My new VDARE.com column is up:
Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.
With President Obama barely back from the climate change conference in Copenhagen, his anti-global warming accord is evidently already working its wonders, unleashing a blizzard to blanket the East Coast with snow.
With climate in the news, it’s a good time to review the Census Bureau study of the factor that will have the single greatest impact on U.S. carbon emissions over the next 40 years: immigration.
With a couple of weeks left in the decade, the Census Bureau has finally gotten around to releasing What If? projections showing the impact of various immigration policies on America’s population (which is today 308 million):“… a greater number of migrants arriving in the United States will correspond to a larger increase in the size of the total population. Under the assumption of a high level of net international migration, the population is expected to grow to 458 million by 2050. … “
[United States Population Projections: 2000 to 2050 by Jennifer M. Ortman and Christine E. Guarneri of the Census Bureau]
That’s an increase of 150 million carbon-belching residents of America.“In contrast, for the Zero Net International Migration series the population will increase slightly by 2050 to 323 million. “
That’s an increase of only 15 million.
In other words, immigration policy will determine whether the population grows over the next four decades by 150 million or by 15 million—an order of magnitude difference!
Although the new Census Bureau projections were released last week at the peak of the media frenzy over Copenhagen, not a single one of the 387 articles tabulated by Google News mentioned “carbon,” “climate,” or “warming.”
Americans are just not supposed to think about the link between immigration, population, and carbon emissions. Ignorance is Strength!
Mark Twain famously said: “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Yet the conventional wisdom in this decade has been that we should be passionately doing something—anything—about the weather, but not even talking about the population.
Read the whole thing there and comment upon it below.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Outstanding. I'm happy to see people getting the population-AGW linkage.
ReplyDeleteSo long as the productive members of society belong to a society that keeps pulling shit like cap and trade, defining CO2 as a pollutant, Obamacare, or letting in 150 million immigrants, the permutations of hope and change will never end. We're playing whack-a-mole (I think the expression is). The productive members need their own society, and let the rest of the leftists and their moronic followers play games with their own people and money. Opt out.
ReplyDeleteSteve, you can't win this war by relying on an untruth like AGW.
ReplyDeleteStop trying to be too clever by half and go back to being just plain old clever.
Let us first wait for the pronouncement on this issue by Al Gore, inventor of the internet, so that we will know how to proceed.
ReplyDeleteIt is not just population growth that is an issue. But look at what happens to our demographics. Because of the recession, it will take 8 more years for whites to fall under 50%. If the net zero rate is followed, whites will still make up almost 60% of the population in 2050.
ReplyDeleteThis country is being destroyed by this left-wing driven concept of inevitability. Don't resist, you cannot affect the outcome. Just learn to live with the fact that the US is multicultural.
I can remember around 1993 Newsweek or Time ran a cover of a computer generated woman which showed her complexion as brown. The accompanying article was about how the US was fast becoming a minority-majority nation.
People have grown to accept that this is inevitable. Republicans like McCain tell us we have to accommodate and stop pushing for tighter immigration controls.
We have now effectively become a bilingual nation. All major stores I go to have bilingual signs, not to mention government services, websites, etc.
Yet, what they don't tell us is that this is far from inevitable. The only way this can happen is for abnormal amounts of immigrants, both legal and illegal, to come here each and every year.
It has already been going on for around 30 years since the explosion of the 1980s. It needs to continue for another 40 for the balance to be tipped.
Get that? For this change to occur we basically have to have about 70 years straight of 2 million or so legal and illegal immigrants coming to our nation. We have allowed this for 30 years and it appears we are content to allow it for another 40.
That is why I was so interested in reading that the recession has caused a dip in immigration and has pushed back the magical date by 8 years.
What do you think would happen if we actually enforced our laws?
I don't know why republicans did not take advantage of their congressional majority to do something about this when they had the chance.
If we can link this issue to the environmental movement maybe we can get more people to support tighter immigration limits without the fear of being called the dreaded racist.
as the cantarell oil field depletes in mexico, the economic boost which mexico gets from exporting oil will go away. this will send millions of poor mexicans north over the next several decades, converting them from resource consumers at a mexico level, into resource consumers at a US level.
ReplyDeletethe american national government will encourage this at every step of the way. open borders with mexico is pretty much official policy at this point.
You assume we will have a standard of living higher than that of Mexico in 2050. If we have lowered ourselves to the level of Mexico then letting them live here won't impact the environment all that much.
ReplyDeleteSteve, Climate Change is not about Climate Change.
ReplyDeleteIt is about an unelected and unanswerable elite, as in China, ruling the entire world. To turn most of it into Zimbabwe meets Bosnia.
The elites will be just fine, and everyone else who is a threat is eliminated. Heck AGW advocate Thomas Friedman longed in print in the NYT for China's system in the US ... to fight AGW.
Climate Change is not Climate Change. It is re-creating the Medieval Catholic Church and clergy without the annoying Christianity. There is a Pope (Al Gore), rituals and indulgences (carbon credits). Heretics and unbelievers are punished, severely. "Denial" has been proposed to be a capital crime.
A couple of things:
ReplyDelete1. "Global warming" is a fraud, so why bring it into the discussion.
