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Has World Oil Production Passed Its Peak?
dido writes "Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has been studying world petroleum production data and has come to the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005. If he is correct, total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December. From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent. The high prices did not bring much additional oil out of the ground. Most oil-producing countries are in decline."
I remember in college a geologist was invited to demonstrate a "resource simulator" for our class. By today's standards it would be considered extremely crude (this was after all, in 1978), (wow, weird unintentional pun).
The simulation was basically a giant video game with a simple graphical display of the world's known and projected resources including but not limited to:
About 20 students in the class were given controllers, each to (again, crudely) simulate usage and comsumption patterns of all of these resources. Also, some students had controllers allowing them to spend resources to explore for MORE resources.
At the time, and years subsequent that demo stayed with me -- it left an indelible image of what could and probably would be.
The results? Basically, no matter what the students did to conserve, and what they did to increase the resources, the "world" pretty much always ran out of fuel and resources by the year 2020. At the time that seemed pretty far away and I don't think many people felt the need to care. Maybe that time has come.
Another interesting piece of the simulation: there were those students who pointed out these "estimates" of known and expected future discoveries of resources were just that, "estimates". The geologist obliged, and let the students rerun the simulations with a magnitude of latitude, i.e., ten times the estimated resources were allocated! The results then?, about an additional 10 to 20 years of resources before they ran out.
Note: the results (we ran many different trials) weren't ALWAYS about running out of oil and petroleum. On a few occasions there were severe food and water crises. A very interesting lesson.
Who ever said that render farms had to do with computers?
Yeah but what time?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
If this is true, hope that hybrid technology and alternative fuels come along in a big way in the next few years. Otherwise, we'll be looking at significantly higher gas prices in the coming years.
Here's the site devoted to peakoil: http://www.peakoil.net/
D E9-42BC-920B-91E5850FB067.htm
A huge chunk of Saudi exports come from one gigantic field. This means our eggs are in this one basket. Here's an article that discusses that field, and the chance that the Saudis might have screwed it by over-extracting. If you do that, you limit how much you can get out later; you might lose the reserves. [I'm guessing you might damage it, but that some future technology might make it recoverable -- just at a higher cost]
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80C89E7E-1
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
If this is true, it's extremely important news to practically everyone on the planet. With a 3% discrepency in what we produce and we consume (and presumably that discrepency will grow for a while), it's essential that we begin to displace oil with other energy sources. Essential. We are completely screwing ourselves otherwise. I mean right now, I'm sitting here reading slashdot instead of writing a paper that's due tomorrow. That's a really bad idea. But sacrificing what literally powers our lifestyle and existence as we know it is doubtlessly a whole lot worse.
And the scary part is, we've procrastinated for so long, I'm not so sure that we'll find a suitable replacement in time, at least not before there are widespread disruptions in global energy supply.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Wouldn't oil companies want to reduce production so that they can hike up prices for the oil that they currently have? Or am I missing a basic element of economics?
...we've hit the peak oil again I see.
The rising prices make ethanol based petrol a much more viable alternative.
Perhaps new cars will implement the required modifications to prevent corrosion throughout the engines from higher percentages of ethanol in petrol.
There are a hell of a lot of other things which do not go to waste during the production process of oil and gas. Examples include the tar/bitumen you put on roads and paths, chemcials that go into make plastics - the list goes on (just hit wikipedia and look up Oil Refinery). Point being that most of these 'by products' are all consumed at the rate they are produced... they are going into useful products. You can expect to see rises across the board for all of these products as well.
Cutting down oil use is not going to be just about cutting petrol/gas usgae - it is going to be about making more durable consumable products than are currently churned out - and being happy to pay top dollar for them (just like out parents had to). Believe it or not, the 'good old days' of 'well built products' may just come back... that should make our grand parents happy.
In my next incarnation, I hope to come back as a code monkey.
Efficiency and cutting back in every way. A big STFU to all the Hummer owners out there.
And maybe over-population is part of the problem too. Stop screwing around!
Start Running Better Polls
Is this peak simply an artificial creation - an attempt by oil cartels such as OPEC to limit production and maximize profits on a finite resource - or due to some technical issue or actually pumping oil? The author also seems to support simple extrapolation by stating that "By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age" rather than attempting to analyze the actual cause of the problem.
Perhaps I've missed something, but I do not entirely trust his conclusions. If what I've stated is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.
I suppose I'll feed the troll and assume you're being sarcastic, trying to point out that (nearly) everyone uses oil. I agree. However, that doesn't take away from the fact that the US government has what amounts to no real plan to get the nation off heavy oil consumption besides a few buzzwords in slick-sounding speeches.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
I worked for a MAJOR oil pipeline and exploration company in the 80's.
Oil prices drove the drilling/exploring companies to Arab countries, just like China is taking certain industries down in the US right now.
If oil prices were to stabilize in the US at a profitable level, exploration and drilling would resume.
But the US would rather let environmentalist driving SUV's sue the living SH*T out of everybody.
This exports the oil production and pollution to some other country rather than allow exploration to continue in the US. At last count only 2.5% of the "projected oil producing land-mass" of the US had been investigated.
It's not a lack of oil, it's a surplus of lawyers.
B
What happened to the tech(s) discussed here a few years ago about refining farm waste or even more general "landfill" type waste into oil? Did they run in problems scaling up? Do any of you have links to recent developments in that field?
So we can now make predictions about permanent peaks in vastly complex - and to a great extent, cyclical - industrial systems only two months after the peak? If we determine a peak after two years, I might believe it. Two decades, I'd certainly believe it. Two centuries, I'd say it was fact.
:(
But two months?
In other news, according to my analysis of the decline of light since I awoke, peak brightness was 10 hours ago. In other news, I became increasingly agitated over the last 5 minutes, and I reached peak happiness 7 minutes ago.
The faster we use up all of the economically obtainable oil, the sooner people can stop whining about using it all up and the sooner we can get on with whatever is next.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
We can only expect these problems to get exponentially worse with all the growth in China and India. Hundreds of millions of people getting wired for electricity and generally starting to use petroleum for the first time will come with a high cost indeed.
What crap he shouts. Humans have been consuming oil for about a century and the production has always had ups and downs. How can he look at a point 2 months ago and say that that's the peak? There are some largish fields still just being opened up, which makes it more likely that oil will peak at March 17, 2006, 14:03 GMT, or maybe a bit later.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There seems to be an assumption that we have been looking for oil with the same intensity, but if there is ample currnet supply, where is the incentive for oil companies to look for more oil? If a company can make more money by doing less work (and making the supply smaller while the deman keeps growing), where is the incentive to find new supplies
Point well taken. But if you want to lower total consumption it makes sense to pick the low-hanging fruit first so to speak. And for various reasons, the US is using oil out of proportion to its population and GDP. Other highly indistrialzied countries manage to have just about the same living standard on very much lower consumption, which would indicate that you could achieve quite substantial savings without actually sacrificing anything.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You will then understand what it means to live in a bubble, where controversial issues are fully settled by politics and personal biases.
(One might also realize how popular elections are lost and won, despite the "genius" expressed in this forum.)
I suggest you read Slashdot
His methodology seems to be that when 1/2 the oil has been used, that is "peak oil". But that isn't peak oil. Peak oil is when the barrels shipped per month hits the highest of all time. That point hasn't come yet. Sorry, it just hasn't. The world has the ability to ship quite a bit more than it is now.
Of course, that just means the oil is being used faster, and when peak oil REALLY comes, the drop off will be rather sudden and acute. Don't panic yet, but DO start building the bunker.
The world can produce a great deal of bio-diesel and ethonal - hopefully this will spur greater efforts into expanding the production and delivery facilities for these fuels as well as the mixed versions. ie gasoline- ethonal blends, etc Not that I want to slow hybridization/efficiency efforts - all on these should be expanded by both consumer desires and by govenment incentives.
I've been reading about Canadian oil sands since the 1970s. They used to be a curiousity because the oil was too expensive to extract. Well with the spike in oil prices they are now competitive and have the advatange of not getting more expensive to extract. The estimates run between a 200 to 400 year supply. I hate to see them become the answer because it means more CO2 but they won't run out in our lifetimes. If you want proof Bush only cares about backing the American oil companies he won't even discuss Canadian oil with Canada. China is the country pursing Canada. Our oil companies don't control it so we aren't interested. This is about corporate profits. Shortages cause price increases which increase profits. The irony is if they can drive prices up enough Canada is going to get as rich as Saudia Arabia and they won't run out in a hundred years. The governemnt is shooting us in the foot and no one is even talking about it.
I have a minor in Geology and recently took a class on Geology and World Affairs, the Professor has his Ph.D in Petroleum Geology and worked in the field for around 30 years with a focus on the North Sea and Texas Oil. That professor also professed the Peak Oil theory, however a problem with him, and other Petroleum Geologists with a focus on "rock oil" is an over specialzation on "rock oil". When I asked during our discussions on Peak Oil about Tar Sands or Oil Shales, I was told that "...if it don't come up through a pipe most Petroleum Geologists don't know a damned thing about it." And that in particular, this Professor with his 30 years experiance didn't know a damned thing about it because that isn't what his firms worked on.
Now then, I don't know what Professor Kenneth S. Deffeyes background is, but I can see he is writing books on the subject as so has a vested and economic interest in this theory. Furthermore he seems to discount Ethanol, fuel cells, Methane hydrates, oil shale, and Nuclear power, as "shimmering dreams" so I think one needs to take what he is saying with a grain of salt since, as stated before, his vested interest to make money at this point is "peak oil".
The truth behind "rock oil" right now is that there is alot being used, and there is alot out there and there are still a good number of basins which have not been explored, including the Arctic Ocean and there is alot of oil we can recoved in "played out" areas with new techniques and with new technologies.
It's been speculated that theres as much oil in Canadian beaches as there was in the middle east. Yes, yes, I know; its not economic to refine it. Only when the price is under $30/barrel. What are we at now? $55? $60?
Its very possible that we've got plenty of oil left to consume. Its also been speculated that only 25% of the oil in some fields was actually mined. As the price increases, it will become economically feasible to mine this oil as well. I'd say we're good for at least 25 years, maybe up to 100. But the way things are going, we're acting like we've got all the time and oil in the world, which is NOT TRUE. We need better energy policies. I'm not one to "beat around the Bush" [dual meaning intended] on most topics (yes, what we are doing in Iraq IS going to have a positive benefit, its just going to take a lot of time. But it could have been planned better, instead of this rushing in thing. See: having more troops, planning for difficult-to-deal-with-insurgence.), but slashing funding to research into renewable energies is NOT acceptable. Problem is that our 4-year term presidential ordeal forces those campaigning to push for whatever will whip up the majority of the public's opinion into the frothiest emotionaly frenzy in the quickest time. But if I recall correctly, we do have the republicans to blame for this energy-funding-slashing.
We desperately need a committed effort to sustain budget spending on researching renewable energy sources. We _could_ be on our last 30 years of oil.
. Or, on the other hand, do you really think it's a grand OPEC conspiracy to get the whole world to pay more for oil, that just happens to correspond with overwhelming geologic evidence that we simply don't have an unlimited supply of oil?
The oil companies control the oil research, so we have no way of knowing if they are under- or over- estimating.
Huh. One trillion barrels produced over human history. Let's say 100 years of continuous pumping, with of course more pulled out in recent years.
:) looking for good-paying work, come visit. We're looking at a labour shortage of nearly 100,000 people just in the construction industry alone over the next 5 years. Plus, there's mountains :)
The oilsands in Alberta, Canada are currently estimated to hold over a trillion barrels of reachable oil. Near as I can tell, that's another century's worth. Now, we're using far more oil than we were during WWII, so let's look at current usage. As of late we're running about 30 billion barrels annually, so 1,000/30 ~ 33. 33 years of oil, assuming the Middle East disappears, Russia decides to stop pumping, Venezuela burns all of theirs somehow, and all of the smaller-producing countries stop as well. This is one small Canadian province providing every last drop of the world's oil, for 33 years. Considering this is less than half of known reserves, we can safely go with 70 years of oil.
A bit Chicken Little, maybe, calling for the Stone Age in 20 years then. This guy sounds like the Steve Gibson of energy research (OMG YOUR WINDOWS COMPUTER HAS RAW SOCKETS!!!!!!). Yeah, there's an issue. Definitely, we should do something about it soon. But the end of civilization in 20 years? Ridiculous.
Peak Oil proponents seem to only look at conventional oil supplies. The linked article claims we only have a trillion barrels of oil left in the entire world. Sorry, but I can drive over that much in an evening. What will happen? Oil's going to stay expensive as hell, that's all. $20/barrel minimum, and that's a very optimistic number. Oil companies need in the range of $30-40 to make oilsands business profitable, and expandable. So bye-bye SUVs.
In the meantime, any IT folks (or pretty much any other occupation, but this is Slashdot after all
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubbert_peak
In Capalist west Russian gas delays Hubbert peak for 10 years.
In Soviet Union KGB delays you for 10 years.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It was US oil production that peaked in the 1970s, not global oil production. There's a huge difference there.
Prof. Kenneth Deffeyes seems to be retired.
Day N-1: oil is $100/barrel...
Day N: Sorry, no more oil.
It won't happen that way. As we come to an end of oil supply (if ever) the price will obviously rise, but it won't do that overnight either. As it does, the big switch-over you are worrying about will just happen. This is the real world - not a binary on/off simulation. Real people don't follow static simulations, they tend to squirm around a bit and do odd things when conditions change.
So far, in my personal observation, gasoline prices haven't even kept up with inflation over the last 30 years or so, which kind of tells me, on a fundemental, imperical level, it isn't scarce yet.
Many problems are politcal problems before they are engineering problems.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
So the price of oil goes up momentarily for what, a year? And this analyst decides that, since oil producers didn't instantly develop the technology to extract hydrocarbons from shale, or find a whole new set of oil reserves in areas we haven't even yet begun to look, that its all downhill from here? What bullshit.
That sounds an awful lot like the 1970's analysts who said we'd have no oil at all by 2000.
Or the brainiac reporter who insisted that Apple's iPod was not going to have any effect on Mac sales after interviewing 10 iPod users who didn't also buy a Mac on their visit to the Apple store in 2004.
Anyone can rub together two brain cells and write a report that glosses over market realities with some sensationalist simplifications.
Basic economics indicates that that the market can fall behind reality for several years. But obviously, at some point when oil rises to a level where it can comfortably stay, all kinds of results will kick in: conservation, alternative fuels, alternative oil discovery, alternative oil sources. To suggest that we've hit the end of the oil pan is plainly retarded.
We've only known about the middle east's oil for most of a century. There's plenty of places we haven't looked, and more we know about and chose not to exploit because either the market can't support it yet, or there is lower hanging fruit, or there are political or environmental concerns we can't resolve yet.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Good luck seeing this happen in this administration, regardless of the BS of reducing americas "addiction" that Bush spouted off... Sheesh he sounded like he was part of the green party !... I beleive this about as much as I beleive he didn't really know there were no WMD's in Iraq... Bush will let the inevitable happen, inflation is coming.. because it has to, to pay for these increased costs.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
Not to denegrate Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes, but Mr. Simmons of Simmons & Co Intnl has been speaking worldwide on this subject from his own research for over 5 years.
Mr. Simmons pdfs and PPTs used with his speaches are avaialable at his website, and are incredibly detailed and convincing.
Nuclear power is the ONLY rational solution, near term.
Weak kneed leaders in the U.S. have been totally 100% cowed by irrational environmental types who do not use any of this data or statistical evidence or engineering facts to oppose anything but "green". What these so-called leaders and environmentalists miss is that they may have doomed the U.S. to great hardship, by delaying the inevitable move to nuclear fission, which other major countries have done and are expanding as we speak.
Bo
Here's the plan
As oil prices rise to about $300 (US 2005 $) per barrel, the cost of automotive gasoline in the USA will be roughly equivalent to the high end of what Europeans have been paying for the last decade, with some dodgy factors thrown in to represent the effect on GDP.
Now, as you might have noticed, that is serious money.
At that point maybe the USA consumer will move away from going to pick up the milk in a 2.5 ton SUV. They will start to drive 100 hp diesels.
That, in itself, is likely to be too little too late.
Plan A: But, as the cars get smaller it gets easier to integrate electric vehicles into the fleet. Electric commuter cars are a reasonable solution for a reasonably sized minority of the mileage in cars, and preserve the autonomy that we like.
To power the electric cars we'll burn coal, initially, and then nukes.
Plan B is that we start turning coal into oil.
I think Plan B is better than plan A. In practice we'll do a lot of both. At $300 per barrel many technologies make more sense than dinosaur juice.
That's pretty dumb. One day, the earth will be consumed in the fires of our sun going nova... so yeh, dire things will eventually happen. If we run out of oil next year, are you still going to be sarcastic, because they were off by 7 years in the prediction?
We need to find better ways of doing things. But the rich are too comfortable to continue making money with the old ways, and probably aren't clever enough to find new ways.
Here are some quotes from the National Center For Policy Analysis, regarding Oil Peaks and attempting to forecast oil production:
In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."
In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years.
In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels.
In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels.
In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment.
By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
The estimates above do not include unconventional oil resources. Conventional oil refers to oil that is pumped out of the ground with minimal processing; unconventional oil resources consist largely of tar sands and oil shales that require processing to extract liquid petroleum. Unconventional oil resources are very large. In the future, new technologies that allow extraction of these unconventional resources likely will increase the world's reserves.
Oil production from tar sands in Canada and South America would add about 600 billion barrels to the world's supply.
Rocks found in the three western states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone contain 1,500 billion barrels of oil.
Worldwide, the oil-shale resource base could easily be as large as 14,000 billion barrels -- more than 500 years of oil supply at year 2000 production rates.
Unconventional oil resources are more expensive to extract and produce, but we can expect production costs to drop with time as improved technologies increase efficiency.
With every passing year it becomes possible to exploit oil resources that could not have been recovered with old technologies. The first American oil well drilled in 1859 by Colonel Edwin Drake in Titusville, Pa. -- which was actually drilled by a local blacksmith known as Uncle Billy Smith -- reached a total depth of 69 feet (21 meters).
Today's drilling technology allows the completion of wells up to 30,000 feet (9,144 meters) deep.
The vast petroleum resources of the world's submerged continental margins are accessible from offshore platforms that allow drilling in water depths to 9,000 feet (2,743 meters).
The amount of oil recoverable from a single well has greatly increased because new technologies allow the boring of multiple horizontal shafts from a single vertical shaft.
Four-dimensional seismic imaging enables engineers and geologists to see a subsurface petroleum reservoir drain over months to years, allowing them to increase the efficiency of its recovery.
New techniques and new technology have increased the efficiency of oil exploration. The success rate for exploratory petroleum wells has increased 50 percent over the past decade, according to energy economist Michael C. Lynch.
Outside the US and other "developed" nations, oil is a lot less of a given. Cars are a lot less of a given. Electricity - well, electricity that goes 24 hours without going off at least once - is a lot less of a given. Broadband is... a joke.
I've only been to a few "developing" nations - and those were all former-British-Empire ones that are either fairly industrialized or fairly politically enlightened (India, Kenya, Uganda) - but there's a big difference between what we take for granted and what's out there. Our "alabaster cities" yadda yadda may as well be the Matrix; they're just that far from the reality much of the world sees.
And for all the talk about bringing them up to our standards... if we run out of oil or energy, I think we'll be heading down to (or past) theirs instead.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
In 1956, geophysicist Marion King Hubbert predicted that _U.S._ oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. In fact, U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, so he was pretty close. U.S. production has been going down ever since. This current article is about _World_ production. Hubbert predicted that would peak around 2000.
Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak in the 70's. He was right.
Based on his formulas, world peak oil production should occur during this decade.
This picture is slightly complicated by the fact that technology has been getting more efficient over time. However, many efficient technologies are locked behind Intellectual Property laws and/or major price barriers and/or political considerations. Oil needs conserving, right? So it would be logical to eliminate wasteful technologies ASAP and replace them with efficient ones, right? You seriously imagine any Government anywhere offering to exchange wasteful 10 gallon-to-the-mile wrecks on wheels for nice, new shiny hybrids? Particularly in the US, where most hybrids are imports?
Nor can I see the President phoning up Castro and offering to replace Cuban power stations with a light water reactor, and to upgrade their grid to be more efficient and reliable. Yeah. That's just not going to happen. It wouldn't happen if Cuba had the last barrel of oil on Earth and it was the only way the US could save the world.
There's also the problem of resource decay. Radioactive materials decay over time. They don't exist forever. Even though they last a very long time (overall), the older they are, the more effort you'll need to put in to extract the usable uranium from the surrounding material and decay products, and the less there will be when you do. It won't wait forever.
The next one's not decay, but it's a limiting factor. Oil and coal are "stable", but you need a certain concentration before it's useful to you. A thousand mile coal seam one millimeter thick has a lot of coal, but it's useless to you. It's also got to be in a usable form - oil shales are bad enough on the surface, but they would pose a far more serious challenge a few miles underground.
The end result is that you effectively deplete resources FASTER than you can extract them. In the case of uranium, through decay. In the case of oil and coal, through wastage and inaccessibility.
The problem is not unsolvable, but the initial outlay would necessarily be very large. To do it right, you'd have to do it all. Every scrap of infrastructure on the planet overhauled to the highest existing standard, with alternative energy infrastructure (direct solar water heating is a good start - if it can work in the middle of Wales, it'll work anywhere!) wherever there would be a net saving of resources to do so. It would also mean abolishing all protectionism and all Intellectual Property concerning efficient technologies.
