Climate change is inconsequential (because Peak Oil is a bigger issue)

[Bofferbrauer2]

kirby007 said:

...in the bigger picture of whats going to kill us.

Forget about the financial crisis and the uncertain economic market. 

There is a bigger problem on the horizon its called Peak Oil.

In short a slowdown in the supply of oil production and the depopulation of the world's population will follow shortly after. 

1kJ of Food Production requires 8kJ of energy to produce.

Most of the energy is given off as heat in the production of food.

Source of most energy is oil. No real alternative to oil. Oil prices are rising because the oil supply has reached its peak.

A slowdown due to less oil in the food production will starve the population and the food prices will go up even further. 

The starvation and freezing of the population will occur eventually and over time the population will go down and those left behind will end up in ww3 over the remaing foodsupplies.

Do you see this scenario happening?

We are getting increasingly less dependent of fossile fuels if looking on a global scale. Hydro, Solar and Wind energy are massively on the rise.

In 2010 already, they accounted for 16.7% of the world energy production, over 6 times the amount of nuclear energy (2.7%). Several countries have taken up measures to limit the use of petrol and coal and replacing them with renewable energy sources. And it's working, as despite the massive amounts of energy needed by China for instance (which more than tripled their energy consumption since 2000 already) the total amount of petrol only rose moderately from 76 to 92 mbpd (million Barril per Day) in that timeframe, much slower than past decades. Wind energy has more than doubled since 2010 (if not tripled, the data only shows up to 2016), Solar is growing even faster, being projected to have grown more than sixfold since 2010.

Add to this that an increasing amount of vehicle fuel is made up from vegetable sources all while it's starting to get slowly electrified, and I think that peak oil will not be when there's no more oil to find, but when there's not enough demand anymore for all that oil. Especially electric power generation from oil is going down fast percentage-wise, as almost none are getting built anymore but more and more getting decommissioned.

The sheer power needs of India and China are the main reason why oil production is still on the rise anyway, and once both slow down after having met their needs in +-10 years or so, I'm sure the world will have reached the maximum of oil production needs, unless much of Africa goes through such a fast development phase by then, too.

Also, keep in mind that oil peak is tied to the oil price. If oil gets more expensive, then more harder (and thus pricier) to extract oil ressources are getting viable, rising the amount of exploitable oil ressources up again. Because oil reserves is not just tied to oil production, but total viable production for a give price. The higher the price gets the bigger the reserves become. Hence why we had several small oil peaks already, but the resulting price increase has also resulted in more reserves becoming commercially exploitable.

Edit: Here is the outlook of world energy consumption by the petrol chain BP:

As you can see, the share of oil (and coal) in the power production is shrinking. Oil was already shrinking for decades, but coal is also going down now, and probably will only survive on the long term as a niche fuel for barbecues.

However, even if we would switch all our power production and all our vehicles away from oil, we would still need millions of barrels of the substance. That's because a whole branch of chemistry is based on it (it's not called petrochemistry for nothing), used mainly for the production of plastics and other synthetics, but also some medicines. But just like the cars do already, they could switch to oils from vegetable sources instead if necessary.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 31 March 2019