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Every year around this time Pantone publishes a "Color of the Year," which shows up in places like graphic design, home decor, and clothing over the course of the next year. I used to follow them, and in the mid 00s they had nice colors like frog green (greenery, 2017), coral red ("Living Coral, 2019), and Emerald Green (2013). Like many things, they've been corrupted lately, and the past three years have seen "Peach Fuzz" (the color children's art sets used to use to represent people), "Mocha Mousse" (the color of a mixed race actress in an advertisement), and now... white. Literally just white. It's called "Cloud Dancer," and has a tiny bit of grayish blue in it.
People are making fun of the "authoritarian" vibes of literally just white. But also, I was hoping that the white and grey trend was on its way out? I've been seeing white and grey boxes going up this past half decade, full of coffee shops, burgers, and more recently apartment buildings, and am not a fan. At least it's not Pot Shop Green, I guess?
Does this predict another year of literally just white and Landlord Grey?
Adding: The LA Times is trying to make the best of it, by highlighting bridal fashion. The Guardian and the New York Times both mention the difficulty of keeping actually white things clean looking, and several people talk about Whiteness.
If Pantone's doing it as its Color of the Year, then, yeah, that could mean it's on the way out. Same way Peak Oil actually meant the end of oil.
Peak Oil was a relatively dumb theory that was only taken seriously because of the unusual 2004 to 2014 spike in oil prices, which was speculative and driven by short-medium term bullish views on Chinese and other EM consumption, and then prolonged abnormally after 2011 by fears of Arab instability. Weird ZeroHedge types seized on this market dynamic as proof that oil prices would never fall and that actually 100/barrel was just the start and justified it with outdated peak oil fearmongering from the 1970s. In 2014 it became clear that Chinese demand would be lower than predicted, global growth was low, and US shale production was higher than forecast.
What exactly was dumb about Peak Oil? The EROI of the oil industry has gone down steadily - all kinds of energy are more expensive nowadays, and when it comes for the global energy mix we are probably running in the teens. And for good development you need 20-30.
Peak oil was wrong in terms of supply because of fracking (which people thought would make a negligible contribution to overall production), wrong on timing because of miscalculations about China and wrong on demand because of the speed of the electric car revolution, especially in Europe and China. Obviously the original argument that fossil fuels are a finite resource (in the timeframe of human civilization) is factually true, but it’s also kind of meaningless.
Fracking isn’t actually that cost effective. It gets massive subsidies because no one wants OPEC to have the world by the short-hairs. And then OPEC in turn sees fracking and starts dumping their own prices to try and drive it out of business. And then no one wants OPEC to have them by the short hairs, so they subsidize fracking even more.
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It's also wrong because substituting for oil is pretty easy. You can convert a diesel vehicle to running off of LNG in your garage(literally, if you're mechanically inclined), and we're never going to run out of natural gas. Nuclear/hydro/geothermal power are buildable. EVs get better every year. Etc, etc.
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How is it meaningless? Being off by a decade or two is not a huge deal in terms of miscalculations because the end result for the oil industry and its dependents is the same: phasing out of fossil fuels and a probable decline in EROI and QOL for most of the globe.
Peak Oil was a classic Motte and Bailey argument.
The rock-solid highly defensible part is that yes Oil is only a renewable resource on geological time scales. So eventually if consumption keeps going up there is going to be some point at which we "run out" of oil and switch to other resources.
The less defensible part of the argument was how fast and how soon this was going to occur. With some implied and ridiculous timelines being "we will run out instantly just next year". The faster and sooner that peak oil was supposed to hit the more something needed to be done right now to avert the disaster. If peak oil is 50 years off, and will come along so slowly that prices and technology can easily adjust then nothing needs to be done right now.
I personally believe we have reached escape velocity on energy. We are close enough to fusion energy. Fossil fuel reserves in the ground are still pretty large.
The biggest new energy hog in the future will be AI, but AI data centers are sort of a best case scenario for an energy hog:
Sometimes I forget how much of a different information world that I seem to live in than a large part of this forum.
