Unfortunatley I suspect that if the world governments ran the likely figures for oil prices in the coming decade the outcome 'would not work' -and that's exactly what is most likely to happen...

In the early years of the coming decade NET importing countries will start to run bigger and bigger budget deficits. In order not to cause a balance of payments crisis governments will have to jack up the rates on bonds to attract funding. This will cause interest rates to go through the roof... I think you get the picture.

Nick.

What is as scary as oil peaking, in geological terms, are the government efforts by the United States, Canada, and Europe, and elsewhere to use corn, soybeans, beets, sugar cane, palm oil, and sweet potatoes to produce biofuels. This is already contributing to rampant food inflation around the globe and is scheduled to worsen. Large increases in farm productivity did not happen in a season, nor was a season sufficient to bring in large quantities of new acres cleared, prepared, and producing. In a season ethanol use is scheduled to rise faster than agriculture is prepared to respond.

While there were some initial reporta suggesting the best wheat harvests ever might occur this year around the world, already Pakistan might only produce two-thirds of the wheat they harvested in 2007. Analysts reported some potential dry conditions remaining in parts of Australia. This is only a microcosm of difficulties that might be faced by the end of the year. Another area reporting winter wheat problems was N. Dakota (USA). If one could see more, one might see that every year there were catastrophic crop failures and not to count the bushels before they are harvested.

United States corn harvests may be lower as fewer acres were planted in corn in the face of higher corn demand by numerous ethanol distillery contructions. Canada was also attempting to ramp up its corn ethanol production. Some hoped they might get ethanol from Brazil, yet Brazil exported a small fraction of its production, not enough to support the strict requirements of the ethanol blending requirements of the United States and Canada.

works fine for me...

Still works for me (in Firefox).

There is a link to the interview on the 4BC web site link that I also posted...

Anytime any Peak Oiler says conservation (and Simmons is fond of it) throw in something about population control. The United States had 200 million people in 1970, it has 303 million now and is projected to have 400 million in 30 to 50 years. And yet we have a simple means of population control that countries like India and Mexico do not have. We can stop immigration.

Mr Mashey, I hadn't seen you over here at TOD but it seems you've been a member for 16 weeks. What brings you to Aussie blogs so often? Quiggin and now here. Is the quality of discussion superior? :)

Both the points you make, Sololeum--population control's being a red herring and our needing to simplify and humanize our lives--seem right on to me.

Population control is a red herring in the current clear and present danger of peak oil. Population measures take decades to work while we only have years to deal with declining energy. In addition China with its draconian measures has not been able to reduce population - there is absolutely no chance of doing so in the white west, let alone using more draconian measures that would work, including euthenasing the chronically ill and infirm.

Talking about draconian measures is a strawman argument. The United States takes over a million legal immigrants (and the number keeps increasing) each year and God only knows how many illegals - the conservative estimates were always 300,000 - now Wikipedia has 1 million - and that number keeps increasing each year as well. That's a bare minimum of 15 million people, but more likely over 20 million entering each decade. And then they begin bearing children... I hope you will volunteer to stop using oil-based products and stop using oil-based transportation in order to save some oil for the coming tens of millions we will see in the short years ahead. What is unfathomable is how we have guys like Gore talking about Global Warming and he sits silent as we build coal and gas-fired power plants left and right in order to accomodate the incoming millions.

As Hirsch depressingly intones, Peak Oil cannot be solved in "years". So hoping for some solution that takes place in "years" and which renders our massive population growth (highest in our history) meaningless is an exercise in futility.

People of good will must concentrate on things that will work and that is moving to a radically simpler lifestyle that eshew the using and abusing materialism and affirms the non material - dare I say spiritual - things like;-
Loving, crying, touching, helping, sharing, laughing, growing, loyalty, generosity, peacefullness, kindness, repairing, re-using - being human beings not consumers...

