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Either I got trolled, or you are just looking for the situation where you can make yourself feel good by bashing Americans.

As an American I have to side with the Europeans on this. Hummers are basically monster trucks in comparison to their cars.

But more seriously, we should really listen to them on the reasons why they don't need our type of cars and maybe adjust our way of life to be less needy of cars.

Of course 60 years of lobbying by Detroit ruined many east coast cities public transportation systems and we have to thank them by writing a bailout check when their "monster cars" no longer sell because people can't afford to pay for gas.

If you haven't already I'd watch End of Suburbia and start considering to yourself that without alternative energies like hydrogen that sometime in the future that if you can't use public transport, bike, or walk to a grocery store then you'll do without.

Of course if they do get alternative energy to work, we may have to deal with European sized cars.

Its not trolling... Its simply a fact.

Molecular oil and economic oil (as in commodity) are 2 different concepts. Peak oil refers to the prohibitive hight price for oil, and therefore the change in oil usage as a commodity energy source (mostly for mobility). The problem is not the amount of oil reserves, but how easy (and cheap) the oil is extracted from them. Arabic oil is (or was) dirty cheap, because it was basically "floating" over the dunes. Current reserves must be dug at great deeps with growing extraction costs (and new techniques, or converting tar sands (not very cost-efficient either).
US oil is criminally and artificial cheap, basically to sustain the most expensive life-style on the world. For this topic I would recommend this excellent documentary: http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

As someone once told: the stoge age ended with plenty of stones around, the oil age will end with plenty of oil reserves underground.

TL

If you mean our #1 foreign supplier, then yes, you're right.

The top 5 suppliers of petroleum to the US are The United States: 39.7%, Canada: 10.5%, Mexico: 8%, Saudi Arabia: 7.4%, and Venezuela: 7.4%.

(Information derived from Energy Information Administration statistics, which only shows the stats for 2005 and earlier)

Personally, I think we should use less petroleum products over here, but convincing people to use their cars less (which accounts for 50% or so of our petroleum usage) isn't easy as long as people here choose to live in Suburbia.

Dyson's moaning about rural poverty misses the point, witness http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ "Who's going to pay for the food stamps" for the suburban-poor, that's OUR problem ! Once upon a time there were peasants with pigs and chickens or rice, whatever. The Chinese government then said to the peasant, look, come to the city, we will give you FREE ROOM AND BOARD in a dorm within bicycle-range of work, for the few years that your are optimally productive, and at the end of this time you can take your few hundred bucks in savings and go back to your pigs and chickens. ( True Story ) In other words "Rural Poverty" is better spelled "Reservation Utility". Pigs and chickens may not seem exciting, but physicist-wise while exciting sex and gambling does NOT actually generate food or goods, they are analogous to "cooling the room by opening the refrigerator door", as The West must soon learn.

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/

Ethanol would take up too much of our ag land that we need to sustain our food supply. Check the movie The End of Suburbia (http://endofsuburbia.com/ for a preview of our sad future.

Interesting. What with their propaganda-styled approach, I just assumed The Corporation was making it up.

Note to people who make films like The Corporation, End of Suburbia or The Money Masters: When you go overboard with your conspiracy theories, you lend discredit to everything you present!

Why key an SUV when you can blow a few up?
In all seriousness, check out the film End Of Suburbia - our local IMC just did a showing of this last night. Hybrid cars won't save you from peak oil.

Well i'm not saying they have to work in our interest, but at least respect us and maintain normal diplomatic relationships, not instigating coups, or openly funding radical non democratic groups.

As an US citizen, you would be very suprised at the amount of money the US administration spends in illegal activities in Venezuela.

In the links i provided you can read some of the details.

Regional integration is one of the long term goals, and one of the main foreign policies for Venezuela. It is a type of integration that goes beyond trade agreements, in fact it gives priority to social, political and cultural aspects as well.

Its not exactly that we are standing up to the states, its more like the US administration wants their rules imposed on us, without us having any chance to discuss anything. They pretend we go to Washington d.c. and sign without reading whatever they wish. Any objection, is good enough for Bush to declare us part of the "axis of evil, communists, etc".

For example, they would love to see PDVSA, the state oil company, sold to private interests. Well who do you think PDVSA is competing with in the international market? Exactly, the multinational oil companies, which the Bush administration is closely related with. Im sure they would love to buy it all, but our current constitution, discussed and approved by the majority of the people in the referendum of 1999, forbids this.

Here are some more links:
http://www.embavenez-us.org/constitution/intro.htm
http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/v enezuela/
http://www.veninfo.org/
http://www.embavenez-us.org/
http://www.vicuk.org/

Richard Stallman has many comments about Venezuela (he has been here many times) http://www.stallman.org/
In fact, he is calling to "Protest Bush by buying gas from Citgo." by citing an article made by Jeff Cohen: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0516-25.htm

Citgo belongs to PDVSA, which means us:
http://www.citgo.com/

We ship daily 1500000 barrels of oil to the United States. of these, 660000 go to Citgo.

Here are some interesting oil facts:

- An oil tanker from Venezuela takes from 4 to 5 days to reach the south coast in USA. The same oil tanker coming from the middle east, takes about 40 days.
- Venezuelan oil is heavier than average (requires more refining), and it has a lower international price (about 10US$ less per barrel).
- Because its not so profitable and enviromentally friendly, there have been no new refineries built in the United States in the past 25 years.
- Refining capacity in the States has peaked at 100% capacity for many years already, getting more oil to the market won't lower prices anymore, and the global demand of oil has already reached maximun production ("Peak Oil" levels).
- Citgo owns 8 of those not so profitable refineries...
- USA with 7% population of the world consumes 27% of total oil production. Please guys, support energy efficiency usage and alternative methods.
- China and India are demanding more and more fuel, we have already established good relationships with them.

