Workplace Stress Is Literally Killing People; Mass Lawsuits Are Imminent

[theLaw]

Without watching the two full hours I would have to ask Where he thinks the oil is? "Amount of oil" isn't the question. The question is Where is the cheap oil. If he thinks it's in Saudi Arabia, that's ridiculous. Obviously the reason the Saudis are selling equity in Aramco is they know the jig is about up and they are trying to pocket cash from naive westerners.

I'm planning on watching it again tonight, so I'll post the time stamps later.

 

[x-ray peat]

Without watching the two full hours I would have to ask Where he thinks the oil is? "Amount of oil" isn't the question. The question is Where is the cheap oil. If he thinks it's in Saudi Arabia, that's ridiculous. Obviously the reason the Saudis are selling equity in Aramco is they know the jig is about up and they are trying to pocket cash from naive westerners.

You do realize that Saudi Arabia has one of the cheapest costs of production and the second largest proven reserves in the world.

They are selling 5% of Saudi Aramco because they need the money and want to diversify their economy. I dont think it says anything about the quality or amount of their reserves. Many oil rich countries badly mismanage their economies and end up as financial basket cases of corruption and inefficiency. Its called the Oil Curse.

 

[x-ray peat]

People don't understand that as hydrocarbon supplies decline the price will decline. It's a complex dynamic system. Everybody thinks "peak oil is debunked" because the price is not near highs. Our financial system is a proxy for energy. As there is less energy in the economy there is less real wealth, and as expectations of future energy decline there is less credit. Less wealth and credit means deflation and lower prices. Oil will crash down in price as supply problems develop.

Drillers and miners need credit and high prices to operate profitably, and so more and more oil and natgas suppliers will go bankrupt as energy availability declines. Suppliers will shut down in the descending order of their extraction costs. As they do so, the price of oil will crash faster. Fewer and fewer bidders will have the wealth buy energy. The tar sands plays will shut down first, then the shale plays, then the stripper wells, and then finally the old supergiant fields of last century like Ghawar and Canterell.

A Look to 2016 | Economic Undertow

Prices of oil have declined because of a glut of production and low demand. You should read the works of real energy economists and not this Steve Ludlum guy. His paper was painful to read but not surprising given that he is a professional photographer and not economist by trade.

 

[theLaw]

Without watching the two full hours I would have to ask Where he thinks the oil is? "Amount of oil" isn't the question. The question is Where is the cheap oil. If he thinks it's in Saudi Arabia, that's ridiculous. Obviously the reason the Saudis are selling equity in Aramco is they know the jig is about up and they are trying to pocket cash from naive westerners.

The discussion about oil starts around 39:12.

He's referring to Saudi Aramco - Saudi Aramco - Wikipedia who it appears is about to go public in the second half of 2018.https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/sau...o-but-waiting-for-government-ok-says-ceo.html. He's claiming that as part of the IPO they will have to release a reserve report, which will show significantly more oil than previously known to the public (the difference between 500Billion barrels max guesstimated.......vs.........trillions of barrels).

 

[x-ray peat]

check out 1:05, he tells a story about these climate scientists on the South Pole who start laughing at him when he brings up Global Warming.

 

[haidut]

The big problem with intermittent sources like solar and wind is our grid must be speced to satisfy peak demand at all times. Brown outs ruin equipment. When you introduce highly variable sources like solar you must also build out additional capacity from other sources, or highly inefficient storage technologies. This in turn reduces both the capital efficiency and the operating efficiency of the rest of the grid.

In any case, the theoretical maximum EROI of solar is simply not enough to scale up to substitute for our hydrocarbon consumption, which has had here-to-fore had fantastic EROI figures. You don't even need to think about the grid specifics. It's like going from a $200K salary to a $35K salary and hoping to maintain the same standard of living. It just doesn't work like that.

If solar and wind made sense there would be profitable operators by now. There aren't. Anywhere in the world it's a tax farm, operating on subsidies of various sorts. Nobody has positive free net cash flow from operating solar panels. Maybe this will change someday soon but I've seen no signs.

