Watts are a measure of power, not energy. In other words, 2000W for a year is 365 (and change) times more energy than 2000W for a day.

It's 2000 W of constant power consumption per person.

So 2 kW * 8760 hours = 17520 kWh per year and person.

Switzerland is currently at 5000 W constant consumption per person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per...

Thank you.

The website gives the wrong impression. The "liberal" parties are conspicuously missing though.

Thanks a lot, Francois!

I would feel a lot better about my own country(US) if we had even five percent of our congress willing to join a peak oil forum.

True.

Because of our consensus politics, change comes very slowly to Switzerland. It takes only a few lobbyists to prevent change ... and those we got. People like Rolf Hartl are doing an excellent job at preventing change, i.e., at keeping fossil fuel dependence high here in Switzerland.

... and yet, I am still mildly optimistic. If you look back to the 1950s and 1960s, you may understand why. Before that time, essentially all Swiss houses were heated using central coal heaters. Within only 10 years, the coal disappeared almost entirely from Swiss houses and was replaced by oil. Granted, oil heaters were more convenient, because you didn't need to reserve an entire room for storing coal and you didn't have to shovel coal into the oven once every few hours, and also, times were different: Switzerland (and the world) were in an expansion phase, i.e., money was easily available, but I am confident that Switzerland can do it again. We are still rich, and if and when oil supply becomes problematic, either because of rationing or because of price, the Swiss will happily exchange their central oil heaters for something else, and if it takes insulating their houses better, they'll do that also.

It is, however, important to continue on our educational mission.

So, you're saying that neither prediction means much? hmmm.

Well, I know what you mean about assumptions. Really, that's what I'm asking: what differences are there in the assumptions, definitions and categories?

After all, these two people know each other and are familiar with all the same information - I can't believe their projections really differ as much as they appear to.

Well you need to slash the middle class in the wealthy countries by at least 50%.

I think the mistake your making is assuming that the number of people in the middle class in the wealthier countries will remain constant.

As the middle class collapses and accepts any work at lower wages profitability will improve and costs will decrease as real wages fall. To some extent of course demand will fall but for now lets assume that the shrinking middle class spends everything it can on oil and steadily drops other expenditures.

Basically even as aggregate wages fall what happens is oil costs make up and ever larger percentage of expenses say up to 15-20% of income. At this point serious attempts to not use oil are made at and individual basis. However we make the further assumption that despite this in general infrastructure contraints make this a slow process.

I'll skip over the details but the short version is the maximum price for oil only occurs after the system has eliminated all of its debt. They vast majority via default. In particular you assume that housing costs fall close to zero before calculating the maximum price for oil.

What I tend to end up with no matter how I do it is about a 50% reduction in the number of people actually living middle class lifestyles about a 25% reduction in overall oil usage for the middle class and a price for oil around 400 plus per barrel and easily as high as 600-800. Now overall oil usage is a lot harder to figure but a further 10% total drop in total in the wealthy countries seems probable.

Its interesting how you can wipe out about half the middle class and still see oil usage only drop 10% and for most unthinkably high oil prices however in my opinion the key is the amount of debt thats available to default on. As mortgage defaults rise housing costs fall rapidly and given the large precentage of income made up by housing there is a tremendous amount of room to endure higher oil price even as net income falls.

For example lets say you make 50k a year and have 1000 dollar house payment. You lose your job and your house and your car if you have a payment and eventually move back with your parents or into a slum apt and take a job making 25k and say you get a cheap car to go to work.

Your oil usage does not change at all through all this i.e it can go in any direction up down sideways with any possible outcome no change is the most likely. Only now once you reach this point are you forced to really conserve oil as prices rise further. Other slightly more fortunate people will be following you down this curve. And of course its obvious housing prices are obliterated so more and more people will default on their loans and stay in their homes for longer and longer periods paying zero for housing.

