We have a lot more infrastructure than Europe had at the time of the Black Death. If we lost 75% of the population, it might devastate things like the power grid, water supply and purification, etc.
We have (I think) more complicatedly interdependent institutions than Europe at the time of the Black Death. Relatively small upheavals in, e.g., our financial systems can cause a lot of chaos, as shown by our occasional financial crises. If 75% of the population died, how robust would those systems be?
The following feels like at least a semi-plausible story. Some natural or unnatural disaster wipes out 75% of the population. This leads to widescale failure of infrastructure, finance, and companies. In particular, we lose a lot of chip factories and oil wells. And then we no longer have the equipment we need to make new ones that work as well as the old ones did, and we run out of sufficiently-accessible oil and cannot make fast enough technological progress to replace it with solar or nuclear energy on a large scale, nor to find other ways of making plastics. And then we can no longer make the energy or the hardware to keep our civilization running, and handling that the best we can takes up all our (human and other) resources, and even if in principle there are scientific or technological breakthroughs that would solve that problem we no longer have the bandwidth to make them.
The human race would survive, of course. But the modern highly technology-dependent world would be pretty much screwed.
(I am not claiming that the loss of 75% of the population would definitely do that. But it seems like it sure might.)
The following feels like at least a semi-plausible story.
It doesn’t feel plausible to me. You don’t need computer chips or oil to have industry and science. Industry + science would eventually progress back to modern capabilities, but probably faster due to people rediscovering old knowledge preserved here and there.
Indefinitely, in the scenario I described—we’d have lost the technology necessary to rebuild the technology. (E.g., if abundant energy depends on one or more of { getting lots of oil, getting lots of uranium, making really good solar cells, figuring out fusion } and making any of those happen depends in turn on abundant energy.)
Besides, can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?
Unfortunately, we can’t. While we’re not going to run out of oil soon (in fact, we should stop burning it for climate reasons long before we do; also, peak oil is not about oil depletion), we are running out of cheap oil. The EROEI of oil has fallen significantly since we started extracting it on a large scale.
This is highly relevant for what is discussed here. In the early 20th century, we could produce around 100 units of energy from oil for every unit of energy we used to extract it; those rebuilding the civilization from scratch today or in the future would have to make do with far less.
I am sure we can. Peak oil said we’d run out of oil Real Soon Now, full stop. The cost of oil has been rising since early XX century, as you point out, that’s not what peak oil was all about.
those rebuilding the civilization from scratch today
Again, we have confusion of technology and scale. The average cost of oil extraction is higher than it used to be. But that cost varies, considerably. If you are trying to rebuild you don’t need much oil, so you only use the cheapest oilfields (e.g. the Saudi ones) and don’t try to pave over the North Sea with oil rigs or set them up all over the Arctic.
Peak oil said we’d run out of oil Real Soon Now, full stop.
If you go to the Wikipedia page about Peak Oil one of the first things you see will be a graph, derived from Hubbert’s 1956 paper. It shows oil production continuing to (and, looking at the graph, presumably past) year 2200. Hubbert’s paper doesn’t actually say anything much about when supply will fail to meet demand—it makes no attempt to model demand. (It does say something like “This doesn’t mean we’re going to run out of liquid and gaseous fuels real soon now, because we can make them from other more abundant fossil fuels”, presumably meaning coal.)
I’m not sure what it means to say that “peak oil was wrong”. I mean, the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite. At some point we will either run out or stop using it for other reasons; at some point before then there will be a global maximum of production (if it hasn’t occurred already). Some specific guess about when those things would happen could well have been wrong, but that doesn’t invalidate the overall picture and I’m not aware of any reason to think it even changes the timescales all that drastically.
The arguments about peak oil mostly consist of running to and fro between the motte (“the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite”) and the bailey. It’s tiring and not very useful.
’m not sure what it means to say that “peak oil was wrong”.
Peak oil has been promising permanent—and accelerating—reductions in absolute oil production, sky-high—and climbing—prices and widespread—and worsening—scarcity leading to a variety of unpleasant social consequences since the mid-1970s. That’s 40 years of being wrong.
running to and fro between the motte [...] and the bailey
Well, what happened in this actual case is that I said it might turn out that rebuilding technological society after a huge catastrophe might be dependent on cheaper oil than we’d actually have, and it was to that that you replied “can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?”.
What version of “peak oil was wrong” refutes what I said?
