Comment to "Doomberg" and Rozencwajg about "peak cheap oil", the oil price and nuclear energy
(This blogpost can very well be read to the sound of "The Smiths' " beatiful song "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now")
There has been much fury and debate about "Doomberg's" denial of Peak Oil lately in the Peak Oil community. The following is a comment to the youtubedebate "Debate On "Peak Cheap Oil": Fact Or Overblown Fear? | Doomberg vs Adam Rozencwajg" that took place 25.1.2024, and which was led by the always mild, courteous and beautiful Adam Taggart (once Chris Martenson's closest coworker at Peak Prosperity):
I have heard before the argument (that Doomberg seems to make in the debate) that the fact that the oil price has not just risen more and more since 2005, but instead collapsed, and somewhat stabilized, with some exceptions, on a much lower level than in 2005-2014 (see this chart), proves that there is no "peak cheap oil".
Doomberg forgets that the oil price on the oil market does not reflect the real price of oil, the price that the world in reality, "out there" has to pay, everything taken into consideration, but only reflects the politics of oil, what the world, or those who manage to control the world, want the oil price to be, with all their manipulation, subsidies and gimmickry. There is a gigantic oil price war going on, stretching far back, and this war is about what the oil price shall be, and "they" want it to be where it does minimal damage to this horrible civilization we have built, minimal damage to economic growth, where it allows our financial megabubbles to just expand more and more, and not burst. They just want our "party" (at the expense of nature and the non-human animals) to go on forever.
The rising real price of oil is reflected in the ongoing collapse of our industrial civilization, in a shrinking global economy, in the beginnings of the slow bursting of the global debt bubble (or "the everything bubble"), in the inflation of almost everything, and not the least in the globally rising food prices and the growing global starvation and freezing. How the EROEI is declining, exponentially, at an accelerated rate, making everything more expensive, leading to collapse. Doomberg must be blind, when he cannot see this collapse. He certainly does not follow collapse news, which is the real news today, and also the most positive news, that hell is in fact collapsing. He seems to know very little about what he's talking about, and has no substantial writings on the internet or elsewhere that merits him to be interviewed (this is all he can master. Just less than three years of writing on the subject! No books, no Peak Oil centered blogs. His very superficial, worthless and uneducated writings on fossil fuels are all gathered here). In my view, he is so uneducated on the subject, that he is not even worth mentioning. That people like him is lately interviewed, and not people like Richard Heinberg and Alice Friedemann (very educated people, indeed! And not only in the brain), just tells me about the growing decadence of the Peak Oil debate, about the growing inflation and dilution of real knowledge, about the rise and overtake of the political opiners in the global knowledge community, people that have expertise in some small field, but think they are able and merited to opine about almost anything. Doomsberg isn't even an expert on oil or an oil insider, still his opinions are listened to. This gives all who hope that this civilization will grow forever, incentives. I was very saddened to learn that Adam Rozencwajg believes in this lie. I had expected better insights from him. It's also very sad that he joins the nuclear energy fan chorus, because this is BY FAR the most horrible form of energy ever concocted, and can never ever stand on its own legs without fossil fuels and the massive subsidies of fossil fuels. And Adam vastly overstates the EROEI of nuclear energy (he says it's 100-180:1). In a 2019 review of an academic book from 2017 on EROEI by our most educated EROEI scholar, a real veteran and pioneer in the field, professor Charles A.S.Hall (b. 1943), the EROEI of nuclear energy was put at 5–15:1. This in a very serious, academic review (it's here, by energy expert professor Christopher J. Rhodes) of a very serious, academic book on the subject. I think the estimate of Rhodes was in Hall's spirit, Hall could very well have said it himself, it reminds of his estimates. We have to have at least 11:1 to run a civilization, Hall says. One often forgets that as the prices of everything rises, because of rising EROEI of oil and gas, the EROEI of all energy, also nuclear power, rises, so probably nuclear energy is below 11:1 by now. If one takes environmental costs into the equation, the EROEI is even lower. Because these costs are IMMENSE, especially after Fukushima. And they will get so, exponentially, with the collapse of civilization.
Furthermore, to think, as some do, that shale oil is cheaper than conventional oil, is so incredibly blind and stupid, that it's almost not worthy of a rebuttal. Such people has not followed the many peak oil videos that has been put out on Youtube since 2005, where the truth on the subject is thoroughly documented, by for example people like Richard Heinberg and Steve St. Angelo, in great detail, for example the lousy shale oil economics, a problem that has not gone away. Just make a search on Youtube and study those old videos.
But it suffices to just study the shale oil industry, how it is done, how much debt, investor money, material, workforce, environmental destruction and transportation that is needed in the process. It's all STAGGERING.
Then the notion that oil hasn't become more expensive since 2005, is straight out laughable.
To be able to believe that, you have do bury your head at least one meter in the sand.
But Doomberg always lean his head against his hopes about "the next technology miracle" that will save us. Unfortunately he does not seem to know about the law of diminishing returs in innovation, almost a natural law, which says that as time goes by, and technology and science becomes more and more mature and sophisticated, less and less groundbreaking and completely new innovations are made, until we are just polishing the surface of the statue, nothing more. With finer and finer sand paper.
We are late in the game.
* * *
Here is the most important youtubevideos with the debate:
Peak Cheap Oil Debate - Doomberg / Peak Prosperity Podcast show Review (Chris Martenson)
We Are Gonna Need Oil? (Interview with Steve St.Angelo)