Sure, fuel may well totally run out in 2020 if we don't do this. I suspect most voters and most tax-payers would RATHER fuel ran out in 14 years time than pay for the overhaul needed today. Today is a lot closer and for many, money means far more than having a future.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I read a great article in the New York Times the other day (go figure... its available for free at my law school) about E85. Anyway I was shocked to read that to make a car compatible with E85 it only costs an extra $150. I'm hardly a rich man and I try to save my money, but $150 per car doesn't seem like much in the grand scheme of things, espically considering the way our modern day governments spend and tax the hell out of everything. I was skeptical, about that $150 figure, but here that price is quoute in another article http://www.argusleader.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A ID=/20060122/BUSINESS/601220310/1003 And Since its so cheap why doesn't our government mandate all (or 50% of) new cars made and imported be E85 comptabile and let the consumer/market choose their fuel? Even if the federal government won't do this, you think some of the midwestern states would. Since the #1 problem with consumer adoption of E85 is its availability, wouldn't these state economies based on farming want to hurry up its availability so they could increase demand for their own product?
If I were an Iowa Legislator I'd want to make every car sold in the state E85 compatible and mandate every gas station sell E85. If the state can succesfuly force E85 onto the market it'd only be a matter of time until gas stations in the surronding states started selling E85 by choice to get those consumers and it spreads. Kind of like how McDonald's spread across America.
Other Problems with E85:
#2 promblem: You get less energy per gallon about 10 to 15% less. But E85 is aparently cheaper than gasoline. So at some point, I don't know where, and I can't find any information on this, there is a "Cost Per Mile" equilabrium between the two. Sure you have to fill up your gas tank more often if you use E85 because you get less milage, but maybe each mile is cheaper. This is a little harder than calculating "MPG" but I'm betting a savy company can add this metric to an onboard dash. If the Prius can calculate MPG, why not be able to enter how much it cost you to fill up the tank and then you get a cost per mile read out, so you can see which is cheaper for you.
What everyone so far seems to have missed is not "what are we gonna use to drive our cars back and forth to work with?!" but, "How the hell are we gonna feed ourselves?"
Oil is food, people. Don't think so? imagine the lines of connection going back from your local mega-mart - very little food is grown locally anymore, it all gets shipped in, and we, as faithful 'consumers' consume what's presented to us. Wanna move closer to a farm? Nice try, that wont work either, most food cannot be grown or survive without the very extensive use of, you guessed it, petroleum based pesticides.
Oh, well we can switch to a hydrogen based economy! Wrong again, can't make hydrogen without oil. Can't make fancy electric cars without a current reserve of oil.
Get a bike, get spare parts, and start riding, it's gonna be a long 75-150 years, everyone.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
But, being the terminally unhappy people they are, they'll just blame Bush and not MoveOn.
Quite the contrary. Most people I know who would fit in that description are quite happy about it
It's clear to me we are at or near peak oil. Here's some evidence:
Major individual countries have already peaked (America, Norway, Venezuela, UK, Indonesia etc.).
Individual companies have peaked (Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Total) (link, link).
Individual grades of oil have peaked (Light sweet crude) (link).
The only thing left to peak is total all oil extraction rates for which the experts predict 2007/8.
These are all things that were going to happen before a global peak, large number of significant individual countries peaking, large number of significant individual companies peaking and the most attractive individual grades of oil peaking - they've all happened.
What this means for the world is a completely different subject but the fact that we're extracting almost 85 million barrels per day, a figure that won't significantly increase and will soon decline is a certainty in my mind.
World food production has reached its peak!! Food demand is growing without bound, this is a complete disaster that threatens to destroy humanity. It's all over, the sky is falling, and we're all going to die. By 1850 we will all be dead!!!
We have two ways:
a. Algae, possibly with genetic engineering.
b. Brute force industry, powered by breeder reactors.
Either way, we can suck the carbon right back out of the air if we have to.
Using agriculture waste and coal is probably cheaper, but just so you know...
If we want it enough, we will have it.
http://www.changingworldtech.com/>
Peak Oil could be 2005/2006, but remember, just because its peaked doesn't mean economies that can afford to pay for it wont get their fix.
Betting against the bull can hurt, I want to see all these gloomy peak-oilists short sell stock and make billions on the impending downfall peakers predict.
I fail to understand why people fear peak oil and get all gloomy, like humanity will just give up and die out and not find other ways such as:
microbes
nuclear
wind
ocean current
fusion
shale oil
tar sands
mile deep rigs
etc.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Well, in an ideal world, if the Iraqi economy wasn't in splinters and not subject to sabotage, and the US properly allocated the money to get the oil infrastructure into full production, they could cause a surge in supply.
As of February 2006, Iraq is lowering its production to 1.1 million barrels per day, the lowest since the latest war. The UK and Norway will run out this decade. To meet the worldwide oil needs in the future, the Iraqis and Saudis should be supplying 40-50 million barrels per day. Iraq has something like 11% of the total oil reserves, but only has 17 of 80 oil fields developed so far.
Even considering population density effects and especially the suburban commute?
It's a little late to be causing mass concentrations of people to make mass transit a practical option for more people, for instance.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I think what some people are missing is the cause in the drop. We shouldn't forget to take economic, environmental and political reasons into account for the drop in production. A drop is not necessarily due to supply exhaustion.
funny how after all that still no one listens...
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
If it hadn't US troops would not be all over the pipeline areas.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
I like this statement, thanks for the message. See mine.
Insinct is stronger than Upbringing - Irish Proverb
(This is from something I wrote up a couple months ago, regarding a question I asked Professor Deffeyes during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2011, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
From what I have seen in National Geographic, it will be a 100 years or more before we run out. The problem is that oil will become scarce by 2020 and the price per barrel could skyrocket to over $500.
Over time, no matter how much humans conserve, every obtainable drop of oil will be extracted and used.
The entire point of OPEC is to keep oil prices stable just below the threshold where people will start moving to other energy sources (and of course, no lower). A spike in the price of oil is the last thing OPEC wants, because while it would produce short-term profits, they know it will bring closer the inevitable decline of the oil industry, which they want to postpone for as long as possible.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...because it costs a lot of energy to extract the oil from the sand. Right now, the whole procedure is only about 20% efficient which means for every barrel of oil we extract, we are essentially throwing away 4 others...
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil. You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
Well, that's sort of the point. Anyone who thinks that this is an argument of wether oil will run out or not completely doesn't get it.
Peak oil has nothing to do with limited resources (even though they are) and everything to do with implementing political controlls so that big government influence can "save" society from their "barbaric" selves. When the price of oil rips thru the roof in these next few years, the last thing in the universe that they would want you to think is that it's the governments fault for screwing up the dollar.
But there are many areas where some minor federal intervention would be very useful.
The first thing the govt. should do is reevaluate the way it calculates fuel economy. The current system is grossly innaccurate, and doesn't give consumers a true picture of the gas mileage they can expect. Consumer Reports had an article about this and the auto industry rep. basically said that the auto companies know how the govt. tests, and optomizes their vehicles for the test (gear ratio tweaking, using prototype vehicles, etc.). Changing the test methods would give consumers more accurate information so they can make a more informed decision.
The second thing the govt. could do is raise the minimum required fuel economy and make light trucks subject to the gas guzzler tax. I work at a Dodge dealership and the fuel economy of new vehicles is attrocious. A new durango gets 14-18 mpg and pays no gas guzzler tax. A station wagon that got similar mileage would have a several thousand dollar tax associated with it. Treat SUVs like the cars that they are replacing and you will find that fewer people will buy one.
The third thing that the govt. and EPA could do to help is to standardize fuel grades. Under the current system, refiners have to produce something like 60-70 different blends to comply with various state enviromental regs. The govt. could reduce this clusterfuck by having perhaps 2 or 3 different blends; one blend for urban/enviromentally sensitive (pacific northwest, etc.) areas, and one blend for areas where pollution isn't as big of a problem. Current refineries in the US are running at or above full capacity, and this would help ease that situation, and allow oil companies to put current resources to better use.
In addition to the step above, I firmly believe that the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
Obviously, these aren't complete solutions to Americas oil addiction, but they are things that would help.
P.S. while writing this post, I came across an interesting ad that the sierra club ran in the new york times on Ford's 100th birthday. 100 years of "progress" indeed.
cast the first stone. Sure, that's a great moral philosophy, and it would be nice if people weren't so sanctimonious, but it runs into problems when used to dissuage VERBAL criticism.
When you say that people in America or Europe who try to lesson the damage they are doing to the planet shouldn't bother trying to convince other people to do the same through social pressure, you are basically saying that it's not worth doing any good unless you can do infinte good. Your foolish rhetoric can be used to justify any amount of waste, and to (bizarrely) criticize those who are TRYING to act ethically.
If the social pressures of the Left in America were to reduce the ecological footprint of everyone from 60 times that villagers to 50 times that villagers, a few hundred million villagers would be able to increase their consumption of the Earth's resources by 10-fold with no extra strain on the environment over the current model.
Furthermore, pressures for ecological soundness would, as has been shown in most market situations, drive further innovation in that direction, the opposite of the effect that SUV purchases have.
If you are unwilling to understand that small improvements are better than no improvements, you might as well just kill yourself now, since the logical extension of your espoused philosophy would be that if your life is not perfect in every way, none of the good in it matters.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Yes they'll be a few years of high prices for domestic users. Oh dear, we'll need to economise, maybe take the bus. But that will be nothing compared to what will happen 10 years after that without oil they'll be little mass production of pharmaceuticals, fertilizer (food anyone?), plastics, etc. We'd need a new set of technologies accross the board to address each industry which is currently reliant on oil.
You're right! If I can only reduce my load on the system by 20%, I might as well not bother at all. Heck, if we're going to run out of resources anyways, and pollution is going to overtake us, let's just run everything into the ground as fast as we can.
Okay, enough sarcasm. I think you're probably right that in your comparison with America, Europe, and the tribesman and their relative impact. Problem is we don't know what exactly is sustainable, and we don't know how long it will take to get there. I think the current American lifestyle is unsustainable -- if everyone on the planet lived as we did it wouldn't work. But I don't think we all have to live as tribesmen either. This is a false dilemma that has come up ever since Regan said "I won't have Americans freezing in the dark".
I believe there is a comfortable lifestyle that is sustainable. I think technology is a part of that, but until it catches up I think conservation is another part of that. I'm one of those people everyone hates who recycles as much as I can, tries to avoid waste, buys organic products, and yes, even drives a Prius. What can I say: I am not willing to become a subsistance farmer, but I am willing to vote with my dollars for more sustainable ways to do things. I don't see how that's bad.
Is my current lifestyle sustainable? Hell if I know. Hell if anyone knows. I doubt it. But I'm doing what I can reasonably do as a working stiff to encourage things in what I think is a sustainable direction.
Cheers.
Instead of worrying about the fact that oil has reached it's peak shouldn't we be figuring out ways of leaving the carbon in the ground? (Remember that greenhouse thingy?) The focus in these debates always seems to be on how to produce more energy not use less. And that while we could easily save almost 50% of consumption using currently available technologies. If youu're interested in more details see this link from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4633160. stm "Energy's 'low hanging fruit'" by Dr Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
Oil from the ground is so 20th century I could care less about stories about it. Europe has begun licensing TDP tech and we have a full-scale refinery running near Kansas City. If we ever get serious about putting domestic oil production the whole idea of oil from the ground will be beyond quaint.
t ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
It works, it provides clean water and high grade deisel oil, cleans the air by providing higher octane product, less emissions from refinery gasses, can empty landfills of plastic, can clean the water supply from biomass waste. Don't as me why the hell the DOE hasn't gotten behind it. A tenth of the cost of the Manhatten project could make us the largest oil producers on the planet*.
Also check the Wiki references to plastic conversions. Say good-bye to plastic waste and ocean pollution as well. Grey water dumping would also be convertable on the cruise ship level. Plus domestic production nullifies the middle east cartels, and puts tanker accidents off our coasts to an end. The middle east argument alone is a national security problem and it's criminal that this tech hasn't gone into a crash program status.
And this blows all previous gas alternatives out of the water, doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
I'm confident that we will engage in this tech at some point - but it'd be nice to hear more about it. Try googling it sometime - you'll find almost nothing in the pop-press. I've even had dialogue with MSNBC about it - and they claim they're aware of it - but never say dick. Neither did Wired and they were talking new-oil on the fricking cover of their rag less than a month ago. FEH!
* The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
I can say with certainty, that we will never run out of resources. Now, having said that, the way we avoid running out of those resources is either:
1) Replacing them with some viable alternative
2) Competing for those resources and killing eachother until we reduce demand sufficiently
I kinda prefer option #1, but it does require a bit of ingenuity and forethough.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Your comment about the footprint on nature is important. Think about this, though.
I live in a studio apartment. I use energy efficient lightbulbs. I recycle. I mostly walk, but very occasionally take the bus. I haven't driven in five years.
Really, how much larger is your footprint than mine?
Now, my lifestyle is mostly maintainable because I'm young, it's true, but a Hummer still takes *five times* as much gas as an energy efficient vehicle. You don't need a Prius to get around 50 MPG.
It also reduces traffic efficiency because it's slow to accelerate and blocks peoples' view. Even apart from gas consumption, it takes vastly more resources to build a Hummer than to build a S.M.A.R.T. car.
Worse, people generally drive in SUVs alone. A vehicle that could carry four people is carrying only one. A carpool in an efficient vehicle is therefore *twenty times* as efficient as the usual SUV trip.
When you get to that kind of difference it really does become a moral imperative. You're using more than your share, and you're not even *trying* to get down to what your share might be.
"I'll never use as little as a starving villager does, so I might as well use as much as I like."
That doesn't fly.
The drop is not caused by supply exhaustion. But this does not make it any less hard to reverse: as you extract more and more oil the remaining oil becomes harder to extract.
That's pretty funny. I'm sure you probably do say that over and over to yourselves. Those fever swamp gases are pretty heady, I hear. Here on planet Earth the situation's a little different.
Slavery
Ended in this country by Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and not the slightest bit "left". In fact, abolition of slavery throughout the world, and by that I mean the British empire, was pretty much accomplished by those religious people you love to pooh pooh so much.
racism
I'm not sure what you mean. Fringies notwithstanding, the mainstream right certainly isn't racist. For real racists you have to look to the left where you find people who think racial minorities just can't be "equal" without discrimination in their favor.
abortion
Huh? You think this is an "I told you so" point? There's no concensus here, and in fact the public shifting right on this one.
gay rights
Rights we're OK with. Special privileges? No.
war in iraq
The left is flat wrong here. Read the news lately?
vietnam
Yeah, OK. According to general Giap, they would have made peace after the disaster (for the VC, which was completely crushed) of the Tet offensive, but then they realized, what with Walter Cronkite and all, the lefties would eventually sap the country's morale and we'd leave, if they could just hold out. On behalf of the rest of the country and millions of murdered Vietnamese and Cambodians - Thanks, lefties! You were right - you could cause us to lose that war!
global warming
Oh, the Earth is warming, but there's not much proof human activity is the cause (Cally's bleatings notwithstanding). The planet has been both warmer and colder in the past, and the link between global warming and CO2 is tenuous to say the least.
But let's say for the sake of argument human activity is the cause. Nobody on the left has proposed an actual workable plan that doesn't involve the destruction of industrial economies. You know, the economies that provide jobs and food and such. All I've heard so far is whining. I'll know you folks are serious when you start to support nuclear power - until then is just, well, hot air.
peak oil
Eh, don't see any evidence. But even so, peak production is entirely irrelevant. So what? If the price goes up people will conserve. That's really the only mechanism that will do it. When crude oil gets too expensive we can use tar sands, alcohol, or coal-based synthetic gas. Our grandchildren will be long dead before all that's exhausted.
Personally I would mind all those lefty SUV drivers here in the SF bay area getting forced into that public transportation they so like to push other people into. Oh, you talk the talk, but then you buy Suburbans as soon as you have a kid. Like to see a little more "walking the walk" here.
Atleast both Finland and Sweden have much lower population density than US, yet they have high standards of living.
Mankind is of course a cancer on this earth, and will soon exhaust all resources like yeast cells in a vat of merlot, however:
The article uses an unfounded and probably incorrect basis that production will peak when half the resurces are extracted. This can be a rule of thunb at best. Then it goes on to use this rule to extrapolate a date with 4 decimal digits. That's a joke.
There are for example enormous oil reserves in oil sand. Possibly more than all other known resources It costs maybe $30/barrel to extract, but at current prices, that is economical.
Prices will most likely continue to grow moderately as other new resouces become economical. This includes alcohol from grain and sugar cane, natural gas, and nuclear power (At least for stationary power)
"Fix it"
Despite all this noise about peak oil, oil futures remain reasonable, and oil prices are coming down in light of new supplies, suggesting that our access to oil isn't nearly as stripped as doomsayers want us to believe.
China and America have already begun investing in alternative sources of energy, all while new refineries are being built to increase supply. The futures market sees this as evidence that oil is heading for oversupply, just like it did in the mid to late 1990s.
If you're convinced that the market is mistaken, well, maybe you're right. But rather than argue with me, I have some simple advice for you: buy. Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune. You can buy us all copies of Mad Max with the words "I told you so" painted on the front in sweet rare crude. Thales will tell you, there's nothing that says "I'm smarter than you" like money.
But if anyone was confident enough in their predictions of peak oil to bank on it, the futures market would adjust to reflect it. Why hasn't that happened?
It hasn't happened because this apocalyptic pessimism is shortsighted.
I'm sympathetic, it's easy to get worried when you're told something is finite, though its consumption is increasing. But in a market, if consumption is increasing, that's a good sign nothing's wrong. Consumption will increase only so long as it's unproblematic, then it will slow, a market is a proportional negative feedback system.
To further allay any fears, keep in mind the imminent end of oil has been predicted routinely for the last 125 years.
Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict. While we're less reliant on coal these days, we still have mountains of it to mine. Cheap oil, not depletion, brought about the end of the coal era. And likewise, cheap x, not depletion, will bring the end of the oil era.
Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.
So . . . let me get this straight. Because of a crude computer simulation that you encountered nearly thirty years ago, you now are willing to accept a single voice that claims that petroleum production has reached its peak. OK, just making sure I had that straight.
All well and good, but do you really think the angry do-gooders will let any of it be built?
First off, let's forget water. There will never again be a major hydropower project in this country. The good sites are already taken, and anybody proposing a major new dam nowadays would be laughed out of town, right before the ELF burned his house down.
OK, wind power then. Well, the Cape Cod wind farm fiasco has shown what happens when you try to put renewable energy generation machinery where rich liberals have to actually see it at work. NIMBY! NIMBY! NIMBY! Put it out in some red state with the hicks. Too bad if it makes no economic sense, we're liberals, we don't do economics, we just do the fingers-in-ears/LALALALA thing.
You MIGHT get the green mafia to agree to cover Arizona or some other flyover red state with solar cells, but I wouldn't count on it, as there is liable to be some endangered bug or rodent that mobilizes armies of Sierra Club lawyers and brings everything to a screeching halt. And I've seen studies suggesting that no solar cell can produce enough power over its entire usable life to balance out the fossil fuels used in its production, never mind the toxic wastes produced during manufacturing.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Dude, this is serious news. I studied anthropology and found out that it takes more calories to produce our food than we get out of it. If we run out of oil, there will be massive starvation.
Peak oil is not about the decline of oil, it's about the decline of CHEAP oil. Some would dismiss peak oil as another Malthusian doomsday. However, one needs to consider the fact that oil is such a huge part of our lives, and the discovery of cheap oil (and the fertilizer made from petroleum products) helped stem the tide. It's not simply energy, it's also plastics and a multitude of other products. While we *may* find alternative sources of energy, can you imagine a life without cheap plastic? Go through your day today and see how often you use plastic.
Oil will always be present on our planet. The problem is that the Return on Investment (ROI) may be severely diminished. Right now, it's cheaper to find, drill, and transport oil than it is to use it. If it becomes more expensive to find and transport oil, we will have to find another source of energy. In case you hadn't noticed, energy consumption is going UP and not down.
It's not something to take lightly. There are people working on it, but we really need alot more effort behind it. I'm imagining bacteria in a petri dish consuming all of the resources. If people don't wake up soon, we could easily be faced with a situation where we simply will not be able to find a solution. Consider that research itself takes up resources, which will become more scarce and valuable. There is a doomsday possibility out there, but I like to hope that some governments will wake up and put alot of effort into finding alternatives. Humans should hopefully be able to think their way out of the petri dish.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Well stated. All of those reasons are why it is actually quite easy to predict when the last barrel of petroleum will be produced. (Answer: The day that no one will pay the cost of producing it.)
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Is cycling ok?
Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory.
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.
For an academic, this is a dangerously unthoughful piece. Or rather, while it is quite possible we have passed peak oil production, the understanding of economics in the piece are terribly naieve.
If oil production continues to decline (which it may well), then prices will rise. We'll see $100 oil. But, and this is the big but, if we see $100 oil then world oil demand will not rise 3%, it'll be down 5%. High oil prices mean less consumption of oil.
This happens in several ways: firstly, in areas like power generation, then oil become more expensive than (existing) competing technologies. Oil fired power stations cease to make sense relative to coal fired ones. (And it is no surprise that we are seeing an upsurge in interest in nuclear.)
Secondly, economic growth slows - especially in areas which are energy intensive. The price of a Ryanair, or Easyjey, or SouthWest Airlines plane ticket rises to reflect higher oil prices. Fewer people fly. Airlines mothball planes. Oil consumption falls.
Thirdly, we will see purchases (and usage) of cars change. In the 1970s, the average horsepower of a new American car more than halved. When people make the school run, they'll use a little car rather than their SUV. It's a fair bet too that we'll see hybrid sales rise and rise. (Similarly, we'll see the proportion of ethanol in diesel increase.)
Finally, rising oil prices make other energy sources economic. There is a wonderful piece from the IEA on the various costs of different power sources. Solar isn't cheap now. But if the oil price is $150 a barrel, it doesn't look so bad.
The Princeton professor poo-pooes oil sands, but if the oil price is more than $100, then there'll be an awful lot of energy produced from them. Similarly, we'll see coal to oil plants (again), and no doubt a second commercial gas hydrates "mine".
So: if we have passed Hubbert's peak, we'll see our energy consumption fall, and we'll see the proportion of energy production that is oil fall. This will not be painless. But nor will we return to the stone age. We may well see GDP growth drop to subnormal levels - perhaps even for a decade - but this is very different to total economic collapse.