200 a barrel should certainly start this process again but its a slow process and oil demand falls even slower so it seems to me at least that the pressure from oil prices has to go much much higher to bankrupt half the middle class in the wealthy nations and until it does oil demand cannot start decaying in a meaningful way. Given that the wealthy nations will almost assuredly enforce their minimum wage laws and even with this wages will fall fairly rapidly enough to offset rising expenses at the company level we should see a larger build in prices. For companies of course the problem is demand for their products will wane so even as wages fall overall demand falls along with it.
And of course even with rising oil prices overcapacity and credit deflation will make it difficult for them to increase prices. But we can assume that in general they won't just shut down operations until after they have exhausted all credit options and wage cuts and layoffs. They can and will run in the red until no longer possible. One can expect repeated government intervention generally propping up the worst companies to stall the decline.

The only reasonable way to handle peak oil is to reduce debt to zero and move to a stable zero or negative growth economy relentlessly and aggressively cutting oil consumption. The various forces arrayed to prevent this are powerful and will slow the movement towards the right answer therefore consistently keeping oil usage abnormally high even as the price increases.

Net result is prices have to go to "ridiculous" levels to get demand to decline the pressure has to be so large that the fundamental shift I'm describing is forced on the system and either it changes or collapses. For all intents and purposes it has to rip the system or break it in order to force demand to decline as long as it can be propped up it will. Its very much a irresistible force vs immovable object type of problem. The net result is extreme changes in price.

This is fundamentally different from what happened up till now when the biggest debt bubble in history popped. This is the destruction of the fabric of the fiat based debt economy not elimination of its excesses. That was a pin prick its time for the crushing hammer blows.

Its a war in every sense of the word including military conflicts.

Francois,

I agree that the effect of an oil-induced economic slowdown in oil-importing countries imposes a limit to oil prices - probably about $100/bbl.

Don't forget that oil consumption/demand isn't static: today's EV/PHEVs become price-competitive with oil at about $70/bbl. As they grow, economies of scale will make them decisively cheaper than ICE's, and they'll replace ICEs.

Yes. Switzerland cannot go it alone.

In WWII, Switzerland was able to feed its population of 4 million people ... barely. At that time, it had about twice as much arable land available as today, because a lot of the former arable land has meanwhile been urbanized. The population has also grown from 4 million people during WWII to currently 7.85 million people.

Switzerland currently imports 40% of its food, and the situation won't improve.

We live in a globalized world, and in some ways, this is good. However, it should not prevent us from doing what is in our power to reduce our dependence on energy imports, and Switzerland has not done enough in this respect in the last 20 years.

I am mildly optimistic because I see that our politicians are largely reasonable people, and because i see that the dialog is increasing, i.e., more time is being spent by the media (in particular, TV and radio) to discuss energy issues, and this should lead to a better informed public within the coming years.

Yeah but it's tame. I don't know about the situation in Belgium but, so far as I know, there's been no loss of life in Switzerland over the issue for over 15 years.

Not in a major way. There could be problems, because the different language regions are of drastically different sizes. Roughly 62% of the Swiss speak Swiss-German; roughly 30% speak French; roughly 7% speak Italian; and roughly 0.5% speak Rhaeto-Romanic. Thus at least in theory, the Swiss-German speakers could dominate Swiss politics. Yet, our political system prevents this.

This is the primary reason why the Swiss are pursuing consensus politics at all levels. In our government, all political parties, all religious confessions, and all language regions are represented. In our government and in our highest court, all four languages can be spoken, and whenever there are differences of opinion, we try to discuss, until a consensus has been reached. This makes Swiss politics very slow and sluggish and is probably one of the main reasons, why so little has been accomplished in recent years to pro-actively deal with the looming problems of resource depletion.

Lobbyists have it easy here in Switzerland to block change because they don't need to convince a majority. It is sufficient to get a relatively small minority to their side, and no change will take place. The discussions will drag out forever.