Re: The writing is on the wall

"travisgod@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <travisgod@xxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1189017478.550290.139670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

On Sep 4, 9:28 pm, "nemo_outis" <a...@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Take a look at their [Russia's] demand growth versus realistic
production decline figures.

I have. The US EIA is not predicting Russian production to peak until
2011 (at 10.6 million bpd, significantly above the 9.8 million bpd for
2007)

Energy resources are going to become HEAVILY nationalized going
forward, to support domestic economic growth; the voters won't PERMIT
anything else.

Russia's nationalization of all things oil & gas is simply a reversal of
the lunatic neoliberal selloff urged on them in the 90s. Russia is
simply reversing that giveaway to mafioso oligarchs and taking direct
control of its primary economic levers. Good for Putin!


I'm literally dead fucking tired of hearing "estimated reserves
divided by current production rates" as some kind of metric probative
of ANYTHING. This is the most utterly IRRELEVANT figure ANYONE could
cite. Don't do it again.

You're tired? Tough! It's a widely used metric precisely because it is
so useful.

Russia's production is already in decline, even from their re-peak.

Say what? Maybe bluff & bull*** gets past the mouthbreathers here on
rma, but you'll have to do better than that to fool me! Russia's oil
production has increased every year since 2002 and is not expected to
peak before 2011!

This is partially due to underinvestment, true also in Mexico and
Venezuela, due to the idiotic decisions by the greedy dictators to
STEAL the fields from the legitimate developers.

Uhh, no, Trav. Oil is a resource owned by the state (on behalf of the
citizenry), and a state may exercise its sovereign right to repudiate
any contract and reclaim its oil at any time should it decide (wisely or
unwisely) to do so. Sovereignty 101, Trav! Oil companies are given
opportunites to develop the oil (at the - always revocable - pleasure of
the State) but the usual arrangement nowadays is essentially a "fee for
service," not production-sharing and certainly not company ownership of
the oil resource.

Russia is
exeriencing internal demand growth around 10% or so, YoY. More cars,
more factories, more everything. Plot the intersection of a 5% supply
decline rate against a 9% consumption increase rate.

Uhh, Trav, Russian consumption is only about 1/3 of its production. Even
if domestic consumption of oil went up 10% that would only decrease the
oil export rate by about 5% (for a constant production rate). But the
production rate is NOT constant. Contrary to your hypothesis, Russia's
production rate is INCREASING! And that's what the stats show:
increasing, not decreasing, oil exports!

And Russian GDP went up by 6.7% in 2006 - the oil is being put to
productive use. And not just oil. Unlike most other nations Russia
mostly uses natural gas, not oil, domestically. Natural gas accounts for
55% of Russia's total energy consumption (oil is only 19%)!

The shock of peak oil in the 70s did essentially squat to the US. A
mere ripple on the pond. Do I need to quote GDP figures from the
70s, 80s, and 90s to show you?

A ripple in the pond? We lost almost all of our domestic
manufacturing, steelmaking, autos, electronics, and began the descent
into the greatest debtor nation in history status. You certainly
weren't here in the 1970s, were you? We've been BORROWING to maintain
those GDP figures.

The US export of its manufacturing had nothing to do with the price of
oil which, as you may recall, has the same price worldwide. US real GDP
has steadily risen since the 70s - despite the US consuming more oil at
higher prices.

No, demand decrease is not "industrial recession," despite your
screaming caps. Industry will adapt and use other less oil energy
per unit of production, through substitution and through increases in
efficiency and productivity. Will there be a cost hit in doing so?
Yep. Will it be disruptive? Yep. Will it be catastrophic? Nope!

LOL. The entire wal mart supply chain is imperiled because of this.
Not catastrophic? HAHAHAHA. Sustained recession isn't catastrophic?

What sustained recession? Your attempt at drawing "inferences" from your
wild speculations about the future is hadly persuasive.


LOL. What an absurd fool you are. The entire MODEL of industrialism
in use for 150 years, you STIPULATE, is ending, oh but it'll die
quietly and easily, along with the "American Dreams" of 6B people
hoping for or accustomed to guaranteed upward mobility and/or
prosperity!?!?!? WTF.

The lifestyle changes will be IMMENSE.

Uhh, no, Trav. Sadly, most of the world is completely cut off from
industrialism and its putative benefits (2 billion people live on less
than $2/day!) and if oil and the entire industrial world were to
disappear tomorrow they would be no worse off. (Likely it would be a
benefit to them.)

Industrialism will not be shattered, it will jst have to adjust and
change. No need for your "sky is falling" hysteria, Trav. No big deal.
Hell, the US has dropped its energy use per dollar of real GDP by a
factor of 2 since the 50s. Cut it in half, Trav. And can - no, will -
halve it again in the upcoming decades.

Without growth, there is no industrialism.

No matter how many times you repeat it, it won't make it so.
Industrialism can work just fine without growth.

Without growth, there is
no hope of "industrial growth" or "economic growth" in the 3rd world.
The game ENDS.

There is not now and will not be in the future any "hope" for the poor
bastards in much of the third world, even if we magically quintupled the
oil reserves on this earth. Those poor bastards, though it pains me to
say it, are fucked no matter what happens. Oil has almost nothing to do
with it.

Holy crap...our entire model of existence is based upon capitalism.
There is no Plan B, moron.

No, Trav, most of the world is NOT a big fan of capitalism (especially
the weird state-subsidized, foreign exploitation, military adventurism
version so popular in the US)

There's coal and nuclear. At least two centuries worth of coal and
nuclear for much longer. China is currently building a giant
coal-to-oil converter, the first on such a scale since the 40s.