People of good will need to get the cajones to speak out against population growth. The longer they stay silent, the longer they engage is self-righteous wishful thinking on the issue - the worse it will be in the end. Wait long enough, and it will indeed be draconian. The kind of draconian that mother nature deals out.

Fertility rates are declining in many countries once famous for high population growth, like Mexico. see: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?IndicatorID=138&Country=MX

Problem is, it takes a generation or two for a fertility decline to translate into slowed or stopped population growth.

Population takes a while to turn around - esp on a global scale.

But fertility rates are declining worldwide - http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0502-rhett_butler.html

Believe me, if something could be done to reduce population it would have been done.

First we would need to get to a place where people thought a reduction in population was a good thing. We are so far away from that it's not even funny. Right now in every country, save maybe China, it's felt that population growth is a good thing, or at the very least, OK. Even Peak Oilers are quick to throw out that old canard that if the birth rate goes below replacment level it will be awful due to a lack of workers. Presumably it will be coincident with a total stoppage in the mechanization that has eliminated so many farm and manufacturing jobs in the last 300 years.

The best effort was in China, but they let party officials and the wealthy have as many children as they liked, and since China has so many party officials, well now there up to 1.35 billion people.

I think it is the only effort. Has any other country on earth ever tried to reduce population? By the way, China based on a co-worker who has a brother in China, they have relaxed their one-child policy due to their newfound wealth. Apparently smog so think on cloudy days that it looks like fog, is not enough to deter them from growing their population if they just recieved hundreds of millions of American and European jobs.

The US has a pro family perspective that the more people have children the more they are serving God (christianity). We visited some bus. associates in Florida and they were heros to their church for having such a massive family. The grandparents have 32 grandchildren. Their house was like a school.

Yes, births are celebrated. It gets applause on Leno and Letterman anytime a guest actor or actress says they have had a child. Which is why Peak Oilers are mostly silent on the issue. However, they are silent on the issue of immigration for entirely different reasons.

So population is the one thing no one can do anything about. Nature will have its way as we bump up against population sustainability, the maximum level allowed by our surroundings based on crop acreage, energy supply, etc. As oil depletes population will follow. This will be most evident in the poorest countries first. Bangladesh, Sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. Like layers of an onion it will work its way through the many layers as it balances to a new sustainability level.

If cheap oil supported huge population increases, then lack thereof will induce its descent.

I have to agree that it appears that the answer to the question asked by someones signature line - "Is man smarter than yeast" is no.

Without having heard Deffeyes presentation, I am going to agree and comment on the basis that "carbon is precious", only we don't know it yet.
It took hundreds of millions of years to collect the oil (read carbon) from a primitive atmosphere. An atmosphere that this globe in space will never have again. in a mear 200 hundred years this species, human, have extracted and scattered that condensed carbon into a system that is geared to recycling over a very long time frame. We are currently dispersing carbon at a rate 40,000 times greater than the earth's natural cycling process can cope with. Now.....it is very important.....that you think about what every thing that you use is made from. Think about the rate at which human technology transitioned from a metal to a carbon and silicon substance based civilisation. Now project that into the future. You can count the generations on one and a half hands that will see the end of our own "very clever" civilisation.

Oil, Coal,....it is all carbon, and it is the only carbon that we have.

Partialy hedging against the problems of peak oil I have the equivalent of 600 barrels of oil through futures etc....
I guess, in theory an average "western" individual could almost eliminate their own oil supply risk by purchasing now (indirectly) enough oil to last them the rest of their lives. Anyone got any idea how much oil that would be? Taking into account all the oil used in the supply chain for the things the person purchases, all the oil used in manufacturing plastics etc etc...
Someone must have done this calculation. I'm guessing its a big number. I'm guessing its not as easy as taking the oil consumption of the UK and dividing by the population (due to export and import of goods and services etc)...
I think this number is important because by looking at it, we can explain to others the huge impact on them, individually, of oil going from $100 to $200. Explaining it in the basest of terms - what it is going to cost them in dollars if we don't change our ways.