If you hadn't had enough scary sounding possible future calamities that you as an individual have no control over to worry about, here's another. My anxiety system for these kinds of things broke back when peak oil turned out to not be a thing (well as described). There lots of things to be concerned about where we as individuals can make better choices, such as sustainable living and not contributing to carbon emissions, but stuff like this, while something I'm not going to ignore because it's at the very least interesting, I can't feel anxiety about.
I just don't have the capacity to be anxious every minute of my life for everything that could possibly go wrong for us someday in the future.
Peak oil kinda happened. All of the abundant easy to access oil is gone. We're gradually moving to other sources like offshore and fracking while using more technology in existing locations like pumping seawater into old wells to get more out of them.
Tech has done wonderful things to keep costs down, but it's a lot tougher to get that barrel of oil now days. I think there are, at least to some degree, costs being offset by increased risk. Deepwater horizon is a pretty obvious example. Groundwater contamination from fracking is another. I think the price per barrel has been on a steady downward trend, but I'd bet that including the environmental impact just from accessing (not burning) oil, we're paying more. I'm not aware of any such study.
In any case, we're the first, but also last technological civilization to use oil. If a wizard waved a magic wand, and we were suddenly sent back to a 1700's level of technology, i don't see how we'd be able to get much oil at all. It's not bubbling up out of the ground anywhere anymore. The easy stuff is gone. there's no way to get the hard stuff by hand.
"The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."
– Ahmed Zaki Yamani (Saudi & OPEC Minister for Oil)
I think oil is just one of those resources that we're never going to have to worry about. We've got two things going for us these days - first, the majority of oil production goes to powering cars which are becoming increasingly efficient, and, second the technology for extracting oil is also becoming more efficient. Fracking techniques right now only recover a small percentage of the actual oil that's in place - as those techniques are optimized, recovery rates will go through the roof.
I think we'll be way past the need for oil, long before we run out of it.
Plastics are probably the largest semi-direct user of hydrocarbons other than energy production, and according to the US Energy Information Administration [1] plastics used the equivalent of 2.7% of the total oil consumption in the US in 2010.
If we just stop burning the stuff we'll have enough for other uses for a very very long time.
We can synthetize all petroleum products from carbon feedstocks, so long as we can pay the energy cost. This is generally true of almost everything these days -- all resources that the modern economy depends on are substitutable or synthetizable with energy.
Peak oil is here, and have been for more than 10 years. Yet, a phrase like this would sound impossible 15 years ago.
It's not that peak oil didn't happen, or that it wasn't traumatic. It did come, just like predicted, and we are on the way to adjust from a growth based society to a society where "if we work hard and right, we can improve the world!", and the transition has been traumatic, just like predicted.
Where predictions failed was that people expected a one in a 1000 years calamity (because it is a one in a 1000 years event), instead we got what looks like just a one in 100 years calamity.
> and the transition has been traumatic, just like predicted.
What trauma? What transition?
We currently have more oil than we know what to do with. It's piling up in huge storage containers, and the price keeps falling because no one needs any.
That's not because of high oil prices, it's because of financial chaos and general market turmoil. The oil boom across the Dakotas collapsed, but not because of lack of oil....?
It has been proven that it does contaminate. That also doesn't consider the pools of wastewater on the surface. There are peer reviewed studies out there that state the evidence. Sadly, there is also a lot of misinformation being pushed by the oil and gas industry.
huh. weird. I thought it was known to be happening, but not yet widespread.
http://ofmpub.epa.gov/eims/eimscomm.getfile?p_download_id=52...
"We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on
drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report,
we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water
resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases,
however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. "
Also the sort of vague claim with no support that "well it hasn't happened yet" is kind of annoying. Nothing is zero risk. we can argue about p(bad_things) <.001 or .1 or whatever, but i think it's foolish to just pretend everything will be sunshine and rainbows forever.
I actually asked a family member who is an ecologically minded geologist about this (while we were at Yellowstone, no less). He said the primary issues now are twofold.
1) Law relating to public land use is terrible and biases insanely in the way of leasing for exploitation. In that the government is both required by law to lease and that the price is far shy of what a market would support (as it hasn't been updated in decades)
2) Inspection and fining of terrestrial operations is typically more self-reported (though only necessary if "sufficient" oil / chemicals have spilled). Measures are then put in place afterwards to monitor the well / location.
Admittedly, he wasn't in legal, but thought I'd share. Also, have to put a plug, if anyone has a lead on good-conscience geology jobs looking for someone with a BSc, I'd be thrilled to forward you on to him (contact me at {username}.co at gmail). He could have made easy money working in petrogeology but felt that wasn't something he could support.
When we were signing up for fracking under our land, we contacted the Ohio Dept of Natural Resources fellow who's responsible for tracking such things (groundwater contamination), and he said he had seen no evidence in 30 years of drilling (including recent) fracking. That's a pretty strong statement from the person whom you'd assume feels responsible for environmental protection
The trick there is that most things are systems, rather than point variables. Just like you can't push down just one place in a bowl of water, you can't expect that the system will not respond to the change in variables. Whether it is Peak Oil, Kessler Syndrome, Global Warming, or Free Markets. People use extrapolation to scare others into some action, rarely are the predictions correct because other parts of the system have adapted.