HAHAHAHAHAHA...Coal to oil is a MASSIVE generator of CO2 emissions.
LOL That's the answer? Burn coal? Pollute the earth until everybody
dies? GREAT. They don't call you a deep thinker for nothing.
Nuclear power won't last centuries with GROWING consumption rates. At
most, we have a few decades with both of these technologies.

Coal WILL be heavily used as oil production declines, CO2 and the
concomitant warming be damned (but fortunately CO2 & global warming is
mostly bullsit hype). So will nuclear. Given the alternative of
freezing in the dark, NIMBY and ecological correctness will go out of
style real fast. Oil will be conserved and used more efficiently, not
out of some pie-in-the-sky environmentalism, but because it will have
become damned expensive.

Several of the producing nations (SA, Venezuela, even Canada) have no
prospect of consuming all they produce. Oil will continue to be
available for export.

A trickle. Nowhere near enough for consumer nations.

You have now drifted to a second-order problem: distribution of the oil.
But the first-order problem, sufficient oil for productive activities and
a manageable transition to other energy sources, is still quite tractable
with a time-scale of decades for its management.

As for the second-order oil distribution problem, maybe producing nations
(yea, Canada! yea, Russia!) will become the global industrial giants
while others wither. No big deal (unless you're in one of those
withering places, I suppose :-)

There is no plan B for the dullwitted perhaps. But the world is a
long way from running out of energy - centuries away. No, only
*dirt-cheap* energy will become scarce. And industry will adapt to
using the now more expensive resource more efficiently and
effectively. It's just another change and the world has been
successfully adapting to change for a very long time. (Yeah, some
folks will get hurt - but I suppose a lot of whalers and buggy-whip
companies decried the rise of the automobile, too.)

WTF...at what point did I EVER say we would run out of energy you
shoddy-thinking, illiterate ***?

You didn't, I did. Haven't you been paying atttention? Or did you think
I was only going to respond to your silly points and not introduce my far
more cogent ones?

Yes, the era of dirt-cheap energy is coming to a close, but there is, as
you acknowledge, no problem of a true shortage of energy for centuries to
come. The end of cheap abundant oil merely implies a transition, a very
manageable transition that the world has many decades to implement.

Just for an example...when earnings growth of a company goes bad, what
happens to the stock price?

In a no-growth scenario, in an economy that isn't driven by insane
speculation, the price of the stock becomes constant (at a non-
speculatively-inflated multiple of its static earnings) and the investor
payout is the similarly static dividend. Perfectly ordinary. Perfectly
OK financially.

Good lord, do you even READ what you write? Listen to yourself,
idiot! In one breath you say it will not be any big deal and THEN you
say that it's ok, we'll just have to "freeze population growth." WTF,
these two are irreconcilable!

I see, so you instead desire that world population should increase
forever unchecked to support your weird conception of the need for
economic "growth."

Sorry, Trav, the world has far too many people now (although I'm not
voluntereering to get off) and advocating increasing that population
(especially for such a nonsensical idea as economic "growth") is silly.


The world has an addiction to growth. And in the coming decades it
will have to give up that addiction. That's a blessing, not a curse.

LOL. So, IOW, despite your pathetically transparent ramblings, you
agree with everything I have said.

You, not I, are the enthusiast about growth.

There's several decades based on oil, several centuries based on
coal, and several millenia based on nuclear. How long do you think
it will take to "figure out"?

before or after half the world has to die?

Half the world is oblivious to oil, one way or the other. There are
limits to population growth, there are limits to economic growth. The
process of dropping the "growth addiction" can be managed with minimal
pain or it can, thorugh inaction, be left to catastrophes. Which way the
denouement plays out is not some preordained certainty but a matter quite
amenable to human management - if humanity so chooses.

Yes, I own shares in that venture. Wait until the carbon taxes roll
in. You know as well as anyone that your forecast was based upon an
expectation of NG prices. NG supply is going off a cliff in 5 years;
this is why COS bought CSP. The tarsands are completely dependent
upon energy to extract the oil. There are more variables than "how
much it costs to lift dirt"

Ignoring such aspects as the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline which will be
dedicated to tar sands production (although nobody will say so publicly)
there are a number of other solutions available (e.g., nuclear).

The plain fact of the matter is that Canada is the US' best hope for
(partially) achieving "continental" self-sufficiency in oil (with Canada,
as always the subservient colony providing it). There is not the
slightest doubt that the US, which is prepared to flatten the middle east
to get oil, would be adverse to the simple expedient of using its
economic muscle to lean on Canada to do whatever is necessary to deliver
tarsands oil to the US in huge quantities.

No, Trav, development of the Alberta tarsands for US benefit will NOT be
allowed to be impeded in any serious way (and certainly not by such
piffles as carbon taxes or what silly Canadians think about the matter).

A BTU/GDP ratio disparity of 9:1, you say? Seems there's
considerable room for shrinkage in oil demand through more efficient
use, eh Trav?

Regards,

No. It would require trillions in reinvestment.

Sounds like a recipe for Chinese economic prosperity to me.

China would have to rebuild all those factories to be efficient.

China IS rebuilding everything - everything, Trav. Fortunately, the old
threadbare small-scale industrial *** they currently have is not worth
keeping and the Chinese recognize that.


And, yes, it is 9:1. 4.9:1 in the EU. The US is about average at
2:1. China is one of the least efficient nations on earth.

Trav, Trav, do you really want me to call you on this? I have the
numbers, Trav. The variations in energy usage per GDP are large, but
nowhere near what you say above.

But, hey, I'm a reasonable man. Get off your fat ass and give some
cites, Trav! (But be wary, Trav, because, as usual, I've got better
numbers from more credible sources right at hand.)

Regards,

.