**Growth Bad – Topshelf
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- Unsustainable – Peak Oil
- Times have changed- the amount of oil the average worker can buy with the average wage has killed productive
- Fracking won’t change economic sustainability- fracking fields can only sustain competition for up to two years
Unsustainable – ModelsSimulations prove there is no situation leads to sustainability and techMacKenzie, reporter of the new scientist, 10 January 2012 (Debora, “Boom and Doom: Revisiting Prophecies of Collapse”, http://www.countercurrents.org/mackenzie100112.htm) The crucial point is that overshoot and collapse usually happened sooner or later in World3 even if very optimistic assumptions were made about, say, oil reserves. “The general behaviour of overshoot and collapse persists, even when large changes to numerous parameters are made,” says Graham Turner of the CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences lab in Crace, Australia. This did not convince those who thought technology could fix every problem. And with so much criticism, the idea took hold that Limits had been disproved. That mantra has been repeated so often that it became the received wisdom, says Ugo Bardi of the University of Florence in Italy, author of a recent book about Limits. “The common perception is that the work was discredited scientifically. I heard it again at a meeting last April,” says Homer-Dixon. “It wasn’t.” Unsustainable – Peak OilGrowth is unsustainable- peak oil prices can no longer satisfy economic surplusUdland, Business Insider's Markets Editor and graduate of the University of Connecticut, 18 November 2014 (Miles, GRANTHAM: The World Doesn't Have Enough Stuff To Make It As Great As We Want It To Be, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-grantham-on-oil-economic-growth-2014-11) Our potential for economic growth is limited by the world's finite resources. Most forecasting models incorrectly assume endless growth. However, the laws of physics will not be defied by economics. These are the main takeaways from the latest investor letter by GMO's Jeremy Grantham. Over the last few months, the price of oil has tumbled from well north of $100 to below $80. Some would say this is likely to result is cheaper gas prices, serving as a boon for the US consumer and potentially US corporations. However, these forecasts are short-sighted. Grantham looks at oil from a far broader perspective, unpacking the commodity's role in the last 150 or so years of economic development and arguing that the serial mispricing and misallocation of oil has lead us to a place where oil's cost has, and will, continue to hamper potential economic growth. "We assume the oil or coal, our finite and amazing inheritance, is free and price it just at its extraction cost plus a profit margin," Grantham writes. And by treating this finite resource as something infinite, Grantham says we have ignored the second law of thermodynamics: that entropy increases over time as the energy in a system dissipates. And so under this framework, Grantham sees the increasingly globalized economy not as a system that is compounding to become more potent, but that is, rather, converging towards increased impotency. "We owe almost everything we have had in the way of scientific and economic progress and the growth of the world’s food supplies and population to fossil fuels," Grantham writes. "And not simply to the availability of these fuels, but more precisely to the availability of those fossil resources that could be captured extremely cheaply." For about 100 years, from 1870 to 1970, the price of oil was roughly pegged at about $16 a barrel in today's currency. Over this period, though, Americans became six times richer and therefore could handle the very substantial increases in energy witnessed over the last 30 or 40 years, driving up the size and complexity of our economic system. This is what Grantham refers to as the "economic surplus" we enjoyed with respect to oil: since oil costs remained so low as a percentage of our earnings we failed to realize how much we'd come depend on that benefit. As Grantham writes: "If it’s true that oil’s economic surplus has accounted for so much of our growth, then what we should have seen since about 2004 as the price of oil began to break out way over its long-term trend was some grinding of the economy’s gears: a persistent seeming reluctance on the part of the economy to live up to expectations. And this, in my opinion, is precisely what we have seen: a broad and increasing tendency for all countries to disappoint compared to their earlier growth rates." And Grantham doesn't see these expected productivity rates coming back. Times have changed- the amount of oil the average worker can buy with the average wage has killed productiveUdland, Business Insider's Markets Editor and graduate of the University of Connecticut, 18 November 2014 (Miles, GRANTHAM: The World Doesn't Have Enough Stuff To Make It As Great As We Want It To Be, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-grantham-on-oil-economic-growth-2014-11) We do not affirm the gendered language of this author When Grantham writes about the amount of oil the American worker can buy with one hour's wages, this is the chart he references. This is a somewhat convoluted chart, and again, the text that accompanies it is only more dense, but the idea that Grantham is driving at here is that the more expensive oil becomes relative to our earnings, the less oil benefits us economically. And so currently, the average worker's earnings buy about 20% of a barrel of oil, roughly what they did in 1940 before the huge manufacturing boom that made the US the global economic superpower of the 20th century. For Grantham, this chart shows, "a remarkable round trip and what a lot it says about the preeminence of oil in our economy. When oil was becoming more affordable up to 1972 and oil intensity per person was still increasing, productivity per man person hour grew at an unprecedented rate of 3.1% a year. "From then until now as affordability fell and oil usage per person fell, productivity per man hour fell with it to 1.1%. This is not a small shift! 