In the words of the Roman philosopher Seneca:
Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was musing on the accelerated rate of decline and fall of empires a couple of thousand years ago. The chemist and scholar of the post-growth world Ugo Bardi has borrowed the philosopher’s name for his idea of a Seneca Cliff–the precipice over which our complex society will likely (according to him) tip and fall.
While such ideas gained considerable traction a few years ago (fanned by rocketing fossil fuel prices and the impact of the Great Recession), they are now deeply out of fashion. Doesn’t Bardi know that we live in an age of abundance, or so the shale oil and gas story goes.
Befitting the name of his blog, Bardi remains a committed Cassandra, warning all those who will listen. To my shale oil production chart of yesterday, Bardi responds with this first (all is well in the world of cod):
And then this (perhaps it was not as well as it seemed):
Full blog post by Bardi on this theme is here. But does the argument “so goes cod, so will go shale” hold true?
This is certainly the view of the geoscientist J. David Hughes, who maintains a web site called “shalebubble.org“. On it, you will find a number of Hughes’ reports published under the imprint of the Post Carbon Institute, the latest going under the title of “Drilling Deeper‘. The full report is 300 pages long, but Hughes concludes that the US Energy Information Administration has built a production forecast on the back of a series of three false premises. Further, based on these, the US economy has taken as truisms a series of false promises (click for larger image).
Should Hughes’ analysis be correct, then Seneca’s Cliff may beckon. Within a decade we will know one way or another. Never forget: Cassandra was proved right in the end.
Risk and Well-Being 