I never was very intelligent, just smart enough to quote intelligent people, so I'll invoke Steven Pinker from his book 'The Better Angels of Our Nature':
Also distorting our sense of danger is our moral psychology. No one has ever recruited activists to a cause by announcing that things are getting better, and bearers of good news are often advised to keep their mouths shut lest they lull people into complacency. Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.
Indeed. I've lived long enough to see a whole lot of TEOTWAWKI scenarios panicked about and either were duly mitigated by sensible people or simply failed to instantiate. "Y2K Bug" was an ideal example (chronic programming flaw could have knocked out computer systems worldwide and knocked humanity back to the Middle Ages, but was recognized as a solvable problem and was indeed solved).
At some point I looked at my own anxieties and simply decided to not be anxious: do what I could about what I could given resource (time included) constraints, be prepared for eventualities within reason, and otherwise carry on.
My biggest recurring concern now is how I'm not anxious. Should something horrible happen, I may be disconcertingly unconcerned - having done what I could in good faith, there is/was nothing else to do but accept reality and move on.
I agree with you, but I think it is still important to be anxious and raise awareness of these problems. Without the panic, would Y2K have been "recognized as a solvable problem and solved"? We need to continue to raise awareness of these really big potential problems, even if we have confidence that they are solvable.
Instead of being anxious, our goal should be to fix things if we can, and plan mitigation strategies if we can't. Peak oil is a thing: by definition there is _some_ global maximum in produciton volume over a long enough chosen interval. It might turn out that the solution is built into the problem though, because price is a function of supply so we get a soft landing, especially if we plan ahead. And we should plan ahead. It's the same with Y2k. It was a serious problem, but we fixed it before it was a disaster.
The Mathusian Catastrophe has also failed to fully materialize because people are not bacteria, and so we planned ahead and are trying to control population and improve agricultural efficeincey. Did we do a perfect job? No, but we did better than bacteria.
Just because a doomsday scenario fails to emerge does not mean the problems were completely bunk.
So I'm guessing Stross thinks we should imagine what will happen if we don't do something about Kessler Syndrome, and then become motivated to do something about it.
Well, don't feel anxious. Charles Stross is a science fiction writer and dreaming up (or researching) interesting calamities pays his bills. If humans are an ant hill, you're just one ant, and unless you work for NASA, ESA, SpaceX, or (at the very least) have a prestigious professorship at a major university and/or serve as the science advisor to someone with real political power, there's nothing you need/can do about this one.
So relax, and enjoy a good setting for a dystopian story.
I can't find the source now, but some estimate that removing only a few of the largest boosters on orbit each year would decrease the cascade risk significantly, since those boosters represent a large fraction of the mass. This is a much smaller move than many other avoid-the-end-of-the-world suggestions given throughout the years.
Now: better modeling would probably help us determine whether Kessler syndrome will actually happen.
Scientists only figured out in the last decades what religions knew for millenia: people love to be told "the world is ending, give us money". Back when I was a teen, the coming ice age / famine of 2000 predicted by the Club of Rome was a serious problem for my educated (adult) friends. So was nuclear war.
Lists like [1] remind me of my extremely scary youth :)
Side note: peak oil is still very much a thing. Enhanced recovery and fracturing of source rocks bought us about another 15 years, but the Seneca cliff is still there.
It's also pretty much exactly as described. Light, sweet crude is gone and we can't sustain low oil prices (the current dip notwithstanding). Oil costs 5X what it did in the 90s. We are forced to use dirtier, more expensive types of oil. Economies suffer as a result. Peak oil happened as advertised.
Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil." The problem is that for as long as we have been using oil, we have been running out of easy-to-access oil. U.S. production started in Pennsylvania and moved to Ohio. That was the easy-to-access oil in the late 1800s, early 1900s.
After Ohio and Pennsylvania, oil production shifted to Texas and California and then, when people found it tougher to find oil onshore they tried offshore.
There is nothing different with newer technologies like hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, and advanced imagine.
We aren't at peak oil because extracting oil always has been heavily dependent on technology.
> Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil."
Some people have misinterpreted that way, but they are people who didn't understand the basic underlying theory. Peak oil is a production peak driven by running out of cheap-to-extract reserves faster than technology reduces extraction costs, such that the amount of the resource that can be profitably extracted with available technology drops.
It is very different from resource depletion, e.g., running out of all of the underlying resource.
> Except that it did not happen as advertised. Peak oil was advertised as "running out of oil period," not "running out of easy-to-access oil."
That's false. There may have been a few tin foilers who didn't read the source material and thus came away with the wrong scenario, but _peak_ oil by definition has always been about production peaking, based on the cost of extraction.
I don't see this article, or these end of the world scenarios, as things you should be anxious about. Maybe some people suggest they are, but to me an article like this serves two purposes:
1. To remind people who are in positions to solve this problem that it is still a problem, by bringing attention to the issue.
2. To give an interesting example of an unexpected negative externality of a system as a case study, which might help me think differently about systems I create.
Better to think about it and end up being wrong, than just having blind faith on Father Progress protecting us forever. Just because one Malthus was wrong once doesn't mean that no Malthus will ever be right.
The problem of progress is that by its own definition we can never be sure of what we are doing until we do it. Being cautious has to be an important virtue to keep in mind.
I just don't have the capacity to be anxious every minute of my life for everything that could possibly go wrong for us someday in the future.