2. It was 7 white men, dominated by Republicans, who imposed Roe v. Wade in 1973, thus leading to the abortion of 1/3 of American babies, mostly whites and blacks. You can't blame that on Mexicans, who took the place of the babies.
3. Both the U.S. and California governments are bankrupt, not because of how Latinos vote (admittedly for more government), but how such white Republicans as Bush, Greenspan, Cheney, Bernanke, and Schwarzenegger misgovern. Trillions for losing wars, massive inflation, easy money for home "loans", debt, socialism -- all were imposed by Republicans before Obama came to power.
4. Bankruptcy means there's no more money for socialism, whether voted for by Latinos (70% Democratic) or anybody else. Only decades of pain remain. What comes after that, whether a return to common sense or a dictator with a funny moustache, no one knows.
There is still plenty of good science on global warming even if you drop the hockey stick papers. Nobody intelligent has disputed the basic science worked out 100 years ago by Svante Arrhenius. Nobody has disputed the greenland ice core work.--read, "The two mile time machine," As far back as that record goes, there has been a strong correlation between warm periods and CO2 levels. Nobody has disputed the Mauna Kea data showing that CO2 levels have consistently increased 2 ppm per year, and and now at a level not seen for the past 100,000 years. I respect anyone who has doubts, and I think there is a lot of doubt over what percentage of recent climate change can be attributed to greenhouse gases.
ReplyDeleteBack to the subject, the other side will say it's all about consumption, not population. But controlling immigration influences both population and consumption.
Close the damn borders now! We need an immigration timeout! An immigration timeout is American as apple pie.
ReplyDeleteThe last immigration timeout begun in the mid 1920's eventually caused the labor pool to grow in value (wages kept up with inflation post WWII until the 70's).
Mass immigration devalues the labor pool overall. Mass immigration left unchecked creates an incoherent NONSENSE DEMOCRACY. Duh.
During periods of mass immigration the elited controlled media will pound the citizenry with the message that mass immigration raises all boats. But it never does raise all boats. Mass immigration always increases the Gini Coefficient in a society and rocket boosts the upper class even farther ahead of the middle class.
It is the importation of cheap labor that destroys the ability of working people to keep up with the high cost of living in the long run. Cheap labor lowers cost of living for the upper class and raises the cost of living for everyone else.
Ironic but true: mass immigration as policy makes the least sense in a liberal democracy. Mass immigration makes little sense for any country but it makes more sense for a dictatorship than a democracy.
Mass immigration causes union busting on a national scale and at the same time devalues the per capita voting power of voters.
In the future when the USA population reaches 600 million the per capita voting power of the voters will be reduced by half (relative to today). Ironic but true: It is in a liberal democracy where it's most important to keep the borders controlled to preserve the voting power of each citizen.
In a NONSENSE DEMOCRACY millions of new voters are imported every year who will work for slave wages and simultaneously flex voter muscle against the interests of the People. In a NONSENSE DEMOCRACY the People are obviously not in control of their destiny or posterity.
Mr. Seiler,
ReplyDeleteLatinos are indeed why California is bankrupt, and they're a major reason why America is bankrupt as well.
It isn't how they vote, it's how they suck on the resources of the Taxpayers to survive and reproduce.
Also it is how they default like fo’ sizzle on Home Loans; and how the desire on the part of Whites to avoid them drove up Home Prices to unsustainable levels, thus helping to cause the housing bubble.
And as an aside, whether AGW is real or not doesn't change the fact that if we add 150m more people to America, it will have a huge negative impact on the environment.
I don't want to contribute because Brimelow just takes a salary for himself.
ReplyDelete"inevitability"
ReplyDeleteThat's the case.
" The U.S. Census Bureau today released national population estimates showing that our nation is becoming older and more racially and ethnically diverse. The estimates found that nearly half (47 percent) of the nation’s children younger than five were a minority in 2008, with 25 percent being Hispanic. For all children under 18, 44 percent were a minority and 22 percent were Hispanic."
AGW is a crock. Human emissions make up 0.26% of total earth carbon transports (up and down). That's not even measurable on a global scale. Either pols did not take Energy Economics 101 or they are trying to fool those who did not take it.
ReplyDeleteMerkel is only pushing this meme coz German industry stands to rake in big bucks selling their perpetual mobili machines.
People have grown to accept that this is inevitable.
ReplyDeleteActually the way MSM phrases it, it sounds more like a goal than a trend.
unfortunately, the hostile elite in this country don't really value the environment and care little for nature and open space, so the real 'environment' will never become an issue.
Social responsibility or conscience is an evolutionary and political advantage within tight-knit homogenous groups where most people share and practice the same values. Thus, almost everyone is conscientious, tries not to be a burden onto others, and helps brethren and sistren in need.
ReplyDeleteBut, the virtues of social responsibility or conscience can be an evolutionary and/or political disadvantage when the community includes a lot of people who don't share in the values of the responsible. Thus, if some people are responsible and work hard and only have children they intend to raise themselves, there are many others without a sense of responsibility, tend to be lazy or criminal, and have lots of kids they cannot raise without outside help. In this case, the responsible people become burdened with having to take care not only of themselves but all the lazy stupid slobs(and their children).