@theLaw may find this interesting as well.
It appears mrMercer has a point. For all of its faults, the UN has commissioned its own report on the future of the global economy, and the report reached some of the same conclusions as mercer said - i.e. there are no more energy sources with EROI low enough to keep the current economic growth going. The report concludes that the economic and political crises we see around the entire world are simply a result of this energy crisis, and not really the fault of any specific government or failed public policies. While the report does not have predictions as dire as mrmercer's (i.e. massive population die-offs), it does say that capitalism (and the technology it depends on) is effectively over since it is a result of energetic availability (i.e. it consumes energy) and not the driver of it. The traditional supply/demand theories are meaningless in a world starved for energy. As such, the report says that the world is entering an uncharted territory of post-capitalism economy/society where there will be a lot less globalism, severe reductions of economic growth, and a lot more localized self-sufficiency due to the usage of lower EROI sources. Very interesting read that I recommend to everybody! If somebody wants to do a separate thread on this topic in the "political theory" section of the forum please do so.
Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism's Imminent Demise
https://bios.fi/bios-governance_of_economic_transition.pdf

"...Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all. Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says. Those are the stark implications of a new scientific background paper prepared by a team of Finnish biophysicists. The team from the BIOS Research Unit in Finland were asked to provide research that would feed into the drafting of the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), which will be released in 2019. For the “first time in human history,” the paper says, capitalist economies are “shifting to energy sources that are less energy efficient.” This applies to all forms of energy. Producing usable energy (“exergy”) to keep powering “both basic and non-basic human activities” in industrial civilisation “will require more, not less, effort.”"

 

[Hugh Johnson]

I've been reading about that collapse stuff for over six years, and my guess is the Club of Rome predictions are more right than wrong. We are likely to enter a period of instability, and during that period we will lose over 90% of our productive capacity and over 70% the population. What we have seen in countries like Syria and Greece have been a taste of what is to come, except that once it is countries like the US, India, China and Germany the situation will be quite dire and there won't be any place for billions to run to. This period is likely to last for a century or so, and will be characterized by periods of stagnations intersped by crises we never really recover from.

Good people to read on this are John Micheal Greer, Ugo Bardi, Joseph Tainter, Dmitry Orlov and Nicole Foss. Others too, but I can't really think of any. Probably solutions that build the future come from individuals and definitely should include both permaculture and community.

 

[Pulstar]

So, what you are saying is that battery technology is the bottleneck for any of these alternative and intermittent sources, right?

At present moment, taking into account the best li ion batteries out there, 1kg of oil / petrol has approximately 40 times the amount of energy compared to 1 kg of batteries. I assume the ratio is not so huge against coal, but it is pretty big in any case. I wonder what kind of volume and mass of batteries is needed for 12 hours of supply to average household? Tesla electric car battery is about 55o kilograms, for what it's worth

 

[haidut]

At present moment, taking into account the best li ion batteries out there, 1kg of oil / petrol has approximately 40 times the amount of energy compared to 1 kg of batteries. I assume the ratio is not so huge against coal, but it is pretty big in any case. I wonder what kind of volume and mass of batteries is needed for 12 hours of supply to average household? Tesla electric car battery is about 55o kilograms, for what it's worth

I wonder if the newer technologies for redox batteries with MB could achieve higher energy density than the older Li technology.
Methylene Blue (MB) May Allow Creating Near-perfect (redox) Batteries

 

[Luann]

I've been reading about that collapse stuff for over six years, and my guess is the Club of Rome predictions are more right than wrong. We are likely to enter a period of instability, and during that period we will lose over 90% of our productive capacity and over 70% the population. What we have seen in countries like Syria and Greece have been a taste of what is to come, except that once it is countries like the US, India, China and Germany the situation will be quite dire and there won't be any place for billions to run to. This period is likely to last for a century or so, and will be characterized by periods of stagnations intersped by crises we never really recover from.

Good people to read on this are John Micheal Greer, Ugo Bardi, Joseph Tainter, Dmitry Orlov and Nicole Foss. Others too, but I can't really think of any. Probably solutions that build the future come from individuals and definitely should include both permaculture and community.

I know this post is 2 years old but I just skimmed Orlov's "Toolkit" tonight. Fascinating. I also see he has a book out called "Shrinking the Technosphere - Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom". Even more fascinating!

 

[Steve]

I know this post is 2 years old but I just skimmed Orlov's "Toolkit" tonight. Fascinating. I also see he has a book out called "Shrinking the Technosphere - Getting a Grip on Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-Sufficiency and Freedom". Even more fascinating!

Your post made me take a look at Orlov's blog. Read a few articles and found them quite disturbing for America. They sounded doom & gloom, but they also seemed logical. I wish I had enough money to go move somewhere rural and become more self-sufficient. I would rather not stay on the sinking Titanic.

 

[Luann]

i will download pdf's for you of "technosphere" and "collapse" if you want. i do think he is very logical. i like that he critiques members of both political thought schools.