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The world once oil starts drying up.

Discussion in 'General' started by Pef, Aug 30, 2019.

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What do you think will happen once oil becomes scarce?

  1. Cover up

    17 vote(s)
    17.0%
  2. Rationing

    18 vote(s)
    18.0%
  3. Inflation

    46 vote(s)
    46.0%
  4. Write in.

    19 vote(s)
    19.0%
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  1. da3monh0st3d

    da3monh0st3d Эскапист

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    Just need to implement clacks :p.
    Fun fact, animal waste including humans' can actually be prepped and used as fairly effective fertilizer. In some cases, the effects are actually better than most artificial fertilizers.

    edit: Also rye is tastier than corn anyway (and more resilient), so who cares about corn?
     
    Last edited: Feb 1, 2023
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  2. Soupervan

    Soupervan Making the rounds.

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    Long before there's no oil left whatever governments can will lay their hands on it reserving it for military use- and possibly paramedic/firefighter/police as well.

    I assume there will be a war or two for said oil, might even turn into WW3 if we're particularly unlucky.

    There will be far far less importing and exporting which means countries that import food will suffer greatly.

    When the oil is near empty and it's revealed publicly farmers will likely start growing soybeans, corn and so on en mass to use as alternative fuels and oils but I can't imagine they'll be able to come close to meeting demand at first, and there might even be food shortages on top of the shipping problem as farmers move to the alternative fuel industry.
     
  3. evildice

    evildice (emotionally stable clown posse)

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    Safe assumption.

    There have been more than one or two oil-related wars already.
     
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  4. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    Given that the USA and Canada currently sit on the largest untapped petroleum reserves on Earth...

    I'd like to see 'em try.

    If we popped the cork, the USA could supply the world for the next 10 years at current consumption rates.

    Canada... less, mainly because jungle and/or ocean plants were the best for becoming oil and coal, and even during the Jurassic there wasn't a lot of either in Canada.

    When you tack on the 20+ in the middle-east, another 10-15 in accessible parts of the ocean... and the absurd amounts in Venezuela (go ahead, conquer Venezuela, the locals will thank you).

    We'll probably all have died of old age before it becomes a concern.


    The thing is, however? Oil consumption is not rising at the rate of population. As more people switch over to electricity for general purpose use, biofuels continue to improve, and synthetic lubricants and plastics have become competitive with natural... we're reaching the point where demands will start to decline in total, rather than merely in comparison to population.

    Even if exactly zero new technologies are developed, oil will be obsolete in the next forty or so years. In many ways, it already is... it's just is taking a while to update old infrastructure...
     
    Last edited: Feb 3, 2023
  5. Aaron Fox

    Aaron Fox That Crazy/Not-Crazy Guy

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    To be honest, we've got the technology to make an oil shortage so irrelevant that it ain't funny. The only real problem is getting it from the lab to the field, so to speak.

    The real problem is... people. More specifically, one specific group of people and a major problem that we're generally facing. The group we're going to be having oh god why so many problems with are the idiots with more ideology than sense. A fairly good portion of these people is more than willing to attempt to pull a The Division's Dollar Flu or LARP the backstory of the webcomic GENOCIDE Man. The former is scary, the latter is soul-crushing. That is why PRISM and other omnipresent surveillance programs have been showing up because people in power realize that those scenarios are possible and far more likely than you think.

    The problem we're facing is, quite literally, humans being obsolete. The current situation with automation is that only the most talented of the talented will have a job sooner than later; everyone else is superfluous. Oh, and that's the best-case scenario. Not likely case, best-case. We've already hit the snowball point for automation going in that direction, and it's not stopping. Between the fact that we've outright resisted accepting the fact that we need to specialize like ants, consider 'soft' science not science (when the reality is that its more akin to the strange, strange world of quantum physics), among other things, we're going to face a situation where Great Depression levels of unemployment are the low end. The only way to prevent complete disaster in that regard is literally dusting off Huey Long's Share Our Wealth program and giving it a few updates.
     
  6. da3monh0st3d

    da3monh0st3d Эскапист

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    I'm not particularly sold on that view. Humans have always been unnecessary, much like the rest of existence.

    And yet obviously we still want to exist anyway, else we'd be doing our best to correct that.