Suppose Nation A mostly has responsible people and Nation B has mostly irresponsible people. Nation A will thrive and Nation B will decay. It is to the advantage of Nation A to be responsible and maintain its social functionalism. But, suppose a whole bunch of people in Nation B slip into Nation A. Suddenly, the virtues of responsibility in Nation A become an hindrance because they mandate that everyone in the nation must be provided with a decent life. Prior to the arrival of people from Nation B, the ideal of good-life-for-everyone used to mean decent hardworking people sharing certain services and goods for the common good, a kind of communal give-and-take. Following the arrival of people from Nation B, it means hardworking people must pay for lazy slobs. It becomes give-and-give and take-and-take. (Climate Change agenda seeks to do this on a global scale.)
Worse, the lazy slobs keep having kids who also rely on freebies provided by responsible people.
In other words, it wouldn't matter if Mexicans or Haitians are idiotic in Mexico or Haiti. Their problems are, well, their problems. But, once they come to the US, their problems become our problems. Our goodness becomes bad for us because it will now be exploited by the lazy and stupid to milk off of us.
Low birthrates among whites isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as we have secure borders and maintain a large majority white population. It means white people are being responsible and having only those kids they intend to raise with their own hard-earned money. But, such conscientiousness becomes useless when US becomes filled with a lot of third world fools who figure on being rewarded for bad behavior--illegaly entering the US and having lots of kids. Worse, PC teaches these people that they are OWED everything from the white man. That's what Obama is really about.
I don't recall seeing any Mexicans in my town driving Priuses. And it's not because they don't like spending money on cars.
ReplyDeleteLiberal American ethos, circa 2009:
ReplyDeleteBetter to radically rearrange our lives in order to address a hypothetical threat, than to even half-heartedly deal with a real threat.
Its true and i am happy that people are getting the population-AGW linkage. @John Seiler, why is "Global Warming" a fraud? I am a college sophomore with a dual major in Physics and Mathematics @ University of California, Santa Barbara. By the way, i came across these excellent physics flash cards. Its also a great initiative by the FunnelBrain team. Amazing!!!
ReplyDeleteIf the net zero rate is followed, whites will still make up almost 60% of the population in 2050.
ReplyDeleteYou're dreaming. The figure is 65% now, at most. Differential birth rates and intermarriage will continue to eat into that figure even without further immigration.
"is still plenty of good science on global warming even if you drop the hockey stick papers. Nobody intelligent has disputed the basic science worked out 100 years ago by Svante Arrhenius. Nobody has disputed the greenland ice core work.--read, "The two mile time machine," As far back as that record goes, there has been a strong correlation between warm periods and CO2 levels. " - SF
ReplyDeleteSorry SF, all of that stuff has been disproven or shown to be irrelevant.
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteI don't know why republicans did not take advantage of their congressional majority to do something about this when they had the chance."
Because they don't care. If anything, many republican legislators are paid stooges of wealthy interests who want unlimited immigration.
I don't follow your argument. If the additional 150,000,000 million is an addition to the underclass, they will live in cities rather suburbs, and will ride the bus rather than own a car. They will have a smaller carbon footprint than a comparable number of white Americans, and they will live in warm places like Florida, Texas, and Calfornia and therefore won't need heating oil or natural gas.
ReplyDelete"Dennis Mangan said...
ReplyDeleteSo long as the productive members of society belong to a society that keeps pulling shit like cap and trade, defining CO2 as a pollutant, Obamacare, or letting in 150 million immigrants, the permutations of hope and change will never end. We're playing whack-a-mole (I think the expression is)."
Quite so. It was worse this year, not just because the democrats had the White House and a majority in congress, but because they followed a conscious strategy of blitzkrieg. By bombarding us with several policy initiatives all at once, they wear down the opposition: Hey - while you're going to rallies against healthcare reform, we were getting ready to declare CO2 a pollutant. While you were writing your congressman about cap-and-trade, we were bribing whores like Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson to vote for our healthcare bill. While you were being outraged by Kevin Jennings promoting deviant sexual practices to school kids, we were using OSHA to make new gun-control regulations. While you're still sputtering about health care, we'll ram an amnesty throught. Next year, when you're writing your congressman about gun control, we'll get around to the deviant sex in schools.
By pushing everything, all at once, they make it almost impossible to effectively oppose anything, because most of us have jobs, and a life apart from politics. This is indeed pissing people off. And a lot of democrats may end up losing their seats as a result. But the new laws will still be in place.
If the republicans want my vote, their platform should be: Repeal it! Repeal it all!
I respect anyone who has doubts, and I think there is a lot of doubt over what percentage of recent climate change can be attributed to greenhouse gases.
ReplyDeleteYou mean like the climate change which ensued after temperatures peaked in 1998, and then declined for 11 years?
Or maybe the sudden INVERTED-HOCKEY-STICK plunge in global temperatures which began about 18 months ago, when our sun abruptly decided that it wanted to get out of the sunspot-making-bidness altogether?
Boy, I tell you what: It is very, very difficult to misunderestimate the baleful influence of the pagan religion of "Science" on folks who otherwise ought to possess reasonably high IQs.
