For those who want to follow and discuss the Peak Oil issue, you may want to join or keep in touch with The Association for the Study of Peak Oil USA (ASPO-USA), which just held a major meeting in Houston, where “Pessimism was in the air concerning future oil production.”
That is a quotation from this report. Rather than trying to summarize the report here for Science Blog readers, I recommend following the link. The report is not long, well written, and summarizes all the key issues.
Here are two excerpts that may help you decide to read further. First, a definition of the issue:
In its narrow sense, the phrase “peak oil” refers to the zenith of global oil production, but the term now often refers to more general resource constraints on “business as usual” going forward. There are issues about coal, natural gas and other commodities. The connection between anthropogenic climate change and future resource availability is now being explored in greater depth as new data-driven analysis comes to light.
Next, the connection between Peak oil and climate change. Note that a declining supply of oil may translate into less CO2 production, though the replacement of oil by coal then becomes a larger concern. (To see the graph, you need to go to the linked article.)
The argument between the climate community and those studying constraints on fossil fuel resources is simple: Rutledge believes the IPCC’s 2001 Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES, also used for the 4th report in 2007) are too aggressive by a wide margin. The IPCC projections for carbon emissions, especially in the mid-high range, seem to depend on recoverable volumes of oil, coal and gas that do not exist. The lowest line in the graph (left, from Rutledge’s report at The Oil Drum, June 25, 2007) is Rutledge’s estimate of possible emissions by 2100. The 540 gigatons shown is well below all but the most conservative IPCC cases. Future columns will discuss this issue in greater detail, but two important conclusions can be drawn now.
1. The peak oil and climate communities share a common goal. Both groups believe that reducing fossil fuels consumption is necessary to mitigate the worst economic affects of future scarcity and warming.
2. Peak oil (or gas or coal) does not obviate the threat of dangerous human-made interference with the Earth’s climate system insofar as incompletely understood feedback loops in the climate system, the oceans, the large ice sheets, and the carbon cycle still exist. However, resource constraints will necessarily force adjustments that substantially reduce the likelihood of all the worst case climate change scenarios.
My reaction to that last point: Though that makes me hopeful that we can solve the problem of too much CO2 production, let’s hope that it happens by a sound new energy policy rather than by the economic and geopolitical impact of running low on oil without adequate planning for it.
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