One assumption is that it matters who owns oil. If the Iraq war had gone exactly as they wanted, and Exxon-Mobil had rights to Iraq's fields, instead of the Russians and the Chinese, Americans would still pay the same price as everyone else.
Things like that aside, the book does do a decent job of covering a vast topic, how we get our energy. It was published in 2004. Reading it turns out to be an excellent demonstration of how bad we are at predicting the future.
For instance, he talks about the incredible growth of the Chinese car industry. It started from nothing not that long ago, and they were producing 2 millions cars in 2000. Roberts wrote that while growth would surely slow, they could get to 3.5 million per year according to Beijing's ambitious plan.
Well, it's 2010 now. Here's a handy chart of China's car production, from wikipedia:
| Year | Production (in million units) |
|---|---|
| 1992 | 1.0 |
| 1999 | 1.2 |
| 2000 | 2.07 |
| 2001 | 2.33 |
| 2002 | 3.25 |
| 2003 | 4.44 |
| 2004 | 5.07 |
| 2005 | 5.71 |
| 2006 | 7.28 |
| 2007 | 8.88 |
| 2008 | 9.35 |
| 2009 | 13.83 |
His prediction for six years into the future was off by a factor of four.
He predicted that by 2020, China might surpass the United States in C02 emissions. How's that going?
Rank  | Country | Annual CO2 emissions[8][9] (in thousands of metric tons) | Percentage of global total | Per Capita[10] (metric ton) | Reduction needed to reach world per capita average | Emissions intensity[11] (kg of CO2 per $1 GDP (PPP)) |
| - | World | 28,431,741 | 100.0 % | 4.4[12] | 0.48[12] | |
| 1 |  China | 6,103,493 | 21.5 % | 4.62 | 4.8 % | 1.03 |
| 2 |  United States[13] | 5,752,289 | 20.2 % | 18.99 | 76.8 % | 0.45 |
| - |  European Union[14] | 3,914,359 | 13.8 % | 8.07[7] | 45.5 % | 0.42[7] |
| 3 |  Russia | 1,564,669 | 5.5 % | 10.92 | 59.7 % | 0.86 |
| 4 |  India | 1,510,351 | 5.3 % | 1.31 | -236 % | 0.56 |
| 5 |  Japan | 1,293,409 | 4.6 % | 10.11 | 56.5 % | 0.33 |
I'm not sure why everyone talks about China and India when they speak of developing country Carbon emissions.
Again, that prediction was made six years ago. This is one of the points that Nassim Nicolas Taleb hammers on in his book, the Black Swan (which everyone should read). We're really bad at this. In fact, it's so complicated that we can't be good at this.
1. We're trying to predict an incredibly complicated system. There are too many variables, including some which can't possibly be known, yet are consequential enough to throw everything off.
2. Predicting the future requires knowing the technology of the future. And if we knew the technology of the future, we would know it today. Ergo, we would have it today. Yet we don't have it today. Hence, we can't know the technology of the future.
Yet we keep predicting anyway. And there are virtually no penalties for getting it wrong, in most fields. No one bothers to check past predictions.
Before I start reading a new author who's in the business of analysing our situation today, and making guesses about our future, I like to read some of the things they wrote in the past. If you want to know if you should trust Thomas Friedman Today, read Thomas Friedman, Yesterday (conclusion: don't read Thomas Friedman).
Some people actually are better than others. Mostly this is because they avoid making the sort of definite predictions that no one can make. Sometimes there are things we can guess accurately: eg. We are going to keep emitting some large amount of C02 in the near term, at least.
We can draw consequences from these predictions: This will block some outgoing radiative energy from exiting the atmosphere, increasing the net energy content of the earth system.
We can then attempt to describe the possible consequences that will have, while staying humble about what it's actually possible for us to know. You shouldn't trust any extremely definite predictions.
No comments:
Post a Comment