"Close the damn borders now! We need an immigration timeout! An immigration timeout is American as apple pie. "
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't seem to be a viable plan. It's time to start talking escape, and I think I found just the place:
Kazkhstan mulls China land deal
By Bruce Pannier
Kazakhstan has a unique problem. It's long on land and short on the people to farm it. The Central Asian country is huge - about six times the size of France - but has less than one-quarter of France's population - just 16 million people.
...
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev addressed this issue during a recent meeting of his office's Council of Foreign Investors on December 4. He surprised many when he mentioned a possible solution, saying neighboring China was interested in renting 1 million hectares of Kazakh farmland.
As Kazakh officials have increasingly made mention of a formal Chinese proposal, seeds of opposition have grown.
In the commercial capital, Almaty, on December 17, Kazakhs assembled for the second straight day to protest the prospect of Chinese farming their land. Bolat Abilov, co-chairman of opposition United Social Democratic Party Azat, warned the crowd of the potential consequences.
"Citizens, dear citizens, dear compatriots! I will talk briefly, about only one problem - about the land issue," Abilov said. "If we tomorrow give, or distribute, 1 million hectares of land, it would mean 15 people working per hectare. That means 15 million people would be brought from China. If one of those 15 people were to give birth each year, that would be the end. In 50 years there would be 50 million Chinese [in Kazakhstan]. Let's stop this move announced by Nazarbayev."
...
"This is a project that requires the migration of many people. Who will grow the crops? Who will harvest and prepare it? Who will get it ready for sale?" Auezov said.
http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KL19Ag01.html
Excellent post by Steve, disappointingly followed up by the usual tripe from the peanut gallery.
ReplyDelete"as the cantarell oil field depletes in mexico, the economic boost which mexico gets from exporting oil will go away. this will send millions of poor mexicans north over the next several decades, converting them from resource consumers at a mexico level, into resource consumers at a US level."
ReplyDeleteHm. Agreed Cantarell's depletion is likely to push northern migration of poor Mexicans. But if Ghawar is peaking, too, as Matt Simmons in Twilight in the Desert claims, there may not BE enough oil in the world to provide for all those poor Mexicans to become U.S. level resource consumers -- or for us U.S. natives to continue U.S. levels of resource
consumption, either.
Yeah, non-oil sources of energy are a good idea -- but not due to some bogie called anthropogenic global warming. The actual disaster that awaits us is Peak Oil.
And the real irony is, by importing all those low-human-capital poor Mexicans, smart native-born White boys -- who are the only ones likely to have the ingenuity necessary to develop non-oil forms of energy -- are being displaced in their educations.
Kunstler's right. We are well and truly flaked.
Note, though, that he leaves the subject of mass immigration delicately unmentioned.
Americans are just not supposed to think about the link between immigration, population, and carbon emissions.
ReplyDeleteSmart people won't because the idea of "carbon emissions" as something bad, and carbon dioxide as a "pollutant" is so ludicrous you'd have to be invested up to your eyebrows or have nothing between your ears to take that sentence seriously.
You know better than us what game you're playing here... but that sentence reads like a total nonsense and threatens to devalue your other work.
Back in the old days there was more carbon dioxide. There was at least tens times as much CO2 in the atmosphere in the Carbonifererous Period as there is today. Over millions of years that carbon has been naturally sequestered by the processes of coal and oil formation.
ReplyDeleteBy the Holocene CO2 was just a trace gas. There was so little CO2 in the atmosphere that plant life was beginning to be seriously constrained. Fortunately in the nineteenth century western man started returning some of that carbon back into the atmosphere and the balance of life began to be restored.
A side benefit of the return of the carbon to the air was a slight return of warmer weather. This is also good. There have been only four ice ages in the last 600 million years. We have been in the most recent ice age for about three million years. The present ten thousand year interglacial is a short term anomaly. The average world temperature once this current cycle ends is very damn cold.
Warm is normal. Warm is good. Lots of CO2 is normal and good too.
Without life there would be no oxygen in the atmoshere. But life tends to get fosilized and over long periods of time strips out atmospheric CO2. Industrialization has helped to bring the world atmosphere part way back to earth's long term averages.
Modern man is "saving the planet" by freeing the carbon that has lost to the biosphere by coal and oil deposition.
Mexicans were allowed into this country in part to be a low-wage working class. Of course they are going to vote themselves benefits if they get the chance (just as the white working class did before them). Stop the influx, kick out the llegals and other criminals and bring back the industrial base of the country and the American working class will prosper again and there won't be so much pressure to expand the welfare state. Unfortunately, this program would be anathema to both Right and Left (for different reasons). The Republicans want their slave laborers and the Democrats want their voters.
ReplyDeleteCockburn/Counterpunch
ReplyDeleteDeceivers vs. Deniers framing,
well articulated depending upon
what one brings to it.
http://tinyurl.com/yjohe8v
If liberals were serious about Global Warming, they would stop all immigration into First World countries. But they don't. It's because they have a hierarchy of values. Global Warming is important to them, but non-discrimination comes first. Since most immigrants are non-white, liberals won't do a thing to restrict them from immigrating to the USA.
ReplyDeleteIn response to the increased pollution from higher population, liberals will just clamp down harder on us, with more and more regulations and taxes.
This country is in a death spiral. I wonder if even the minorities can see this ?
