no small part, by increasing insulation. Thus, energy consumption will no doubt decrease yet more, and continue to decrease. On probably all fronts, the world at the beginning of this century would have been utterly inconceivable to those at the beginning of the previous century, as their world was to those at the turn of the 19th, and as the turn of the 22nd century will be to us.
No, EM, your desire to provoke predictions of doom and gloom will not work with me, nor, I am glad to see, with almost everyone else. All the indications are that there will be oil, coal and gas aplenty for our grandchildren and their grandchildren. Why put a block on any future development by listening to the nay-sayers that are infesting the mainstream media?
Check out this site: http://conservativewoman.co.uk/david-keighley-climate-change-alarmism-another-obsession-unaccountable-elite/ to gain a good indication of quite what is behind this utterly artificial panic about the weather.
Radical Rodent
RR
In the early 90s I was a director of a computer graphics company that did a little hardware assembly on the side.
The 486 processor was cutting-edge technology and we nearly threw an office party the day our supplier offered us — gasp! — 800Mb hard drives at £1 a meg!!.
This thing I'm using now cost me less than half that and has a 500Gb drive in it. Factor in inflation ...
splitpin
Raff is almost certainly an expert in making farting noises with his armpits, a skill I never mastered and which I grew out of when I was 12. It's good to have an area of expertise even if that is all you can rise to. However he has a way to go yet before he can reach TinyCO2's intellectual level which is probably why personal abuse is the best he can do.
Mike Jackson
Mike Jackson
During the 1970s I was a Component Test and Reliability Engineer. DRAMs were not that old and very unreliable for all sorts of reasons, us reliability-test engineers had what looked like employment until we retired. When we received the first samples of 64K Drams we weren't allowed to test them; the bosses wanted to take them round to potential customers to show how cutting edge we were.
Within 10 years the Japanese had solved virtually all the problems, we all moved onto other things within another 5 years. Then the UK electronics manufacturing industry virtually disappeared. At various I have worked for Ferranti, ICL. Plessey and GEC/Marconi. (sometimes without changing office and payroll number!).
SandyS
SandyS - I sometimes have wondered if there is still any electronics industry in Britain.
My recollections, nearly all from the sidelines:
- Ferranti: Taken to the cleaners by some yank shysters - bought a US defence company, handed over millions for it, and then found that all its lucrative defence contracts were a just work of imaginative fiction. Shortly after, I drove past its headquarters in Bracknell - all boarded up.
- ICL: Formed as a merger of ICT with its 1900 mainframes and EE with its IBM look-alikes. (Merging of computer companies almost never works out as hoped - instead of two companies with problems you get one company with all those problems and lots of additional problems due to incompatibility of product ranges). ICL faded away as the market for its 2900 mainframes withered away. Finished up being bought by Fujitsu.
- GEC/Macaroni. Deserved to disapear if only because of the British casualties in the Falklands due to the failure of the Nimrod project. Weinstock had always been very frugal but, as soon as he departed, the management went on a buying spree like Viv Nicholson and bankrupted the company.
- Plessey - Not sure about Plessey - split up and bits were shared out between GEC (which then went tits up itself) and British Aerospace?
Martin A
The problem with your Chinese scientists is that research scientists and research engineers are a small group resting on top of an intricate pyramid of 7 billion people. Most of those are kwpt busy trying to keep the pyramid functioning at a cost of 87000 barrels of oil per day.
How long that can last is an open question, but there is a time limit. If a replacement is not found in time the pyramid collapses and the survivors go back to scrabbling in the dirt.
Oct 23, 2014 at 5:13 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
EM - As I said ( I think it was me who said it) stop worrying yourself silly - it's just not your problem. And the problem will be very different from how you perceive it . It does not work the way you see it. There will not be a day when the last barrel of oil is brought up.
We lack the imagination to see what things will be like, even within our lifetimes, let alone on longer timescales. So although it's interesting to talk about how things might be, let's not kid ourselves that we can sketch out the solutions our descendents will work out.
Martin A
Check the figures - the energy intensity of economic productivity ( kWh/$) has been falling for over 125 years.
Glebekinvara
Martin A
Plessey Telecoms went to GEC/Siemens then Siemens. That part withered on the vine as the Internet took over communications. Not sure what happened to the defence arm after the Siemens GEC carve up, and the other odd bits.
IT was Plessey (or ex-Plessey) engineer who developed the Hawkeye system for Cricket
Sadly, because to survive as a nation you have to make stuff, I ended up working for DHL.
SandyS
Is it just me or are the codes required to confirm posting just undecipherable, my last posting took three goes.
It looks like another disaster hit humanity (it the eyes of disaster mongers and others crossing bridges which may not actually exist)
SandyS
Captcha does seem to take the P from time to time.
TinyCO2
SandyS - DHL always seemed to know what it was up to. I had interactions with them a couple of times - once giving a presentation to their top management in Brussels on a study they had commissioned, another time installing an X.25 switch at their data centre near the Hammersmith flyover while on a sabbatical from my regular job. Don't they do all the parcels post in Germany now? The sooner they take over from Chronopost (spits on floor) in France, the better.
