I disagree. This sort of conservative mindset is new to America. In previous decades we did things like build transcontinental railroads, power generation and distribution networks, fly to the moon, etc. Adventure and daring was quintessentially American. Then all those adventures resulted in some people accumulating vast treasures, and suddenly they became a lot less daring.

I think the conservative mindset isn't new, it's just more prevalent. There was the same resistance to previous innovations, but it wasn't as powerful. The psychology of an empire on the rise rather than in decline.

Great post! Given what's happening in the Gulf, I think it's a perfect time to swing from the rafters screaming, "We don't need BP, or any of the rest of 'em!"

I'm fascinated by saurabh's comment. As an engineer and an educator, it's something I think about a lot. I think I agree that it's pretty new.

It seems to me - and it's a broad generalization, but it holds pretty well in my experiences with individual humans - that Americans began their now decades-long descent into fantasy when most of them quit working with their hands. It's that acquaintance with reality which is lacking.

You're overanalyzing. He's is a hack, he knows what's expected from him and he delivers.

I can be very tiresome about this, but this is not a conservative thing. Conservatives are very much about process improvement.

What you've just written about is the fear instilled by a top-down system in which those furthest removed from the actual work make the key decisions. Stupidity is not a left-right thing, but it is deeply ingrained into the bogus MBA-driven form capitalism we now suffer under.

Samuelson doesn't suck because he's conservative. He sucks because he's not very effing bright. Wingnuts would disparage him as an elite if he ever dared disagree with them.

Aaron - I'm not so sure. There are plenty of brilliant engineers I know, extremely capable with their hands, who wind up doing very little, simply because the days of individual effort producing fantastic change have faded, and now the great conglomerations of human industry (that suck up a lot of talent) are devoted to producing very little - a slightly better cell-phone, maybe. There's probably plenty of people still capable and interested in doing daring stuff, but there's no one enabling them. I blame the growth of finance as an industry - now that capital has so many less-risky ways of producing super-profits, there's no reason to invest in things that might not work, and certainly no reason to invest in things that won't pay out for the next ten years at the expense of something that generates profit every quarter.

Mark - I didn't mean to use "conservative" to imply "right-wing", i meant it in the primitive sense, i.e., least inclined to change.

I don't doubt he's a hack, but.

From the article: "We have assumed that most fossil-fuel heating (as well as ovens and stoves) can be replaced by electric systems and that most fossil-fuel transportation can be replaced by battery and fuel-cell vehicles."

That latter is a big and, I suspect, dubious assumption. Electric commuter cars are difficult enough to engineer. Is anyone even proposing electric big rigs?

Aren't there tons of industrial processes that rely specifically on fossil fuel? Fertilizer? Plastics?

There is always plenty of energy, of course. Hundreds of watts per square meter in sunlight. Getting it to do useful work — the real trick.

In short, I agree that a prosperous post-fossil fuel civilization is physically possible, but I'm skeptical that it could look at all like ours — with centralized agriculture, trains and jet planes and trucks, and (elephant in the room) billions of people on the planet.

That latter is a big and, I suspect, dubious assumption. Electric commuter cars are difficult enough to engineer. Is anyone even proposing electric big rigs?

I think the "and fuel-cell" part is doing a lot of work here.

Electric commuter cars are NOT that difficult to engineer. In fact the engineering is a lot simpler than internal-combustion cars, which require tons (literally) of parts that electric cars don't require - carefully-timed fuel injection systems, ignition systems, starter motors, catalytic converters, mufflers, etc. By contrast, electric cars require: four electric motors and a bunch of batteries. It's true that energy storage systems are pretty primitive right now, but they've seen nowhere near as much investment of time and energy as the engineering of the internal combustion engine.

It's pretty astonishing that people have managed to produce cars able to travel 200 miles on a charge in about a decade, at much greater energy efficiency than an entire century's worth of engineering has managed on the internal combustion engine.

Saurabh - You and I agree, I just didn't express myself plainly.

One of my oddest and favoritest possessions is a copy of the Yale College yearbook from 1908. It's fantastic to see where Yale grads headed off to in that era - the Wanocheatague Button Factory, Imperial Screw Thread, etc. I'm only being slightly facetious. They worked for industrial concerns and, broadly, contributed to making useful things.

This suggests to me that the upper class - which decides things for the rest of us, generally for the worse - used to be accustomed to grappling with reality. The situation is much different today, and not at all better.