A couple of documentaries i recommend you to watch:

http://endofsuburbia.com/
http://www.chavezthefilm.com/

I for one am glad I'm not the only one thinking about Peak Oil. I read a local newspaper article with a man stating that Peak Oil would happen around Thanksgiving this year! And although, IMO it won't happen until 2007 or by at the latest of 2020 but it's something we should seriously consider being the gas prices are going up and up.

The question each of us must ask is:

What will you do when gas reaches $5 per gallon?

What will you do when it reaches $10?

I guess I'll be taking the bus instead of driving but how many Americans have live in areas where Public transporation isn't available. The US Economy will just collapse in a sense or at least permantly change until an alternative fuel source is available. As of now that isn't looking too promising.

As of now Japan, China, and the EU are dumping tons of resources into this, but I've yet to hear anything about the US government acting on it. Maybe when gas prices get painfully high it will become an election issue, but by 2008 it might be too late.

Okay, okay, here's the real link.

Now we've created quite the niche market for organisms which can metabolize asphalt, discarded tires and plastic bags, and life might find a way, but it won't happen soon enough to make a difference for humanity.

I have great confidence, that no matter what we as a Class 0 civilization can do to the planet, life in some form will go on. I also have an interest in the future of the human race, and I hope for its survival. Our mild climate is finely balanced such that we can survive here, and as far as we know, nowhere else. If we change the climate much, life will be fine, but we'll damage ourselves, make ourselves extinct, and leave the world to sleep for tens of millions of years until life comes back somehow.

This isn't about preserving some mythic state, it's about cleaning up our poo in our backyard. Localized decisions that seem best to us as humans leads to short term, market driven thinking. Market thinking excells at allocating scarce resources in the short term. For humanity to survive on a longer timeline, however, we need to embrace on a broad scale, biological processes, quit making 'waste' and start making 'food'. For this to happen however, it needs to be a better way of doing things than the one we've got. And the one we've got is good for probably another ten years. Which means nobody will bother changing, again, at least on a broad scale, until then. And then, whether it's ten years or not, we won't be as equipped to change, because the disaster had already happened. I was going to pull out a "When did Noah build the ark?" kind of question, but instead... "When's the best time to backup your data?"

Also, watch a movie called The End of Suburbia. More focused on oil, but still, totally worthwhile. When the revolution comes, don't say you weren't warned.

Hydrogen is a public dillusion which stems from the fear of us running out of hydrocarbon energy, which we will be soon. Hydrogen is a net energy loser, which means it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than the energy you get from burning it. Right now the only practical way to make hydrogen on any kind of scale is with natural gas, something that we are running disasterously low on. The United States imports 15% of it's natural gas from Canada, and that 15% is over half of their production. The United States had it's production peak of natural gas in the 70's.

Oil is used as a feedstock for all commercial pesticides and natural gas is used as a feedstock for all commercial fertilizers. We have turned our farmland into nothing more than a nutrient defficient sponge so without these petrochemicals farming output would drop from about 140 bushels/acre down to roughly 30. Oil is used in plastics for the medical inductry and almost every other kind of plastic you can think of. There are 7 gallons of oil per every single tire we put on our cars. 40 barrels of oil are used in the energy to produce one car. 24 solar panels operating in the Austrailian desert for 24 hours produces only the energy equivalent of 1 liter of gasoline. If we were to remove hydrocarbons from the picture and replace that energy with energy from nuclear powerplants, it would take 10,000 of the largest plants and at that burn rate the uranium supply would last roughly 20 years. The bottom line is that there is nothing that can replace the energy efficiency of cheap oil.

Now for the bad news, we are peaking or about to, very soon, in both oil and gas, and that means the production slope of both begins on a slide down an irreversable decline. Demand will soar while production will slowly sink lower and lower with every subsequent barrel extracted. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination as to what effects this will have on the economy.

http://ospmm.sourceforge.net/ is a project I am creating to wake people up. Check the research section and read the reviews of the books if you don't believe me. Also I suggest viewing the award winning documentary http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ for a primer on what is about to come down the pipe. The movie is laiden with credentialed industry experts, geologists, and urban planners. This shit is for real people, we are living our lives way beyond what is even remotely sustainable, wake the hell up!

In a lot of cases, such as recycling paper, it uses even more energy than making new paper from scratch. I'm sure it's the same for other products.

Also, the efficiency of vehicles on the road today is the same as it was in 1970! This is because of all of those damn SUV's on the road....does it seriously make sense to have a 150kW engine move you when about 200W will do the same thing? (ie, 200W is roughly the amount of power you use when walking, 150kW is roughly the power of an SUV).

Oil will peak one day (some say in 6 years). When that happens North Americans will be in for a shock when they find that they'll have to grow their own food in their yards instead of importing it from 3000km away. "The End of Suburbia" is a great documentary talking about all of these things http://www.endofsuburbia.com/.

Sigh, I remember watching this film:

http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ (There audio plus a transcript of the interview that inspired it available.)

I remember some guy in it saying how hard it would be to have a war over oil because all it takes is five pound of plastic explosive and a camel to blow up an oil rig.

Now I'm thinking how hard it is to fight for our freedoms. It seems to take so little for the U.S. Gubment to do something really atrocious like this. All it takes is a couple of guys with airplane tickets and a few phone calls.