Atlantic: What if we never run out of oil?

the oil has made the Gulf unable to support life top and bottom.

Corexint itself is lethal to sea life at .86 parts per million. So JUST the Corexit 2,000,000 gallons pollutes 208,333,333 gallons of water, 200 times. Now add to that the dispersant's effect on breaking down the oil which is lethal to shrimp at 50 ppm, 0.006675 of an ounce per gallon.

The additive and cumulative effect is huge.

It is impossible to exaggerate the BP oil disaster.

 

I am not sure how you would do an attribution study to find that the oil spill killed the small creature. If you look at satellite pictures you can easily see that big dead zone in the gulf, that feeds fertilizer and peasticides into the gulf. Its about the size of the state of new jersey. You know the state that wants to add a $100 plug in tax, so that we use more oil. Look at time lapse of the gulf coast over the last 100 years and you will see widepread destruction of the wet lands. Sure some is natural, but a great deal is caused by changing the coarse of water with canals and levies, and some even more direct policies of filling them in. If you can attribute that little creatures death to the oil spill, and not those other things, I'm game to look at the research. I was cautioning not to blame the oil for some of the more mass environmental destruction. I am of course horrified that bp did this from shear greed, and that MMS, that we knew was a problem at least 10 years ago, seemed to collude with bp and Halliburton to throw caution to the wind and just drill.

I can see the smoke stacks that were based on the idea in the 70s that we were running out of oil and natural gas quickly and we needed to switch to coal. I think anything you can do to make people understand these things will get more expensive, but will not run out tomorrow, will help not embrace the extremely stupid policies of oil price controls and regulations forcing coal or nuclear to supply baseload power. The damge of the scares makes people act irrationally and buy big SUVs when they find out those politicians were lying to them again.

I would call it a big lie that human population needs to contract. We have heard that crap since malthus, and every time the people claiming it have been proved wrong.

Oil and natural gas will get more expensive. We need to get rid of coal pollution in a quick manner, say 20 years. Natural gas ccgt power can help do that in an economical fashion. At the same time we should be building renwables. We don't need coal to gasoline plants, we don't need price controls, we should have sensible policies that bring out the best in people. How about insulate your home and get an efficient natural gas heater, instead of wear a coat inside?

 

I wasn't much caring about a study, are assessing blame, just mentioning a possibility and advising caution.

This is what I call the snow forecast fallacy. If weather forecaster predict snow 20 days in a row, and it doesn't, does that mean it will never snow again? Predictions failed or not, have no effect on the real world. Someone claiming that we would be overpopulated in 1950, does not affect whether we will be overpopulated in 2050. The simple fact is we are currently growing exponentially in population. This is impossible to sustain. One only needs math to prove that. At some point we will need to stabilize our population, or it will be done for us. The question then becomes what is a sustainable level for that? Cheap energy has been allowing us to grow with abandon, and its end could well leave us at an unsustainable level. Studies of other species show that populations tend to overshoot their carrying capacity.

 

What if people predict doom and starvation at 1 billion people, then at 2 blillion people, then at 4 billion people. Every time human ingenuity found technology to break this impenetrable barrier.

Do you think we need to go back to 1 billion? Who chooses who lives or dies. Normally there is some racism and classism. I think the last one was some rich California professors that decided people in India and China were just going to have to die. No it wasn't that asians were inferior, it was simply math, they were going to starve. Malthus proved with his math, that 7 billion people were impossible, and poor people just should not be allowed to have stuff. What do you think when you read malthusian math? Was he right and the people telling us how many people are alive are lieing? By the way a much smaller portion of the population is at risk of starvation today, than there were when malthus proved his math.

Snowfall falicy please.

If your minister says it the appocolypse coming next year because your a sinner, and he fails, do you believe him next time. This has been going on for over 200 years, and people still believe that man is doomed. Its no different from religion.