Buying lots of gadgets for family and friends this holiday season reminded me of another environmental downside of immigration (+ multiculturalism). Has anyone noticed that technical manuals for digital cameras, cellphones, etc. sold in the North American market are now routinely as thick as phonebooks thanks to the need to reprint their contents in their entirety in both Spanish AND French?
ReplyDelete"You mean like the climate change which ensued after temperatures peaked in 1998, and then declined for 11 years?
ReplyDeleteOr maybe the sudden INVERTED-HOCKEY-STICK plunge in global temperatures which began about 18 months ago, when our sun abruptly decided that it wanted to get out of the sunspot-making-bidness altogether?
Actually, the past few years have been a wash. Unusually rapid warming and ice melting in arctic regions has been compensated for by cooling at some mid-latitudes.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/11/19/cooling/index.html
i think there will be enough oil for US per capita consumption rates for a long time. several decades at least. there is a lot of undeveloped oil in iraq - at this point, i have to figure this is the main point of the US maintaining an occupation there. there's no way the american government can pull it's soldiers and marines out of iraq now. there are too many contractors from too many oil companies in iraq that the US government has to protect, at american tax payer expense. iraq might be able to produce like 8 million barrels of oil per day at it's peak, which would replace a lot of saudi arabia's production.
ReplyDeletethere's still a ton of oil to develop in canada, russia, the gulf of mexico, and off the coast of brazil. those projects all work well economically for the oil companies when the price per barrel goes up to $80 or so. heck, there's a lot of oil in alaska in the ANWR, and in north dakota in the bakken. those projects will be ramped up when the price of gasoline hits $5 a gallon. democrat politicians will have no problem at all breaking and ignoring all of their environmental principles once things become uncomfortable. they'll scream for the new oil and gas projects to get underway.
So we'll be polluted, but we'll be vibrant. Huh.
ReplyDelete"Warm is normal. Warm is good. Lots of CO2 is normal and good too." ABSOFREAKINGLUTELY. Even if there was AGW, so what in the grnd scheme? A few degrees warmer and we can adapt swimmingly- literally if necessary. But ice ages are absolute show stoppers for humanity. NYC under a mile of ice and we're fair and squarely effed.
As for peak oil: talk about peak oil when we've reached peak techology. Maybe cheap(er) oil.
AGW is important to liberals. So too is taking care of the third world. One of the reasons they give for allowing open borders is that it helps the third world nations by allowing their workers to come and send back money back home.
ReplyDeletePart of the climate change racket involves nations of the first world paying money to the third world to assist them in dealing with climate change.
I might agree to such payments if they attached the following strings; namely, the nations receiving such payments must keep their citizens at home.
If all the liberals care about is combating AGW and making sure the third world gets assistance, then sending payments in exchange for keeping their folks at home would accomplish both. At home they would have a lower carbon footprint and their nations would receive the funds that their labor would have otherwise provided.
"iraq might be able to produce like 8 million barrels of oil per day at it's peak, which would replace a lot of saudi arabia's production."
ReplyDeleteMIGHT. There's an interesting concept.
It's been 6+ years since "mission accomplished." Iraq's actual oil production (NOT talk. Not pretty, airy-fairy projections made by guys with laptops and charting software inputting assumptions while munching hoagies in a board room in Texas. ACTUAL production) peaked at 3.5 mbd in 1990. In 2009 Iraq's production is 2.39 million barrels/ day
So WHERE's all this lovely production we keep hearing talk of, that's supposedly coming Any Day Now?
http://musingsoniraq.blogspot.com/2009/10/iraqs-oil-exports-continue-to-rise-and.html
And note, while production has risen slightly since "mission accomplished," EXPORTS have fallen.
Also, even IF Iraq theoretically has enough oil for us to keep native-born Americans AND poor Mexican immigrants' SUV tanks full, GETTING it out of unstable Iraq is going to be no mean feat.
"those projects will be ramped up when the price of gasoline hits $5 a gallon"
I happen to know something about Bakken in ND. I'm a royalty owner. Bakken is exceedingly expensive to drill. Requires complex, horribly expensive, difficult horizontal drilling and fracturing in order to get a great well.
Yeah, it's profitable at $5 a gal to drill those wells. UNFORTUNATELY, $5 a gal kills the economy, as we've seen, at which time the price per barrel plummets back down, and all those expensive drilling rigs get idled and all those expensive drilling plans get canceled.
Sorry. Contrary to know-nothing Hannity's bombast, Bakken ain't the happy, easy solution to our desperate need for cheap, abundant energy that you seem to think.
As for Canada, Russia, etc.? You're forgetting something. The last time there was an oil shock, in the '80s, CEOs were convinced oil was going to $100 a barrel. So they greenlighted a bunch of expensive projects for which profitability was only possible at very high prices.
And so what happened? The price collapsed to $10 a barrel. Those guys were shell shocked at the horrific losses they incurred. They suffer from PTSD about it still.
There is an entire "lost generation" of petro geologists / engineers as a result of that price collapse. No young guys wanted, during $10/barrel days, to go anywhere near the petroleum engineering schools. And so there currently are virtually NO middle-aged, experienced guys ready to take over from the old guys who lived through the '80s oil price collapse, who are now retirement age.