That wasn’t an argument against your position per se. It was more of a side lunge. Or a distraction or a pirouette or a slip-and-fall or a bête noire or a whimsy or a wibble—you pick :-)
Another possibility is that it will become possible (and cheap enough) to produce oil from other things, before it runs out. In that case it would seem reasonable to say that the peak oil theory was wrong.
And, as I remarked above, when Hubbert wrote his original paper about “peak oil” (at least, I think the thing I saw was his original paper), he explicitly said that coal can be used to make oil and gas, and that therefore diminishing oil extraction doesn’t have to mean no more oil.
Peak oil said we’d run out of oil Real Soon Now, full stop
Peak oil refers to the moment when the production of oil has reached a maximum and after which it declines. It doesn’t say that we’ll run out of it soon, just that production will slow down. If consumption increases at the same time, it’ll lead to scarcity.
If you are trying to rebuild you don’t need much oil
Well, that probably depends on how much damage has been done. If civilization literally had to be rebuilt from scratch, I’d wager that a very significant portion of that cheap oil would have to be used.
Yup, we did. But after this hypothetical partial collapse our situation won’t be the same as when we started building our technological society. In some ways it’ll be better, but in others it’ll be worse; in particular, scarce natural resources will be harder to find because we already got out all the easy stuff.
I think you’re confusing technology and scale
I don’t think I am. I’m saying that technological advance is much easier in a society with good infrastructure, and that that infrastructure may depend on having lots of reasonably cheap energy, and that in this hypothetical scenario we may not have. (And that getting it back might depend on those technological advances we aren’t in a position to make until we’ve got it back.)
I don’t think I am. I’m saying that technological advance is much easier in a society with good infrastructure, and that that infrastructure may depend on having lots of reasonably cheap energy.
Scale.
Is your society 7 billion or 10 million? 10 million people can rebuild much of high-tech civilization and they won’t need a lot oil to do that. And then, of course, you go into a positive feedback cycle.
So. I ask: how many people does it take, as a minimum, to maintain our current level of technological civilization?
In the collapse-and-rebuild scenario you don’t need to “maintain the current level” right away. For example, you don’t need to be able to immediately build contemporary computer-controlled cars. The fully-mechanical cars of the XX century would do fine, for a while. All you need to do is have enough technology to not get stuck in a local minimum and get the positive feedback loop going. That’s a much easier task.
Of course by the time you’re done with the rebuild, your 10m people will multiply :-)
We have a lot more infrastructure than Europe had at the time of the Black Death. If we lost 75% of the population, it might devastate things like the power grid, water supply and purification, etc.
We have (I think) more complicatedly interdependent institutions than Europe at the time of the Black Death. Relatively small upheavals in, e.g., our financial systems can cause a lot of chaos, as shown by our occasional financial crises. If 75% of the population died, how robust would those systems be?
The following feels like at least a semi-plausible story. Some natural or unnatural disaster wipes out 75% of the population. This leads to widescale failure of infrastructure, finance, and companies. In particular, we lose a lot of chip factories and oil wells. And then we no longer have the equipment we need to make new ones that work as well as the old ones did, and we run out of sufficiently-accessible oil and cannot make fast enough technological progress to replace it with solar or nuclear energy on a large scale, nor to find other ways of making plastics. And then we can no longer make the energy or the hardware to keep our civilization running, and handling that the best we can takes up all our (human and other) resources, and even if in principle there are scientific or technological breakthroughs that would solve that problem we no longer have the bandwidth to make them.
The human race would survive, of course. But the modern highly technology-dependent world would be pretty much screwed.
(I am not claiming that the loss of 75% of the population would definitely do that. But it seems like it sure might.)
It doesn’t feel plausible to me. You don’t need computer chips or oil to have industry and science. Industry + science would eventually progress back to modern capabilities, but probably faster due to people rediscovering old knowledge preserved here and there.
For how long?
Indefinitely, in the scenario I described—we’d have lost the technology necessary to rebuild the technology. (E.g., if abundant energy depends on one or more of { getting lots of oil, getting lots of uranium, making really good solar cells, figuring out fusion } and making any of those happen depends in turn on abundant energy.)
We built it from scratch to start with.
I think you’re confusing technology and scale. Besides, can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?
Unfortunately, we can’t. While we’re not going to run out of oil soon (in fact, we should stop burning it for climate reasons long before we do; also, peak oil is not about oil depletion), we are running out of cheap oil. The EROEI of oil has fallen significantly since we started extracting it on a large scale.