If you toss a fair coin and it comes up heads 20 times, the odds are still 50% that it will come up tails the next time. If you toss the coin for over 200 years and its heads every time, and you are predicting tails, odds are your theory that it was a fair coin are wrong.

In which case if you predict snowfall where it never snows, where is the fallacy? If the population turns vegatarian, and uses 70% renewable power, what is the population limit? I'll give you a clue, much much higher than today. We don't even need a technological breakthrough to sustain a higher population.

 

As long as you understand there is a limit. We can have a long fruitful discussion about where it is, or even where we want it to be.


p.s. You do yourself a disservice by dismissing they math though; it can be fun. How many years at current growth rate before humans are the sole biomass on the planet? How many before we outweigh the planet? How many before we fill the space inside the orbit of Pluto? Outweigh the galaxy? Can stretch from here to the Andromeda galaxy? Fill the space from here to Andromeda?

 

Everything I have read on population growth does not have it growing exponentially. The rate of increase has been decreasing for some time indicating a leveling off. Some uncertainty on when the leveling off inflection occurs (if we even get there), but it is not exponential.

The forecast fallacy concept is valid, but whether it applies to the earth's population (and when) is not a given.

 

You have proved otherwise in this very thread.

 

You seem to be doing quite well at that impossible task.
There are 643,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water in the Gulf of Mexico.
2,000,000 gallons, evenly spread out would give you 1 gallon dispersant per 321,500,000,000 gallons of seawater or about .0003 parts per million.

Yes, it hurt the fish population, but even the articles you provide indicate while oyster stocks are down, they are not gone.
Stop hurting your own cause through exaggeration.

 

I'm getting 0.000003 ppm. The seawater concentration of Uranium is 1000 times higher.

 

And the oil with dispersant is 0.06 parts per million for the ENTIRE GULF OF MEXICO from ONE oil spill.

And it doesn't instantly dilute it moves in a killing wave of higher concentration, killing in its path.

This on top of the 10% hypoxic dead zone, growing by 10% per year, 1% total, this on top of the 4,000 other oil wells, all leaking crude into the Gulf, likely mixed with more Corexit.

This on top of already historically low shrimp, crab and oyster catches. The Gulf was already in steep decline.

 

Your innumeracy is showing. Or your calculator is still flaky.

No credit until you show your work.

(My work: 176 x 10^6 gallons (released oil + gas + dispersant) / (660 x 10^15 gallons water) = 0.0003 ppm)

 

Your numbers have credibility from what Google reports although there may be some variability:

• 176/660 x 10^(6-15) ~ .27 x 10^-9

Now if the oil and dispersants are biological or other ways concentrated, I would be interested. I've read scattered reports claiming 'clouds of oil' in some thermal layers but nothing that seems reproducible. But there are other, unaddressed assumptions:

• Gulf of Mexico is not a pond - there is a natural rate of exchange with the global oceans and we don't have that number, yet.
• The tidal flows alone will exchange water.
• Oil is digestible - there are microscopic critters that 'eat' it.
• Toxic substances tend to concentrate in the dead bodies - killed, they tend to sink and get trapped in the layers of mud and sediment.

Bring us core-sample analysis that show the event and subsequent years. Or bring us surveys that show concentrations of the released oil and dispersant. Heck, if the oil is concentrated enough, someone will be working on how to 'harvest it.'

Bob Wilson

 

This point is commonly overlooked. Unlike Prince William Sound and many other areas that have suffered major oils spills, the Gulf of Mexico (and Santa Barbara, and several other locations) have large amounts of natural hydrocarbon seepage. In the past decade, researchers have even found numerous underwater 'asphalt volcanoes'. This seepage, combined with warm habitats, have lead to considerable populations of microscopic critters that consume it. While they are not able to quickly handle huge concentrated releases such as the Deep Horizon catastrophe (3 to 20 years worth concentrated to one place and time) before the oil harms or slaughters other critters, they will eventually take care it. It doesn't need anywhere near full dilution across the entire Gulf before it is no longer a problem.

Note also that well over half the released 'oil' was really natural gas, still liquid at the ocean pressures of the wellhead, but more easily dispersed and metabolized than the heavy oil. The nastier heavy oil component was still a record catastrophe, but significantly smaller than the numbers quoted in this thread.

The 'dead zone' from inland runoff, and the destruction of shoreline habitat from development (which includes other oil operations) are far bigger problems.

 

I'm sure there is some physical limit, but I am a pilot, and can look out. We are not close to that limit. There are barriers at each level of technology, but the math mistakes always assume technology is stagnant. That only X of food will grow on Y acres of land, but haber bosche broke that with fertilizer, then we broke it again with the green revolution, making each hard limit, an easily passed soft one.

I have done mathematical models for extinction, I don't dismiss math, only mathusian math. There are two extremely bad assumptions, one that we have exponential population growth, and two that we have fixed food productivity. Both assumptions are constanly proved wrong.

I layed a trail for people to follow last sunday with a danish friend in the greenbelt. Denmark has 0% population growth, the US 1% per year, which is much lower than the 1800s. Any assumptions of constant exponential growth must get questioned here. How can denmark have people and no growth in population? Simple, people are breeding about as much as they are dieing, nothing forces fixed exponential growth. Both Denmark and north america are not growing rapidly. I asked my friend if they have anything like this in denmark? All the old growth got cut down long ago. It is only here because the wood was not as good as other areas to clear cut, and now it is protected. A second lesson, to keep things wild we need to protect them. This is inspite of the fact that metropolitan austin is growing fast. It has grown so fast that the population is higher than the entire state of maine. That is inspite of the weather, that people claim will be a disaster if it reaches the rest of the country with climate change. I hope the population stops growing soon, stil the Austin MSA is only the forth biggest in texas. It could be worse. We could look like dallas or houston, and have no wild places close in.

Education seems to be reducing population growth, and if you extrapolate the national trends, the near term peak should be around 9 Billion. These people should have less than half the risk of starvation as people in the 1960s. New technology though may raise the soft limit again.

 

Both population bomb and food limit have been proven correct sadly. The population bomb is indeed exponential, accelerating growth. The "green revolution" is an unsustainable oil based fertilizer eco disaster. One only need look at the 10% of the Gulf that is a dead zone from it. This is the once highly productive coastal shelf areas where the historic catches for food stocks are 50% of historical highs and declining. The hypoxic zone increasing because the "green revolution" is not sustainable.

As for the concentrations of the oil/Corexit toxic mix, think of it more like an atom bomb going off with the concentration of toxic oil/dispersant spreading like a wave in the ocean.

This bomb hits an already declining Gulf, it's ability to support life already down by 20%-30% based on 10% hypoxic zone and 50% decline in historic fisheries.

 

What percent of the available resources would you say we are using. Most numbers I have seen are around 50%. That is one doubling from an extinction event.

So you don't believe in fixed population growth, but you believe in fixed technology growth. Weird.

The first isn't an assumption, just an observation. And once again you are making exactly similar assumptions. Food productivity can not continue to increase forever. What percentage of the current increase in food production would you say is related to use of cheap energy?

Of course not. That is, in fact, exactly what people complaining about population growth are hoping for. And to the extent that that is happening, perhaps some claim can be taken by them for it.

 

I have no idea the actual number but it is very little. The US has about 0.5% the population density of Singapore or Hong Kong, so we are not running out of space. I thought we were when I was about 8 years old, but family trips cured me of that poor assumption. On energy use, the percent of wind, solar, and geothermal is extremely low. Unconventional fossil fuel, also very low. That leaves food, and most of the world is extremely inefficient.
Take this for what it is, I am a texan and a meat eater, but we have a problem with too much obesity here, not lack of food. We have starving people, because we are not getting the food to them.