Martin A
Martin-A, Sandy S, I can tell you about one part of the old Plessey, PRP Optoelectronics, that makes LED displays for aircraft and other specialist applications. It was taken into a management buy-out, one of whom is my father, now retired.
By a strange quirk of fate, the company is officially opening their new site, today, in Swindon. My father and mother have been invited down for the ceremony.
michael hart
michael hart
We've drifted slightly off topic,. Good news I read a headline somewhere, perhaps BBC, that UK manufacturing output was now higher than in the 1970s. I'm not sure how that was measured.
Of all the companies I worked for Plessey seemed to me to be the most innovative.
SandyS
Saw some sick making stuff on French TV this morning, bureaucrats with their grandchildren and everyone smiling. Presumably celebrating the new deal which will see Entropic man's dream and others nightmare come true in 2030.
Not sure the energy efficiency target is meaningful, as has been pointed out, energy efficiency improves without political intervention.
SandyS
"energy efficiency improves without political intervention" - but it (and other things like environmental protection) improves much faster with that intervention.
Raff
Oct 23, 2014 at 6:05 PM | Registered CommenterRadical Rodent
"..and, in AD200, Tertullian wrote: “We are burdensome to the world; the resources are scarcely adequate for us.”
I think there is quite reasonable evidence that the end of the Roman empire was perhaps due to resource limiations ie "Peak Wood" and similar resources. ie http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5594
I'm a bit of a peak oiler still myself and do think there are reasonable discussions to be made about resource usage. The thing is the free market is still probably the best arbiter of any potential issues. As pointed out here, it is impossible to predict what potential problems you may see even a decade down the line so even if you are positive thay will occur the best thing to do is probably wait until they actually do. There is plenty of evidence that mankind can mobilise and coordinate very rapidly when the right conditions are present. Just think of something like WW2 and the Manhattan project. We can't even build a new nuclear power station now in the time it took to invent and use the first bomb.
Rob Burton
"the free market is still probably the best arbiter" - Would you call the oil and gas markets "free markets"?
Raff
They are as free as they can be, within the constraints of national and international regulations – indeed, they often react in ways contrary to the wishes of the national and international regulators, which really upsets them and their NGO masters (though perhaps of benefit to the general population, which could be why the masters get upset).
Methinks that is not how you see it, though.
Radical Rodent
Rob Burton
I think there is quite reasonable evidence that the end of the Roman empire was perhaps due to resource limiations ie "Peak Wood" and similar resources. ie http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5594
I'm sceptical that about that being the sole reason for the Decline and Fall. I have heard/read several theories. The one that I favour as the prime reason is a combination of over taxation leading to falling revenues as citizens gamed the system. This led to various problems including declining military and employment of barbarian mercenaries who liked the look of the wealth they saw. Emperors bumping each other off added to the government lacking direction.
Bear in mind that in the 19th century the citizens of Paris were heated by wood burning, there's no reason to suppose other French cities weren't heated in the same way. In rural France any old building has massive beams of mature trees, plus many other wooden beams.
The French population in 1789 is estimated at roughly 28 million; by 1850, it was 36 million and in 1880 it was around 39 million.Wiki
Estimates of the population of the entire Roman Empire are
By the beginning of the 4th century, and the reign of Constantine, civil wars and foreign incursions had taken their toll. The number had grown again, likely to somewhere around 55 million, but the rate of growth had obviously slowed considerably. By this time too, a major shift in imperial power was taking place from the west to the east. The population of Rome was in decline and Byzantium (or Constantinople) was on the rise.
http://www.unrv.com/empire/roman-population.php
So the population of France was 75% of the entire Roman Empire in the 4th Century AD. I have never heard of peak wood for France in the 19th century. Although I'd be interested if you have evidence proving otherwise.
SandyS
How about Easter Island, did they not have resource issues?? Quite hard to tell what caused the seeming decline in civilisation for a long period, perhaps cold weather was a major contributor.
Rob Burton
Raff, the success rate of tits with ponytails telling the rest of us how to live is very small. The sort of problem he is talking about needs to be experienced before it's acted upon. You forget we have had generation after generation of doom mongers telling us that our wicked ways will destroy us. It may one day be true but we refuse to act like it's happening now. We don't beleive you any more. If you want to make an impression, you have to gang together and start living in the way you think is possible. Don't wait for us, just do it! But you won't. You don't see why you shouldn't have your share of the goodies if we're not all going to join you with sack cloth and ashes. Well it's not going to happen. What are you going to do about it other than whinge at us? You're not even whinging at those who care so little about the issues they're not prepared to debate them.
The elephant in the room is not growth or energy use but population increases. It's not a popular issue with greens because it's not something that they can blame on westerners. You need to grow up and stop asking for utopia. We won't give it to you. We like energy more than we're scared of your badly predicted future and until you can come to terms with that you'll be wasting your time. Instead of pretending that current renewables are fine, invent something better. If you can't do that shut up and stop boring people with your personal fears and ideals.