This is highly relevant for what is discussed here. In the early 20th century, we could produce around 100 units of energy from oil for every unit of energy we used to extract it; those rebuilding the civilization from scratch today or in the future would have to make do with far less.
I am sure we can. Peak oil said we’d run out of oil Real Soon Now, full stop. The cost of oil has been rising since early XX century, as you point out, that’s not what peak oil was all about.
Again, we have confusion of technology and scale. The average cost of oil extraction is higher than it used to be. But that cost varies, considerably. If you are trying to rebuild you don’t need much oil, so you only use the cheapest oilfields (e.g. the Saudi ones) and don’t try to pave over the North Sea with oil rigs or set them up all over the Arctic.
If you go to the Wikipedia page about Peak Oil one of the first things you see will be a graph, derived from Hubbert’s 1956 paper. It shows oil production continuing to (and, looking at the graph, presumably past) year 2200. Hubbert’s paper doesn’t actually say anything much about when supply will fail to meet demand—it makes no attempt to model demand. (It does say something like “This doesn’t mean we’re going to run out of liquid and gaseous fuels real soon now, because we can make them from other more abundant fossil fuels”, presumably meaning coal.)
I’m not sure what it means to say that “peak oil was wrong”. I mean, the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite. At some point we will either run out or stop using it for other reasons; at some point before then there will be a global maximum of production (if it hasn’t occurred already). Some specific guess about when those things would happen could well have been wrong, but that doesn’t invalidate the overall picture and I’m not aware of any reason to think it even changes the timescales all that drastically.
The arguments about peak oil mostly consist of running to and fro between the motte (“the amount of oil on earth is in fact finite”) and the bailey. It’s tiring and not very useful.
Peak oil has been promising permanent—and accelerating—reductions in absolute oil production, sky-high—and climbing—prices and widespread—and worsening—scarcity leading to a variety of unpleasant social consequences since the mid-1970s. That’s 40 years of being wrong.
Well, what happened in this actual case is that I said it might turn out that rebuilding technological society after a huge catastrophe might be dependent on cheaper oil than we’d actually have, and it was to that that you replied “can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?”.
What version of “peak oil was wrong” refutes what I said?
That wasn’t an argument against your position per se. It was more of a side lunge. Or a distraction or a pirouette or a slip-and-fall or a bête noire or a whimsy or a wibble—you pick :-)
Another possibility is that it will become possible (and cheap enough) to produce oil from other things, before it runs out. In that case it would seem reasonable to say that the peak oil theory was wrong.
It is possible to produce oil from coal. It’s not a new process, Germany used it widely during WW2 as it had little access to “regular” oil.
And, as I remarked above, when Hubbert wrote his original paper about “peak oil” (at least, I think the thing I saw was his original paper), he explicitly said that coal can be used to make oil and gas, and that therefore diminishing oil extraction doesn’t have to mean no more oil.
Peak oil refers to the moment when the production of oil has reached a maximum and after which it declines. It doesn’t say that we’ll run out of it soon, just that production will slow down. If consumption increases at the same time, it’ll lead to scarcity.
Well, that probably depends on how much damage has been done. If civilization literally had to be rebuilt from scratch, I’d wager that a very significant portion of that cheap oil would have to be used.
Oh, yes it does.
Yup, we did. But after this hypothetical partial collapse our situation won’t be the same as when we started building our technological society. In some ways it’ll be better, but in others it’ll be worse; in particular, scarce natural resources will be harder to find because we already got out all the easy stuff.
I don’t think I am. I’m saying that technological advance is much easier in a society with good infrastructure, and that that infrastructure may depend on having lots of reasonably cheap energy, and that in this hypothetical scenario we may not have. (And that getting it back might depend on those technological advances we aren’t in a position to make until we’ve got it back.)
Scale.
Is your society 7 billion or 10 million? 10 million people can rebuild much of high-tech civilization and they won’t need a lot oil to do that. And then, of course, you go into a positive feedback cycle.
How sure are you of that? Here is a contrary opinion.
He answers a different question:
In the collapse-and-rebuild scenario you don’t need to “maintain the current level” right away. For example, you don’t need to be able to immediately build contemporary computer-controlled cars. The fully-mechanical cars of the XX century would do fine, for a while. All you need to do is have enough technology to not get stuck in a local minimum and get the positive feedback loop going. That’s a much easier task.
Of course by the time you’re done with the rebuild, your 10m people will multiply :-)
I’m really not sure it is.