--- My dad's political betting
...and may I just mention that you can thank the so-called European Left that there is a thriving industry developing energy conserving technologies for power plants, heating plants and transportation. I'm telling you, forget about the IT business, microelectronics, pharmaceutical companies. They won't save the world. Energy conservation is The Next Big Thing.
Oh, and by the way, we Europeans aren't all French. Actually, most of us can't stand them at all.
I guess the Chineses just need some Lebensraum ('living space') in order to survive! The Chinese may want to look to history (circa 1937) for ideas on how to sustain their growing nation.
So what you've suggested is that there is no point in trying to minimize your oil consumption at all, and that if you use any oil you might as well be a complete glutton about it. Right... That's utterly idiotic but is something the rest of the world has come to expect from the average American. In many countries in the world you can't help but use oil to some extent to live a somewhat normal life, but that hardly means that trying to limit oil consumption should be disregarded entirely. How comical this would appear to somebody who has never seen a motor vehicle is entirely irrelevant and is an argument that would only appease complete idiots.
So keep driving to work alone in a vehicle that's meant to hold eight people just because you think it makes you look "cool". In reality, it makes you look like a sad pathetic retard who's compensating for a lack of self esteem.
SUV hating is just moral superiority (although I really don't understand why some people have 4.5L cars which they basically use for shopping). If someone's running an average diesel SUV in the UK, chances are that they're probably getting as good fuel economy as someone driving a 2L car.
Peak Oil News and Discussion has a lot of info and discussion topics on Peak Oil. It even mentions the current slashdot peak oil thread.
Right On!
Who are you talking to? Got a mouse in your pocket? My car is a small BMW.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Nuclear reactors are the way to go! The Canadian Tar Sands need to build up the Nukes to power the extraction of the remaining Oil Sands; this will save all the Natural Gas that they are burning now. We need that Natural Gas to heat the homes in the North and to warm the planet with the green house gases so that we don't have as cold winters up north.
Nukes are clean environmentally friendly energy and with new reactor designs can use up to 95+% of the energy content of the fuel.
Let's get fuel from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and their moons. There's plenty of fuel there.
Hydrogen is awesome. Let's use Hydro, Nuclear, Wind and Solar to power the conversion of abundant water into pure hydrogen.
Let's save our fossil fuels. When we run out lets use the garbage dumps which have plenty of fuel potential in the methane and plastics embedded and not rotting quickly.
Let's mandate the replacement of all lights with LEDs as they are more energy efficient. Everyone needs to upgrade their computers and monitors to the latest energy efficient models.
Oh ya, how about GeoThermal energy. Just a few miles beneath the surface of the Earth is hot hot hot... let's make us of that and slow the planet's orbit down by letting it cool faster.
Let's take advantage of green house gases and warm up the planet so that we don't need to burn as much fuel in the winter.
Let's move to the tropics by encouraging mass migrations. Canadians move to Mexico, Americans move to Costa Rica and Panama while those in Quebec can move to the Caribean French Islands.
Let's Nuke em by building thousands of the new kinds of reactors. Let's grab all the enriched uranium fuel deposits that can be used for weapons and burn it to protect future generations and enable the extraction of energy now and in the coming future.
Let's continue to develop fusion technologies.
Let's put solar cells into the Lagrange point between the Sun and Earth and beam the energy to the Earth via microwaves.
Let's have all the humans on the planet get on bicycles and generate power or wind hand held energy cranks.
Bring it on. Technology to solve are problems.
Let's stop killing people. State sponsored mass killing won't solve the energy problems since wars consume a lot of energy and production capacity which also takes energy.
Let's Nuke Em by extracting energy from the 10's of thousands of nukes. The energy from the control detonations of the bombs will enable massive collection of energy.
Above all let's not freak out from those that predict the end of the world with their Quatrain's of doom and gloom. Embrace the Global Warming and accelerate it. It's the warmest it's ever been for 1200 years, bring it on! Heat is better than cold. Balance is for sissies. Let's make it happen.
Oh, ya all those other energy sources that I missed; let's do them too.
And maybe you should look at the history of human rights under socialism - Germany 1933-1944, China, Romania under Ceaucescu, Communist Russia, Cuba.
People have been predicting that we'll run out of this or that with catastrophic results for centuries, most famously Malthus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthus>. Personally, I'm with Julian Simon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon> on this. If we run out, we'll find something else. Higher oil prices give a bigger incentive for someone to find a substitute.
Ok, supplementing or even replacing gas with ethanol is great. Its cleaner, and its slowing down the use of fossil fuels. But where does the ethanol come from ? Plants ? And what's going to encourage those to grow once the oil runs out and there's no cheap fertilisers available.
Oil discoveries have been surpassed by consumption in the mid-eighties. I remember a presentation with a simple chart at the Annual Meeting of AIChE (American Institute of Chemical Engineers) 2005, Cincinnati about this. Since the usual lag between discovery and commencement of production is about 15 years (this is what I remember from my course in energy economy), the production peak was expected already about 2000. A few factors (wars, Russian oil becoming available to the west, etc) delayed this, but it's not like people never saw this coming.
New oil fields are being found all the time, but this is not compensating enough for the depletion of previous oil fields.
In case you wondered what is going to happen, remember that US production already peaked a long time ago (in 1971 if my memory serves me). In 1973 the Saudis noticed that they held the big levers now (Americans could not flood the marked anymore), and took the chance to become the market leaders.
What this means to us is exponential growth in gasoline prices. Smart countries stopped producing power with oil long ago (think oil crisis), moving to coal or nuclear for energy security (not necessarily because they were cheaper). Coal is going to be soon the most competitive fuel for power production. Nuclear will likely stay there in the corner where its poor economics has put it, since there is enough coal to burn all oxygen in the atmosphere.
Given that most transportation and building-heating sectors are based on oil in most countries and that these are big chunks of the total energy consumption, I expect some countries will find it cheaper to steal oil invading oil-rich countries, especially those countries that are very oil-intensive and where conservation is not considered an attractive option.
Furthermore, the US now have a base of operations (Iraq) in the middle of everything in the Middle East, already up and running. Invading the whole Middle East could become a real option in the next decades (it was actually already contemplated in 1973, but then we had the Soviet Union).
Interesting book to read: The end of oil, Paul Roberts, ISBN 0618239774.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Even if it hadn't, oil companies would limit supply in order to keep prices high, anyway. Duh.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
While there are probably quite a few ANWR size fields around, they're only big enough to keep the hummers running for a couple of months. There simply are no new big reservoirs to be found.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap. All that new tech can only delay the inevitable by a few years.
If you haven't already, read "The end of oil" by paul roberts. Written by an oil industry journalist, his basic conclusion in the end is that the only way to put back the inevitable is simply by using less of it. No one needs 6mpg autos, expecially not when new production cars now routinely get upwards of 70mpg in europe (without all that hybrid shit). (I'd actually like to see what the author thinks now, it was written before the current price hikes and he said that a price over $30 was unsustainable. It's now been over $50 for a year.)
I was going to respond to each point, but there isn't really any benefit to that. If you have some time, you might enjoy "The People's History of the United States". It never claims to be right, but it is history from the side not represented in normal history books.
grouping people into "left" and "right" is pretty stupid. I understand why people do it, but it still pisses me off.
FWIW, if you want to look at a group that has a good historical track record, check out the Quakers. (specifically hicksite) They were pro women's rights and racial equality in the 1600s and were talking about many other social issues way before most people would consider them.
In the United States for one, large percentages of farmland that used to grow Wheat, Oats, Barley, Corn, Sunflowers, and Cattle are now in "Set Aside" Programs where the Federal Government pays the farmer not to grow anything on it for long periods to help support prices. Furthermore, on lands in the United States and other developed and developing countries monoculture farming over say 60-120 years actually say increases in yields.
"If you don't take care of your soil, it becomes less and less fertile. It starts requiring larger and larger amounts of chemical fertilizer, which frell up the environment pretty bad. Soon you get soil erosion, and then you're frelled. You have to let it lay fallow for a long time to recover."
While some crops can reduce fertility, Safflower comes to mind in my farm's experiance, through rotation and setting aside a field for 1 year, you can see yields remain uniform for long periods. Our farm in South Dakota used the same land for 50-75 years for Wheat, Sunflowers, Oats with no reduction in yield and actual increases in yield due to better equipment and better breeds.
Setting aside a field for 1 year lets you maintain the yield. Intesively farm any plot of land it will NOT necessarily make it go to shit reeaaaaally fast. Farming replaced the ecosystem in that place, so your comments about ecosystems and messing with the environment are not really accurate.
Let's use Nukes, as in reactors, to extract the Oil from the Tar Sands rather than Natural Gas. Oh, and while we are at it let's continue the Global Warming and heat up the Earth so that winters in the north require less heat to stay warm thus saving energy. About five to twenty degrees should do it.
Your rant stinks like the new attack of 'moral relativism' that American 'conservatives' have started to throw around at everyone they don't like (themselves being among the worst offenders when it comes to bending their morals).
The idea that unless you're an African villager you can't point out great waste is beyond ridiculous.
Lets try it from a lefties perspective...
Unless you stop using the socialist, nationalised road system, you can't possibly say that Communist Russia was excessive, only someone in libertarian Somalia has the 'moral authority' to say that.
That sit nicely with you?
Of course not, but you will bend your morality to fit your argument anyway, as you have done. Now when some neo greenie comes along in this thread and screams that we *should* be living like African villagers you will argue that he is an extremist and he just goes to show how rediculous 'liberals' are, and you will have snuggly wrapped yourself up in a blanket of self righteousness smirking that your 'right' and everyone else is 'wrong' totally ignoring the issue at hand which doesn't matter just as long as you feel like you have won the argument.
SUV are the inverse of terrorist : you fight them at home in order to not have to fight them elsewhere. The problem is not with 30% of americans owning a SUV, it is with the 10% of chinese that can afford to do the same...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
We do not break even now. Assuming peak oil sends energy prices to double or triple price, break even will be much easier, not because solar gets cheaper, but because energe costs more. The Alberta Tar Sands couldn't break even until the price of crude went up, and the technology matured. I assume PG&E is your energy supplier. Legislation changes are trivial if you live in a democracy, and the majority want the change. If you don't live in a democracy where this is possible, your job is obviously cut out for you.
What you will see is a much lower stadard of living for everyone across the board, which will force these changes, along with technological changes such as thin film solar, which would mean pennies per watt, providing you have the room. I think market forces will make it inevitable.
I agree with you entirely about home solar power, it's a bloody stupid idea.
8 1152.htm
However does this constitue under $5/watt
700 million dollars / 200 million watts = $3.5/watt, and that's AU$.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s3
Admittedly it's not PV, but it's still solar power.
What could be better than a jet powered motorcycle? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8l6GTHLSWE
You're forgetting that the high price will drive people to alternatives in droves, and the enormous boom in the alternative energy industry will lower prices with economies of scale and drive more R&D investment. Before long the world's energy sources will be far more diversified, efficient, and eco-friendly; possibly even cheaper; and it will be *because* of high oil prices, not in spite of them. Because capitalism works.
Also, I don't actually think OPEC is causing a major problem, because I don't think there is one. But if there was one, it could only be caused by market manipulation of the type OPEC tries to practice. And I didn't mean to say the U.S. had the most purely capitalistic system (absolutely pure capitalism is probably not a system I'd like to live under). I just think the U.S.' capitalistic system is the best (despite its many flaws) (and hence the flame-retardant gear...).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
What do you spend your money on, if not a car? A computer? Well, a ton of energy went into making that. Lots of CO2.
The most accurate measure of how much CO2 you emit is probably how much money you spend, regardless of what you spend it on.
The fact that you don't like the answer or feel that it's not "fair and balanced" doesn't automatically make it wrong. Life is not fair and balanced. Cause leads to effect. Every effect cannot have all causes, no matter what you have been told or how much you want to believe that there is no global warming, that we are bringing freedom to the Middle East, that Reagan and Nixon weren't crooks, or that we won't run out of oil. Americans are spoiled brats, conservative Americans doubly so.
Reality is not "fair and balanced."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/ is $2.5US/W, perhaps as high as $3US/W including a regulation grid interactive inverter. And neither the sunball, nor the GI-inverter are being mass produced at the moment. I know someone who is getting $1.2US/W including inverter, without subsidies or magic. He just uses a large, cheap, concentrator and water cooling.
(However, I agree that PV is not economical in the current economy)
Part of the issue is when he refers to the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. It produces roughly 6% of the world's oil production (5 million barrels/day). The Burgan Field in Kuwait recently had to scale back its production because it couldn't sustain a pump rate over 1.7 million barrels per day (That's about 2% of the world production). When the two biggest producing oils fields in the World have their production rate capped: you either have to look else where for additional oil or you have to start using less. In the mean time you end up with more people who want oil then can be supplied. Then who ever can pay for it will get it.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
I also call bs on the post, but was too lazy to put this together. There is even more. Oil is now above 60 bucks a barrel of Brent. This is two to three times as much as it used to during the 90s. Nobody expected this sharp increase. Damn markets. Oh, well, since nobody expected nobody prepared for it. The decision to put up a new well or start processing sand heavily depends upon the price, because higher prices means higher production costs can be justified. So we now can have two to three times as expensive technologies to dig it up than we had five years ago. It takes some time for this to get started. We also had economic downturn in 2002 so people were weary to invest upon the assumption that oil prices would stay this high, since they just lost a lot of money on the assumption that internet stock prices would stay as high. It takes more than a couple days to set up new production facilities. During the last oil crises offshore pumping started in the North Sea, but it took them some time. I don't remember how long, since I was not born yet.
As I said, BS
I have been following Peak Oil Theory for the past 20 years and those that just scoff at the idea are in for a big shock. I like many others have seen it coming and I have seen the governments ignoring it.
A world with no affordable oil???
As the rich and privileged hog the remaining oil and leave the masses to fight it out society will collapse, there is no doubt about that. I am just glad I do not live in a society where every man and his dog has a firearm, now that society would truly descend into a hellish nightmare.
Scoff at your peril, or learn how to grow your own food (because there will be no distribution to your local supermarket) and then learn how to defend your food, because everyone will want what you have.
Your an idiot.
A,B and C need to drive to their job.
User A gets in his Prius, drives 40 miles spends 1 gallon.
User B gets in his Hummer drives 40 miles spends 4 gallons.
User C gets fired from his job because there is no way zimbee the pine cone collector can get to work in 35 minutes. Or maybe he sprints it and dies of a heart attack.
Either way I recommend method C for yourself.
This is all good but the cost to extract these oils is very high. Can you afford to run your car if oil is $10 a litre??? it could well eventually get to that.
- Thus solving the problem once and for all!
- But...
- ONCE AND FOR ALL!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Just quickly, you can find out more about the Peak oil background in a good article Peak Oil, the Next Big Thing and the follow on alternatives (nukes anyone?) in Peak Oil: the next big thing. (Part Two.)
Well Said Indeed. I love SUVs.. I own one back in the middle east. Why? Gas there is cheap.. its about $1.80 for a gallon of gas.. I want one here, I wouldn't buy one.. why? Coz gas here is $2.80. If gas were $3.80 or $4.80, I'm sure a LOT more people would start thinking like me and not get an SUV.
:)
You may find it odd that I agree with your idea even while I say I love SUVs. But that isn't the point.. You get hybrid SUVs too.
However, I dont think gasoline should be taxed... But if you HAVE to interfere... then make gas expensive.. through taxation if necessary. Use the revenue to fund research into renewable energy.
I believe in capitalism and market forces. Intefering with the demand and supply will lead to inefficiencies and wastage. Let the price rise, as it inevitably will.. and you will automatically see people decrease their use of gasoline. Make electricity more expensive, and people will not leave their computers on overnight. Make water more expensive, and they will not flush 3 times when they take a piss. (atleast in their homes)
- Tempestdata
I recommend reading "Twilight in the desert" by Matthew R. Simmons.
The book covers the Saudi oil production and shed light on the difficulties the Saudies face extracting the oil from the reservoirs. Simmons thinks the Saudies hit the peak of their oil production in the 80's.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
It is called a Methane Digester. It takes farm animal (cows, chickens, hogs) manure and stores it in tanks.
What happens in the tank:
The existing bacteria in it eats the remaining food in the manure and produces methane and carbon dioxide. The remaining fluid is a mixture of nitrates and lignin (non reactive solids). The water can be spread directly on the fields as a fertelizer. The lignin can be spread on the fields as well or used on the farm as a bedding or filler. Since the bacteria have eaten all the food by before the water is drawn off it dies before being spread in the fields and is more environmentally friendly all the way around. Here is a good short study on the matter: Minnesota Dept of Agriculture
The study shown there used a 135kW generator. Currently they are beginning research to determine if fuel cells can be used. It looks neat.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Is cycling ok?
What about a horse?
ender-iii
This whole subject makes me want to watch Mad Max over and over while I stroke a shotgun.
ender-iii
SUV hating isn't _just_ about moral superiority. Try sharing the road with the fuckers on a bicycle. The only thing more terrifying to a cyclist than a 4WDriver is a 4WDriver talking on a fucking mobile phone.
I've actually driven a _lot_ of miles in 4WD vehicles in remote areas of Australia while I was in the Royal Australian Survey Corps (no longer exists, alas - finest map-making organisation in the world), but there were only a few places where I actually needed the LandRover - most places that you don't need a helicopter to get to, an ancient Holden (Chevy/Vauxhall/Opel to you non-Australians) is quite sufficient.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Oh, man, there are few things as good for a laugh as the make-believe world you inner-city right-wingers dream up for yourselves. You get to hop through all these bullshit illogical hoops to actually continue to believe in your views. The majority of the right wing isn't racist? That's a good one! Have you even ventured into the countryside before, maybe, spoken with the majority of the republicans in the US? Either you're sheltered or flat out lying your ass off. Getting married is a "special privilege"? Oh, you crazy conservatives crack me up. Just because Lincoln was part of the Republican party (before the political spectrum completely switched in America), you think that makes him "conservative"? Let's just put slavery and civil rights on the same page before you do another triple lutz of logic on me. I'm not even going to get into the Vietnam issue, as I know a few too many people who lost family in that gigantic fuckup. And yes, 30+ years of legal precedent makes abortion an "I fucking told you so" point, just like civil rights!
Anyway, as you haven't learned yet, just thought I'd share what a good laugh I get from you guys. Keep wandering around the planet like those homeless folks spouting illogical gibberish about your fantasy political landscape. Ta-ta!
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
on the pro side: you don't need to work as hard riding one, they are good friends and I would love to have a horse of my own to ride, good manure.
on the cons: higher capital cost, higher maintanance, extra food bill, needs more storage space, produces exhaust even when parked, not as fast, not suited to modern road pavements.
I guess a horse uses less energy (and certainly much less fossil fuel) than a car.
The part about shooting people at the border, though, I think is optional...
But I still believe that there's a certain amount of witch-hunting. There's a strong groupthink element too. Very few people make an issue of people flying off to Switzerland for a weekend of skiing, even though it's probably a more pointless thing to do.
It is about the total energy supply, where coal is much larger (buth currently and in supplies), and nuclear power has more potential for the future.
Even if oil production has peaked, all it means is that oil prices will continue to rise, making the already existing and competitive alternates even more competitive. Some of the alternatives are practically unlimited in supply, which mean they will effectively set an upper limit on the oil price, until opil become so limited that we no longer would dream of just using it for energy.
A worst case scenario would be that your next car will be electrical. Is that really so scary?
Except that the capitalists of America have decided that the best way to profit is to climb into bed with OPEC, which means all the rich people win and all the poor people lose.
American capitalism is just another way of saying that large corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and the government passes laws making sure they can continue to do so.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
If you honestly believe that capitalism is the solution, you are definitely part of the problem. OPEC are not manipulating the supply, they are trying deperately to keep up with demand.
... (apologies to Bob Dylan)
Face it, your comfy lifestyle is doomed. Oh! I forgot! You're one of God's Chosen People (TM), a Merkin. God'll save you because He's on your side
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I think the US reliance on foreign erl represents a clear and present danger to the security of the US.
I think 'W' has gone some way to making this announcement, but not actually stated it as such.
I wish he would, and I also wish Congress would pass some very draconian laws about energy efficiency in reaction to such a declaration. We have allowed conspicuous consumption - WASTE - of energy for too long.
The free market has not behaved rationally in this regard until very recently (at $100/ barrel oil is still cheap), primarily because the market has never truly been free, but encumbered by the political wranglings of OPEC states, and other forces.
This has lead many countries to 'flex' their muscles into areas which we have seen to have catastrophic effects upon the lives of US citizens.
It is time we rid ourselves of our dependence upon foreign sources of energy. I would have very little sympathy if the economies of the Arab states and Venezualia would simply dry up and blow away. Perhaps then their corrupt dictatorships would finally disolve.
Did you ever read Jared Diamonds latest book? Bottom line: civilisations collapse at the top of their power, because they rather die than give up their status symbols. So yes, if the choice is driving a hummer and starving, or riding a bicycle and eating, people will keep on driving until it's to late.
Trust me, I work for the government.
If you use up 1 square mile of oil per year, whats left in its space? a giant massive cavern? or sea water?
1 0apr05.shtml
* 50 years, theres 50 sq miles of empty earth under saudi.
UNLESS, oil gets replenished from the mantle.
There are oil fields that have been proven to be seen replenishing. But at not the same rate as its being
used, perhaps 1/5th the current usage rate.
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/oilfieldsrefilling
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Really? They're one of the few countries that murdered their king and kicked the ass of every aristocrat they could find. On second thought, I'm not shocked at all by your disdain for the french...
Not been on a bike much since they got popular
One hundred years ago?
Very few people make an issue of people flying off to Switzerland for a weekend of skiing, even though it's probably a more pointless thing to do.
