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I have been beating this drum for a while now. Many things point to a decline in demand for oil, including how the self drive car will change the autos we use, making them lighter, safer, more efficient, and with smaller fuel sipping engines. Oh the other more muscular autos will still be around but they will not be driven on a daily basis, but on a more rarefied basis.
"The most obvious risk to this scenario is an unraveling of the global effort to reduce carbon emissions, the chances of which have clearly risen with the election of Donald Trump." Sorry, but this argument only holds water if one believes that environmental change only (or primarily) occurs due to government regulation. This is not supported by historical fact. Environmental changes occur because people become more wealthy, and this allows them to want environmental changes. First they want a cleaner home, then cleaner immediate area, then neighborhood, then city, then state, then nation, then world. Humans have been on a decarbonizing spree since we first began using open fire. This process will continue, and will accelerate as we become wealthier. A real environmentalist would seek to create wealth worldwide first, since this is the best way to create a cleaner environment. But environmentalism is not about a cleaner environment, it is about reducing the human population footprint, because they find humans, icky. While it is true that forecasting energy use is difficult, one thing is constant, we are moving from high carbon to low carbon use, and that will continue. Oil in midway on the spectrum, so our use of oil will eventually fall, and significantly. But for the sort term evaluating oil usage will remain difficult. I expect we are close to peak oil demand, and we will never reach peak oil. I also expect that wind, and solar as currently envisioned are cut-de-sacs which will offer us no valuable lessons other than cul-de sacs are dead ends. Of course, that is redundant.
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