Mewit

The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like this one showing overall humanity is on the road to start shrinking over the next few decades. I think a lot of people still believe we're in the population bomb scenario Ehrlich painted in 1968, when actually we're looking more like a sad "Children of Men" scenario, particularly in developed countries.

I wonder what the end game of this decline is. The population of countries couldn't go to zero (right?). So at some point fertility rate must rebound. But at what point? 50% of the current population? 20%? 5%? Could we (or our great grand children, if we have any) see a world with just 2 million people living in Japan, finally beginning to grow again?

It seems to me if there is ANY sub group in the country reproducing above the 2.1 replacement rate, eventually they will come to dominate the population, if they pass this inclination on to their children. The "bottoming out" of the population might be determined by the relative size of that sub group today, and how much over replacement rate they are reproducing at. So maybe in America, the population bottoms out at 100 million people, with Mormons making up 50% of those, and as time goes on the population slowly grows and becomes more and more Mormon.

The other thing I think may happen, at least in more authoritarian countries like China, is that the state steps in directly. If offering tax breaks and free day care just aren't moving the needle (which they haven't so far), governments set up, for lack of a better term, "baby farms". Giving birth is turned into a full time job, completely separate from raising the children, which is done by some other state institution, and the population is stabilized that way.

I think one factor the article doesn't mention is how alternative opportunities change at oil companies depending on the oil price. When oil is at $30/bbl, having a job at a big, boring, stable company like Exxon is very attractive. No one else in the industry is hiring, small companies are going under, there is motivation to keep your head down and ride it out.

When oil goes to $100 a barrel, there is a sudden explosion of opportunities for people with the right education and experience at a company like Exxon. They're looking at all these alternative things they could be doing for similar or better pay and start thinking about all the things that have annoyed them at the company.

In other words, maybe Exxon has an unusually stuffy or toxic environment for the industry, but I think a bigger factor might be that Chris Rock line "Men are as faithful as their options." Workers are as loyal to their employers as their options.

Looks better than I thought! But of course they'll burn through that storage fast if it's a cold winter. The import graphs give me hope that they might be able to mostly plug the gap with LNG and maybe Algeria. Of course for LNG they're competing with Asia, so even if they are able to avoid physically running out of gas, it's probably going to get very expensive.

I think what this has really demonstrated is the danger of always taking the easy solution on energy generation. Germany seems like the best example. They decided they wanted to phase out coal. Fair enough, it's by far the dirtiest hydrocarbon. Then they also decide they don't want to use nuclear power. And they don't want to frac for gas. And they don't want to invest much in LNG terminals because ultimately they don't want to burn gas either. But renewables aren't anywhere near big enough to close the circle right now, so basically by saying no to everything else, they by default grew their dependence on Russian gas.

There are no perfect sources of energy (at least not yet), so countries have to make tough choices. Hopefully that is clearer to decision makers in Germany and elsewhere now; making the easy, uncontroversial choice every time can lead you into a big jam.

I don't know anything about this, but contamination seems plausible, as you say, and it would probably make sense for California to update its regulations to make sure the crops grown with this water are safe for consumption.

I think this is a pretty unusual situation. As far as I know, most spent frack fluid is reused in oilfield operations or disposed of in deep disposal wells.

I think it's best to look at the options through a risk matrix. Is it possible that an earthquake is generated by fracking that is big enough to geologically connect a hydrocarbon formation with a surface aquifer thousands of feet above it? I suppose, but I think it is very unlikely. I don't think there are any cases of that on record, and wells have been fracked in the US for many decades (although not as frequently as recently). What is the consequence of that happening? A community (likely a rural community) loses potable drinking water. I would say that is a low probability of a medium impact event.

The calculation is going to change if there is a higher probability of drinking water contamination for whatever reason, or if more people live in the area and would be impacted by an event, just as the risk matrix is different building a nuclear power plant in France compared to building one on the Japanese coastline. Of course every jurisdiction makes its own decisions, as is their right, but the consequence of always taking the least risky option can leave a country in a tough situation when those options don't cover their energy needs, like in Germany (and elsewhere in Europe) right now.

I don't think it is accurate to say it "dissipates into the rest of the water system". Typically the hydrocarbon formations being fracked are thousands of feet below the water table, separated by thousands of feet of impermeable shale. It's the same, or more so, for disposal zones where the frack fluid that flows back is injected. For the fluid to mix with a potable aquifer, it would have to leak within a wellbore. That's possible, for sure, but it's pretty rare, can be detected through proper monitoring, and can be more or less eliminated as a risk when the well is ultimately abandoned by pumping cement down the well. You don't really need a computer model to tell you what's going to happen: the formations have been separate for millions of years, and they're probably going to continue to be separate for millions more.

I hadn't heard about them using the water for crops, that is a little more alarming to me. I suspect it's not being done quite as cavalierly as you're suggesting - they are clearly treating and testing it, as discussed in the article.

In my (maybe biased) opinion, all of this should be weighed against the alternatives. Gas is much cleaner than coal, after all. In Europe, they made the decision to ban fracking, and also eliminate nuclear energy (in some countries at least). Some of the gap can be filled increasingly with renewables, but as recent history has shown, not all of it. Most of the gap is filled with Russian gas, which has its own issues. And overall it makes the energy supply less robust, which allowed their current energy crisis to happen, when the wind doesn't blow enough and the Russian supply has hiccups.

I don't think it's fair to paint this as oil and gas companies reaping all the benefits while everyone else pays the price: everyone benefits from lower energy prices, directly or indirectly. In my opinion, consumers bear some of the responsibility for environmental issues, as well as the producers.