Cloud raised the point I was gonna raise. It is true that we need to begin the switch to renewables, but we also need to do a fundamental restructuring of the way we live, otherwise we will fail to wean ourselves off of petroleum products. Agriculture is an especially big culprit here.

I read the article and I think it is doable. I also think with conservation we can reduce our usage by 50% which means we wouldn't need to build that many power plants. I think we need to focus on the following: rails for commuters and cargo, solar power heat pumps for heating and cooling, led lighting.

root cause :

> (elephant in the room) billions of people on the planet.

this.

saurabh,

"We" didn't do those things. Those things were done to us.

Big deal difference.

Aaron Datesman

That's an interesting hypothesis--that the descent into fantasy began when most Americans quit working with their hands. I have never thought of that.

Personally I have thought that it was The Jetsons. Or Star Trek and those damn food replicators and dilythium crystals and such, because when I think of departures from reality, television and movies come to mind. But maybe you're on to something there.

I won't ridicule Larry Summers' Uncle Paulie just for saying fossil fuels are socially necessary right now, though like his nephew he does have a good bio in the 'awful' category. (Hey, you have to admit that 'economic strength' sure was 'paradoxical'!) Richard Heinberg has been shouting from the rooftops that the end is near for quite a few years because our society is unsustainably dependent on hydrocarbons, and to me Heinberg's arguments have seemed persuasive. I'm curious what he'd think of Jacobson's paper. I haven't read the paper, but I have a hard time believing that wind and water and solar power could meet all or even most the world's energy needs by 2030. I'm certainly no engineer, but for 1% of the land surface of the earth to be covered by "farms" of wind turbines for this to happen under Jacobson's plan seems awfully ambitious to me.

Here's an article, NOT from the "everything is OK right now" perspective, that argues that renewable power is further away than many would like to think

http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/07/july-1-2009-renewable-power-not-in-your.html

Yeah, mistah.

"Renewables" have to be built using the existing oil platform.

As in, they won't be built.

Full stop.

Since every one seems to be ignoring it, I'll point out that agriculture is not some distraction from the issue at hand. Sure it'll be nice to wean, if it is possible, agriculture off oil on the transport end, but I haven't seen a very credible discussion anywhere about how we're going to wean agriculture off oil on the input end, upon which it is currently heavily dependent. If some is aware of works that do credibly address this, links would be appreciated.

Rojo,

It will be done. When the State has reshaped itself for a new constituency (those Creatives we keep hearing about). As in, when it no longer needs to bother with preserving the lumpenproles.

The oil inputs will be used to maintain whatever size platform is essential to their power - their food.

Not ours.

Unless, of course, they need a whole lot of bodies to hold ground taken in Central and South America.

Rojo

Heinberg says Wes Jackson is a legitimate expert on that, but I don't know a damn thing about it so I'll just give you a link to an interview:

http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/archives/0307InterviewHeinberg.htm

Wes Jackson is doing the right things at The Land Institute -- but he thinks its a thirty-year research program. Contributions can help with that, but it's a long process.

I think that will we or nil we, climate change, war, ecological collapes, famine, and disease will sharply reduce the human population of the planet before thirty years pass. I wish I knew how to prepare my kids.

NE, thanks, that's an interesting interview. It certainly raises many of the issues that I think are being woefully ignored by many who think "peak oil" and are limited to thinking "no more cars" and not much beyond that...

Joel Hanes, thanks as well, I'll have to look over that site a bit more before I offer any encomiums, but I will check it out.

"I wish I knew how to prepare my kids."

Amen.

Those are both stupid ways to cut beans.

First, a large part of the agricultural use of fossil is from natural gas to produce fertilizer, not oil. It's true gas supplies are pretty closely constrained, but the process suffers from far fewer bumps on the way to replacement - especially public indifference.

Second, transportation constitutes a significant fraction of petroleum consumption - 70% - so getting rid of cars will basically entirely mitigate the problem of peak oil - though not of global warming.

--

On a separate note, I'd like to take a moment to castigate people wailing and gnashing their teeth about the billions of people on the planet, a "problem" I always find casually racist, fear of the teeming brown hordes out to overwhelm this beautiful earth that white people have been despoiling so unabashedly for centuries.

I don't believe that this is a matter of mere arithmetic. First, the three hundred millions in the US consume far more resources than several of those billions. Second, I'm a big fan of Peter Kropotkin, who in "Fields, Factories and Workshops for Tomorrow" asserts that our world suffers from underproduction as a result of capitalism. Kropotkin, a geographer by training, believed that productivity could be much higher and far more efficient, if it was not driven by the market instead of by actual human need. Third, every demographer will tell you that population growth is a temporary problem. Look up "demographic transition".

