Peak Oil, AI, and the Straw | Frankly #56
The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens
Nate Hagens
4.8 • 553 Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2024
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Recorded March 5 2024
Description
In this Frankly, Nate shares his perspective on the new all-time high in oil production in the context of AI's growing influence in the financial markets and technology space. While 'all liquids' just hit an all time high, the varying categories of what is considered oil obfuscates a long plateau that is starting to decline. However, given AI's expanding reach, it may not only invent ways of getting a higher percentage of Original Oil In Place to our economies, but also increase demand for energy worldwide. In similar fashion to shale fracking, MMT, and debt, AI will increasingly widen the resource extraction/ecosystem damage "straw". Artificial intelligence is potentially a wonderful tool, but it is lower down the hierarchy than money/power maximization and thus will accelerate, not diminish climate change and other environmental damages. Can we resist the cleverness of AI and its ability to drain sources to the very last drop to instead navigate the road to the Great Simplification with wisdom?
For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/56-peak-oil-ai-and-the-straw
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Greetings. |
| 0:02.0 | Last week I said that this week I was going to talk about what I learned in India. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm going to postpone that to next week because over the weekend, two things came to my attention. |
| 0:16.0 | Number one, that we just recently pierced the November 2018 peak of what is called oil production |
| 0:27.4 | in the world, a new all-time high. And number two, and this is as of Monday night, March 4th, NVIDIA is worth 1.3 times as much as all of the energy companies in the S&P 500, |
| 0:51.2 | valued well over $2 trillion in anticipation of AI being a productivity, world-changing technology. |
| 1:01.0 | I want to talk about peak oil and what AI may mean for peak oil going forward. That'll be today's topic. |
| 1:13.6 | Okay, brief recap. |
| 1:16.6 | Many followers of this show know that energy is incredibly correlated with economic output. Over 99% correlated. And if we grow 100 units of GDP, we'll need around |
| 1:34.5 | 70 units of energy globally that are incredibly linked. Of all the energy we use, oil is perhaps the master resource because it is a liquid at |
| 1:49.4 | room temperature. It's incredibly energy dense. It's storable. It's transportable. It's versatile. |
| 1:56.1 | And there's thousands and thousands of products we make from it. So a barrel of oil has 1,700 kilowatts of energy. |
| 2:07.0 | A human has around 6 tenths of a kilowatt. |
| 2:11.8 | So we get massive economic benefits from this stuff that we just pull out of the ground. |
| 2:18.3 | Now humans are more efficient at directing their muscles to energy, so the 1700 to 0.6 ratio isn't quite exact. |
| 2:27.3 | But historically, the carbon pulse, which is humans drawing down ancient carbon and adding it to our economies, |
| 2:38.7 | has been supported by adding more and more of this incredibly productive energy to our economies. |
| 2:49.5 | If you think about it, historically I I've been showing this purple graph. |
| 2:53.3 | That is the carbon pulse. But carbon is oil, coal, gas. And so the oil is a core part of this, |
| 3:06.1 | but it isn't the entire pulse. |
| 3:08.3 | So this has resulted in massive economic productivity in our economies. |
| 3:15.3 | But the GDP growth in the developed world, the OECD countries, has been increasing most years, but increasing |
... |
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