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[...] according to a new U.S. Army report, Americans could face a horrifically grim future from climate change involving blackouts, disease, thirst, starvation and war. The study found that the US military itself might also collapse. This could all happen over the next two decades, the report notes.
[...] The report paints a frightening portrait of a country falling apart over the next 20 years due to the impacts of climate change on "natural systems such as oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, reefs, and forests.
Current infrastructure in the US, the report says, is woefully underprepared: "Most of the critical infrastructures identified by the Department of Homeland Security are not built to withstand these altered conditions."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 28 2019, @03:55AM (5 children)
> as I took peak oil seriously.
So did I (but didn't invest except as part of an index fund). And it was nearly true too, my natural gas heating bill in NE USA was climbing steadily ~10 years ago. Then along came fracking in PA (and other states) and it turned out that there was more gas still down there.
Will there be technology to get even more fossil fuel once the fracked deposits run low, or has this bit of expensive* technology just pushed peak oil out some years?
* expensive in terms of both $$$ and the environmental cleanup required.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Monday October 28 2019, @07:33PM
I'm betting the new peak oil is a peak in market demand, as other sources of energy continue to replace fossil fuels. Of course, supply limitations will show up as consumption limitations, so the two are similar in effect. The main difference is the price. As demand decreases, the price tends lower; as supply decreases (hypothetically, in a peak oil scenario), prices increase.
Here [timogrossenbacher.ch] is an interactive infographic that suggests that oil usage has already peaked in some areas. Maybe that's a short-term turnaround because of economic difficulties, but the monotonic increases expected by the peak oil theory are not there in many locations around the world.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 29 2019, @08:07AM (3 children)
If you wanted your energy to be cheap, you could have just stayed with your traditional sources, and given people rebates. Fracking is a sign that you are really really desperate to inefficiently try and squeeze fuel out of a stone, it's not the success story you're claiming it it, when looked at rationally, it's proof of abject failure.
It could well also be one of the things that brings down your economy too, enjoy that bust: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-fracking-industry-debts-set-off-financial-tremors/
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Tuesday October 29 2019, @10:45AM (2 children)
*blinks a few times*
That was a spectacularly, eye-wateringly ignorant analysis of the oilfield economy; I'm shocked that a university was willing to put its name on it. Wharton has a pretty good reputation, too; pity.
Here's my I-have-5-minutes-before-leaving-for-work rebuttal:
The authors of the article didn't seem to grasp any of this. They seem to have heard of some production companies going bankrupt, and did the bare minimum of research needed to publish an *opinion* piece in the Times. I'm not impressed.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday October 29 2019, @07:33PM (1 child)
I normally take articles in fields I'm not so familiar with with a pinch of salt unless I have heard widespread (i.e. explicitly not partisan, either truly independent or multi-/bi-partisan) support for the reputation of the department, or individual author, behind an article. I will confess that "Wharton" is one of the names that put me in a "should be trustworthy" mode before I've read a single word. They're boring, they're old-fashioned, they seem to be proper academics. Or so I thought - perhaps that's misplaced. Now I want to see the source of the data - the source of the money, and the sinks. The oft-repeated 280 billion figure must have come from somewhere. (Sometimes that somewhere is thin air, or an "extrapolation", or somewhere less sunlight accessible - chinese whispers are *terrible* at the interfaces between academia and journalism.)
Most of the articles I read do corroborate each other, but I have no idea how independent they are. But when you read quotes from a CEO of a natural gas producer like calling fracking an "unmitigated disaster" (I forget the exact quote, it was short of swearing, but was pretty damn blunt) for investors, it kinda supports the thesis that it's a money-hole and won't pay off.
Anyway, thanks for your contribution to the thread.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by Zinho on Tuesday October 29 2019, @11:14PM
I know, right? It's part of the UPenn system, and I started off the read giving them the benefit of the doubt as well. I really expected more.
The article got quite a few things right, as far as the finances go. Pension funds have been throwing a bunch of money around, and it flooded the market with money banks were anxious to lend. It's part and parcel with the mortgage crisis; the banks wanted to lend money so badly, they made many bad loans. Then when the price of oil started spiking and exploration companies started asking for capital to rent rigs, the banks were happy to lend.
Rigs aren't cheap: ocean-going rigs can cost millions of dollars a day to rent. Even land rigs can run in the hundreds of thousands per day, and drilling takes weeks. Active rig count in the U.S. land market peaked at over 1500, [tradingeconomics.com] so if those were being financed instead of paid for in cash that would be ~$50 Billion per year invested in exploration, and ~5 years of that gets you to a cool $250 Billion easy. If they borrowed that money on the assumption that the produced oil would sell at $100/bbl and instead they're only getting $25-70 [cnbc.com] they aren't going to be able to pay their loans.
The majors (Exxon, Shell, National Oil Companies like Aramco) aren't taking on loans, of course; it's the small players like Chesapeake that are vulnerable here. And the well owners that have cash reserves instead of debts are reacting to the oversupply and price drops by shutting down production. They're waiting for the price to recover: the oil isn't going anywhere if they don't pump it. The smart ones are still drilling while the rigs are cheap; when the price comes back up and rig time gets expensive again they'll simply uncap their wells and have all the capital they need. Meanwhile, the ones that took on too much debt are in really bad shape, and we'll probably see quite a few of them go bankrupt. Sucks for the banks, sucks for the well owners, and life goes on for the rest of us.
One last thing: this quote is killing me.
Even assuming they meant "oil and gas exploration companies" instead of "service companies", I think their analysis was wrong. in 2014 the U.S. was trying to put political pressure on both Venezuela [wikipedia.org] and Russia, [wikipedia.org] and the timing of the Saudi production bump coincided surprisingly well with that. Worked a treat on Venezuela, not so much on Russia. This seemed pretty obvious to most people in the oil & gas industry, not sure who would have been saying that it was targeting small US exploration companies.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin