Comments lbrw has made

Peak oil: catastrophic or merely unpleasant?

In general we're not talking about either-or situations.  

1. Our demand for oil is unchangeable and is not significantly affected by price.

Our demand for oil is changeable and can be affected by price if the price goes high enough.  The price went high enough in the early 80s.  Demand will certainly change in the event that there is simply not enough supply to go around.  So he is right; statement number one is false.  But the premise that it has to be true before we will see serious and severe social and economic problems does not follow.

Our demand for oil is changeable, but it does not change overnight.  There is a lag.  People are reluctant to change long-standing ways, and institutions, building codes, and economic incentives interfere with peoples' ability to adjust to impending shortages before they have arrived.  

Our demand for oil is changeable, but it is not likely that it will change in time for a soft landing.  Indeed, given the amount of energy and the lead time required to develop the technology and infrastructure to exploit a new energy source or sources, the time has already passed.

2. We are so badly addicted to oil that we will watch our civilization collapse rather than change our behavior.

We are so badly addicted to a particular way of life that we are used to that we will not recognize that our civilization is collapsing before we ourselves are living in FEMA tent cities.

3. Significant oil conservation is not possible in the time frame needed.

It's not a question of what is possible, but of what is probable.  Conservation is our best strategy; it is easier and cheaper to conserve energy than it is to generate it. And many  strategies and technologies that could greatly facilitate that effort already exist.  But many of these stategies will require a radical restructuring of everything from community layout and organization to the the monetary system.  As a permaculture designer Mr. Hemenway would be an excellent reference for how some of these strategies would look.

This statement (#3) is essentially equivsalent to statement number 1, and the same objections to the underlying premise applies.  There are some very heavily invested, very heavily entrenched, and very powerful interests for whom radical restructuring for the sake of conservation would not sit very well.

4. Even with conservation, demand will be more than oil plus alternatives can possibly meet.

Well that's true on the face of it provided you assume that unending economic growth is possible and desirable.  Since unending growth is neither, one must admit that there will come a time when supply and demand will come into balance.  The devil is in the details though.  How painful will that adjustment be?  How painful does it have to be?  

Also, the complexity of a system or a society depends on energetic and material throughput.  Less net available energy will support a less complex society.  Social restructuring played out as a sort of collapse of now overly complex institutions would seem to be the inevitable result of the laws of thermodynamics.

5. Society is so fragile that it cannot withstand large shocks.

This seems to me to be a misdirection.  Any society is precisely as robust as its resource base.  Society is a subset of the ecosystem.  The law of the minimum applies.

Lonnie Brown