Spidey wrote:tidal wrote:My bet is that most of the reserves will get left in the ground. The owners of the existing reserves will be in a mad scramble to both (a) avoid any limits on their extraction and (b) get theirs out before their competitors do. But in the end, only a fraction will get out. Odds are better for a larger proportion of the proven oil and gas reserves to be burnt.
With 1.3 billion people, the People's Republic of China is the world's most populous country and the second largest oil consumer, behind the U.S. In recent years, China has been undergoing a process of industrialization and is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. With real gross domestic product growing at a rate of 8-10% a year, China's need for energy is projected to increase by 150 percent by 2020. to sustain its growth China requires increasing amounts of oil. Its oil consumption grows by 7.5% per year, seven times faster than the U.S.'
http://www.iags.org/china.htm
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/ ... uench.html
If there is a point being made here with respect to my contention, then it's escaping me.
Is it that the forecasts for annual oil consumption - in China and globally and in the U.S. - are forecast to grow? Well, duh, yeah. And? Is this the first time you have bumped into the EIA and IEA? And I am not saying that's wrong - in fact I explicitly indicated that there are large proven reserves of all fossil fuels.
But that wasn't my
main point then, now was it? First, it is a "stock" problem, not a "flow" problem. ("Peak oil", by the way, a different topic, is more characterized as a "flow" than a "stock" problem, at least initially, depending on how much you ascribe to it...). You are responding with a bunch of "flow" data and forecasts. Second, my point was about two very incompatible objectives where the implied quantities don't appear to be reconcilable.
I'm still a big fan of the Denzil Washington attorney character in "Philadelphia" who would often say, to the effect: "Explain it to me. Like a three-year-old would do."
So let me try this again.
Let's say that at age 20 you weighed 170 pounds. At age 30, 180 pounds. At age 40, 200 pounds. At age 50, 230 pounds. And you are zooming up faster and faster towards 340 pounds and beyond. And now your doctor is saying that you need to stabilize your weight asap and try to get back below 200 pounds or lower or the whole project is likely to crash and soon.
Your contribution here is like saying "But there's still lots of food to eat! I like eating food! And my forecast is that I am going to eat ever more and more food!"
Well, maybe so. In fact, I'd bet you would.
But that really has not much to do with what the physician said, now does it? So what if there's lots of food? So what if everyone is screaming for more ice cream? The two things remain incompatible. Something's gotta give. THAT was my point.
OR, was the point that it's all the fault of the dastardly Chinese?
Sorry. Over 50% of the
cumulative increase in the atmospheric CO2 is courtesy of just the USA, Germany and Britain. China represents about 10%. Did I mention that this is primarily a
"stock" problem, not a "flow" problem? Yes, China is now the single largest annual emitter. Big deal. They will add about 0.4% to the 10% cumulative responsibility this year. Besides, they/we ALL have to effectively go to net-zero later this century.
Oh wait. It wasn't about
EITHER of those points, now, was it? It was about a big hand-wave away of the physical reality of a greenhouse effect and a climate crisis. Oh, well then, carry on.
Here is the point. We've got two numbers that are based on what our best oil/gas/coal geologists and our best climate scientists are telling us. They are engaged in different studies of the physical world, but at one point their empirical estimates and forecasts come together on one common "stock" metric: the amount of carbon in those fuels we can combust. And the numbers are very, very, vastly different. Essentially irreconcilable. And it makes you think "Do you feel lucky punk? Well, do ya?" Because otherwise, we have some hard trade-offs ahead of us...
So, back to my original point. My opinion is that most of the existing fossil fuel proven reserves of the Exxons and Gazproms and Saudi Aramco's and Petrobras and PetroChinas and BHPs and oil sands and everyone else will eventually stay in the ground. Either because we choose to or because we run into serious disruption problems with respect to climate by later this decade. Something's gotta give. Since this has to do with perhaps the most important valuation metric for by far the largest industry in the world, one would think that investors would be, um, puzzled by this discrepancy... But, no, that would upset too many apple carts and too many delicate fee-fee's. Ergo, no such discrepancy can be allowed to exist. Poof, by collective fiat... a.k.a. "the longest river in the world"...