Meat Production Wastes Natural Resources | PETA.org

1 lb of factory farm, grain fed meat takes 13 lbs of grain. You do the math on how much less land use would be needed to feed the world. The biggest famine in the 20th century was caused by Chinese politics, and politics is the number one cause for starvation today. This was not the case when we had 1B people, but .... then a lot higher percent of people were starving. Americans are obese, as are more and more of the Chinese.

No I said I don't believe in predictions of straight exponential population growth until there is massive starvation. That is a religious belief not a scientific one. There are natural reductions in population growth. A snapshot in the industrial revolution population explosion, does not mean it will never end. It is a completely non-scientific assumption, created from a small snapshot of history, and a great misunderstanding of populations. I also did not say fixed technology, I said the oposite. Technology makes any fixed idea of resources completely useless. What was it, "we will never be able to buy as much oil as we used in 1978 at any price". That seems to be wrong, for the very obvious reason that we can get unconventional oil. OR the big one from Erlich, India's population is not sustainable, the US should not give them food aid, because they will be dying at high numbers by 1980. This was at a time that there was hope that technology will help aleiviate starvation. Instead these neo-malthusians advocated starving india and building large numbers of coal power plants out of fear of running out of oil and food. Really awful policies out of fear. What if instead of the fear, people sided with the economists and said oil and natural gas will get more expensive in the future, so we should use less of them. In the 60s and 70s the coal pollution should have been already obvious, so maybe building many more coal plants was not the best plan. Starving india luckily did not happen, some good people, including americans helped them to grow more food for themselves, while the government continued food aid.

Why can't food productivity increase? It can't increase as fast people having 10 children a couple, but how many couples are having 10 children. Do we cut off charity, and tell people they should starve because they have too many children? Awful assumptions.

A friend posted this on his facebook to make fun of one of his friends, but hey its appropriate.

You can try to heal the world and have hope.
Or you can try rule the world with fear. Some claim these people have good intentions predicting catastrophe, fearmongering, because if we follow their policies the world will be a better place. IMHO the world becomes an ugly place when we give into this irrational fear. neo Malthus leads to hording the worst of politics. Further they ask us to suspend the scientific method, that if you subscribe to the theory, any predictions the theory has, should be ignored when they fail.

Here is the thing, and the big problem with the population catastophits. They want to use fear to force some really bad world government policies. Simply increasing wealth and education should naturally reduce population growth. We don't need to deny the Indians food or the Chinese power. We can try to put better sustainable policies in place where the environment is protected, and more renewables are built.

 

A cool chart of population growth and technology. No doubt this will disturb many of you neo-malthusians, but for those of us on the other side, you can see that population spurts happen with changes in technology, and then plateau until some governmental or techonological breakthrough happens. I'm sure in the semi-nomadic era, ehrlich would have claimed we can't get to 20 million people, the land just won't sustain it. Then we got the wheel, and pottery, and irrigation, and populations boomed.
Human Population through the Ages | EconoSystemics

 

Here are some agri opinions that will throw those too many people proponents make new excuses why we are not all starving. The estimation is world population will platau around 9 billion at around 2050, before it possibly starts rising again.

I used only the NYT and not cato, as I'm sure you won't trust cato.
A Hybrid Path to Feeding 9 Billion on a Still-Green Planet - NYTimes.com

wwf, Wth, how could they say we are not all going to starve to death. Read the report. We already have more than enough technology to grow food for a higher population, and do less environmental damage.

From Farm to Fridge to Garbage Can - NYTimes.com

If we could not feed 7 billion people, how could we be wasting so much food, and getting so fat?

Huh. Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World? - NYTimes.com

Fear of starvation and of running out of oil drives many poor policies. Let's look at the technology we already have available. and feed the world, while decreasing pollution at the same time.

That is the other problem, some are claiming we ran out of resources in 1980, while others want policies that will help us run out soon. I don't think you can fix the problem if you exagerate it to disaster, or pretend the current government policies are not making the problems worse.

 

What BP did was terrible. The resulting disaster and spill was terrible.
But the world did not end, so it is possible to exaggerate what happened.

WWII caused more environmental damage, IMO.

Mike