Submitted on September 20th, 2008 by Unregistered user (not verified)
Lots of action on this provocative, no doubt intended. I haven't read them all, but people should know about the digital utopians and Chris Anderson, the editor of "Wired" magazine and another member of the Board of The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. Digital utopians believe the continuing exponential growth in their industry will, put simply, save the planet and mankind too.
Ironically, post-peak oil fits exactly one of the utopians favorite theories, "The Long Tail", espoused by Chris Anderson in a book of the same name By memory, this is a graph of marginal computing, really advertising, costs that drops so quickly you can sell all sorts of arcane products to a whole lot of niche markets. Everybody gets their favorite lolly and everyone is excessively jolly.
Oil will never run out. Never. Ever. It will just decline quicker than we would like. This sounds trite, but it is the basis for our concern over peak oil. As various replies have recited, in answers that sound suspiciously like cant, PO is a legitimate concern as well as a basic mathematical truth based on recent about a hundred years of statistics, about twice as long a sample set as computer statistics. I think Mr. Schwarz knows this.
With or without carbon taxes, in the absence of energy policy that promotes a just a little stability (think agriculture...) oil prices will keep going through the roof and then the floor and then sky high and then back to the roof... Each gyration will kill off a few long term plans (conventional and alternative) and shut a few old wells.
Why? Oil is such a useful, concentrated energy source that it simply blows away all its competitors if it is around in any quantity. It's guns versus bows and arrows. If oil products are available in any quantity, special measures must be in place to protect those of gentler entropy and preserve consumer choice and overall resiliency (security).
In other words, if the Saudi's decided to blow off their gas caps, they could probably drive oil prices into the dirt, as they did in the 1980's and again in the 1990's.
As a consequence, they could take dominant positions in a cowed solar and wind industry to complement their desert kingdom's greatest renewable resource and stay very jolly.
If you put peak oil's "long tail" of declining production and rising marginal production costs together with ever tumbling marginal computing costs - specifically its effect on energy production, distribution and efficiency - and you have a formula for mass jollies and unlimited lollies. The rise of the digital cornucopians.
There's a quantum leap involved in this particular ideal, one that I don't buy myself. But I can see (and know) some people who clearly do. There are other cornucopians who are in the game for a host of more sinister reasons, mainly to make friends and influence people. Among other things, they have effectively monkey-wrenched effective action on climate change in North America.
Concentrated useful energy is nothing more than another form of mass/capital. What you are looking for in your ruminations and networking at at Cleantech is the equivalent of the speed of light - squared. Good luck!
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Digital Utopians and The Long Tail...
Submitted on September 20th, 2008 by Unregistered user (not verified)Lots of action on this provocative, no doubt intended. I haven't read them all, but people should know about the digital utopians and Chris Anderson, the editor of "Wired" magazine and another member of the Board of The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. Digital utopians believe the continuing exponential growth in their industry will, put simply, save the planet and mankind too.
Ironically, post-peak oil fits exactly one of the utopians favorite theories, "The Long Tail", espoused by Chris Anderson in a book of the same name By memory, this is a graph of marginal computing, really advertising, costs that drops so quickly you can sell all sorts of arcane products to a whole lot of niche markets. Everybody gets their favorite lolly and everyone is excessively jolly.
Oil will never run out. Never. Ever. It will just decline quicker than we would like. This sounds trite, but it is the basis for our concern over peak oil. As various replies have recited, in answers that sound suspiciously like cant, PO is a legitimate concern as well as a basic mathematical truth based on recent about a hundred years of statistics, about twice as long a sample set as computer statistics. I think Mr. Schwarz knows this.
With or without carbon taxes, in the absence of energy policy that promotes a just a little stability (think agriculture...) oil prices will keep going through the roof and then the floor and then sky high and then back to the roof... Each gyration will kill off a few long term plans (conventional and alternative) and shut a few old wells.
Why? Oil is such a useful, concentrated energy source that it simply blows away all its competitors if it is around in any quantity. It's guns versus bows and arrows. If oil products are available in any quantity, special measures must be in place to protect those of gentler entropy and preserve consumer choice and overall resiliency (security).
In other words, if the Saudi's decided to blow off their gas caps, they could probably drive oil prices into the dirt, as they did in the 1980's and again in the 1990's.
As a consequence, they could take dominant positions in a cowed solar and wind industry to complement their desert kingdom's greatest renewable resource and stay very jolly.
If you put peak oil's "long tail" of declining production and rising marginal production costs together with ever tumbling marginal computing costs - specifically its effect on energy production, distribution and efficiency - and you have a formula for mass jollies and unlimited lollies. The rise of the digital cornucopians.
There's a quantum leap involved in this particular ideal, one that I don't buy myself. But I can see (and know) some people who clearly do. There are other cornucopians who are in the game for a host of more sinister reasons, mainly to make friends and influence people. Among other things, they have effectively monkey-wrenched effective action on climate change in North America.
Concentrated useful energy is nothing more than another form of mass/capital. What you are looking for in your ruminations and networking at at Cleantech is the equivalent of the speed of light - squared. Good luck!
Fred M. Strong