    Technical limitation isn't the sole reason for existence, as otherwise the industrial revolution wouldn't have been correlated with an explosion in population when a large part of its benefits was to make it possible to do much more with fewer.
     
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  7. Longtimelurker

    Longtimelurker I trust you know where the happy button is?

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    Malthusian Industrialism - civilization survives, but the screws are turned down on ordinary people to a horrifying degree
     
  8. Aaron Fox

    Aaron Fox That Crazy/Not-Crazy Guy

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    Sorry but, no, technological limitations are the reasons why things like slavery and serfdom existed. We've literally become the horse in the car analogy. That's a sad reality we must face in the end.
    Not really. The thing is that we've got the technology to produce synthetic petrochems; the problem is that the only real energy source for making that process viable right now is fission.
     
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  9. NuclearBird

    NuclearBird Lustful Sacraments Muted

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    The "problem" you are referencing is paradoxically the only truly "green" source of energy that can help civilization transition away from fossil fuels.
     
  10. Aaron Fox

    Aaron Fox That Crazy/Not-Crazy Guy

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    Petrochems are more than just fuel, mind you; it's plastics, medicines, and even fertilizers. Fission's (and fusion's) energy-to-weight ratio is immense, and people's resistance to it is why I said it's a problem.
     
  11. da3monh0st3d

    da3monh0st3d Эскапист

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    The steam engine was invented at several times in the past (and each time was largely ignored) and yet industrialization in many places occurred after slavery was already on the way out or gone. It wasn't a question of technical limitation, those places didn't cease to exist during the gap period. It was a question of social limitation/choices.

    Many societies never had anything even remotely similar to serfdom.

    In any case that wasn't even the point of my post.

    I really should've done the quotation thing to make my post clearer originally but alas I didn't.
    My point was that if humans only kept themselves around for the sake of some usefulness (whatever would that even be?) and nothing else, then the industrial revolution should've led to a reduction in global population since fewer would've been needed from then on. Since the state of obsolescence/unnecessariness/superflousness was never changed (the lack of fundamental need for existence also completely breaks utilitarianism and it's why so many argued to find some axiom for it to ignore the question) and yet population grew, then that obviously isn't the problem.

    I don't disagree with your conclusion as far as I understand it, but I do disagree with the way you reached it.
     
  12. Andy333

    Andy333 Versed in the lewd.

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    Like other people have said, we have the technology now to make oil. it's not very efficient and it's prohibitively expensive, but we could do it and if technology keeps getting better in thirty forty years, who knows how far were gonna get with batteries and nuclear fission. So I'm not worried about running out of oil or power, we have time for technology to get to where it needs to be. The problem i'm thinking is that transitioning to the renewable power is going to necessitate a significant life style change for most of the world and the sad truth is that while I would love to blame the resistance to making those changes solely on the rich and powerful, every time I order a brand new Iphone even though my old one stills works perfectly fine, I'm causing damage. I'm consuming more resources than I actually need which needs oil to manufacture, transport, build the plastic cover on it, to create the electricity to power it.

    And that's what I mean by significant life styles changes. You want the oil to last longer you either need to reduce the human population or people need to consume less. Specifically the first world needs to consume less and I'm not sure if we're willing to do that, but I'm pretty sure that there's a decent sized chunk of people who would much rather do the first option then the second one.
     
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  13. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    I mean, the rich and powerful could stop you from buying a new iPhone if they wanted. They won't, obviously, but it's important to remember that lifestyle changes could be enforced through top down societal changes. In fact, I'd say that's the only way to actually make it happen!
     
  14. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    Yeah, but I'm pretty sure all industry being devoted to producing jackboots and military parades would ultimately see greater overall environmental destruction than a few extra tons of plastic in landfills.
     
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  15. NuclearBird

    NuclearBird Lustful Sacraments Muted

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    I wouldn't count on any battery tech that isn't "liquid-form chemical energy storage", joke entirely intended.
    Nuclear is another matter entirely. I've said so in the past and swear by it every time; nuclear energy is the only viable way to sustain modern civilization even without the climate change narrative driving a civilizational guilt-trip party line.

