I heard the Exxon CEO last night on teevee..

[Virginia Dare]

saying that we can't conserve our way out of this problem, and we can't alternative fuel our way out of this problem. My question is, why can't we?

[supernova]

1. What else is he gonna say, but

please everybody keep driving 300 miles/week! :7

:P

[flakey_foont]

2. What??????????

did he really say that? Uh,,,,,let's try simple math -
If you have 10 apples delivered every day, and you eat them all,,you have none left,
but if you start eating only 8 a day,, you have 2 left, which means after 4 days, you have 8 in reserve-
now, I'm no Einstein when it comes to spelling, but his statement kind of sounds like male bovine excrement

[YOY]

3. Don't even try...we did the research for you! Yeah, that's the ticket!

n/t

[GliderGuider]

9. Well, I've done my own research

And I agree with him on this one. You can't get there from here.

[YOY]

10. Do some more.

n/t

[GliderGuider]

11. Your wish is my command

Here are the recent articles I've written on this topic:

World Energy to 2050: Forty Years of Decline (Oct. 2007)
Energy Intensity and GDP: To Have or Have Not (Dec. 2007)
Can Wind Power Plug the Energy Gap? (Feb. 2008)
Africa in 2040: The Darkened Continent (Feb. 2008)

There are more on my web site. I've done enough research to be confident of my position.

[YOY]

12. Actually your one on the "Plug the Energy Gap" gets my interest piqued

I note that you say that fusion is out of the question until one is up in running. Quite right . So lets throw some real money and time into this.

That's the developmental research I am talking about.

Not wind power although that would be a patch in the arm.

[DemoTex]

4. Imagine

Imagine where we would be energy-wise had Jimmy Carter's successors continued and built upon his energy austerity programs. Waste not, want not.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Simply because we use too much and...

we have no way to possibly manufacture alternatives in the foreseeable future. We have 250,000,000 cars in the US alone, and maybe a hundred million or so dwelling and commercial units that require winter heating. Imagine the task of replacing any significant percentage of all that in any reasonable time frame.

And it's not just driving around and winter heating, but fuel for and manufacturing, feedstock for the chemical and plastics industries-- everything we do or own has crude oil somewhere in its foundation.

[MasonJar]

6. Never buy Exxon!!!!!!!!!! Personally I'd walk first. Actually I do walk a lot now.

[Subdivisions]

7. He simply knows that oil production has peaked and will

very soon begin to decline.

Without cheap abundant oil, we can't do anything our way out of anything. It's too goddamned late.

[GliderGuider]

8. Did he say "Don't conserve" or "Don't develop alternatives"?

I doubt he said that. Nobody with half a brain says that. What Rex did probably say (or at least meant) is that the problem is too big to be "solved" by those means, if the word "solve" implies maintaining Business as Usual. The reason he thinks that is because he understands better than most the scale of the energy problem the US is facing, and the imminence of the timeline.

The USA uses about 850 million gallons of crude oil per day (20 million barrels), of which two thirds (about 650 million gallons a day) is imported from places like Canada, Mexico, Russia, Brazil, Algeria, Nigeria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

A number of those exporting countries are unstable (notably Iraq and Nigeria). Some of them are experiencing very rapid declines in production and exports, as is the case with Mexico.

I suspect that in his heart of hearts Rex knows that within a couple of years production declines in a number of major exporters are going to start biting into their exports as they try to balance off competing domestic and foreign demand for their oil. As that happens, the global market will start to dry up, and the price of oil will rise even faster, with even greater volatility than we are seeing now.

Such a situation could translate into a rapid drop in availability, especially to the poorer segments of the American market. My estimate based on following the issue carefully (as an independent citizen) for the last four years is that the effect would be equivalent to a loss of 5% or more of the US oil supply each year, probably starting in 2010 or early 2011.

Such a decline would be very difficult to conserve our way out of -- after five years effectively a quarter of the oil supply could be gone. This rate of conservation could only be achieved by a drastic slowdown in economic activity, which would probably be involuntary. Improvements in energy efficiency and a transition to electric vehicles would not be enough to offset such a steep decline in such a short time.

Alternative liquid fuels will play a part, but at the moment ethanol only supplies 3% of the US fuel consumption by volume (or 2% of the energy when the lower energy content of ethanol is factored in). If ethanol is to plug a 5% per year decline in the American fuel supply, it would need to ramp up much faster than it is right now. Given that cellulosic ethanol is still in the demonstration phase, we will be stuck with food-based ethanol as the primary source for at least the next ten years. Ramping up crop-based ethanol production enough to offset such a decline in oil would mean that the impact on food supplies would become extremely serious within a scant few years. Permitting such an impact would probably be political suicide (though stranger things have happened).

Obviously Mr. Tillerson is speaking with the best interests of his company and industry at heart. That doesn't necessarily mean he's lying when he says that conservation and alternatives won't solve the problem. I for one am utterly convinced he's telling the truth about that.

Rex Tillerson understands Peak Oil, even though if you ask him straight out he'll deny it.

[Virginia Dare]

14. No, the only thing he lied about was Obama's position..

and in actuality he lied about McCain's too, implying that they both present a "be all end all" solution, which to my knowledge neither one of them does.

Your excellent analysis gets the the heart of answering my question. In reality it seems to me, we have an unsolvable problem.

[GliderGuider]

16. Unsolvable problems

The unsolvable problem we face goes a lot further than the American energy difficulties. The world as a whole is faced with convergence of wicked (i.e. messy, circular, aggressive) problems. They include energy, climate change, the death of the oceans, extinctions and the loss of biodiversity, loss of soil fertility, fresh water depletion, declining food security, global financial instability and a myriad of issues stemming from excessive social complexity. All these problems are converging now, and there are multiple interdependencies and synergies between them -- trying to solve one will make one or more others worse.

Unfortunately there appears to be no way to untie this Gordian knot, and cutting it would cut human lifelines. We can address small pieces of it, but even that needs to be done carefully, with great wisdom and holistic system-level thinking, lest we run afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences and inadvertently make matters worse.

There are useful things we should be doing, but in my opinion they don't come under the heading of "Technical Solutions". Instead we should be concentrating on our personal responses, especially those that help us change those parts of the system that are immediate and local. To figure out what those responses should be (because they will be different for every place and each person) we need to pay a lot more attention to developing our wisdom and clarity of insight.

I have a number of articles on my web site that speak to this aspect of the converging crisis and our responses.

Approaching the Limits to Growth

[Javaman]

13. We use 25% of the worlds energy resources with only 5% of the population

of course we can't alternative fuel or conserve our way out of this. That is of course if we continue with our gross over use of energy.

If we cut back and stop being energy hogs, then yes we can use alternative energy and conservation to solve our problem.

But if we are to maintain our current wasteful existence then, in a phrase, we are fucked.

and at the end of the day, it won't matter anyway, because last time I checked, oil was still a finite resource and will run out anyway.

So we either cut back and use other means now or we hit a brick wall at full speed a few years from now.

really not a hard choice to make.

And to those who wish to flame me, knock yourself out, because no amount of useless blather on your part will change my mind. Your screaming monkey like screeches will only reinforce my position.

[Virginia Dare]

15. No flames from me Javaman..

we're truly between a rock and a hard place here, there is no solution at this point. No good one anyway. Perhaps if we had followed Jimmy Carter's counsel 30 years ago, we might be in a little better position now, but of course it's impossible to say. My gut feeling is that we would. Now, I just don't see any soft landings.