So those now-gunshy, old, exploration co. CEOs are still, largely, in charge. And they are highly reluctant and skeptical of approving risky, expensive exploration projects --
the very same risky, expensive exploration projects, upon which the success of, all your comforting projections are based.
If you think the Science pagans get crotchety when you question the sanctity of AGW, then just wait until you throw the concept of Abiotic [Abiogenic] Oil at them.
ReplyDeleteHell hath no fury like a Science pagan whose Gods are under assault...
Some arguments work better with certain categories of people than do other arguments.
ReplyDeleteOn this website and elsewhere I have said that one of the easier and quicker ways to instill doubt in political moderates about the wisdom of mass immigration is to mention--quite correctly--all the crowding, resource depletion, and pollution that it leads to.
A particularly useful tack is to point out that if present immigration trends continue, by the middle of this century the US will have an extra hundred and fifty million inhabitants by the middle of the century...then to ask where all the water for them is going to come from? It can be a devastating question. I’m not the smoothest talker in the world, but I have still managed to bring more than a few people around to my position—or to at least regard it more sympathetically—through this strategy.
It’s fine for those of us in the Steveosphere to decry the folly of both multiculturalism and HBD-denialism vis-à-vis immigration policy, but we should keep in mind that lots of otherwise intelligent folks have trouble understanding those issues. Maybe later they’ll be ready for the rest of what we have to say.
Baby steps. Baby steps.
--Excellent post by Steve, disappointingly followed up by the usual tripe from the peanut gallery.--
ReplyDeleteGlad you posted the great thoughts! Moron...
I don't follow your argument. If the additional 150,000,000 million is an addition to the underclass, they will live in cities rather suburbs, and will ride the bus rather than own a car. They will have a smaller carbon footprint than a comparable number of white Americans, and they will live in warm places like Florida, Texas, and Calfornia and therefore won't need heating oil or natural gas.
ReplyDeleteGood Lord, we have a commenter who is unfamiliar with air-conditioning. Yes, immigrants have a smaller carbon footprint, but not by much. Maybe 15-25%.
"So WHERE's all this lovely production we keep hearing talk of, that's supposedly coming Any Day Now?"
ReplyDeletei guess it will take a while to develop, in a nation where people get blown up all the time, and there is no real government. all i know is that iraq has lots of undeveloped oil, and most major oil companies have bid on projects there. contractors have billion dollar plans in iraq, so the US military will never leave. forget the doomer approach. i read peakoil.com all the time. most doomers are very wrong about oil.
"Also, even IF Iraq theoretically has enough oil for us to keep native-born Americans AND poor Mexican immigrants' SUV tanks full"
it doesn't necessarily go to the US, it goes to whoever buys it. it goes into the global oil supply, something like 85 million barrels a day right now. getting iraqi oil to buyers somewhere is not a problem. canada will ramp up production in order to sell more to the US, if other US suppliers drop off in the future.
"I happen to know something about Bakken in ND."
so do i. the flow rate will never be good there, but it could get up to 1 million, 1.5 million barrels a day if it had to, if oil was $100 a barrel for a while. it would probably take another 10 years of development to get 1.5 million barrels a day out of there, though. it's not like getting oil from a well.
ANWR could deliver 1 or 2 million barrels a day in only a couple years. there's not much good reason to not develop that area.
"And so there currently are virtually NO middle-aged, experienced guys ready to take over from the old guys who lived through the '80s oil price collapse, who are now retirement age."
get out of here with that matt simmons stuff. he's almost always wrong. a couple years ago he was talking about how there was an oil rig crisis. it never happened.
If the US were to fall to mexico's level as some commentators have said, the result would in fact be even worse than Mexico. Remember, Mexico lacks africans, ulster scots and irish. Those three groups are responsible for a large portion of america's crime problem.
ReplyDelete" Yes, immigrants have a smaller carbon footprint, but not by much. Maybe 15-25%."
ReplyDeleteAnd that is much larger footprint than they would have where they came from.
"i guess it will take a while to develop, in a nation where people get blown up all the time, and there is no real government"
ReplyDeleteNow you're getting it. It will take a while to develop, all right -- as in, for all intents and purposes, forever. Certainly not in time to compensate for Ghawar's decline rate of double digit percentages per year, if Matt Simmons is right.
"canada will ramp up production in order to sell more to the US"
Canada's assumed ramp-up is based on assuming the tar sands will increase production. Tar sands production takes ferocious amounts of water -- natural gas is used to heat water to steam to heat the thick tar to thin it enough to make it flow up the wells -- or by strip mining. The energy return on energy invested of producing tar sands is not good.
[Bakken] "it could get up to 1 million, 1.5 million barrels a day if it had to, if oil was $100 a barrel for a while."
Did you happen to notice that the last time oil hit the $100 + mark, it killed our economy, so did not stay that price for long? In view of such reality, what gunshy explor/prod CEO, who's already been burned once or even twice with price collapses, is going to take the risk of going whole hog to do the risky, difficult, expensive, massive work of bringing Bakken into that kind of production, when he lives in fear of an imminent price collapse?
"ANWR could deliver 1 or 2 million barrels a day in"
As you said, ANWR oil will go onto the world market. With a world that uses 80+ million barrels a day currently and will likely want 100+ million barrels within 20 years, ANWR is small potatoes.