That's true. But I once did the math on that. I fly about twice a year, usually only long distances (to a different continent, usually; for everything else there are trains). I still use less fuel than most people do for a year of driving around here and certainly a lot less than Americans.
It *is* an energy problem. If energy were 100% free, or so cheap as that it might as well be so, making hydrocarbons is no big deal at all. Any chemical that doesn't rely on rare elements becomes feasible. And as far as I know, no one is claiming that we'll soon reach peak gold...
Hell, if we did solve energy, even elements might be feasible.
The guy in Birkenstocks, whose footprint on nature is fifty times bigger than the villager's, sneers at the guy in cowboy boots whose footprint is sixty times greater.
The guy in a Birkenstock will have a seriously smaller footprint.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Even if all this analysis is wasted breath, if peak oil has certainly and suddenly hit and we're all staring at a future of expensive oil, even then, I'm still not worried. [R]ising oil prices are... an invitation to corn and coal and hydrogen. For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy. Expensive oil only means we shift to something else, probably something cleaner, and I'm fine with that too.
I've seen that wired article you bring up, and it's simply ridiculous. Basically it says to use all the oil we have so that we'll be forced to develop new, cleaner technologies. What it doesn't address is whether such technologies that can replace oil even exist. All alternative energy sources have one or more of the following three problems:
1. Their pollution is as hard or worse to deal with than the pollution from conventional oil (see nuclear and coal power)
2. There is not near enough of it to replace oil (see wind, geo, and hydro power)
3. They have a low Energy Profit Ratio
The last is perhaps the hardest problem to deal with. Energy Profit Ratio is (Energy obtained)/(Energy Expended). Simply it's the amount of energy you get out of an energy source vs. the energy you put in to make that source viable. For example, until recently oil has had an EPR of 20, meaning for every barrel of oil's worth of energy you expend drilling for the oil, you get 20 barrels out. That is fantastic. Unfortunately alternative energy sources just don't compare to Oil's EPR. See this page for further disadvantages of alt. energy sources.
In terms of science, Wired doesn't know what it's talking about, and apparently neither do you. Quit using silly excuses like "The scientists will figure things out" to justify your extravagant western lifestyle when you clearly are ignorant about the subject.
"Quite frequently recently, OPEC has been producing at 100% capacity and still not producing enough to keep the price of oil down. This is one of the oft-quoted symptoms of the "Peak Oil" theory."
Why would you want to keep the price of oil down?
Yes, people would *like* to have cheap gas. But that's impossible in the long term. Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
'In 1855, an advertisement for Kier's Rock Oil advised consumers to "hurry, before this wonderful product is depleted from Nature's laboratory."'
Since when do you believe an advertisement?
"In 1874, the state geologist of Pennsylvania, the nation's leading oil-producing state, estimated that only enough U.S. oil remained to keep the nation's kerosene lamps burning for four years."
Even though this is not an advertisement it was in the 19th century. Technology and science progressed enormously since then.
"In May 1920, the U.S. Geological Survey announced that the world's total endowment of oil amounted to 60 billion barrels."
The USGS was proven to be wildy inaccurate even in their own country, I quote: "As recently as 1972, the USGS was releasing circulars that estimated US domestic oil production would not peak until well into the 21st century, and possibly not until the 22nd century. (See Theobald, Schweinfurth & Duncan, U.S. Geological Survey Circular 650)
This was despite the fact US production had already peaked in 1970, just as Hubbert had predicted. Richard Heinberg reminds us, "in 1973, Congress demanded an investigation of the USGS for its failure to foresee the 1970 US oil production peak.""
You say, that: "In 1950, geologists estimated the world's total oil endowment at around 600 billion barrels.
From 1970 through 1990, their estimates increased to between 1,500 and 2,000 billion barrels."
Source?
"In 1994, the U.S. Geological Survey raised the estimate to 2,400 billion barrels, and their most recent estimate (2000) was of a 3,000-billion-barrel endowment."
Actually, no. Please see this link, I quote: "The USGS 2000 divides the petroleum assessments into 'categories of probability': F95, F50 (i.e. median), F5, and Mean (i.e. arithmetic mean). "F" means fractile, as defined by the USGS", and then "TOTAL GCOE at F95 = (approx.) 2,000 Gb
TOTAL GCOE at F50 = (approx.) 2,700 Gb
TOTAL GCOE at F5 = (approx.) 4,900 Gb
TOTAL GCOE Mean = (approx.) 3,000 Gb".
This means, by their EXTREMELY flawed logic, that if they take the probabilities and get a mean value from them, then thats how many oil is out there, while anything below F50 probability is wishful thinking only, if not outright dreaming. I'd say that the quote: "and the estimates for the world Grown Conventional Oil Endowment will converge somewhere between 2000 and 2200 BBO (i.e. near the F95 estimate in the USGS 2000 report). The peak of world oil production is within sight." is very accurate in describing the real reserves.
"By the year 2000, a total of 900 billion barrels of oil had been produced. Total world oil production in 2000 was 25 billion barrels. If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056."
The problem is not that oil is gone, but that consumption is bigger than production and that production cannot be increased by any significant numbers!
We currently need 83.5 million barrels per day. We are projected to need 120 million barrels per day by 2020. On the other hand, when|since we hit peak oil production (will) decrease by around 1 million barrels per day of production per year. We just cannot tap into the remaining oil reserves quickly enough and in such way that it would be worth the costs (in monetary and energy terms)!
Dick Cheney said, that "By some estimates, there will be an average of two-percent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead, along with, conservatively, a three-percent natural decline in production from existing reserves.That means by 2010 we w
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Part of the reasoning is that the term "Reserve" does not refer to the actual, physical quantity of oil present.
From This document
SPE and WPC stress that petroleum proved reserves should be based on current economic conditions, including all factors affecting the viability of the projects. SPE and WPC recognize that the term is general and not restricted to costs and price only. Probable and possible reserves could be based on anticipated developments and/or the extrapolation of current economic conditions. (emphasis mine).
In other words, the "gold standard" means of defining "reserves" allows producers to take into account the price of oil and the cost of extraction. If the price of oil rises, those bodies of oil which would previously be uneconomic to extract suddenly become worthwhile.
Hence the ability to triple your reserves in a very short time, with no requirement for extra discovery or exploration. It just happens that oil fields that you were previously ignoring start to look viable because the prices are high.
In no way does this reflect an increase in actual real amounts of hydrocarbons. But it does mean that you can increase CONFIDENCE in the supply. Almost by definition, reserves will start to increase the moment any kind of shortage begins.
Of course, it doesn't account for the inevitable increase in price (remember, if prices drop, reserves will DESCREASE instantly). Most of the benefits of oil to the economy are linked to it's high energy profit ratio. As this decreases, the inherent value of the oil decreases, and you end up in an economic downspiral. And that's the real kicker of "Peak Oil". We'll probably never actually drink the oil fields dry, we'll just get to the point where the world economy is so crippled that we can't afford to extract, refine, or ship it.
The USA automotive manufactuers have been doing E85 since the late 90's. IIRC, all of the USA cars (not trucks and SUV) are E85ed. Likewise a number of SUV/Trucks are, but not all. That is why so much money is being expended by a number of groups to push for corn based ethanol production. Right now, the vast majority of the Ethanol is going to replaced MTBE (which has become an environmental nightmare).
James Woolsey helped start Set America Free and has been pushing since the late 90's to move us away from Oil
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm just trying to address the point about groupthink which can mean that opinions are formed and unchallenged when there are often more significant issues.
A friend of mine has an SUV, but drives only occassionally on weekends and for holidays. I drive a car and do about 2-300 miles a week. The guys doing the most environmental damage are generally sales reps, who don't even drive SUVs. I've even heard people say "no-one needs an SUV" but then, no-one needs beer and iPods, either.
Personally, I don't think I'd have one because I just don't like them. They always seem like a lot of space is wasted. I'd rather have a good estate car.
heheheh it's very rare slashdot makes me laugh. someone mod that remark funny...
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Even if I was 100% sure that the world would be destroyed tomorrow, I'd never ever bet a dollar on it. It would do me no good since I'd be dead when the time comes to collect my gains.
I guess you're right, nobody bets against himself in russian roulette. In any event, it's good to know we agree on one thing:
Oil might be running dry, but I wouldn't bet on it.
That's correct, and that's also just fine. At that price, most former oil users won't care, because they will have turned to more economic alternatives. (And if that primarily means nuclear power, you can be sure that the eco-freaks will still be whining that their favorite alternative power sources could be made economic with just a little more government subsididy.)
Also, if you think the U.S. is one of the best examples of a purely capitalistic system in the world, you're still living in the pre-Great Depression era. China's current economic policies make it _much_ more capitalistic than the U.S. (although not democratic) right now, including all the bad parts of capitalism like screwing over the poor people.Okay, now that you got in your anti-capitalist rhetorical dig, perhaps you'd like to know the actual truth about the Chineese economy? The vast majority of Chineese still work in rural collectives. In the handfull of urban areas where the government has allowed capitalism to take root, living standards have shot up. But even in those areas, most industries experience a lot more political interference than in the U.S. The government still controls to whom banks lend and who may invest in public companies. It prevents the failure of a great many un-economic firms. Contracts are not enforced uniformly by the courts.
You can certainly point to saftey and environmental regulations in the U.S. that don't exist in China. But those regulations are, by and large, a set of ground rules that affect all players equally. In China, capricious interference in the markets for political ends is all too common.
No, that's e-ink, Oil has always been infinite, at least until the last 15 years.
As oil becomes more and more difficult to extract, people will start moving to alternative sources of energy because they'll have little choice. If that's the only way people will ever switch, so be it - We need peak oil.
OK, fine, I don't own a car at all! Our whole family only uses public transportation! And we consume about 1/2 what the average household does. (Yes, we garden, too). Now what? Does that entitle you to go out and buy a Lear jet to fly to the mall to compensate? Just how much harder DO you expect the world to sacrifice so you can have your luxuries?
Sorry to get attention with that title. As others have posted, oil is not really the problem. Energy can be provided via coal, solar, wind, tides, ethanol, biodiesel, nuclear you name it.
/. a few weeks ago) it would be an excellent idea, as it would help stem the tide of rising plastics costs and it would provide employment opportunities for many who would do the recycling and separation.
The real problems stem from the numerous other products that we get from oil, plastics being the most important one. Right now, plastic is incredibly cheap. The problems will become apparent when plastics cost too much to be used in everyday appliances. Imagine that: Your compter case, keyboard, mouse, all the plastic wiring, all the plastic goods in your house, your car, the shops etc, too expesnive to replace.
Now, while I'm pretty sure that alternative sources of plastic raw materials can be found, either from biological matter or elsewhere, the costs of retooling for new lastics would be enormous.
So what about recycling?
For years, here in Europe, and I'm pretty sure in the US and Asia too, I've seen computers and electrical gear used for landfills and plastics burnt for energy (part of the energy policy here in switzerland).
Just think how much of an opportunity it would be to start recycling plastic (like they do with PET containers, but with all plastics) and electrical goods for the metals and other components. At the moment it's not cost efficient to recycle electrical goods, but since even copper is getting rare (article on
"Well that's great, that's just fuckin' great man. Now what the fuck are we supposed to do? We're in some real pretty shit now man... That's it man, game over man, game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now? What are we gonna do?"
Because the US is the most-lit country on this map:http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http:// planetforlife.com/images/zearthlites.jpg&imgrefurl =http://planetforlife.com/where/&h=397&w=787&sz=51 &tbnid=LEK0DVp-7_4uzM:&tbnh=71&tbnw=141&hl=en&star t=1&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dglobal%2Benergy%2Bnight%26s vnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26client% 3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26s a%3DN
and the most ignorant. The rest of the world will be living in a solar-powered, clean-aired, efficient, comfortable Jetson's space-age world while the Neanderthals will still be dragging their clubs in the dirt as they shuffle around looking for the very last thing to burn. It is already too late to change this course, but be damn sure *I* won't stick around to suffer with all the fools who wouldn't listen to people like me for 35 years.
Yeah, there is some 35% efficient panels (which are much more expensive) and a (from memory) 6:1 concentrating fresnel lens in front and a system to move the waste heat to the outside.
o r/rac_index.htm
I think grid tie inverters are about 20 times over priced from what they would be if they were made with the same technology as computer power supplies. Considering modern computer powersupplies (500W for $45AU) are required to have powerfactor correction in them I suspect that they are practically grid interactive already.
I'm waiting until the sunball stops having a 6month waiting list, then I'll consider buying one.
This might be a good basis for one too:
http://www.svvti.com/projects/ringarrayconcentrat
...and our breeding habits ar ehighly dependant on our social lives. We're not driven to breed by an unstoppable biological force like yeast. We have stuff like birth control. Which is why the population is rapidly approaching rquilibrium, and even approaching decline in regions.
All you have to do is look at an actual global population growth chart to see that the curve is rapidly flattening. And all you have to do to see the reasons why is look around you. In highly industrialized modern countries, like the US, Europe, Japan, etc, the birth rate is actually very close to or even *below replacement*, which is 2.2 births per couple. If it wasn't for immigration from other still-above-replacement-rate countries, like China/India/African continent, these countries would actually have declining populations.
And not to be harsh, but the places in the world where the birth rate is still far above replacement (Africa, South America, south-east Asia), also have a much higher mortality rate, due to disease and hunger. There's only two possible outcomes. Either the poor countries with high birthrates will industrialize and subsequently lower their birthrates, or they will not, and will implode with skyrocketing amounts of mortality due to disease. Either way, there is no unlimited exponential growth to population.
We all know Capitalism and ecomonics are driven by supply and demand, but it is important to realise that neither of those factors are naturally regulated any more. Before the industrial revolution supply was dominated by the relative scarcity of pretty much everything, and demand was purely about getting what you need to survive for the vast majority of people.
Since mass production was invented the scarcity of almost everything has been potentially negligable. Anything we need, we have the resources and technology to churn it out by the ton. In order for the economy to function demand must match supply as closely as possible. The sensible thing to do would be to cut back on production so that it matches the real demand. But then individual suppliers can't out-compete each other by virtue of economies of scale, so what is the alternative? Artificially increase demand. (the exceptions are monopolies and cartels which can reduce supply and increase price since they have no competitors.)
Make everything disposable so that people buy everything over and over again, and flood the public conciousness with advertising and create a culture of mindless consumption.
The more we waste, the more profit is made by somebody. This is the inevitable culture that is fostered by capitalism and economics. Its endemic. Its not a conspiracy or evilness or whatever, it is purely the way it works.
It is not coincidence that hybrid cars only become commercially available once oil peaks. And it isnt some conspiracy by the automotive industry and the oil industry. It the mechanism by which capitalism works. If we concentrated all non essential resources on figuring out cold fusion or finding some other viable energy source we would probably have it licked very very quickly. So why don't we? No one profits.
Once it is no longer possible to profit significantly from oil then we will see the right amount of effort expended on alternative energy. By then i only hope the environment isnt totally ruined.
Capitalism is an anachronism that is destroying our planet and causing pointless suffering to thousands of starving people around the world. Unless we lift ourselves out of that rut things will never get better, and i genuinely believe the human race is capable of so much more than this.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
150 million people versus 90 million people is not a big difference... the problem IS with both and with everyone else wasting energy without thought.
You're forgetting that at current price levels (relative to those common up until two years ago or so) anyone who can produce oil -IS- producing oil.
Companies are bound by various fiduciary requirements to extract money to return to investors. Individuals aren't going to live forever and probably want to enjoy the spoils produced by their assets.
And if anyone is holding something back, it's such a small amount that it will never offset declines in the larger conventional fields.
We've hit peak oil several times since the 70's. It's going to be a while still, I think, before we actually hit it.
the Political Inquirer
http://peakoil.com/ All these issues have been examined in depth at PO.com There is indeed a difference of opinion about peak oil. One of the premier peak detractors posts regularly @ PO.com Mike Lynch Matt Savinar from LifeAftertheOilCrash.com is also a regular. The answers are out there... & they will find you... If you let them...
Relax... You're soaking in it." -Madge
The alternatives have to be put in place first, and subsidised to bring them to a realistic price point. Once renewable energy is within the purchasing capacity of "ordinary people", they will buy it; then economies of scale will set in, and the subsidies can be gradually cut. If this isn't done, then what will happen is that non-renewable energy will just get progressively more expensive, eventually catching up to the price of renewable energy; but this will cause serious social problems along the way.
It won't just be fuel prices that will rise; everything that has to be manufactured and/or delivered will become more expensive. The poorest people will find themselves unable to afford to travel to work; they will exist in a state of perpetual unemployment, so increasing the burden on the taxpayer. As prices continue to rise, more and more people will be forced into this situation, and the welfare state will be further strained. People will not be able to afford to refrigerate food, nor cook it thoroughly; diarrhoea germs will run rampant, placing an additional burden on the National Health Service over and above the problem of drugs becoming more expensive {due to increases in the costs of chemical feedstocks and logistics}. Deaths by fire and smoke inhalation will increase, as people try desperately to burn wood in old fireplaces with unswept chimneys and makeshift stoves. Recall that many dwelling built since central heating became the norm don't actually have chimneys, or have simple precast flues which are only meant for gas fires.
To get an engine to start, you sometimes have to use an external power source. The beardy-weirdies and the forward-thinkers alone simply won't have enough buying power between them to initiate the process of bringing down the price of renewable energy.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
True. However, the USGS is notorious in peak oil circles for having continued to raise estimates of ultimate recoverables (IE, total production possible over human history) in the continental US, even after domestic production had reached and passed the predicted Hubbert Peak (IE, the halfway mark). The USGS 1972 predicted US-48-UR was a value between 2 and 10 times the value currently accepted. (Hubbard, by contrast, was about 10-30% low... from a range of 15 years pre-peak.) And, if you examine the weasel words in their footnotes, you'll see the USGS and similar agencies effectively admit to fixing their supply predictions to equal the value for predicted demand. We're at the absolute brink of Peak Oil. It would also provide a plausible secondary motivation for the Iranian nuclear program, and explain why they are so adamant about pursuing the atom despite having one of the world's largest oil reserves: they also think that Peak Oil is at hand.
If world oil consumption continues to increase at an average rate of 1.4 percent a year, and no further resources are discovered, the world's oil supply will not be exhausted until the year 2056.
This, however, assumes that oil production can remain steady, and that those reseve estimates are accurate. The premise of the Hubbert peak is that production rates will begin dropping at increasing rates, due to increasing difficulty in extraction.
I don't have time to address the problems with each of your silver linings, but looking at a few Peak Oil sites and a quick search for "Energy Profit Ratio" should leave many people skeptical about them.
Which, in Realpolitik terms, might well justify the invasion of Iraq completely, aside from the stupidity how the invasion was executed (IE, without detailed post-invasion planning or comrehensive allied support). And, no, I am NOT a fan of Bush or the Iraq war... largely because of the aforementioned stupidity in execution.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Horses too contribute to the greenhouse effect!
I find this interesting and insightful both, sorry- no mod points here today
formally producing wells are only pumping water now this is lame and frustrates.
I believe you want formerly, which means "before" as opposed to formally, as in it wears a tuxedo
further, I cannot concieve of the geological event that allows a hole that use to push hydrocarbons, now just pushing h20
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I don't know... I just bought a 2003 Honda Pilot, and the gas mileage isn't significantly lower than my 99 Grand Am (17mpg mostly city vs 20mpg mostly city -- actual averages, not EPA estimates). Bad for the Pontiac, or good for the Honda? We report. You decide.
BTW, the reason for the switch is that I have five people to move around on a regular basis, and fitting 5 people into a Grand Am (or, really, any sedan) when two are in car seats is no fun at all. Not that I should need to justify my decision, but I know the topic will come up.
It's also nice to have AWD/4WD during the winter, and especially in the 20"+ of snow we just got this past weekend.
No problem - my civilization will research Future Tech, and will discover ways to re-populate exhausted resources, along with getting a score and happiness bonus. ...
Erm, isn't this Civ 4?
Darn.
"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - Major Mike Shearer, UK
Well, two easy scenarios:
(a) Fertilizer and pesticides largely come from petroleum products. American farm production techniques rely heavily on these.
(b) It doesn't matter how much food you grow, if you can't transport it to consumers.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Do you have your own rubber tree for the tires, or do you use synthetic rubber from petroleum?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Large nuclear plants have a 20 year production lead time, there's NIMBY idiots everywhere, Uranium reserves can't make up the difference in energy demand for more than about 20 years, and no-one has demonstrated a commercially viable U-Pu or Th-U combination breeder/power reactor.
HAND.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
...for bringing a breath of sanity.
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Well said ccm. I'm always amazed at the Ecos who bash "the wasteful modern lifestyle"--while sipping latte brewed from beans flown in from Columbia, in a brightly lit coffee shop made of 82% plastic with hundreds of little point lights throughout, on a laptop made with a hundred modern industrial processes, using a worldwide network built with literally megatons of glass and refined metal.
The average African native would think the whole thing was magic.
Steve
From the High, Snowy Mountains of Colorado
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
Well, in addition, I'm exiled in a French speaking country and enjoy all the French contributions to modern culture, such as:
,
useless public servants who stop their personal and professional development after they get employed by the government with virtually no chance of getting laid off.
The fantastic French trafic culture where no one uses turning indicators, they're obsessed with cutting in front of you no matter how fast you're going
and (hooray) their awful and sophisticated sour wine.
I mean, really, just look at Corinne Maier's book "Bonjour Paresse" ("Hello Laziness!: Why hard work doesn't pay"), which provides guidelines to how people survive in large corporations without actually working. Apparently, it's a bestseller.
Not all of these are on the same par. Copper and iron not only "don't pop into existence", but they don't pop out of existence, either. Instead, they are recycled, either from existing iron and copper products, or from iron and copper ore already in the planet. The only limiting factor on them is the amount of energy it takes to "produce" them.
Food is genuinely produced, with the limiting factors being space and fertilizer.