    You'd be surprised at how destructive the production of batteries for all those fancy consumer electronics actually is, but especially for all those stupid EVs and assorted superfluous goods that technophiles wank themselves off to, in figurative and literal terms.
    Compared to that, some rubber, synthetic or latex, and fabrics and paper plus dyes is positively benign...
     
  16. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    I was more concerned with the depleted uranium armor and ammunition so lovingly employed by main battle tanks. Seriously. Uranium isn't near as radioactive as some people think, but its toxicity is pretty concerning.

    Plus all that diesel.

    And all the cool gizmos like radio towers powerful enough to kill birds that fly too close, sonar that can explode dolphins' brains, and whatever the fuck is used to make all the classified shit.


    I'm just saying that military dictatorships aren't any better for the environment than they are for the population.
     
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  17. NuclearBird

    NuclearBird Lustful Sacraments Muted

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    ...eh, a bit of Gulf War Syndrome never hurt anyone...

    I meant the crap in mass production for the civilian market, in all its planned obsolescence glory, stuff that is entirely superfluous outside of maximized consumer engagement.
     
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  18. evildice

    evildice (emotionally stable clown posse)

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    We have rich & powerful people preventing climate-saving changes, like actively spending money to block mass transit.

    So it's absolutely certain that top-down changes can be enforced, but I'm not convinced that bottom-up and peer-to-peer are not viable -- they're just currently being prevented.
     
  19. da3monh0st3d

    da3monh0st3d Эскапист

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    That first option leans into ecofascist narratives (which ought to be enough to disqualify the idea on its own) but similarly importantly as far as pollution and ecological impact goes, a small comparatively rich minority of the global population is responsible for most of it so a very localized reduction would be far more effective (or possibly the only actually effective take on it) than the oversimplified "there's too many humans" line used in the west and wouldn't be quite as wildly unethical (still pretty damn awful though).

    Moving on, the second option "degrowth" (of bad naming choices that relies on a very regional type of French...) is such an option which requires no genocides and might legitimately improve the living standards of many by simply giving up on "lucrative waste" as I'd call a lot of monkey-brained "numbers go up" GDP-inflation measures that are by any other rational observation often completely pointless or actively harmful.

    There's no reason to make that phone impossible to upgrade nor exceedingly difficult to repair besides the fact it's profitable (the ultraslim aesthetic they purposely popularized was a way to "justify" those flaws). Software (and so hardware) requirements? Their growth is artificially inflated by the fact that inefficiency is practically rewarded by new sales, so craftsmanship is thrown away hurriedly.

    I'm having a pretty hard time staying away from certain rules, which kind of make it hard to address the topic. But essentially, McDonaldization and Goodhart's law make for an awful mix.
    That's really only because of the myopic obsession with energy density. Aqueous-electrolyte batteries are far less damaging and for stationary applications are perfectly viable.

    Portable applications would suffer from the lack of density, but making it easy to charge-up relatively quickly (such as via batteries chemistries that don't explode or catch fire if they happen to charge up a bit too quickly) helps with that.

    For non-stationary and non-portable applications you quite often don't really need batteries much, for example: trolleybuses, trams and trains (all of which are mature technologies) could very well have means by which you can charge your equipment on the go, while requiring minimal on-board battery power thanks to pantographs.
     
    Last edited: Sep 9, 2023
  20. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    Are you under the impression the military isn't already one of the worst offenders?

    You can have bottom-up and peer-to-peer consumer choices, but things like infrastructure really do require big government.

    Someone has to tear down the highways and build high speed rail.
     
  21. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    No. But looking at one of the worst offenders and saying "I wanna do things that'll give them more power and excuses" just sounds suicidal to me.
     
  22. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    Why on Earth do you even think the military is needed for the government to restructure society to use less oil?

    The support structure needed for oil consumption is so unbelievably massive and government supported that it could just be turned off.
     
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  23. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    Because that's quite literally the only way to take away peoples' rights, freedoms, and ability to act on their own desires.

    Trying to force people to comply requires force. To do it on this level requires a lot of force, directed at one's own people.

    What you propose can only be accomplished with tyranny. At the very least, the tyranny to prevent the next election from seeing literally every member of the party pulling this shit permanently ejected from politics. They sure won't get voted in a second time.
     