"get out of here with that matt simmons stuff. he's almost always wrong. a couple years ago he was talking about how there was an oil rig crisis. it never happened."
Pardon? My lease did not get fully drilled out BECAUSE THE DRILLING CO. COULD NOT GET A RIG. Then the price collapsed, so drilling plans were canceled. So, no new production from my lease for the foreseeable future.
Get it? This cycle is deadly to the industry.
During times of high prices there certainly is a shortage of rigs. So some rigs eventually get built -- but when the price subsequently collapses, those new rigs costing $100K + end up getting sold for scrap. This is replaying today just like the '80s price skyrocket and subsequent collapse. How many times do you think the high prices = investment in new rigs / subsequent price collapse = expensive rigs sold for scrap cycle will repeat before no one is willing to build new rigs?
I don't get the Peak Oil dismissers. With all the factors out there: China and India modernizing; Ghawar dying, Cantarell dying; price surges and collapses killing the risk-taking appetite of CEOs; political instability in oil-rich 3rd world countries causing explor/prod interferance; and known new supply sources are either modest or very difficult to drill or both; your unflagging optimism is astonishing -- even foolhardy.
The mindset strikes me as similar to the mass-immigration-promoting propositional-nation bunch. They say, about millions of incoming low-IQ Mexicans with a historical grudge against us gringos: "No worries! They'll all assimilate just fine.
All the European-extraction immigrants did ok in the end, so these guys will do just the same... It's all always worked out okay before, so that's proof it always will..."
"The oil needed to meet world demand has always been there before, so that's proof it always will be..."
Yikes.
sorry carbon based doomer, i don't have the time to respond point by point anymore.
ReplyDeletefor instance, i'm not sure how you don't see that your position contradicts itself. if the supply of oil is finite, and humans will eventually reach the end of the oil age, then...the oil industry can not possibly sustain an indefinite boom and bust cycle, because as we approach the end of the oil age, the oil industry will enter a period of permanent boom. the price will be $100 a barrel, then $200, then $300, then $400, and so forth. there is no substitute, so the price must continue to rise, and everybody must continue to pay.
this is exactly the scenario that peak oil doomers go into ecstasy over. this is their own personal fantasy, the "told you so moment" that they desperately hope is coming for us all.
but you already have money in the oil industry, so...you're going to make millions of dollars when the end of the oil age begins and the oil industry goes into permanent boom. in public, you tell us all that you're going broke because nobody wants to buy oil anymore. we're all going to abandon oil and gas and go back to wood and steam. but in private, you've already positioned yourself in the oil industry, because you know the price is just gonna keep going up and people are just gonna have to pay, as nobody is going to go back to wood and steam, and nobody has cracked fusion, the next step on the energy ladder.
what's actually happening is that the floor, the low price for a barrel of oil, is moving up as we approach the end of the cheap, easy oil. projects that were not economical in 1999 are economical in 2009, now that we are in a fairly permanent environment of $70 oil. projects that are not economical in 2009 will be economical in 2019, as the floor will have moved up again. this process will go on and on for a couple decades. there is no immediate danger of oil suddenly vanishing, although in 50 years it will be very hard and expensive to recover.
the oil age will end, and we'll transition to the fusion age, with a higher energy density and dramatically lower pollution. but not soon.
"there is no substitute, so the price must continue to rise, and everybody must continue to pay.
ReplyDeletethis is exactly the scenario that peak oil doomers go into ecstasy over"
You are reading me wrong. I see no cause for ecstasy. The money I'll make would in no way compensate for the collapse of my country I see coming.
I would NOT be a Peak Oil Doomer were it not for massive immigration -- the massive immigration of which consists of low-human-capital mestizoes.
CERTAINLY there exist technological solutions to Peak Oil. Electrified rail transport powered by pebble bed uranium nuclear reactor or thorium plants is one. Coal -to-liquids is another. Ocean energy may be a third.
BUT, and here is the big but. The great, big, giant freaking BUT:
The smart White boys who are in school now who are the people that we would need to develop all these innovations are having their educations derailed because all the ed resources are being sucked up trying to bring low-IQ mestizo babies up to the achievement level of average Whites. Half the school kids in many states are now "Latino" -- who tend to, if not flunk out / drop out, even after 12 years of schooling perform at the level of an average White boy in 8th grade. THESE kids aren't going to be figuring out any new sources of energy.
Nope. Our American future is to bump along for 10-20 more years -- but always the trajectory will be down. Cycles of price spikes followed by price collapse with the subsequent failure to find those new oil supplies. Meanwhile the old developed fields slowly deplete and the infrastructure falls into disrepair and collapse.
Then the starvation begins.
"the oil age will end, and we'll transition to the fusion age, with a higher energy density and dramatically lower pollution. but not soon."
Not soon is right. "Never" is more like it. Mestizoes who read at an 8th grade level won't be building any fusion plants.
Jody
ReplyDeleteHow did you come to the conclusion that oil resources are not finite? Through divine inspiration? The scientific method of course is the most efective way to to figure the physical facts about the world.
Free market libertarian economics- whether you want to believe it or not- is dependent on the physical facts about the planet. Physics trumps everything. If oil wasn't a severely scarce reosurce, the US wouldn't be murdering Iranians and Afghanis for the past eight years.