And energy ... well, energy is actually consumed, and then lost as heat. The only long-term hope for energy is that we might consume it more efficiently. But a *short-term* hope for energy is to harness really really big sources of it: basically, fusion and solar.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
My car is powered by my own sense of self-satifaction
Besides the best Peak Oil web sites are
http://energybulletin.net/
http://globalpublicmedia.com/
While I think you're full of it (reducing your impact is good, even if you can't eliminate it) I will say that I'm not terribly fond of hybrids. They tend to be overblown toys, with lots of computers and blinking lights and crap, and the mileage they get is NOT tons better than you can get out of other non-hybrid cars. The VW Golf TDI can get > 50 MPG and cost so much less than a Prius, and has so much lower of an impact during manufacture that the Prius really doesn't look very good in comparison.
I did the numbers last year when gas was > $3/gal, and just in terms of economic payback, the extra mileage of the Prius compared to a Golf TDI, and even considering that currently diesel costs more than gas means that you'd have to drive it > 850,000 miles in order to break even on the extra cost of the Prius.
However, the main reason I don't like SUVs has nothing to do with their fuel consumption. SUV owners tend to be self-centered jerks who don't give a crap what happens as long as they got theirs. Take a look around at who are the bad drivers on the road sometime. SUVs are proven to be more dangerous both to people inside and outside the vehicle, but by God, people gotta look up to you if you're drivin' one of THESE babies! HA! Nobody will laugh about my...never mind.
Very soon we'll hopefully see more and better diesel cars in the U.S. - assuming the low sulfur mandate goes through. Most manufacturers that make diesel cars have not been pushing them in the US because our diesel fuel is crap; it's basically filtered and dyed heating fuel. Sept 2006 is the switchover date, there's a 20% phase-in lasts until 2010, only after that point (and only assuming Bush doesn't strike the bill for one of his buddies) can they be sure users won't be pumping 500ppm crap into the tank, so some manufacturers may hold off anyway.
[blah]
[blah]
[blah]
The sky is falling! We're going to run out of (*).
[blah]
[blah]
[blah]
wash, rinse, reuse annually, replacing (*) with:
- fresh water
- oil
- food
- land
- habitable temperatures (it's either going to get catastrophically hot or cold)
-Styopa
See Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Which, as an aside, doesn't mean it won't be used at all; such oil might be a good way to turn nuclear power into plastics. It just means such oil won't contribute to a solution for the energy crisis.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Problem is we don't know what exactly is sustainable
That's pretty much the nail on the head right there. There's no such thing as one sustainable lifestyle. Sustainability just means renewability. So while everyone is moaning and groaning about how the Americna lifestyle is unsustainable they are forgetting to mention the fact that it is high technology that increases the level of sustainable lifestyles. Until solar power, ethanol, etc "sustainable" meant "what you can build with your hands". It is only thanks to advanced research that we may actually get a sustainable lifestyle that also involves such frivolous things as running water and medical treatment.
People who are all into "you can't justify going farther than you can walk" are the perfect example of a cure that's worse than the disease. If you can't go farther than you can walk you may save the environment but you completely decimate human society. Cities can not exist, universities can not exist, the bottom falls out from underneath society. You get a bunch of isolated pockets of survivalists who have no time for literature, art, or communal society. It's just neo-luditism. Why bother trying to save modern civilization if the answer is to destroy modern civilization? And by modern civilization I don't mean things like shopping malls. I have in mind things like physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and essentially all the human intellectual capital that rests on our ability to talk to one another over long distances and support specialists who don't have to tend their own fields every day.
Technology has made possible our ability to live the type of lifestyle that we currently live. Technology, in my opinion, is also crucial to increasing efficiency to a point where maintaining a semblance of this lifestyle can be done sustainably. It's no questions that we've annointed convenience as king of efficiency and we probably would have to give up things like hummers and civics (and priuses) to really become sustainable. But the question is - do you want to give up these for smaller, ethanol-driven vehicles or for your bare feet?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
This is an interesting interpretation of simple arithmatic truths...
... ~33 years ago.
... your keen grasp of the obvious is an inspiration to us all.
r =2005 202 days last year, did not use a car at all 205 days, drove my car (which goes 3~4X further/gallon than your hummer) less than 5K mi, had summer electric bills 0.5X and winter gas bills 0.6X the avg. of the area ... My curbside waste stream is about 1/5 of my neighborhood avg. My recreational toys are either pedal or paddle powered, and they're all ridden or hand-towed to where i use them. I use a push-powered reel mower.
I'm generally interested in this sort of thing, having watched the US suffer the Arab Oil Embargo from Munich, and comparing the two countries' response. Got me interested in energy-related stuff
You are of course correct that virtually anyone in America has a profoundly larger energy footprint than a mud hut living goat herder in the African outback. I'm not sure how you you think that's a rhetorical scoring point in the context of choices available to the American consumer, but
I've done the math for my life.
I know, because i track with daily logging and simple stats, that the choices i make result in a lower energy use than they would be if i followed the Ameican standard modality. I cyclecommuted http://tomato.fnal.gov/bicycle/usersInfo.php?orde
My energy consumption and resource footprint is just about as low as i can make it, short of living only on rice and dried beans and drinking my own urine.
i'm pretty sure my energy footprint is lower than yours, and yes, i go to some level of inconvenience to achieve it, since i ride pretty much year round, in all weather, on a rotating shift. There are absolutely times when it would be easier to take my car.
So i pretty much earned right to bitchslap you and your tranny hooker tonka toy. Let's see some numeric analysis from you instead of a bunch of Hannity-esque moral equivication. In the meantime, you should probably thank me (feel free to pick a cheek to kiss) for making available an extra couple hundred gallons of gas for you.
How much gasoline did you piss away this week?
And if you're really discerning, you'll be able to intuit how i personally save the American taxpayer 1~3 million dollars each year in electricity. Not because i have to, but because i want to and i can.
So you can kiss me on the other cheek for saving a little extra uranium for you to post with.
You're wrong about the beer.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
Actually I'd be pleased as punch to get governments out of the road business. It's not really their task anyway (at least at the national level) and we've seen what the temptations of eminent domain lead to.
Better to have roads built and run privately....that's how they were done for a long, long time before the Feds got involved.
Steve
From the High, Snowy Mountains of Colorado
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
The first thing that comes to mind is. If we humans are supposed to be reducing our energy needs then why is it everytime I hear that oil production is up. Or there has been an increase in housing or other development therefore a greater need for energy. All this is more and not less. Energy reduction/efficiency is a lie. The little bit of reduction in one area means an increase in another. We will never reduce if this keeps up. So as sad as it is for us now it can only be a good thing in the end. There are other energy alternatives that never get developed because Oil is too much of a money maker. I understand that hemp would be an excellent alternative but of course the corporate's control the government and want to keep pumping that oil; keep those wars going and line their pockets. I look forward to the end of oil. We may not all survive the chaos but mother earth will be better off.
The horror-struck gasps from the liberals reading that released still more CO2 into the air!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
While there is off shore exploration and production in the shallower areas like the US Gulf Coast, the North Sea, and the Persian Gulf to name a few I contend (with nothing more than wild speculation to back me up) that there are vast oil fields in the deeper areas of the ocean to could last for generations even with high single digit increases in demand.
I won't even mention Antarctica. Oops....
OK, is to too expensive to exploit? It is now. Is it worth while to travel down this fossil fuel road any further? No. But I suspect that there is lots of the "Texas Tea" to go around for those willing to dive for it.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
How exactly is demand measured? Does he mean consumption? Consumption must equal production, otherwise we would be rapidly draining/filling enormous reserve tanks. Current production is around 70 million barrels per day. Overproduction of 3% would fill a large oil tanker every day with nowhere to go.
This is a common misunderstanding in talking about oil production. "Oh no, we're consuming 100% of the oil we produce. The world will end next Tuesday!". Do you buy twice the food you need at the grocery store? Will you starve if you have company over next week and your demand goes up? No, you will buy (drill/research) more food when you need it.
And did we really need a graph to show linear interpolation between 0.9812 trillion and 1.00748 trillion barrels? The author assumed that the total world supply of oil started at 2.013 trillion barrels, so the halfway point would be reached in 2005. The production rate stayed near his estimate, so the halfway point stayed in 2005. Wow. December 16, 2005 is a day which will live in infamy. Unless of course his supply estimate was off by 0.5%. Then February 28, 2006 shall be a day which will live in infamy. Obviously, the author of Beyond Oil is just trying to sell more copies of Beyond Oil.
I do believe that the world's energy future needs attention. I think we'd be wise to invest $100 billion in fusion and renewable energy, rather than spending ten times that on destroying and rebuilding nations. But I don't think crying wolf is a wise way to change policy.
AlpineR
But you do understand that it indeed is a simple numbers game?
Your Hummer uses how many gallons per mile? Ok well its more like miles per gallon but you get the point. Lets assume 13 miles per gallon for an H2. The Volvo uses how much? Volvo S60, lets assume we drive only in the city thats 22 miles per gallon then. My Polo can do 36 miles in the city. On the highway these numbers get a little higher assuming you don't speed
Now you tell me, this is "differing only by a relatively minor degree"? 13 miles against 36 miles that's more than 2,5 times more per gallon.
Lets play with the numbers a little more. Assume you drive only 60 miles a day (thats about as far as I had to drive to the university and back each day until recently and I will assume the 36 miles per gallon that I would use in the city. My way to the university was in fact 3/4 highway 1/4 city).
You will have used 4.6 gallons, 1.6 gallons for me. I did this 5 times a week, you need 23, I need 8 gallons. In one semester lets assume 20 weeks I need to actually be at the university out of the 26 => You use 460 gallons, I use 160. Multiply this by the number of students. I don't know the percentage of students driving 60 miles per day to the university but the parking lot is normally so full that you need to park at the nearby shopping center if you are not half an hour early.
Go figure.
That's the stated aim. I think this is the first serious attempt by any government to ween their citizens off of "oil addiction". It's a pity Bush didn't put resources where his rhetoric leads but then his power-base would start whinging, no?
I'm sceptical that the Swedes won't be able to do it without nuclear power but kudos for attempting a difficult problem. I wonder if they'll get rid of all oil-based *products*. Replacing plastic bags with paper ones would be a start. umm. I'd like to see UK supermarkets replace their plastic bags with paper. Using paper instead of plastic for some products would encourage the planting of trees.
Will the swedes make a push in the EU at stopping tax-free fuel for air travel? Of course, that would be the end of cheap trips abroad but that's going to have to stop sooner of later.
I'd also like to see studies of mining operations in the asteroid belt and elsewhere in the galaxy. A space elevator is needed more than ever.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
Despite what you may think the difference is not minor.
For example, average petrol consumption in cars in litres/100km (in 2000) :
Use of primary energy is more than one third higher per person in the US compared to Europe. The difference is much higher when you compare final energy usage.
I'll grant you that the European way isn't sustainable in the long term either with the current energy structure, however it is much less wasteful on many levels than the US one.
In the end though the only thing that would make sense would be a complete culture chage. While many people in Europe are willing to at least consider the idea, I'm not too sure about the US where your view on things seem to be predominant at the moment.
Time will tell.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
The exercise by this professor was supposed to simulate thought. But the end result is only as accurate as the model.
Take weather prediction. Here in the northeast, the TV weather people are always saying "the computer models don't all agree." Basically, they run several weather models, each with different results. Sometimes, one or more models are very different than the others. Why? Because the meteorologists that design models have different criteria and put different emphasis on some inputs into the model over other inputs. And the assumptions they make in the algorithms that make up the model are based on their interpretation of "how weather works". Basically, they have some idea, but they don't know for sure.
Same with every economics model, natural resources model, global warming model, and every other model you can think of...
I'm amazed at the sort of intellectual and moral bankruptcy that would allow someone to think that conservation is useless unless our ecological footprint is as small as a Maori tribesman's. It's like saying there's no reason to donate $100 to a homeless shelter, because at the end of the day you'll still be wealthier than the people they serve. It's like saying you may as well toss your child out on the street if you're not reading to her every night like you're supposed to. It's like quitting watching sports the first time your favorite team loses. It's like deciding you'll never be as perfect as that Jesus fella, and that it's therefore perfectly fine to embark on a career as a serial killer.
Why does this sort of specious "if you can't do everything, then why not do nothing" logic inspire you when applied to resource conservation, when you could see what a load of crap it is if you tried applying it to any other part of your life? Apparently, it's because you and the parent poster are looking for any reason to avoid making any tough lifestyle compromises.
Frankly, yes, the "modern lifestyle" is wasteful. Despite your accusations of hypocrisy, there is no shame in me regretting that fact, even though I'm not going to join a tribal society to "solve" the problem. It's not a solution at all, because the world could never support six billion hunter gatherers. As long as we choose to have that many people about, we need modern infrastructure to fill their needs. So your entire argument boils down to "shut the hell up and let me drive my Hummer, because your Prius is just as bad." Which it isn't.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Folks, if the evidence is that it is all downhill from here, with respect to oil, then every day wasted in not massivly researching controlled nuclear fusion is just going to mean that much less power available later, when it is really needed. It does take time to turn successful research into power plants, after all. And, by "massive research" I mean that ALL the avenues should be explored, even the controversial ones like Pons/Fleischmann Cold Nuclear Fusion. Let's stop the arguing for a time, put a wad of money into it to END the debate one way or another, and if it doesn't work, move on to something else. There's still the proposed super-scaled-up Farnsworth Fusor, there's the new sonofusion results, and so on. Even traditional hot fusion could benefit from a major scale-up. Back in the early days it was noted how a donut-shaped magnetic field leaked because the magnetism was weaker on the outside of the donut than on the inside. But why use a TIGHT donut shape? How about something more like a bicycle inner tube, where the inner and outer radii are nearly the same? Put one of those in, say, the place where the SuperConducting SuperCollider had been planned (with something like a fifty-mile circumference), and the leakage problem all but disappears.
If the situation in Iraq ever stabilizes that could add another 500k to 1MM b/d. The Iranians have seen their oil industry become antiquated and there are others who also need new production technology. Central Asia is yet fully devolped (Caspian production) is expected to ramp up to an additional 3-5MM b/d.
And I think anyone over 21 has heard this claim quite a few times
before.
American companies switched to liters in the early 80s to hide the fact that they were replacing 350ci engines with 200ci engines in most mainstream cars.
Also, in America, anything that is European is automatically perceived to be more sophisticated (which is either good or bad, depending).
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
IMHO, the parent post was VERY well stated. And the people countering that "small improvements are better than no improvements" miss the point too. Convincing people to settle for smaller vehicles does nothing to solve the *real* issue; our dependence on foreign oil. In fact, it just drags it out longer.
... I'll be an early adopter of technology X. The potential hassles and glitches are worth suffering through to save me Y$ per week!"
The *only* solution we're going to see is a move to alternate forms of energy for our vehicles - and even in a world where we've all moved to driving Priuses around, we're going to run into that need pretty quickly. (Much of the increase in oil consumption has nothing to do with what U.S. drivers own. It has to do with other nations becoming advanced enough to have more energy needs.... so in essence, new customers competing for the supply.)
It's arguable that if all of our vehicles were large SUVs eating up 2 times as much gas, we'd all switch to alternate energy MORE QUICKLY, because we'd collectively feel the "pinch" of the high fuel prices enough to say "Ok
That's a good point. You shouldn't listen to anyone claiming that level of certainty and precision. Some thoughts:
1) What happens when oil production passes that (if in fact it does)? Is the Peak Oil theory falsified/obsolete, or do you just "massage" the data, and bump up the date, but never question the assumptions of the theory?
2) If Peak Oil believers are so certain that energy will become scarce, and know exactly when, why haven't they bougth the necessary oil futures? Before you paper over this objection with a trite comeback:
a) Yes, many of them would deem that "immoral", but the greedy capitalists who have access to all their data and yet have no such compunctions, don't. They're not bidding up futures, why?
b) Yes, oil futures will actually be "worth something" even if oil falls off precipitously -- contracts are written so that even if they can't give you oil, they have to pay big money. Specify it in gold and you're set.
c) Yes, it may be more important to "avoid the peak" than get rich, but why not hedge your bets, if you really believe this stuff?
3) How are predictions of oil/energy running out fundamentally different from the earlier, very wrong predictions (happening many times in the 19th and 20th centuries)? What assumptions have been altered?
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
if you read the chart on page 81 of this 1998 edition of Sci Am. you will see the World Total line hits its maxima around 2004. Only Bush administration hacks and kids who have read nothing but comic books for the last 8 years would be unaware of these facts. By the time a former executive of a failed oil company tells the nation "we are addicted to oil" we have already run out of veins to stick the needle in.
I suppose I shouldn't gripe at what a bunch of retards my courtymen have been on energy conservation issues...it could be worse: yet another article on oil depletion could have been ignored. The matter could have been framed as if it were some kind of questionable theory, similar to the treatment bushco wanted to give evolution. Really, I ought to be glad that everybody finally gets it. I'm sure Hummer sales will go to zero day after tomorrow.
Yeah, right.
[We are so screwed. any of you know how to saddle a horse?]
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The Nazis synthesized oil products using coal and were thus able to keep the war machine going.
Let me get this straight; I'm not living in the most awkard way possible (the important part with food is that it is locally grown), and as such cannot critise you for massive waste of resources?
Errr?
I don't own a car, and I walk most places. On the infrequent occaisions I need items not sold locally, I take a bus to the nearest city. I share a three bedroom house with two other people, and insulate it as best I can given I'm merely renting it. I use energy saving bulbs, and turn lights off in rooms we're not using.
Sure, it's not perfect, but I think it gives me a point to say "I'm putting this much effort in, maybe you could at least try?"
Canada is the US's single largest supplier of oil. I think we actually product the same amount of oil as the Middle East combined. The Alberta Tar Sands have an estimated 1700 - 2500 Billion barrels of oil locked away in clay and minerals, and current technologies are unlocking that trapped oil and making it economical to extract and process. By contrast, Saudi Arabia has only about 240 billion barrels in reserve. Currently, Canada has about 300 billion barrels of oil available to be easily processed.
While I believe we should be weening ourselves off of oil as a fuel, I can't believe how reports like this suggest we are in a dire state with oil production slowing down and we are nearing saturation of the oil we use. I can only imagine these reports are funded by the oil companies to ensure that the price of oil remains artificially high and keep the prices rising.
This is good in the long run because it will drive consumers to find alternatives, such as ethanol which is cleaner burning and renewable. You will know when the oil companies feel the blow back of keeping the price of oil too high when you can suddenly fill up a tank of gas for 40 cents a litre again because everyone else is running ethanol or bio-diesel or electric or hydrogen (not from oil sources) powered vehicles, the oil companies are just screwing themselves.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I agree that federal governments (well in Australia and i suppose the US as well being similar state vs federal models and all) shouldn't be involved in road building.
:).
They can also give my income taxes back to my state the bastards
But i can't agree that road building should be private, it would be impossible for it to work, who ever gets to own the roads will own the state and country, nobody could possibly afford to buy up the existing property in cities to lay new roads (as if laying asphalt would be more lucrative than the existing structure as well) so competition would be zero. Plus it would be an absolute nightmare to drive anywhere if you had to stick to one companies roads.
But certainly the less each of our federal governments are involved in the better at this point.
Sorry folks but the idea that I can get a ceasar salad shipped to me from 3000 miles away has come to the end. Belly up to the last drop saloon because it's a downer. The upside is that thin americans will begin to appear again on the landscape now that walking and local economies will be all the rage in the post cheap gas era...
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
The determination of whether we've passed the peak is something that can only be determined in hindsight, and probably from a greater distance than a mere two months. I'd be interested in seeing whether he still thinks that was the date in, say, two years.
Foot print calculators.
http://www.myfootprint.org/
http://www.bestfootforward.com/footprintlife.htm
http://www.safeclimate.net/calculator/
http://www.mec.ca/Apps/ecoCalc/ecoCalc.jsp
My score ranged from 2.2 and 3.5 hectares of land use.
They all also tell me how many earths would be needed t support the worlds population at my standard of living they Ranged from 1.2 to 2.5 earths.
--meh--
The problem isn't that the first world uses up too many resources, it's that the third world is not yet able to achieve our standard of living. We should not punish ourselves for not living like that villager. Instead, we should promote conditions that allow villagers to lift themselves to their desired standard of living. (Remember, standard of living is a lot more than transportation; it also includes things like life expectancy and infant mortality.)
As a child of the 70's, I'd like to personally thank you for posting this comment. Not that we didn't have plenty of plastic crap back then, but nothing even close to what the eighties and beyond have brought us. Plastic has cheapened all of our lives.
"Metal - it's the Stuff of the Seventies!"
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
There are good reasons to think that the harder we try to be efficient, the faster we'll end up using up our fossil fuels. Efficiency only works if the whole world cries out and does it at the same time. Failing that, someone in the world can, and will buy up the cheap oil in an effort to get ahead of those silly efficient people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Jesus christ, another cheese-brained smart-arse who thinks he knows it all. Listen son, I suggest you go hide in a hole somewhere for a couple of years with a few texts on commodity economics, because quite obviously you know FUCK ALL about it.
Even if it isn't 33% world oil consumption will drop significantly as airline flights are cancelled - people stop driving to public events for pleasure and business travel gets curtailed.
Anyone have any figures on this?
You want to see waste? After all the smoke clears, and the last argument is piled on this bloated topic tree, I'm confident that no one will have changed their minds about the realities of this issue (or any of the tangential political arguments). People don't think objectively. We frame our understanding of things in coherence with our existing emotional associations. The depressive sees the negative in everything, the manic sees the pleasure, etc (aka, the glass is half full). Despite this, we all attempt to modify each other's vantage point with an intellectual exercise of "argumentation", which is only effective for topics where the arguments do not cause a conceptual conflict for the receiver. The only people likely to incorporate the argument are those who already accept the underlying premise, rendering the effort relatively ineffectual.
Can you point me to the moral authority that declared this to be so?
