Post by Jonathan Schofield

2y

The British coal age began in earnest about 1750, I think. That’s about 11 generations (of 25 years).

Trade in oil dates back to at least the same era in Yenangyaung in Burma https://allouryesterdays.info/2022/08/26/august-27-1859-the-oil-age-begins/

But crude oil extraction for European industry began in Romania in the 1850s. That’s about 7 generations ago.
https://www.rferl.org/a/romania-oil/31510946.html

(Although it’s fewer generations for me. My great great grandfather, and almost namesake John Schofield, was 31 in 1857. His son Benjamin would have been 9.)

“Industrial-scale oil production in Romania dates back to 1857, when the world’s first systematic oil refinery began operation in Ploiesti. The early oil refiners used wood fires to begin the process of separating crude oil into different petroleum products.”

Pictured is a flaring oil well in Moreni.

ALT

Edited 2y ago

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2y

…But oil really hit its stride after WW2, and it occurs to me that the modern oil industry will have flared and sputtered in a span of about two human lifetimes.

Somewhere there’ll be someone who was born in 1901, when Spindletop in Texas began gushing, whose child born after WW2 will go on to live to the mid 21st C, despite all that’s ahead of us, just long enough to see the oil industry sputter out.

The Spindletop oil field gushing with a cloud of black oil, silhouetted against the sky, along with oil derricks and onlookers.

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2y

…Oil extraction *at scale* won’t sputter out because we’ll have run out of oil, but because the burning of unimaginable quantities of it will have made it impossible to extract affordably.

We’ll have created climatic conditions where it will often be too environmentally volatile to extract oil (or gas), so there will be intermittency. And that will have extraordinary cascading effects.

We’ll have chosen an #energyTransition, but without really choosing.

Get ready

#climateDiary

A chart of the historical production of crude oil from 1950, at about 10 million barrels of oil per day, to over 70 million barrels per day in 2005, with projections up to 2030.

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2y

Imagine how expensive things will become when the externalities of oil finally get priced IN.

We need a different economics *before* our own stupidity forces it on us.

Biden/Trump won’t bring it.
bin Abdulaziz Al Saud won’t bring it.
Kishida won’t bring it.
Macron won’t bring it.
Meloni won’t bring it.
Modi won’t bring it.
Scholz won’t bring it.
Sunak/Starmer won’t bring it.
Trudeau won’t bring it.
von der Leyen won’t bring it.
Putin won’t bring it.
Xi Jinping won’t bring it.
🤷🏼‍♂️

#degrowth