Which brings me to another point. I'm agnostic on global warming. However,most of the attacks on AGW are motivated by politics:free mrket rape the planet or screw-ball anti-malthusians such as Alexander Carbon-who fled the malthusian dystopia of NYC for the underpopulated Cascadia mountian range of northern california.
For example, it is claimed by critics of Global Warming-such as the retards over at prison planet.com-that carbon can never be poison..at any level. How do they know that this is true...through divine inspiration? Only science can setttle this question. And the best research on the carbon level issue shows that in controlled studies, there are abnormalities in trees and other vegetation.
The debate is far from over. Most of the critism comes from the libertarian right and left. Neither of them should be trusted for the final word on global warming.
For the poster who claimed that smoking is harmeless. Did you ever walk through the smoking car on the LIRR before smoking was banned on the LIRR?
By the way, triple or double the oxygen level in the atmosphere, and watch the nature select for giant insects. Would you like this to happen? The experiment has already been performed....300 million years ago.
The most sophisticated statistical analysis to date of Anthropoegenic caused global warming has been recently completed by Martin Tingle in his recent Harvard phd thesis.
The global warming alarmists are not consistent. In fact, they treat this issue like a game of rock, paper, scissors.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to drive a Hummer, then the global warming alarmists will call out carbon footprint. That in effect is like someone choosing paper to your rock. They win.
If you want to limit immigration, then the global warming alarmists will call out racism. That in effect is like someone choosing rock to your scissors. They win.
If you point out that the VIPs flying into Copenhagen just used more carbon than several small countries for a year, the global alarmists will ignore you. That in effect is like someone choosing scissors to your paper. They win.
The strongest case against immigration is racial demographic case.
ReplyDeleteI have no interest in preserving the natural beauty of the US and protecting its ecosysytems so the Hindus,Pakistanis,Mexicans-and the rest of them- can enjoy America's natural beauty while White Americans are demographically wiped-out. What the hell is the incentive for White Americans for doing the right thing for the enviroment if they are going to be race-replaced by nonwhites? White Americans were punished for doing the right thing-zpg level fertility rate forty years ago- for the environmnet. White Americans should just live it up and destroy the environment.
I am obviouisly making a point about the complete fradulence and insanity of the US "environmental movement". The big ten clearly have pursued a policy of punishing White Americans for lowering their fertility to the ZPG for forty years. There is no incentive for White Americans to tread lightly on the land.
Steve
I think it would be a really good idea to write about this on vdare.com. Stick to the phony-big ten-"environmental" organization.
Their solution is totalatarian smart growth. Smart growth is Clintonian social engineering.
One last point. It just occured to me that the public backlash against anthropogenic global warming may very likely be coming mostly from a demographic group that a made very effort to do the right thing by the enviroment by reducing its fertility level to the ZPG-for forty years-and woonders "what the hell us do you environmetalist want from us now". That is to say, this demographic group whose fertility dropped to the zpg level forty years ago, now sees itself being punished by wealthy rootless cosmolitan liberal envirmontalists-Carl Pope for example-who now are demanding that this Demographic group put up with high rise housing and totalatarian smart growth to accomdate a massive and rapidly growing population of a different demographic. Of course, the population that is bitching about AGW is none other than ordinary conservative White Americans.
ReplyDeleteAs this demographic group continues to experience a significant drop in its standard of living, it will very likely oppose other policies to proterct the enviroment. You think America's endangered species are in trouble now...just wait.
The best tactic is to accuse liberal environmentalist-who are the very same liberal immigration enthusiasts- with the charge of racism.
I think this is the point that an Anon at 12/22/2009 was attempting to make.
> This country is in a death spiral. I wonder if even the minorities can see this ? <
ReplyDeleteThey see nothing! The average NAM is just as dumb as the average white couch potato. Both types will wake up only when there's no more beer to stick in the fridge and no more ball on the tube. Brace your ears for the similtaneous collective cry of "WHAT THE F--?" on the awful awful day when that happens.
The government ought to sink every dime it steals into maintaining professional sports and disseminating drugs, if it wants to avoid mob probs. Panem et circenses and all that.
As the old saw says, there are people who make things happen... there are people who watch things happen...and there are people who wonder what happened.
"jody said...
ReplyDeletethe oil age will end, and we'll transition to the fusion age, with a higher energy density and dramatically lower pollution. but not soon."
I wouldn't count on it. Sixty years on in fusion research, and we are still no closer to building a reactor. Fusion is even more of a fond delusion now than it was in the 1950s.
Steve, I am surprised that you didn't do a follow up on this story. I somewhat expected blogger of your stature to focus on more important issues like the outright prostitution of science and frontal attack on Reason but you pounced on paltry 'extra zero'.
ReplyDeleteIs it because the trail would inevitably lead to Scottish-Irish communitarians?
This is a serious issue, that extra zero means a lot more carbon emissions in our country. We have to look out for our countries well being. I wish there were more students and teachers in this country to teach the uneducated people out there something. Maybe they should go try online flash cards from funnelbrain. They seem to have been working for me as my test scores improve. Such a simple thing like online flashcards can make a huge improvement in my education, an in the end society!
ReplyDelete