Just to be clear, a person who grows 90%+ of their own food, rides a bus a few times a year, and lives in a small, self-built wood frame house off the grid and off the public water and sewer systems is no different morally from a hummer driving, mcmansion owning person who eats 50% mass produced beef and animal products shipped from south east asia?
If that's how your morality works, you've got some f'ed up morals.
Intent might just be relevant to a reasonable person when considering the moralness of an action. If person A needs to ride a bus to aquire the money to pay the property taxes demanded of him such that his family can continue to live a nearly self-sufficient life, while person B uses 4 gallons of gas a day on a commute in his individually owned fuel-inefficient vehicle, to a job he could do from anywhere when he already has more than enough money to retire and his children's children will never need to work, who is being less moral?
get off your high horse and come down and deal with some of the relative aspects that need to be considered in the real world.
And another part of the problem is warlords interrupting supply and 'taxing' (extorting money for passage) supplies being shipped. Often times there is plenty of food, but no safe way to deliver it in the quantity needed (air drops can only do so much). If the warlord of Iowa, for example, started blocking food shipments to Chicago you would see Katrina like things happening in Chicago also.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
You're living in your own world. The drive to end slavery was indeed fueled by "religious types", but not the ones liberals like to mock. You seem to think that we deride all religious viewpoints equally, which is absurd. What we scorn is the sort of people who think:
* that God loves gun rights more than helping the poor.
* that science is inherently anti-religious, and that modern scientific understanding is somehow antithetical to their religion.
* that it was God telling our president to invade a country, killing tens of thousands of civilians, in a quest to stop Saddam's WMD program... I mean, fight the terrorists... I mean, promote democracy around the world... but absolutely not to give the U.S. a military staging point in the Middle East or secure oil supplies, you commie traitor!
* that God gave us dominion over the Earth, and Jesus will come back shortly, so environmentalists should go stuff themselves while we drill the ANWR.
Think about it: In America, 90% of people claim to believe in God. 48% voted for the Democratic presidential candidate last time around. So even if every atheist were also a Democrat, that still means 38% of the country is both religious and leftish. If you're not willing to accept that there are deeply religious people on the left side of the political spectrum, and want to keep spouting your more-persecuted-than-thou tripe about how the political left hates God, then you're really just being a twit.
The drive to end slavery was led by the same style of religiously-motivated social reformers who are promoting environmentalism and living wage laws, and preaching acceptance and tolerance today.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
I can see what you're saying, but at the same time, this is like chopping off your foot to fix a broken toe. If we're happy to live as the African - then we have nothing to worry about lack of oil in the first place.
But we're not - the solution to "how do we prevent returning to a pre-industrial society when oil runs out" is not "become a pre-industrial society" - that's clearly absurd!
So the point is, given that we desire to have certain things, what is the most efficient way of doing it? So if two people need a car, but one is unnecessarily less efficient, it is reasonable for the former to criticise the latter. But if they don't need cars, it's reasonable for a non-car owner such as myself to criticise them both - even though my energy consumption is still much higher than an African.
A reasonable answer to "how do we prevent returning to a pre-industrial society when oil runs out" is "that we should try to be more efficient". To suggest that there is no answer, and we should just give up as we're as bad as everyone else, helps no one.
One of the points that struck me is that you need to drive 60 miles to work every day. That sounds like a really long way to go everyday. Is that average for everyone in the US?
Maybe, a simpler solution will be to eliminate the need in the first place, by living closer to your place of work. It may not work for everyone, but who knows, we may be forced to do it in the future.
> Princeton University geology Professor Kenneth Deffeyes has
> been studying world petroleum production data and has come to
> the conclusion that the world hit peak oil last December 16, 2005.
This is because he's a geologist and not an economist.
> If he is correct,
Don't worry, he is not.
> total world oil production will never surpass what was produced last December.
Yikes, the cluelessness of this guy is astounding. Anyone wanna bet? Anyone? Hello? Bueller? Bueller?
> From the article: 'Compared to 2004, world oil production was up 0.8 percent
> in 2005, nowhere near enough to compensate for a demand rise of roughly 3 percent.
The ability to increase takes time. If the demand will continue to rise at 3 percent, greedy capitalists will compensate. Also, the higher the price, the more alternatives are found, from exploration to better extraction to alternative ways to create oil to alternative fuels to alternative motors to things no command-and-control government bureaucrat can possibly predict.
Provided, of course, those command-and-control bureaucrats are held at bay. Which is this guy's point all along, and what the earth scientists never understood. Well, the ones writing gloom and doom books, anyway.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Obtaining alcohol from corn/cane sugar (never understood why Americans love getting their sugar from corn, blech!) costs far more in energy to run the harvesting/transport/refining equipment than you get out of the alcohol in the end.
Are you certain about corn?
And cane sugar? Are you saying that Brazil is secretly importing magical free oil or something?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
In addition, if someone can grow all their own food, they have the luxury of a decent amount of land. If everyone tried to do this, there may not be enough food to sustain the population in many developed countries. The current food system may not be the most efficient in terms of oil usage, but it is in terms of supporting a large population.
Perhaps we should add anyone who has children to the list of people to criticise?
I am absolutely sure it was December 15, not December 16. I think he forgot that 2000 was a leap year.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Here's the deal with the SUV bashing: It's nothing more than guilt-ridden scapegoating.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
No actually we do have the moral standard to criticize. To live in the U.S you need to have a car to work and live. Some people need a large truck or SUV due to their business or family. Which is fine. No rational person will criticize those drivers. However, there is a diffrence between need and excessive and conspicuous consumption.
The average SUV owner has an SUV for their ego. A lot of people drive luxury cars to stroke their ego. However, a luxury car doesn't have the excessive environmental impact like an SUV. I suspect you fit into this category of an EGO driver. They want something big and bad to drive to work in. Sure they are the only one in the car and they only use it to commute to work and to the store. However, They don't care if it....
1. Causes more wear and tear on our roads. Thus we are subsudizing your desires to drive a vehicle which appeals to your ego.
2. Is not safer than your average well made sedan or wagon. SUV's are more likey to flip and seriously injure the driver. Our health insurance is higher as a result. Once again we are subsidising your desires to drive a vehicle which appeals to your ego...
3. Kill the person in the Honda Civic that they hit. Once again insurance prices....
4. Increases our dependence on foreign oil. Yep thanks to you we can spend a little more time in Iraq and the middle east....
5. Increase the cost of gas. Since you are using more gas to get to work. We also have to pay more due to supply and demand from consumption.
6. Increase polution. That brown smog cloud over Atlanta just got a little browner thanks to your SUV.
The desire for one to drive an SUV when there is no need ( business or family ) for an SUV is SocioPathic.
This all reeks of the arguments made by some cirgarette smokers in the early 90's. They argued that it was their right be able to smoke on airplanes , buses, etc...
Do you know why they are 20 times more expensive than normal bulbs? Because they take approximately 20 times more resources to make
20 times? Doing a quick look at lightbulbwarehouse.com I see a incandescent for 48 cents. A pin based florescent is $2.98. That's about 6.2 times as expensive, not 20. Secondly, since when were all resources equal in terms of environmental costs? I don't know what extra resources it takes to make a fluorescent, but what if it took more labor? That's not something we're exactly running out of, or something that people are talking about conserving.
You claim you won't save any money over the life of the bulb. Let's do that fairly simple calculation. On a 100 watt incandescent over 10,000 hours (which is the rated life of the fluorescent) you'll use 10,000*100/1000 kilowatt hours of electricity, or 1000 kilowatt hours. A Fluorescent uses about 1/4 of the energy to produce the same amount of light, so that's 10,000*25/1000 = 250 kilowatt hours. Around here electricy is pretty cheap at
The lifetime of the incandescent is 4000 hours (and I'm even giving you LONG LIFE incandescents), so you'll need to buy 2.5 bulbs, at a cost of $1.20. So the incandescent bulb saved you $2.98-1.20= $1.78 in bulb costs, but you paid an extra $52.50 in electric costs. That's an extra expense of $50.72 for the incandescent.
Now you claim that the florescents only last about as long as the normal bulbs. Ok, let's do that calculation. That's not true for most people but it's true for you, so let's say the florescent only lasts about as long as normal incandescents, which is about 1000 hours. You'll have to buy 9 more of them to get that same 10,000 hours. That's an extra $26.82 in bulb costs. You're STILL saving $50.72-26.82=$23.90
AccountKiller
I bought a whole bunch of energy efficient bulbs. Most of them died within a year because they don't like dirty electricity and being cycled rapidly -- shorter than the average lifetime I get out of normal bulbs (despite the marketing blurb explaining that they last 8 times longer). The only energy efficient bulbs I have retained are the ones in the living/lounge room -- ie, the ones that are on for a substantial part of the day and are kept on for hours at a time without being cycled, and if they last 1 year, then I have likely saved >$10 in electricity, hence they have acted as a net energy saving.
You bought junk!
I have CF bulbs that I have been operating for years. For that matter, I still have the first one I bought way back in 1994, and it is still in service and still works.
My experiences are that you need to buy decent quality (which does not necessarily rule out cheap), or you will pay for it in the long run.
First, do not buy Lights of America. As much as I would love to support an American manufacturing concern, they suck. I think I still have one of the six of these that I bought; the other five bombed out within a year; two of them within a month..
Don't get me started about GE.
Sylvania, Sunbeam, Philips are all good, but a bit expensive.
Commercial Electric bulbs work really well, last really well, come on instantly, and are at very nearly full intensity with a second.
Don't get bulbs with magnetic ballasts. Get bulbs with electronic ballasts.
That's about all I've got. Follow these guidelines, and you should have no problems.
Oh, BTW, my power is not really describable as clean. I've seen worse, but I've seen much, much better, too.
www.wavefront-av.com
Site showing a graph of U.S. oil production since 1973: www.hubbertpeak.com/us/
Rep. Roscoe Bartlett's congressional peak oil presentation is also quite good.
Right, so what you're saying is that China is currently a DEVELOPING capitalist economy; the United States is a STABLE or DEVELOPED [When I say stable I don't mean that it doesn't fluctuate, rather that the biggest pieces of the infastructure have been in place for decades now] economy.
The parents point was that capitalism, regardless of who is doing it, drives innovation. So yes Oil is going to rise to $20/gallon and that is going to be a real pain in the ass but as it occurs the market will bring to bear alternatives. I wouldn't be surprised if the large oil companies are sitting on some of the said alternatives; why release it to the market just yet? You can drive the price of oil up, getting probably 7-8 a gallon in the states before it really starts to have an affect on the purchasing power of consumers at which point the alternative will be introduced. Chances are they are working on streamlining the process to maximize their profits and this is what is so beautiful about capitalism. At first glance, the greed is a little nauseating but by streamlining the system they are able to get the product to the consumer at a cheaper price.
Now the real key is going to be whether a single company has a monopoly on whatever this alternative technology is because that will be dangerous. Assuming it is dispearsed between a few large companies/nations there will be competition which will mitigate the ability to price gouge.
The sky isn't falling, the world isn't about to end and even if it does in another 10,000 years there will be life on Planet Earth once again...just might not be us!
Here's the deal with the SUV bashing: It's nothing more than guilt-ridden scapegoating.
Wow what drugs do you take?
Here's the deal with SUV bashing. Typically the owners are asshats. On the highway they block vision and decrease safety of everyone else as bad as Semi trucks yet outnumber them 100 to 1. SUV owners at intersections do not carefully keep back so car drivers can see around them, they creep up to make sure nobody can see past them. In parking areas they take up 2 parking spaces because parking is not designed for insanely wide and LONG vehicles.
Most people dont give a rats arse that the idiot in the Escalade XLT whatever is getting 6 mpg. They do give a rats ass about the ass riding 4 inches from the car's bumper blazing the misadjusted headlights directly into the car's interior, the fact you cant see around them unless you are 5 car lengths behind them and everywhere you go you find someone that thinks they need to jam the damned SUV into a spot that forces the 2 cars around it to almost climb in the other side door to get in.
THAT is the real reason that people hate SUV's and SUV owners.
Very few people drive like an asshole in their Insight. Quite a few drive like an asshole in their oversized SUV.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Oh, that's easy. Modern agriculture is totally dependent on oil. Read The Oil We Eat , originally published in Harper's.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Even without peak oil, the US economy won't go on like it does today.
Because today, the US exports goods of much less value than it imports. To simplify the situation somewhat you could say that the Chinese are producing a lot of goods (= real value) in exchange of stock, government bonds, etc. (= victional value).
Sooner or later, the Chinese will want to get something out of their investments, which will mean that the huge flow of real value going from China to the US will decrease or even go the other way. - And that will diminish the standard of living because the standard of living is based on real value, not vicitional value.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/05032 9132436.htm
If you make ethanol from corn, what you produce will not even be enough to run the tractors of your ethanol farm. If you count all the energy costs of farming, you consume six units of energy to produce one unit of ethanol energy. And you destroy perfectly good land. This must be the dumbest investment ever, and the only reason people talk about it is because they want to win over "rural voters" who are slobbering for federal farming subsidies (tax handounts). Fucking leeches!
As said it was to the university and now I do live closer to the university (Same city instead of next city where my parents are from :)). The 60 miles are to the university AND back, so yes thats about 100km each day, 50 in the morning, 50 in the evening.
:)) and that costs less than living near the university and paying for my own food. At home I only had to pay for the gas not food and living space.
:)
I had to refill the car once each week (if not driving on the weekends which I actually did
As for the 'average' thing, I can't tell you that, as I don't even live in the US but only converted the numbers to gallons/miles to be 'compatible' to the common US reader
Also stuff like "By 2025, we're going to be back in the Stone Age" and "when the Ghawar field waters out, you can kiss your lifestyle goodbye". It implies that one should forget about dreams, forget about technology, forget about thinking since everybody will be forced to be a farmer etc.
Creative creators like painters, poets, writers, and engineers & software developers are basically told that they will never be able to do what they can do best ever again. It is an extremely fatalist point of view, which makes me wonder why people claiming this don't simply commit suicide. Instead of draining all hope and motivation people should encourage investitions into research & alternative energy infrastructures. While I agree that it is foolish to waste energy like it is done now (SUVs, throwing away stuff thats edible or still working, expensive stuff bought just because its "in"...) I won't sit around lamenting that everything is doomed. For the record, I do cut down consumption in my life. My computer is pretty much the only expensive investition, I don't have SUVs or big TVs.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
as long as I don't have to pay war time taxes to send them over ;)
(seriously, if we were serious about the 'war on terror' we would be paying war taxes and there would be a draft.)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
But we know everything now. The people who made those previous predictions were simply uninformed. Now that we have all the information, we can make these predictions.
It's fearmongering. Refined product futures have been steadily declining, and cutting into profits. Some people are starting to wonder why if HU is trading at 1.38 on the NYMEX they're paying an extra buck for it at the pump. Since the end of January HUJ6, April 2006 Unleaded, has dropped nearly $.50 a gallon. A warm winter has reduced need for fuel for heating in the US, and speculation that both OPEC and Non-OPEC countries will be increasing production in the next year have helped this happen... So you get articles like this which help justify the gouging that is occurring.
The real facts are, we keep finding more supplies of oil, conventional and unconventional, and technology to obtain it is steadily improving. A true crisis is very far off. Everyone in the supply chain enjoys a nice windfall when a crisis, either real or percieved occurs. Look at the record profits recorded last year. I don't know what other buisiness can benifit when significant portions of its infrastructure are either lost or shutdown.
It's ironic that these companies can so easily use those that claim to be their opponents to their advantage. This type of fearmongering only helps to increase their profits.
But, I think we can all agree that fossil fuels are a finite resource, if we keep burning them we'll run out. There are better sources of energy we can leverage. But, these need to become economically feasable. Hybrid autos are not the answer, some of the technology in them is good, but for the most part they're a feel-good solution, not an actual solution. H2 is a potential solution, but the most feasable methods of obtaining H2 is still from products that are oil based. Until we can overcome that, we're still tied to fossil fuels.
What I think is our best option today is biodiesel. It's got an excellent BTU/Volume ratio, easily distributable, and potentially cheap. The most interesting suggestion on production is using huge algae farms in the southwestern US which would be fed by salt water from the pacific.
It also doesn't take the automobile technology we currently have and scrap it. Both Americans and Europeans have a very romantic attachment to the way cars work. While rethinking the entire concept of automobile engineering might produce more effieceint vehicles, it is more difficult to sell the concepts to the public, and to redesign factories to build vehicles on an entirely different platform than what we do today.
Diesel engines also make more sense in large passenger vehicles... I'm the owner of a mid-size SUV, and would gladly welcome the additional torque and general economy that a diesel would provide. Unfortunately it's not an option in my brand of choice today.
I first heard about Peak Oil about 2 years ago.
For a couple hours, I scanned websites, and read the ramblings of many predicting calamity and the end of the world...
These days, Peak Oil is getting more and more attention... But I don't worry about it...
As oil from current sources becomes more and more expensive alternative sources of energy become relatively cheaper... I heard recently that the oil sands in Canada have about as much oil as those in Saudi Arabia, but that it is 6 times more expensive to extract... Let's say gas suddenly costs 12 dollars per gallon... Well, I could afford to drive OCCASIONALLY... I would probably ride a bike to work... But it need not mean "The END of the WORLD! ARGH!" Like these Peak Oil nuts believe...
We currently have Nuclear power plants. We will not run out of oil over night, and these nuclear plants will not stop functioning immediatley... We will build more of these...
At worst, we MIGHT have to cut back on some consumption... But human ingenuity will satisfy demand...
td
hard core geek-ware
"(the current administration likes optimistic oil figures). "
Yopu are aware that all of the dates in the post are BEFORE the current administration?
Nice try, though.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
One of the more interesting contrarian books is Peter Huber's et al "Bottomless Well". Besides the usual contrarian mantra that "technology and the market always find solutions", he introduces the concept of the "refined energy pyramid". The pyramid has coal at the base, then petroleum, then electricity, then computing, and optical-laser at the top. (I forgot where he place nuclear). Each level of the pyramid represents more sophisticated and useful types of energy. The pyramid is getting wider (more production and use of each) and taller (more types of refined energy) as time goes on. The prime example is the automobile which used to have a 100% petroleum/mechanical power train, but now is at least 20% electrical energy and computing (and more for hybrids). The more refined energy make the car more efficient and more functional.
"... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs." -- Robert Firth
1) Oil is used everywhere, especially in agriculture. Will we be able to produce enough ethanol etc. to insure our industrial farming techniques still operate?
;)
2)Oil is also used in a host of other applications. Take for example medicine. Disposable medical supplies have removed an easy path for infection to spread. Without them we are back to using autoclaves. Also, most pharmacuticals are petroleum based. What can we replace oil with, in the manufacture of the precursors needed to produce important drugs?
3) Other applications, e.g. synthetic rubber, plastics, etc. would also need a replacement. WHat do we have in the pipeline? Cellulose again? There is, in fact, an entire school of thought among some Geologists/Env. Scientists that oil is too important to waste on fuel.
4) Finally, I think I will learn flint napping. That way I will have the technological skills I need to make it in the new global economy
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Having more time to build alternative energy structure sounds like a good idea but it can also be very bad. Because the crisis is postponed, people are much less likely to change enough to actually avert the crisis. It's kind of like going to the casino and always playing a small bet. You might win big at some point but the house odds are against you and you'll statistically lose everything. If you just bet everything the first play you are at better odds of succeeding. I think we have to throw all our money and resources at alternative energy this year to be able to have any chance of replacing oil in time.
Either way, humans WILL adapt, with or without oil (face it, we haven't had the stuff THAT long anyway).
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What blows my mind is that everyone is looking into the "fancy smanchy" hybrids and other overly complex and margionally effective solutions while everyone is ignoring more efficient old tech that has existed in Europe for decades now.
Cars like the SmartCar get Fuel efficency that makes all the hybrids look like complete jokes. A friend of mine has a Diesl version in Canada that he get's a regular 60+mpg and that is driving it kind of crazy, on long highway jaunts he usually finds 70mpg the norm.
Why are these cars not available in the USA? The bull about safety is not a realistic issue as I am sure that Canada does have effective car safety standards as well as many other modern countries do... Everyone points at volvo and Mercedes as uber-safe yet they do not make the cars only safe for americans. Smart is made by Mercedes, they certianly are not into letting people die in "death traps" with their name attached to it.
Why is everyone looking to use systems that are horribly expensive and only marginally effective? Why is pure efficency ignored?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
On one hand you say we don't know what exactly is sustainable, then you state that the American lifestyle isn't sustainable. So which is it?
Seriously, if everyone on the planet lived as we did, the gross economic output of the world would be an order of magnitude higher than it is now and it's entirely possible that it would work. Don't forget that not only do we consume more than other nations, we produce a hell of a lot more. If the entire world did that, things would not be as dire as many suspect.
This is not meant to be uncaring, racist, or crass, but there are a lot of nations that--even though they don't consume much--are a net drain on the world. This may be no fault of their own (though it probably is, in large part, the fault of their governments). But, for example, if we could make every nation in Africa as productive as the U.S., the world economy would probably overheat and we'd have to increase interest rates even further to keep uncontrolled growth in check.
You're right that if everyone in Africa continued to produce what they produce now but also lived an American lifestyle, that would be unsustainable. But if everyone consumed and produced like Americans, that's an entirely different story and it isn't reasonable to assume that it "wouldn't work."
Speak for yourself. Actually, just operating at the TOP of the Maslow hierarchy is optimal. I am a passionate coder. An Amish way of life would mean for me to give up the thing I really like to do. Its like taking away a writer's pen or typewriter and forever denying him any chance of writing ever again. In short, "back to nature" means to give up LOTS of thinking and science. This may be your dream, but it is certainly not mine.
Also, you forget about the medical problems the Amish have.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
Basic economics does cover this. When the supply curve meets the demand curve at a point above production cost (or more realistically at a margin >= the MIRR), the suppliers will no longer continue production. Both alternatives and increases in efficiencies are covered by the law of diminishing returns, so we will likely run out of feasible alternatives at some point. We've got an increasing number of people using an increasing amount of a mostly finite resource.