3.1% will take $1 to $21 in 100 years, where 1.1% will make it to barely $3. But to rub this point in, the productivity from 2000 to now has fallen to 0.8% a year at which rate $1 just about doubles in 100 years." And so the upshot here is that as oil got more expensive not just in nominal but also real terms, this cost ate into our productivity not just in the near-term but over the long-term. Fracking won’t change economic sustainability- fracking fields can only sustain competition for up to two yearsUdland, Business Insider's Markets Editor and graduate of the University of Connecticut, 18 November 2014 (Miles, GRANTHAM: The World Doesn't Have Enough Stuff To Make It As Great As We Want It To Be, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeremy-grantham-on-oil-economic-growth-2014-11) In the last ten years, the US has enjoyed an "energy renaissance" courtesy of the fracking boom that has taken hold in places like Texas and North Dakota. But Grantham isn't sold on this "boom's" robustness. "First, let us quickly admit that U.S. fracking is a very large herring," Grantham writes "Its development has been remarkable. It will surely be seen in the future as a real testimonial to the sheer energy of American engineering at its best, employing rapid trials and errors – with all of the risk-taking that approach involves – that the rest of the world finds so hard to emulate. Similarly, it will always stand out as remarkable proof that, so late in the realization of the risks of climate change and environmental damage, the U.S. could expressly deregulate such a rapidly growing and potentially dangerous activity." Grantham writes that there are few regulations regarding fracking, which has given the US an advantage over other potential projects, and nearly 100% of the global oil production over the last eight years has been due to fracking. But for Grantham, the "red herring-ness" of fracking comes in what it hasn't done. "It has not prevented the underlying costs of traditional oil from continuing to rise rapidly or the cash flow available to oil-producing countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, and especially Venezuela from getting squeezed from both ends (rising costs and falling prices)... Yes, they have been drilling more wells that chew up money, but not that many more, and good operations have lowered the costs per well by over a third. On the other hand they have drilled, as always, the best parts of the best fields first, and because the first two years of flow are basically all we get in fracking, we should have expected considerably better financial results by now. The aggregate financial results allow for the possibility that fracking costs have been underestimated by corporations and understated in the press." Peak oil is still a thing and it will collapse the econ while driving us towards ecological disaster Gates, Trauger and Czech 14- Professor of Wildlife Ecology, professor in natural resources management, PHD (J. Edward, David L., and Brian, Peak Oil, “Envisioning an Alternative Future”, Economic Growth, and Wildlife Conservation, Chapter 15, p.317, 21 Nov 2014 http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4939-1954-3_15)//WB Although the best net energy reserves disappeared 70 years ago, there have been a plethora of recent news releases heralding that the USA is on the cusp of a second oil boom and that Peak Oil is nothing to worry about. This optimistic news is not based on recent or sudden discoveries of new oil fields. These newly tapped US oil reserves have been known to exist for many years. What changed are recent innovations facilitating recovery of oil bound tightly in shale rock formations in the Great Plains. This “oil boom” conclusion is based on the assumption that innovation and higher prices have changed the economically recoverable oil supply and that higher prices automatically will cut demand for oil products. Peak Oil is not about running out of oil, as there will be plenty of oil left following the peak; but, whether or not it can be produced at low enough costs and high enough rates to satisfy the current global economy. Production of cheap conventional oil peaked a few years ago [15]. Exploration is currently focused on formerly ignored regions, for example, deep water and arctic environments, as well as development of unconventional sources, such as tar or oil sands and tight oil plays. These sources are more expensive to produce, both in energy (energy return on investment, EROI) and in dollars (Chap. 2). Because of the high cost of production, oil is currently trading around $ 100 per barrel in spite of the so-called oil boom. Furthermore, even if oil and other fossil fuels were still cheap and abundant, it is in our best interests to stop using them, as their combustion is leading to catastrophic global climate change and disruption [27]. An acrossthe-board rising fee on carbon emissions as well as other incentives, such as a high carbon tax rate at the mine-mouth and wellhead, would begin the process of curbing their use; but, it needs to happen rapidly, as continued delays in implementing such action will only result in worsening climate catastrophes and damage to the biosphere [11]. Furthermore, exponential growth of our fossil-fuel-driven economy is accelerating biodiversity loss, and potentially contributing to irreversible planetary state shifts [2, 7, 11, 26, 27].
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