  24. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    So first off, all oil-based infrastructure requires huge amounts of government support. Those roads and pipelines and refineries don't build themselves. Move public infrastructure investment away from private oil-based transportation and towards public electric transportation, boom, now people stop driving everywhere because the roads are shit and the trains are nice. That doesn't require any force at all.

    Gas stations are central locations that can be easily controlled. Simply tax the gasoline. If you went to the gas station and fuel was twice as expensive, you aren't going to stage an armed robbery. You'll just pay the new price or you'll start riding the train. No force required.

    Oh look all bridges now have a toll for cars. The train across the river is free though.

    People, also, are quite easily persuaded to have different desires. As long as they have food, water, shelter, and entertainment they'll accept pretty much anything. You seem to think that people will always want cars, but that's only because they need their cars to survive. Once that's not necessary they'll happily walk, bike, or take the train. None of that requires force.

    There's so so so many ways society can be rebuilt away from oil without anyone getting hurt.

    Instead we'll all die because the world burns while the oil runs out lol
     
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  25. evildice

    evildice (emotionally stable clown posse)

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    The infrastructure projects that I've seen halted by "top down" billionaire efforts recently were at the municipal and state level.

    Infrastructure can also be done at the federal level, of course, but it's not strictly necessary.

    And it's difficult for me to call a functioning democracy "top down".
     
  26. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    Yeah, because states and municipalities can be bullied by billionaires. That's why we need Big Government to bully the billionaires instead.

    Also, unless it's direct democracy and everyone is voting on every bill as a huge People's Congress (which actually would be cool as fuck), I'd call it top down. Certainly not peer-to-peer or bottom-up.
     
  27. TanaNari

    TanaNari Verified Dick

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    Perhaps. But the ways you're describing all more or less immediately result in the people doing it voted out of office, and the new guys promising to undo it getting in.

    And the second you stop allowing elections that allow this to happen. You're now a coup and you've started a civil war.

    Freedom.

    Control.

    Pick one. If you're lucky, you might even get it.


    Alternately- and this is what we've been doing, because it's working (albeit slowly)- advance technologies, find solutions that are easily embraced rather than forced upon you, and improve everything as a whole by building everyone up, rather than tearing everything down.

    We're about halfway to petroleum independence right now. We'd be a lot further if the 60s hadn't poisoned so many people against the idea of nuclear power, but most of those people are dead now and a revitalized nuclear revolution is right around the corner.

    At which point, basically everything will be electric and it's mostly a question of figuring out how to make less destructive batteries. I'm still betting on ceramics. That tech's in its infancy and still considered cutting edge in energy storage.


    People will be able to keep their cars (or not as they please)... but ultimately they'll be switching off of gas engines for the same reason we switched off of steam engines in generations past. Not because of government mandates, but because the technology became obsolete.

    All without forcing everyone who lives in the rural regions to be packed like sardines into cities in order to be in range of public transport.
     
  28. NuclearBird

    NuclearBird Lustful Sacraments Muted

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    My money's still on synthetic hydrocarbons solely because of how well a decent blend of diesel or kerosene can stay stable and because the infrastructure for its distribution is already there and there wouldn't be a need to spend gargantuan amounts of resources and energy tearing it down alongside the old electric grid and building a much bigger one in place of both.
    It's literally a drop-in replacement, which might as well be the most marketable kind.

    And that's what all of this boils down to: No-one is allowed to escape utopia, and everyone must suffer, and only a few will ever be allowed the "luxury" of experiences that were almost universal and considered key aspects of human dignity in years past.
    You'll face less pain if you jumped head-first into Hell.
     
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  29. evildice

    evildice (emotionally stable clown posse)

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    Rural regions have a reason to exist, and I support their productivity.

    Suburbs though -- no reason.

    Plow them under and pack the sardines.
     
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  30. queermunist

    queermunist Cummunism Will Win!

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    lol I live in Iowa

    Every town out here is a decaying ghost of its former self and all the young people are moving away to pack themselves into cities.

    I'm sure some people will still live out in the middle of nowhere, but the vast majority are going to be forced to move by the changing economic conditions - economic conditions that are just as much tyrannical as any government forcing them to do the same thing.

    I'd just rather it be done in a controlled and organized fashion instead of at the chaotic whims of the market.
     
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