We've managed to use up a large portion of hundreds of millions of years of plant decay in only 200 years of industrialization, most of it within the last 50 years. It's not going to last all that much longer.
The point is simple: for a given way of life and type of civilization (i.e. Western civilization) you can consume between 1x and 10x. It is ridiculous to claim that just because we embrace our way of life, that is by default quite "expensive", we should just let go and consume even more!
That being said, there is no reason to feel guilt over an SUV or a sport's car, provided that one's overall way of life is reasonable otherwise. I like sport's cars myself and drive one regularly, but I always try to save energy if possible.
P.
Competition from foreign car manufacturers. Up until maybe the late 80's, we used cubic inches, but it's easier to compare apples to apples when you're deciding between a Chevy and a Suzuki.
are the percentages of people driving SUV's based on people driving, or an entire national population?
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
All that means is that what oil is left will be efficiently allocated by selling it at $20/gallon when it becomes scarce enough.
By that time, the only people paying $20/gal for oil will be those people who absolutely can't use an alternative material. The rest of us will be paying less than $20/gal for some substitute, which someone will have developed by then because it became profitable to do so.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
There is no shortage of oil... there is only a shortage of oil at today's prices. Today's prices reflect today's easier methods of recovering oil from the reserves. There is plenty of oil that is simply too expensive to be recovered profitably using current methods. Only two things can happen to rectify this: either the price of oil continues to go up until it does become profitable to go after the "expensive" oil -or- new technology makes recovery of the oil possible (profitable) at current prices.
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
There are some things we could do. The vast majority of shipping related fuel is Diesel (with the obvious exception of Jet-A in airplanes). That could be converted to biodiesel if you just have the infrastructure to grow the fuel. That's doable, it just might take a little while, and it would suck in the mean time.
The most difficult thing to deal with will be automobiles. They are not something readily converted to burn something else, nor is there an infrastructure to deliver a different type of fuel. Having said that, on the bright side, how long does the average person own a car? Cars naturally get cycled out every 5 or 6 years for most people (if not sooner). So provided some infrastructure was put in place to use some alternative (most readily, biodiesel), then the switch could happen in relatively short order.
None of it is going to be easy and the lack of cheap energy will have a significant negative pressure on the economy for some time to come. The sooner we go through that pain of transition, the less painful it will be. If we wait too long, we're going to be fighting, literally, with other countries for the control of the remaining oil.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
... we can stay at the local shelter. The market works again!
That isn't necessarily true.
Lets say that I pay about $150/mo to heat my house using my natural gas furnace, which is stretching my budget. I've already spent all I can afford on making my energy use efficient, so I'm completely tapped out. Lets also assume that next month the prices skyrocket, so that using the same amount of gas, my bill is now $300/mo. At this point I have two options:
1) Freeze (I've already got the heat down as far as I can manage)
2) Use credit
I'm in somewhat the same situation. I've opted for #2. Many others who can't afford to pay their heating bills are in the same boat. Some people don't have any credit in order to pay their bills or are already maxed out. These people will freeze. Meanwhile the market has very efficently decided who will live and who will die, based on their ability to pay. The people who can afford the initial investment to use a cheaper method of home heating will be in the free and clear. Those of us who can't
I was under the impression that high prices (domestically, at least) were due to a shortage of refining capacity http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/energy/co/?postId= 4441&pageTitle=EXTRACTING+TOP+DOLLAR%3B
Pittsburg PA, in the 1890's (not 1990's BTW), had air pollution so thick that the sun was completely blotted out, not just brown and hazy. And the "three rivers" of Pittsburgh were so polluted that nothing lived in them and were full of industrial waste and raw sewage, not to mention the "biological pollution" of croweded streets filled with horses leaving behind the stuff from their behinds.
If the world is going to h*** and is always getting worse, why is Pittsburgh not like this today? And decades (or perhaps even more than a century for some aspects of these laws) of environmental laws in the USA have absolutely no impact at all? Why even pass the laws if they are so ineffective?
BTW, I agree with your view of China, and with 4x the population of the USA it is likely to get much worse before it gets better. China is still using largely 1930's/1940's era technology and industrial methods for their mining and manufacturing industries, except for those areas that the Chinese government is aggressively following. That isn't bad, and it is better than China has had for decades, but they are now entering the equivalent of the most damaging and polluting stage industrialization before they can refine the manufacturing techniques to make them less polluting. And China doesn't really have the financial resources to really deal with this pollution, not to mention the political willpower to deal with it either.
I won't even touch Eastern Europe, but China is not alone for these problems either. Or try to take a stroll down the Tiete River in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The joke in Sao Paulo is that if you jump into that river, you will die before you hit the water due to the fumes from the chemicals that are in it.
Yeah, the U.S. government is responsible for all of this global pollution and can stop all of it by a simple act of the U.S. Congress.
On one hand you say we don't know what exactly is sustainable, then you state that the American lifestyle isn't sustainable. So which is it?
:) The fact is nobody knows, but my guess is that it isn't. That's all.
That's why I said I think the American lifestyle is unsustainable
I agree that America produces a load of stuff, and other nations would be well off to follow our growth (hey, there's a reason I live here, I love this country). But there are some things where the balance is way off -- such as the consumption of oil. There's also a reasonable question to be posed for anything we buy super-cheap today that was made with sweatshop labor in other countries. Our shoes and clothes for example -- if everyone on the planet lived as Americans did the price of these products would likely go up an order of magnitude. There's probably a way to work it all out, but the picture will be different than today.
But you're right: increasing output in other areas is part of sustainability too. Overall I'm optimistic enough to think it's something we can achieve.
Cheers.
Why would you want to keep the price of oil down?
Economics 101
If you raise the price too much, people will either cut back, or in the case of a product with inelastic demand like oil, pass the added costs into their products (which keep in mind, EVERYTHING is effected by the price of oil due to the supply chain), thus sparking inflation. Inflation means there's less purchasing power, and walla! You, the sheik with the oil, have no purchasing power, and are screwed.
Inflation is a Very Bad Thing(tm).
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Before that, the exhaustion of coal was the fun thing to predict.
c oal_peak.html
Coal for steel, electrical power and synfuels are growing markets. With that in mind, depletion of our coal resources is a serious concern. So lets see what the facts are.
Article: Years of reserves remaining is easy enough to calculate: one only need determine how many tons of coal remain in the ground (available from the EIA) and divide by the production for that year. If we look at the year 2000, we can see that we have 255 years of coal remaining. However, if we look at other years, we see something strange: there were 300 years of coal reserves in 1988, 1000 years reserves in 1904, and 10,000 years reserves in 1868! As each year goes by, we use our coal more quickly and we see that the standard formulation of 'years remaining' is nearly meaningless.
Using the EIA's assumptions, coal will peak in 2060. However, The Annual Energy Outlook 2004 was published before it was widely accepted that U.S. gas production had peaked and that growth of LNG would be difficult. If we assume that U.S. gas consumption cannot grow beyond 2002 levels (2003 gas consumption was less than 2002) due to the North American gas production peak and limited LNG imports, then growth in electrical demand must be met by coal instead of gas. In this second scenario, coal is forecast to peak in 2053. The final scenario assumes that in addition to flat natural gas consumption, oil will peak in 2010 and synfuels will be produced from coal for use in vehicles. It is further assumed that these synfuels will be produced using the process currently employed by the Sasol Company in South Africa. While this is a rather inefficient process, it has been proven at large scales over many years. In this scenario, coal is forecast to peak in 2035.
(As Coke and energy from oil becomes unavailable) Recent interviews with coal and rail companies have revealed that metallurgical coal demand in the Spring of 2004 has been unexpectedly high. If industrial coal demand does increase, this will also cause coal to peak at an earlier date.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/052504_
theWatt has done a survey of peak oil dates, avaialble here. Basically, it seems as if 48% of the publications predict a peak oil date by 2010, 20% predict peak oil between 2010-2020 and 25% predict sometime after 2020.
I'll never understand the Slashdot crowd's fascination with space mining. Let's talk about a few issues.
What on^H^H off earth do you think could be mined in the asteroid belt that would solve our energy issues? Oil is formed from decayed organisms, of which there are a notable lack in the asteroid belt. There are some carbonaceous asteroids up there, but not many, and those that do exist have a small proportion of organic materials (reference). Uranium is in plentiful supply on earth - there's no need to mine any of that from the asteroids, even if it exists there in quantity. And even if there were huge sources of energy-rich material up there, the costs involved in getting to it, mining it, and getting it back to earth would be... astronomical, if you'll pardon the pun.
100% pure pie-in-the-sky. We have no way of GETTING anywhere else in the galaxy in anything like a reasonable amount of time. So I doubt you'll see too many studies on the economics of THAT scenario.
By whom, exactly? While a space elevator would be a very cool piece of technology, it would still be enormously expensive, the technology to do it doesn't yet exist, and even if you built it, there's still the same problem. There's no energy to be had in the outer solar system that you can't get more cheaply on earth. Your statement is a non-sequitur.
Sean
Hey, I peaked long, long, long ago and I'm still going (sortof). I think this whole oil peak issue is overstated.
You, my friend, have a very good perspective of the future of energy. Bravo.
checking for libvirus... no
ERROR, libvirus.so not found, terminating
does the futures market still exist and continue to function as it presently does as demand exceeds supply by a significant amount? Oil supports the thing we like to call "the military/industrial complex" and there's a reason that the word "military" comes first. Who will do without? The military? I doubt it very much. Do they play by typical economic "rules" when they need something? History says that they don't... The real question here is what social and political evolution will occur to compensate for the gap between increasing demand and dwindling supply.
Now you see the genius of United States economic policy. We are consuming oil as fast as we can and producing all kinds of polymerizable materials so that when we do hit the point of diminishing returns for oil from the easy sources, we can turn around and sell all that oil we stockpiled in our Big Wheels (plastic 3-wheeler with a rear wheel brake--vintage drag racing, baby!). There you have it. Now I see the brilliance of our rampant and unsustainable consumption of petroleum products.
The majority of the right wing isn't racist?
Correct. And random anecdotes about rednecks don't invalidate this.
I'm not even going to get into the Vietnam issue
I can see why you wouldn't, considering it was a Democratic President that got us into the war and the leftist media that made sure we lost.
And yes, 30+ years of legal precedent makes abortion an "I fucking told you so" point, just like civil rights!
And just like slavery in 1860. I'm pro-choice, but "30 years of precedent" is a really bad argument.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
There certainly is a lot more oil available in unconvential forms, but the financial and environmental cost of extracting these starts making even hydrogen look cheap.
Great. So then you agree there is no problem? That we have plenty of oil, and that other sources of energy will simply become more financially attractive?
Peak Oil has been a constant discussion for years. This guy has some very interesting
info:
Peak Oil Debunked
Corn is an incredibly large consumer of oil resources, both in terms of fertilizer, and farm resources (humans, tractors...). It is not that all corn is this dependent, but the versions we have bread most certainly are.
Do you know how much energy is required to grow the food that powers your legs??? Cycling is ridiculously inefficient. Take a look at some real conservationists: dead people!
(Actually, this is the OP's post taken to its logical extreme.)
// This is not a sig.
Based on the information I've researched on the subject of alternative energy it becomes readily apparent that there is no silver bullet solution to oil. The available alternatives are all useful and should be developed but no single one of them can replace oil. It becomes more reasonable to start talking about solar and wind generation as a source of primary electricity which can be used for many things including production of synthetic fuel in the forms of biodiesel, ethanol, and as primary energy for thermal depolymerization, each of which would allow us to keep our current infrastructure while changing the source. A particular advantage of TDP is production of crude oil which can be used for all those nifty oil based products like plastic (and yes I know that they discuss plastic as the most effecient feed source for TDP, I refer to using organic feedsource). Also, solar and wind technologies (which is "free", discounting initial contruction costs and maintenece) can be used to generate the energy necessary to extract the less viable oils such as oil shale, tar sands, and some of the more energy intense forms of oil field extraction. And as we go alone we can start shifting to a more electricity based society for our transportation and production needs, i.e. electric cars and plants powered by electricity. A particularly important part of this will be transportation of this energy generated. As it stands at the moment long distance transmission of electricity results in huge losses to heat from the resistance in the lines. A solution to this would be a national network of superconducting transmission lines (similar in topography to the internet backbone) which would allow production of electricity anywhere without huge losses getting that energy back to civilization. These transmission lines are already in production and have been used on a limited scale in industrial applications, further development would allow us to lower cost and improve performance of them. Such a plan would eliminate problems of NIMBYism as you could place offensive and unsightly power plants in the middle of nowhere where nobody cares about what it looks/smells like. I would suggest vast solar generation in the Southwest, vast wind generation in the Rockies and Appalachians, and wave/tidal generation along the uninhabited areas of the coast. All of these technologies have had huge gains in efficiency and pricing as the demand for them has increased. Europe is leading the way in alternative energy with Germany recently installing wind turbines that are far more efficient than previous designs (and boy are they HUGE). And all the people that have talked about a changeover in terms of the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Missions is absolutely correct. If you consider that a few billion dollars carefully utilized to setup such a system is trivial to the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS we've spent other countries (which happen to be major oil production nations) you begin to understand that the mouths will always be where the money is. But I contend that building such a system would benefit our enconomy far more than any other solution. It would be similar to the New Deal during the Depression, thousands of jobs would be created both during construction and the maintence afterwards. The Bush administration loves to talk about "national security" but true national security would be being free from extranational influence on the American way of life. Imagine an America where we are completely self-sufficient, all energy, raw materials, and consumable goods produced within our own borders. That sounds like national security to me.
Did you know that you can be apathetic to apathy? Not that I give a shit...
Whatever happened to watching science fiction movies and thinking "We'll be that advanced in just a few more years."? Now we favor creation myths over accepted theory, stifle NASA scientists who try to warn us about the environment, campaign against stem cell research like we were having the Salem witch trials all over again, and the brainy of our culture get hung with derisive nicknames. I guess science is only important if you're going to bomb somebody or invade their privacy...we still lead the world in those two departments.
By all means, burn the oil as fast as possible and leave the US high and dry! Maybe then these fatheads I have to share a country with will learn a thing or two...possibly even the word "learn" will cease to be dirty again.
And we can always fall back on nuclear energy.
Are we going to have nuclear plants in our vehicles? Are our Lunchables going to come in nuclear blister packs?// This is not a sig.
Hotelling's rule... which assumes an otherwise stable economy. Of course, the problem is that diminishing petroleum supplies are likely to have substantial effects on the economy, including wide spread inflation.... which does what to interest rates?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
>I bought a whole bunch of energy efficient bulbs. Most of them died within a year because they don't like dirty electricity and being cycled rapidly
Ain't that the truth! I have replaced just about all the bulbs in our house with these flourescent guys that are supposed to burn 1/4 of the electricity of a standard bulb and last 7 years.
I've probably had 6 or so that didn't last 3 months. I've got two on right now that if you hit the fan switch instead of the light switch and turn them off, then turn them right back on again when they are hot, they won't re-light.
I have started marking the bulbs with a sharpie pen to write the date on them when I install them, so that when they break, I'm taking the damn things back to Home Depot for a refund.
Cleverly, the writing on the box says I am supposed to mail them back to the manufacturer, but damn, it will probably cost as much to do that as to just buy another bulb, which is, of course, what they are hoping.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
OPEC wants cheap oil to prevent investments in production capacity of oil sands and shale oil (and other alternatives to Middle East crude). As long as the price of oil per barrel sits under $40, it will continue to be economically infeasible to produce oil from these sources, and the world will continue to give oodles of money to the Middle East for a share of what comes out of their ground.
The big secret is that the US and Candada have enough KNOWN oil sands and shale oil to supply our petroleum demands for more than 100 years. In fact, the exact quantities are still largely unknown. The supply could be much greater.
But no one will invest in production unless the price of oil stays above $40-$50 per barrel permanently. There is a great deal of interest right now in the oil sands up in Candada, but to my knowledge, the shale oil in the US is still largely untapped.
Read this for some refutation. The article's statement about discovery vs. production since 1971 is so misleading I would almost call it a lie. Look at a graph, which tells a far different story than their 35 year "snapshot":v es.gif
http://www.theoildrum.com/uploads/44/hirsch_reser
Those prices have to be wrong, as even the greenest energy sources produce at less than $0.50/KW HOUR. Billing by Watt doesn't make sense, anyway.
---The alternatives have to be put in place first, and subsidised to bring them to a realistic price point. Once renewable energy is within the purchasing capacity of "ordinary people", they will buy it; then economies of scale will set in, and the subsidies can be gradually cut.---
As oil supplies are exausted, the price of oil will rise which will start to stear long term investers toward toward R&D into alternatives to oil as the search for new oil supplies becomes more costly.
---It won't just be fuel prices that will rise; everything that has to be manufactured and/or delivered will become more expensive. The poorest people will find themselves unable to afford to travel to work; they will exist in a state of perpetual unemployment, so increasing the burden on the taxpayer.---
Oil will gradually become more and more expensive as it becomes more and more costly to produce. Other supplies that cost a lot to get will start being tapped as oil prices rise. The market will handle that so the effects will not cause big shocks. Oil prices will still fluctuate from time to time but periodic shocks, like the aftermath of Katrina, are less likely to spur any major investment in energy production unless a world event was so severe that the price wasn't expected to recover any time soon.
---To get an engine to start, you sometimes have to use an external power source. The beardy-weirdies and the forward-thinkers alone simply won't have enough buying power between them to initiate the process of bringing down the price of renewable energy.---
The wildcard here is that many want to get away from oil not because of oil running out but because of the environmental ramifications of oil use. This is where Govt. subsidies would help jumpstart a process but reduction in polution from oil use is a viable alternative in this case.
No matter where you go, there you are.
How much oil is needed to make all the plastic in a Hummer (H2)? A friend of mine has an H2 and I was horrified to see the amount of clunky plastic that makes up the door panels and dashboard. The H2 feels no roomier than an old Jeep Cherokee, especially if you keep the spare tire inside.
"Eveyone is living in the pre-Great Depression Era. When Peak Oil hits, then it will be Great Depression times 10."
I doubt this since the oil peak isn't going to "hit" but rather it will gradually cause prices to increase as production of oil gets more expensive. While the supply of oil in the mid east is really cheap (You pee in the sand too hard and you might cause a gusher), there are other places where oil could be extracted at a higher cost.
There is also the chance that we will find some more previously unknown oil reserves that are easy to get to also.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Google Hubbert linearization.
I would argue that if you drive an old Ford, you can't run it on anything... but I digress. You can run almost any diesel on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) but you have to filter, dewater, and deacidify it first. Also, you typically can't start up on WVO, so you need to install a second tank and a switchover system so you can start up and run on diesel until the engine warms up, and switch back to the diesel before you shut down so the fuel doesn't gel in the system. You also need to heat the oil before injection in order to reduce the viscosity, which means you get [better] atomization of the fuel, allowing it to combust.
There is also a German company called Elsbett that sells a single-tank multifuel kit that lets you start up on oil. You can pour in anything your engine runs on. Mercedes diesels are the best for running on funky fuels because they are an IDI (indirect injection) system with a prechamber. The alternatives are DI (direct injection, no prechamber) and EDI (electronic direct injection.) There might be EIDI or whatever they would call it but I've never seen it. The kit for my 5 cylinder mercedes is about US$1100.
Certain major commuter corridors already have hydrogen filling, as well as E85 fuel. The former is being scaled up as we speak. The latter is probably tapering off since so few multifuel (E85/Gasoline) vehicles have been produced (though a surprisingly high number of them are available.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have read Howard Zinn's book and wasn't impressed. I thought he didn't provide enough detail to back up many of his assertions. It may be he felt it was more important to cover a little bit of everything instead of going into detail. I don't know.
I like cheese.
No matter where you go, there you are.
People who are all into "you can't justify going farther than you can walk" are the perfect example of a cure that's worse than the disease. If you can't go farther than you can walk you may save the environment but you completely decimate human society. Cities can not exist, universities can not exist, the bottom falls out from underneath society.
... and Newton and Da Vinci drove Hummers.
If you're trying to suggest that before Henry Ford, we didn't have cities, universities, or society, then I think you need to find another history book.
You get a bunch of isolated pockets of survivalists who have no time for literature, art, or communal society.
Riiight
I understand that the average city-dweller uses far less of an environmental footprint and consumes far less energy than the suburbanite. But the city-dweller relies more on imports, which require energy to deliver.
Meanwhile, the suburbanite has more land and is closer to farms, but is almost entirely dependent on automobiles for almost every facet of life and has a relatively huge environmental footprint.
My money's on the city-dweller, but somehow I fear we're all screwed...
"There's a hundred years of coal in the US; even if coal has to take up the slack, big deal."
The deal is air quality. Maybe coal can be burned cleaner than oil. My bet is on: probably not.
"Basically, the worst thing that will happen is that worldwide economic growth will slow. "
Have you applied for a job at FEMA, I hear they are looking for someone with as much vision as Brownie. If that's really the worst you can imagine, I think you're in for a nasty surprise in the next decade when China comes knocking for energy.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I wonder if you actually have any idea what you're talking about, or you've formed this opinion by reading the Times in your NYC apartment. My personal experience is far different.
The most pervasive American racism I've encountered is in blue state America, where the so-called liberals can be against racism while at the same time totally isolating themselves from anybody who doesn't look like they do, except for the nanny.
You want to know the dirty little secret of gun control? Liberals are fearful of the minorities they've excluded (economically) from the gated enclaves, but they can't very well say "I'd feel safer if minorities didn't have guns". So they support gun control for everyone. Well, everyone except for the cops who are far more numerous in their well-patrolled neighborhoods. And the private security in the gated communities.
I'd like to refute your other points, but it's clear you haven't taken your medicine, so why bother?
Let the price of gas go up, people use less. Eventually it will get high enough where alternate forms of energy are more feasable.
