14 hours ago, A Satanic Panda said:There's a difference between actual productivity, i.e. how much stuff you are making, and accounting. I see a lot of confusion between the two and it's important to separate them. Productivity is what puts a roof over your head and food on the table, accounting is assigning a monetary number to those products. As governments become more and more Keynesian, the price of goods and services become more and more warped. It's gotten to the point where the prices of things like food, college, health care, automotive, real estate, electronics, and oil, are completely decoupled from their actual value. Because of that, it's hard to know how much work in the economy is being done versus how much people are paying for that work. What we're seeing right now I wouldn't call The 2nd Great Depression, but The Great Correction. As you've seen, stock prices are in la-la land and The Fed is running the money printer as fast as it can trying to keep it up just a little bit longer. The accounting part of the economy is coming to terms with the fact that productive growth since the 1990s has actually slowed or completely stalled while the number of people it's had to serve has gone up.
I get what you're saying, but I don't see how it matters outside of theory. Yes, there's a difference between not being able to produce enough food v. mismanaging the economy so that vast numbers of people don't have resources in order to purchase food. In either scenario, people go hungry. Housing is a good example of this. We're projected to evict 40 million people in the USA. Do we just not have homes for them? No, of course we do, but we're managing things so we don't. Unless there is a major intervention, that throws tens of millions of people out on the street. This raises instability for society all around and I honestly don't know how that plays out, but probably nothing good.
QuoteMy understanding is that the estimated shale reserves in just the US and Canada is enough to meet our oil needs for hundreds of years. Probably longer since exploration is still on-going. An honest to God peak oil situation is far off the horizon.
I think you may not understand how peak oil works. We could have oil for thousands of years or even infinite in theory, that's actually irrelevant. Peak oil is when we hit maximum rate of production. Yes, there's tons of shale oil, but it's more energy intensive to get out of the ground. So, regardless of the cost, we get less oil back for the amount of oil we spend extracting it compared to traditional wells. Peak oil is all about the RATE of production. So say in order for us to be functioning as normal, we need X oil outputted each day. We could have infinite fields, but if we can only extract them at a rate of X - 1, then we start having problems and that contracts the economy. Since our economy is fragile and we're incredibly dependent on oil, this causes job losses, increased prices in essential goods and almost inevitably causes a depression. I think my analogy to a car engine overheating in the video is an apt one. We can go through a depression, which causes a drop in demand of oil. As soon as we try to recover because demand has dropped, if we're successful, we'll slam up against the limits of supply again, over and over. I don't see a way out of this with our current economic system.
As for CO2 relationship, that almost is irrelevant also. I think you might be mistaken on that and the reason that projections have been off is the oceans absorb more heat than we anticipated, but again, it's almost besides the point. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere reacts with saltwater to make it more acidic, thus killing off large swaths of the ecosystem. Maybe fossil fuel burning is the main culprit, maybe it's a loss of biomass from human activity, maybe it's mass cultivation of cattle that's increasing the temperature. Again, in my eyes, we're still headed to the same destination. So even if increased CO2 isn't the main culprit for the warming itself, we ARE still warming and the CO2 IS raising hell with the health of ocean.
You can call me closed-minded, but I'm not interested in a debate on whether man-made global warming is happening or not. Speaking purely anecdotally, I haven't seen snow for the past couple winters in Poland and summers are more intense than what used to happen. I tend to trust the bulk of evidence by the scientific community to be the closest thing we have to truth, it's not like this is all based on one fringe study. I'm a fan of Carl Sagan's quote of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." At this point, I think humans NOT warming the planet is the extraordinary claim. Think what you want, I'm convinced we have huge problems. Now the EXTENT of how bad this will all be and by when is a complete unknown to me, I'm definitely interested in theories along those lines.