In what world are we nearing "escape velocity on energy"? We are not particularly close to fusion: there have been recent advances, but the EROI is still less than 1, and this is with a calculation that doesn't include the construction of the reactor or obtaining tritium (note that current fusion reactors only work with tritium to start the reaction, which is exceedingly rare in nature). Even if we were close, we'd have to have a massive buildout of new reactors in a declining energy environment (fossil fuel extraction is level or declining, which is not a good sign for the future of energy, even if reserves are large). Even if we do somehow manage a soviet style five-year plan buildout of reactors across the globe, there is still the electrification problem. Most of the global transportation fleet, heavy industry, and mining equipment currently requires fossil fuel usage. Many of these have electric alternatives, but again replacement takes time, and metal supplies that we do not have on earth (Simon Michaux calculated that current estimated lithium reserves are not sufficient to even replace the global fleet of personal transportation vehicles with electric cars).
So basically consider me very skeptical that your suggested way to avoid Peak Oil relies on a technology that doesn't exist yet (and may never exist), a rapid buildout that has never been done before in history that relies on declining reserves of metals and fossil fuels.
"reserves" are economically recoverable resources. As the price changes, reserves increase. There was a brief lithium bubble where ignorant players thought lithium worked like copper with multi-year lead times etc. but there is more lithium than we should ever need. Bubble -> overcapacity -> price collapse -> reserve decrease. Everyone in commodities knows how this works. But lithium doesn't give you long periods of profit because it's a salt and production ramps up in weeks. You can fill a bore with water then pump the brine out, let the water evaporate and boom lithium. There are plenty of easily accessible molecules, refining is more difficult but you weren't worried about that.
Base metals are in a far worse situation with all recent copper exploration presenting dreadful grades (significantly worse than the gold mining ventures I'm involved with). Grades are half of what they were in the 90s and brownfield expansion costs have ballooned to rival greenfield. Only 14 deposits have been discovered in the past decade! Marimaca and Glencore are still interesting here.
Now, I believe the peak oil narrative was 100% correct and fracking only caused a 10 year delay as incinerated a trillion in capital (because of short well lives and gassing out) although there are still great conventional opportunities e.g. Prio in the Brazilian presalt layer. But even without nuclear, China's found a way forward with much to most of its heavy vehicles already running on LNG instead of diesel and build outs of synthetic gas, which I suspect will build a price ceiling around $80 BOE by the end of the decade, powered by cheap solar (which certainly has a positive EROI in their deserts.) I suspect there will only be one more oil bull market. I am rather pessimistic about the West (baring Chinese largesse) here. In the US, Trump finally cut the Gordian knot and freed mines from (in some cases) 30 year permitting hell - his talk of price floors and raw material tariffs makes me suspect auto-genocide from the right too. Financing is still hard abroad (ESG inertia still keeps US funds away and EU banks still have such laws, royalty companies have also seen massive consolidation with all 14 I'm involved with going through M&A this year)...
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I think you misunderstood one point I had above.
Peak oil worries are about how fast we run out of oil and how soon.
Fast and soon being two different things.
Scenario 1: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.
Scenario 2: hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.
Scenario 3: hit peak oil in 5 years, hit basically no oil in another 50 years.
Scenario 4 hit peak oil in 50 years, hit basically no oil in another 5 years.
Only scenario 1 worries me. And I think it is the least likely scenario.
I think #2 or #4 are more likely. I think oil reserves are effectively unlimited right now. Not easy oil reserves. But oil reserves plus some new technology. We already know of a bunch of marginal oil reserves like tar sands that are crappy but semi unlimited compared to current consumption rates.
I might be horribly off base in my assumptions. Willing to be corrected if I'm very wrong on those assumptions.
The fusion technology feels closer than 20 years. Ten years feels too optimistic. 30 years and something has gone horribly wrong in society or technology.
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Most of the Motte (and the internet as a whole) are so divorced from any extractive industry that they’re like the kid from Deadwood: “Peaches come from a can. A man in a factory put them there”
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So we'll transition to sodium ion batteries eventually? CATL is supposed to begin mass producing them in December this year, with a broadly comparable energy density to LFPs.
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If you're an AI maximalist, then anything that doesn't happen before AGI is basically meaningless: Climate change, peak oil, demographic collapse, etc.
The singularity hinges on the implicit assumption that there is some level of intelligence where you can think your way out of the laws of physics and thermodynamics.
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I don't know if I count as an AI "maximalist", though I'm definitely of the opinion that AGI is likely and more imminent than 95% of the population. I still don't think it's guaranteed and have sufficient uncertainty that it's worth making some investment in mundane infrastructure and mitigation. You know, global warming (which is not existential anyway), space exploration yada yada.
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I think that philosophy is silly. AI is still going to be materially constrained. The energy has to come from somewhere.
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