Butlerian Jihad (Repost From 2011)

"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."

                                                                                  Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune


To start, I would highly recommend reading the entire article by Chris Skrebowski over at the ODAC.  Then make the jump with me as to why the lesser developed countries get such a huge economic boost from relatively small amounts of oil.  The law of diminishing returns is at play here.

Why is China’s tolerance higher? Because the value of oil is higher there. For example it is fairly clear that the economic benefit of the first car in a family is much greater than that of the third. Similarly the productivity gain from the first truck in a commercial fleet is greater than that of the twentieth. This observation suggests that rapidly industrialising economies such as China and India have a higher marginal productivity from an incremental barrel of oil than in more developed economies.
This in turn poses a terrifying question: Would this higher price tolerance mean developing economies could keep developed economies in growthless stagnation by paying oil prices that were just above those that bring developed economies to an economic halt?

This really cuts to the nut of the problem that the industrialized world faces.  It points at a problem that Mayberry and I have been discussing.   When you think about the way that energy is used in this country, you might say that, along with peak oil, we are looking at peak return on investment.  The amount of power that we use is inappropriate to the economic realities.  Hence the inordinate use of power.

We have powered everything.  We put a motor or engine on everything because we are too damn lazy to do the minimal amount of work required to simple household tasks.  Pound a nail?  Fuck that, but a compressor and a nail gun, groovy.  Screw a screw?  Piss on that noise,  buy an electric drill.  Mop the floor?  Buy a floor cleaner.

All of these things suck power.  All of these things increase the rate that you are able to get the job done (I won't say efficiency, that is still in question, but they certainly do make tasks fit well within our legendary fifteen -minute attention span. When you go to other less-developed countries, they use the older hand powered systems.  Now, all of the first part of this article is a set up, the next is an apparent non-sequitur, but look hard and the ghost of Ned Ludd still appears and makes it clear and connected

Now, we have been bleeding jobs for years now.  I would guesstimate (which is every bit as accurate as BLS statistics) that around twelve to fourteen percent of our neighbors and friends don't have a job or have a job worth having.  That is because our beneficent leaders, the corporations, have replaced us with robots.  They don't appear to be stopping this trend any time soon.  Every thing has a motor attached to it for the express purpose of getting rid of a human body so that a mid-level manager can move up the line for eliminating one of his employees.

The issue that we need to be dealing with is the distribution of wealth and the need for humans to have a job.  Mechanization and robots are there solely to increase production and decrease human costs.  Both of these functions are questionably appropriate in the current and future economic milieu.

We have had a systematic concentration of power in the hands of the large corporations at the expense of first, the lower class, and now the middle class.  This trend is accelerated by the political class, but remember above all, that it is the machines, wielded by the corporate managers, who drive the trend.

OK....Bunch of assumptions and SWAG, I just trying to lay down some groundwork here

So, my man-crush JMG sez we ought to go back to a 1950's technology level:

Imagine, for a moment, that an industrial nation were to downshift its technological infrastructure to roughly what it was in 1950. That would involve a drastic decrease in energy consumption per capita, both directly—people used a lot less energy of all kinds in 1950—and indirectly—goods and services took much less energy to produce then, too.

The idea has merit, but the numbers I come up with show a different picture

So here is the way that I am thinking about looking at things.

It isn't so much the total amount of oil produced/imported that matters, it is the quantity of oil per capita that matters.

Then, take a peek at this graph:

Data taken from EIA 

So gentle readers, lets make some assumptions for the sake of argument.

First, the assumption that wells will keep pumping. But I post that the import fraction of our consumption will begin to dry up and the fracking will come back on line.  I make some ball park guesses below about the imports available to the US.

Second, the fracking, when it comes back on line will dry up in around 10 years from restart, the phase "squeezing blood from a turnip" is the principle that will drive this.

So I am asking you to go back one page and take a look at how I come up with my S.W.A.G. (scientific wild-ass guess) for US production of oil in 2023.

So, really, what we are looking at is a steady decrease in overall oil supply and a lower oil consumption per capita and a correspondingly lower technology base.

I could run a new spreadsheet to add things together to give you a false impression of precision and accuracy, but when one is throwing together SWAG, that is considered bad form.

SO take the year 2023 (eight years from now) and add the oil production sans fracking and the imports that we will be able to access and you get this

Estimated US Oil Production:  1.5 Billion Barrels
Estimated US Oil Imports:  2.2 Billion Barrels
Total available US Oil:  3.7 Billion Barrels
Estimated US Population:  346 million
Estimated US Oil per capita:  10.69 Barrels

So, going back to JMG.

He posits a 1950's level lifestyle/technology base.  Well in 1955 the US oil consumption per-capita was 16.8 barrels.  In 2013, the oil consumption per capita was 17.5 barrels.

So, if we follow JMG's thoughts, we are looking at a per capita consumption roughly equivalent to 1941 in eight years.

Now, truth be told, there was not a lot of difference in technology between '41 and '55.  So maybe he os on to something.  But the downward slope of the oil curve will continue to be negative.

I am thinking that we maybe ought to be looking at the 1920's instead.