Electric commuter cars? SERIOUSLY?

That's an improvement HOW, exactly?

CF,

It's an improvement for the Creatives, is how. They still get to consume hydrocarbons by the metric ton per hour, but the knowledge and awareness is pushed even further back, by placing a layer of mediation between them and their consumption.

The car may use no fuel - but the electric generators do and will. And there's the lubrication. And the support systems. And the hydrocarbons in the ground, for the food supply.

And so on. And so on.

It's a "fix" for the managerial class, only.

Fuck 'em. Fuck the lot of them.

Let them starve.

Saurabh,

One doesn't have to have a single racist sentiment to recognize that a planet can have a carrying capacity.

Look at the world's population, until oil.

Fairly stable at a billion persons for two thousand years. And taking eight thousand years to go from 50 millions to that billion.

Another six billion petro-people between 1850 and 2030.

What's "racist" about that fact?

Jack Crow,

The idea of Malthusian collapse was, simply, wrong. Maybe there is such a thing as carrying capacity, but I don't believe we have the foresight to prove a number. Malthus's ideas about carrying capacity were destroyed by the Green Revolution, which proved that it WAS possible to feed billions of people. It's conceivable that we can continue to feed even more billions of people with some changes in diet and farming techniques.

I find the discussion of "billions" racist because it pretends that an individual in India is equivalent to an individual in the US, when we know that the American consumes way, way more resources than the Indian. The number of people consuming is not the problem, and never was - it's the manner of consumption that's at issue.

Electric commuter cars are better, first, because they are far more efficient. Tesla's Roadster (not exactly a commuter car, but on the way to one) gets about 120 mpg, equivalent, which means about 1/6th of the total amount of carbon being injected into the atmosphere. That is a huge improvement, methinks.

You could also argue that pushing the energy production problem to a single point also makes things easier on us (fewer technologies to implement to replace hydrocarbon use). I'm not a big fan of the grid, and since most of the power generation is probably going to be through coal, I don't really buy this argument. Still, even switching from oil to coal to drive cars is, I think, a net boon on the basis of the amount of CO2 reduced.

The idea of Malthusian collapse was, simply, wrong. Maybe there is such a thing as carrying capacity, but I don't believe we have the foresight to prove a number. Malthus's ideas about carrying capacity were destroyed by the Green Revolution...

The whole point of the woe-sayers is that the six billions are sustained on the oil economy, and the oil will run out. We timidly suggest it may have been better not to do the population explosion at all, than to do it and have the mass starvation down the road.

Or as E.F. Schumacher put it, y'all Green Revolutionaries are treating oil as if it were income, when in fact it is capital. Not a sound business practice.

And as for the 'racist' appellation, screw that. It was the white people who did the population explosion first, in western Europe.

I never mentioned Malthus, Saurabh. I guess if you respond to arguments people don't make, you can always have a win.

Good for you.

My argument is about oil. And the population which grew on oil inputs.

Population had a native stability which was broken by oil.

That has jack all to do with Malthus, which is why I never used his work to make my case.

Thank you, cloud. That was my follow up point. Population explosions follow on oil inputs - and they happened in Western Europe and the US first.

"Population had a native stability which was broken by oil."

It's been broken by other things too, like diseases and invasions and other technological advances (See Guns, Germs, and Steel).

But oil sure has been the giant piece of birthday cake able to give the birthday boy a fatal heart attack.

Feynman:
"Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren't worth anything, and all they're in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they're not going to give you a goddamn thing; I'm not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic."

The population started growing before the Green Revolution - industrialization was what changed the curve, not oil. The Green Revolution accelerated growth, but it was already increasing exponentially.

In any case, you guys all seem to treat peak oil as some sort of cataclysm, when I don't think that's accurate. The oil inputs to agriculture are actually pretty low. It's a tiny fraction of our consumption. We massively overproduce food; we regularly pay people NOT to grow food in order to keep the price up. I can't really anticipate a scenario in which the reduced availability of oil is going to result in mass starvation. No driving to the beach, yes. Economy in the shitter, yes. No more farming? Unlikely in the extreme. The fact is, it is just not that hard for us to feed ourselves any more, and it probably never will be.

but we already have mass starvation, don't we? and lack of clean drinking water and septic systems?