As a means of finding a natural equilibrium that is indeed an efficient way to go. The problem is that the intervening time while a new equilibrium is being established may not particularly pleasant, and might not be particularly short when compared with natural human timescales.
Consider this hypothetical: over the next year demand continues to increase, while the supply increases much more slowly and oil prices spike quite high, say $100 or $150 a barrel. That's high enough to make many of the alternatives economically viable. The problem is that the infrastructure fr the alternatives isn't there yet. Certainly you'll have a number of companies starting up, or shifting focus, to take advantage of the now economic alternatives. It will take time for both the new industries, and the new systems for distribution, delivery etc. to become sufficiently widespread for the alternatives to fully take up the slack. That leaves you with a period of expensive oil, and insufficient alternatives, which will likely see oil prices spike further. Yes, in due course the other industries will gear up, take over, and return things to something resembling normality, but that's not immediate.
Trying to artifically shortcut to this state tends to blow up in our faces though. So, don't worry, be happy.
Artificially shortcut there? Probably not that helpful. Have a little foresight and make preparations with regard to alternatives that will significantly ease the transition? Possibly a reasonable idea.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
It is interesting that you shoud mention OPEC, as a world oil crash could mean some dire things for the entire middle east. Countries in the middle east have made vast fortunes in the last century as a result of these deposits. What is to prevent them from returning to the previous ecenomic status once the oil runs out? Once western oil money drys up, there will be severe shakeups in some economies in the middle east.
While Iran is acting very shifty for a country that claims to only have an interest in nuclear power for peaceful purposes, it could very well be a strategic shift to prepare for the day when it's wells run dry.
I've often wondered if the vast influx of money to gulf oil states from first world countries has increased the instability of the reigon. if there had been no oil, the middle east would have probably not be much of a strategic concern, and the international community would have been content to largely ignore the reigon.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
This isn't a case that can be explained by economics, because there's never been anything in the past to compare to. This isn't grain supplies or something like that which can easily be replaced. We're talking about the permanent decline of the single greatest resource that sponsors all the economic theories that exist.
All of modern economic thinking is based on the assumption of continual economic growth. Without this growth recession creeps in, followed by depression. And yet this required continual growth is physically sponsored by an ever-growing amount of oil, to power the ever-growing needs of the economy.
Take away the oil, you take away the mechanism for economic growth, simply. As the costs of food and transport grow, people find themselves tighter and tigher financially, and unable to depend on future potential income, borrowing declines sharply. Take away borrowing and you take away the injection of fresh money into the economy, and the whole things just spirals down.
It's not a pretty picture.
The reduction in farmed land is pretty insignificant and takes place mostly on "highly erodable land" or in buffer zones around water. Neither of these are very appealing places to put back into rotation.
:-)
That's not entirely true. We've lost a lot of smaller farms as the farming industry has been consolidated into larger firms. As a result, we've dropped from 1.2 billion acres in the 1960's to ~968 million acres in 1997. That's over 200 million acres (or about 20% of previous capacity) to explain away as poor farmland!
The real answer is, of course, more complex. Farming technology has increased considerably, upping production across all farmland. Production is so high that it's been driving down prices and making it more profitable to convert the land to other uses. (Especially if it's not the creme de la creme of farmland to begin with.) Of the land that's left, the U.S. government actually pays farmers to leave some of it unfarmed. This helps prop up the market by artificially driving down supply to keep pace with the demand. If the demand were to suddenly rise, that farmland would become more profitable to use rather than leave empty.
The second point would be a good one except that replacing crude with corn would take a lot of land. Much more than we make up in increased yields.
That's my point, though. We can use the extra farmland we have lying around That 200 million acres could easily produce ~100 billion gallons of ethanol just from corn. Now if we factor in increases in Sugar Cane production (which is exceedingly poor in South America mostly due to farming through manual labor and wasteful burning of crop husks that could be recycled, and otherwise poor in the states due to overall low demand) we could easily produce enough Ethanol to offer E50 and E85 blends to all consumers. Futher increases in production plus the addition of Bio-diesel to power our trucking infrastructure could easily make up the difference to eliminate petroleum altogether.
In any case, there is a thread about algae elsewhere in this commentary that is worth thinking seriously about. There is also the possibility of using one of the microbes Venter found in his current voyage to extract hydrogen from water.
I'm definitely open to these sorts of concepts. However, in the short term Ethanol allows us to reuse our existing infrastructure and vehicles while new technologies mature and roll out to the market. Plus we have an existing supply to start from that can be ramped up with demand. For all we know, E85 blends with the petroleum coming from algea could be the way of the future.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The UNH scheme supplies the carbon from coal-plant exhaust. This is not a closed loop, and it depends on coal combustion (with all that implies). True, it traps most sulfur and other nasty stuff and gives you a twice-through before all that carbon winds up in the atmosphere, but you're not closing any loops.
If you actually made sustainable biodiesel from algae, you'd have to grow them on carbon from the atmosphere. This means leaving the ponds open, evaporative losses, and considerable water use. There are probably places on earth where you can do this without having to worry about water shortages (any process that uses seawater or even more saline water won't run out any time soon!), but it's not something you can just ignore.
Carbon is the key
Ignore water at your risk
You aren't worth your salt.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
I have not investigated where the rest of our oil goes, but I suspect that any carbon source converted to clean carbon monoxide could produce most or all of our petrochemical requirements by steam reforming to syngas (CO + H2O -> CO2 + H2) followed by Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier or other chemical synthesis. A lot of things are already made that way and a process which yields CO would cut out the middleman.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
There are 8 acres of land for every person in the US. There is just about the same amount for every person in Africa. That figure includes each area's respective amounts of desert/mountains/grassland, which are surprisingly similar.
:p
And, while the US is dependent upon resources from all across the globe, 8 acres really is quite a bit when you think about it. On 8 acres, any American should be able to heat and cool a reasonably sized house, produce a reasonable amount of fuel for a small car, feed himself grains and vegetables and meats, produce all manner of household chemicals, and generally maintain a level of prosperity beyond that common in the US just a century ago.
All this can be done without a drop of oil or an ounce of coal.
So, in a sense, you're right. But, in another sense, you're still an asshole if you're driving a Hummer
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
That post is 100% bullshit. Every figure you cite is wrong. Instead of correcting you, again, like others have done, you're just going on my foes list.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I concur that OPEC has very limited capability to limit oil production these days.
On the other hand, militants in Iraq and Nigeria do have the capability to limit oil production, and are doing just that.
On the other hand, there are other ways of making ethanol besides corn.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
A system like this could remove net carbon from the atmosphere.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
The argument that we must "help capitalism out" is a fallacy. The market is an incredibly accurate predictor of phenomena like the future supply of commodities. Far more accurate than the chicken littles who run around proclaiming the end of civilization. As soon as it appears that oil is *actually* going to run out, the market will go crazy with investment into alternative energy sources. R&D will boom. Long before oil is actually scarce, prices will rise due to speculation. Still long before oil is actually scarce, alternative energy will first become competitive with and then cheaper than oil, both due to rising oil prices and falling alternative prices. And as soon as alternative energy is cheaper, the switch will begin in earnest, bringing in economies of scale. The switch will proceed exactly as fast as it needs to, guided by the invisible hand of the market.
Overall energy prices may rise during the transition. But the market has already survived a sextupling of the price of crude oil since 1998, and no disaster has resulted. The market can and does adapt to changing prices. Now oil has very little room to rise further, because alternatives are coming close to its price. Capitalism works.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
To live in the U.S you need to have a car to work and live.
This is not true. You've been brainwashed by the U.S. auto culture. I live in the U.S. and both live and work and somehow don't own a car. I bicycle to work, which is over 10 miles from my apartment, and I know people who bicycle commute more than twice as far. And I could afford a car if I wanted one. I don't.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
TFA is not claiming that we've "hit the end of the oil pan." Peak oil simply means the supply and demand curves will never be closer again than they are now, as demand begins to increase faster than supply.
It's as much an economic condition as a geologic condition, because one of its attributes is that oil companies slow the rate of their exploration and new development because of economic constraints, despite high demand.
It's true that as price rises, the greater potential returns allow for some new development that would not otherwise be possible. But the price elasticity of oil is not infinite, and at some point new development gets so expensive that the resulting prices exceed the market's willingness to buy oil.
For a clue we might be entering that realm in the U.S., take a look at prime-time TV car ads, a fair number of which are now touting energy efficiency. Or talk to U.S. manufacturing companies, who today obsess about efficiency and energy costs. The evidence is that the market is seeking ways to reduce oil consumption. This implies that despite high demand, supply is unable to be met at an acceptable price, and the market is seeking alternatives
This is a big clue that demand and supply are starting to separate. They could come back together only if the rate of change of demand drops or rate of supply discovery/development increases. But we know from data that demand continues to increase at larger and larger rates, while the rate of development of new oil sources continues to drop.
Does this mean the end of Western civilization as we know it? No, of course not. Peak oil is not a peak like the Matterhorn, it's like pointing to the highest hummock on a plateau and saying "there's the peak." Its effects will be gradual enough for the world market to create coping mechanisms and alternatives, which as I mentioned above we are seeing the beginnings of now.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you haven't read The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon, now might be a good time. He was an Economist who died a few years ago. His point is that the human brain/ingenuity is the ultimate resource that can solve any problems that come along. Bring on the "Oil Crisis".... Over the years there has been a wood crisis (an early fuel), a coal crisis (the next fuel) and about a hundred oil crisises. In all those times the prices have risen then slowly returned to lower levels than before- relative to income- due to increased efficiency and a change to a newer system. Coal largely replaces wood. Oil largely replaces coal. The old systems don't go away but the new ones surpass them in volume. That's not to say that conservation and living within our means isn't a good idea (or a bad idea).
CWT used to have a press kit on their site with a bunch of PDF's regarding the process (some of the same figures were in the original "Anything Into Oil" article in Discover). That whole press kit seems to have been removed (so much for transparency!), but I saved a copy of the file which has the yield figures. From 100 pounds of municipal liquid waste (which includes a large fraction of grease-trap waste, which you would not normally have) it claims these yields:
- 26 lbs oil
- 9 lbs gas
- 8 lbs carbon and other solids
- 57 lbs water
So, if you could get 6 billion tons of waste a year, and if half of your waste stream was nice, energy-rich grease, you could get about a quarter of it back as oil. At CWT's figure of 7.7 lb/gallon, that's less than 1 billion barrels/year. For comparison, the whole US only uses about 3 billion gallons of cooking grease per year (about 70 million barrels). It is not going to be that easy. (For that matter, corn will get us nowhere. If you took all 11.8 billion bushels of the record 2004 crop and converted it to ethanol at the 2.66 gallons/bu that the USDA says is about the best feasible, you get 31.4 billion gallons. The US burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline alone in 2004, and another 60-odd billion gallons of distillate fuel oil.) Garbage In, Garbage Out (pun intended). It is not going to be that easy; our current systems simply are not efficient enough to satisfy our needs on the biofuels we can grow. We are going to have to change our transportation systems, which mostly means making them use electricity from the grid as their primary energy source and liquid fuels only for extended range.Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you grew the algae in open ponds it would be otherwise, but you will not get the same phenomenal growth rates with atmospheric CO2 concentrations and you'll have issues with evaporative losses of water, contamination by other algae strains, predators and parasites.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Dead people are only good if their bodies are completely converted to energy by being lowered into a blackhole.
p.s. we grow all our own fruit and veggies on a 580m^2 block of land (i.e.suburban). Last time I calculated it, our footprint was about a quarter of a hectare.
Also get rid of all ethanol mandates, and tax farm inputs so that fossil pass-throughs don't get preferential treatment.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Many viable solutions to the problem of energy resource depletion are being overlooked by industry, government and academia due to the need to find ways to explot or take credit for discoveries in the area of energy production.
The time is right for the open source movement to expand into the area of energy technology, and enable people to freely produce energy on their own, without concern for erratic markets or proprietary control of resources. Although migrating open source software development to energy technology requires a different set of infrastructure components and science, the core concepts and tools facilitating free exchange of ideas can be directly adoped from open source software development.
An example might be a project for developing a homebrew solar system:
* Plans and specifications for construction of devices that fabricate non-silicon solar cells.
* Information on how to obtain and process the materials required for homebrew solar cells.
* Schematics for construction of solar energy components, such as charge controllers, inverters and monitoring systems.
An example of an open source platform for energy production utilizing photosynthesis might consist of the folowing:
* Architectural specifications of an eco-system consisting of biological organisms such as bacteria and algae, that form a process whereby the inputs are carbon dioxide, water and sunlight and the outputs are useful hydrocarbons.
* A set of blueprints for construction of devices that facilitate collection and storage of hydrocarbons and enable the various stages of processing performed by bacteria or algae.
* Information on how to obtain, exchange or construct the various components of the system at low cost.
Applying the existing open source software infrastructure to energy technology is simple. Tools such as sourceforge, forums, wikis and blogs could be populated with pilot projects. Like open source software, intellectual contributions to these projects, regardless of how trivial or seemingly simple, would accumulate and self-organize over time into coherent solutions that could be adoped by many with relative ease. Or at least it might resemble the linux of energy technology - not for everbody, but everbody is free to use it if they choose.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Pot. Kettle. Black. In essence, you have just pointed out that you believe the current "flat earth" economic theories that have been spouted for decades.
Capitalism does one thing really well. It allocates scarce resources efficiently. As oil diminishes prices will rise and demand will fall. The market will clear. This isn't good news for consumers and those of us raised on $15 a barrel oil. It isn't good news if you own a gas guzzeling SUV. It isn't good news for unemployment.
But it isn't the end of the world. We will end up living in a more energy efficient world. We will end up using other forms of power (solar, nuclear, coal, gas, etc.) Humankind will not be wiped out. Democracy will not die.
You state that capitalism can't deal with this. I think this is the only thing c
For your education: When we consider solar power (PV, DHW, space heating), we talk about the peak watt cost of the system (this is a figure of merit, like the capacity of your shower heat). That is, how many watts maximum can the system produce on noon on the equator on a perfectly clear day (something like 1100W/m^2 input). Then the system will produce energy depending on the climate. Standard commercial panels, mounted perpendicular to the sun will produce about 90% of their peak capacity in summer at noon in Melbourne, if kept cool. (I know this because I've measured it on my parent's array)
Energy is usually sold as a non-time dependent cost in $/J, or $/kWh. The numbers I was quoting are the peak rating cost of those systems, compared with about $10/W for commercial panels fixed mounted at the latitude. You can look at the sunball site yourself and work out the number by dividing the cost in $US by the peak output in W.
Converting peak watts to actual energy production accurately requires a good database of insolation data over many years and knowledge of the positioning and cooling. Or you can get a yearly average and use that as a rough guide. My parents produce about 6kWh per day on average from their 1.5kW peak array, so you might expect 4kWh/day kWpeak average in melbourne using fixed panels. This equates to about 1500kW hour/ year kWpeak worth about $230 a year.
The sunball costs $1100au for a third of a kWpeak, paying itself off (ignoring interest) in about 5 years.
Does that help you understand?
to generate electricity and fuel airplanes.
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and uselessly burn the oil yourself. It might even be more efficient. Or better yet, spend your money on a bit of gasoline and start torching national forests. That'll really get you a good ratio!
In any case, unless your real spending habits are far different from the average person's (ie, you don't spend your money on consumer goods, your home, car, services, etc) your emission profile is the same, multiplied by your spending vs the average.
The trace is designed to provide a stiff supply on its own and seemlessly move to interactive when available. This is a very different design requirement to a grid interactive only inverter. (My parents have a SW3024, and I've done power electronics for my degree).
:) Many other inverters without the requirement for stiffness just use PWM on a 300V DC supply. I've wondered if a 300V series string of panels could be directly connected to the grid using an H-bridge and an LC filter. That might cost $10 for 2kW: $5 pic controller, $3 H-bridge, $2 inductor and cap. It would have better power factor than a light dimmer as the panels are current sources and the power is symmetric.
Fried linesmen is probably a myth, as a) the lines men around here do everything on live wires (we had an outage last week, and the tech calmly drove up and hoisted his cherrypicker into the live 22kV lines and pulled a fuse out with his hand - made a nice flash when he put in the new one...) b) a 1kW array at peak would not produce enough power to support even a single phase in one block and it is easy to monitor for falling voltage and out of tolerance frequency (just a little bit of software on a chip).
Yes SMPs convert to high voltage DC, but if they don't use a large input cap (and new ones don't I've found) they are operating close to 50Hz already. 'universal' suppies operate from about 80V to 300V, and automatically do better power factor correction by tracking the input voltage more closely.
Nick Pine points out that a standard triac type light dimmer is perfectly acceptable for harmonic distortion, and it is conceivable that a simple modified sinewave inverter could be connected to the grid directly if it were synchronised (easy to do - wait until the voltage reachs say 50V, then connect your DC-DC to the line, when it drops, disconnect) and filtered (using the same LC circuit used in light dimmers).
p.s. the trace works by switching three different windings on and off in offset-ternary(-1, 0, 1). Work out what the windings are, and how many steps of sine it can produce. Is it worth adding an extra winding? I had my parents one connected to an oscilloscope years back, it's quite fun to watch, particularly as the load changes
Look at the Honda Fit, being introduced for this model year. There's a Toyota offering as well. These cars were not previously sold in the US because the lack of demand precluded their sale.
You're absolutely right. The problem is, we don't know exactly what is sustainable. Hell, listen to most people, and we don't know exactly what quantity of external inputs such as oil and gas are being used to support our unsustainable lifestyles. That I can agree with. And it's a real problem.
But, here's what I don't get:
To have arts/literature/culture, we must have cities. That's the argument, right?
But cities are expensive. Cities are an emergent phenomenon. Most cities are not sustainable and probably shouldn't exist. If you look around your city, and don't see a plentiful natural resource that requires humans to exploit, such as a mine or a bay or a transportation hub, you don't really live in a city. You live in an artificial creation. You live in a housing addition. You live in a possible future death trap.
So, your argument seems to be that cities exist to produce art/literature/culture. But, in reality, cities exist for the same reasons piles of ants exist on dead insects. There is a nearby resource that people are willing to crowd together to exploit. The "artist" in this example would be the one ant that decides to sit down and eat instead of taking his share of dead insect back to the ant hole. If anything, art/literature/culture is a response to this unnatural crowding and/or abundance. And when the dead insect is gone, the city goes away too.
So, if for many cities, the "dead insect" is fossil fuels or increased production due to fossil fuels, why should we invest in cities? In 500 years, will our descendants look back and say "we don't have fuel or Mars colonies, but, dammit, our forebears gave us this art and literature and we're thankful!" ???
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I hate to break this to you, but hydrogen is fairly easy to obtain. While certainly hydrocarbons in oil are hydrogen rich, so are hydrocarbons in coal, or peat, or even biomass. Worst case scenario, we can extract it from water with enough electricity. Electricity can also be generated without hydrocarbons, so worst case scenario, the prices go up. Methanes, benzenes, and all the rest have been easy to refine for more than a hundred years.
Refining diesel from coal isn't end-of-the-world expensive. South Africa does it today, Hitler ran a war on it in WWII, and the US could probably switch to coal refining in a few years with enough economic incentive (ie, high oil prices). The sky is not, in fact, falling.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Note: as gas gets more expensive more and more electricity will be provided from nukes, solar, whatever. So electricity won't get expensive as quickly as gas.
I play Nerd-Folk!
There are no working commercial breeder reactors because we blocked them as part of a misguided effort to keep commercial operators from dealing with weapons-grade plutonium.
If the time lag between the response to the crisis and the effectiveness of the response exceeds the time lag between the onset of the crisis and the culmination of the crisis, capitalism will no longer EXIST, and will not be able to do any work.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Want to read a great book? Try "Basin and Range" by John McPhee. It is a fascinating read about Plate Tectonics and geology in general. The "star" of the book happens to be Deffeyes. He's led a pretty cool life.
I don't think it's especially militant, meaning more militant than normal, to violently oppose the invasion of your home and its robbery for foreign interests. It is militant, in as much as the opposition elicited is military opposition, but it is not militant in the sense of being an aggressive expression of a peculiar ideology. It's just defending your home.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I recently had this future-history vision of my now-teenaged son's future children complaining to him that "all you old guys talk about is how great it was when you had oil." while skinning cats around the campfire. Of course I shared it with him so that he'll have deja-vu in 50 years.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Let me just clarify: You don't mind 30% of 300 million amercians = 90 million SUV drivers, but the 130 million chinese are bad? Why?
NYC apartment? I live in the south, dumbass: Tucker, Georgia. That's where my experience comes from.
Pervasive racism in Blue States? That's cute. Come to a Red State before you open your inexperienced, inner city republican mouth.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Actually, a family lived entirely off their own block last year in an experiment in queensland. Despite the worst drought in history they managed to pull through the entire year with a veggie patch, a goat, chickens, ducks and fruit trees in a 1/4 acre block.
We make all out own fruit and veggies (more because we're snobs that don't like commercial produce) from a 580m^2 block.
Clearly, you don't live in the Great Lakes area.
The better choice is futures options. For a few thousand dollars you can buy an option whose value will be 1000 times (oil price - $100). If oil got to $200 your few thousand dollars would turn into $100,000. And you don't get wiped out by any fluctuations along the way; you pay up front, then sit tight and wait to get lucky. The down side is that you lose your entire investment if oil is less than $100 at the end, but it was only a few thousand dollars, which you should be able to afford if you're thinking about this.
Woah, woah, woah! Slow down there. Let me explain commodity futures a little better before you go thinking that it's a low risk investment with a high pay-off.
When you buy an option, you are entering a contract with another person to buy a large amount of a commodity at a certain price. The brokerage fee is what costs a fractional chunk of change. Let's say you buy an option to buy a minimal contract for an offset on 5000 bushels of corn for $2.50 per bushel. A contract like this would cost around The contract has a time limit at the end of which you must make the trade.
If corn goes up to $2.70 per bushel, you just made $1000. If corn goes down to $2.30 per bushel, you just lost $1000. People who sell commodity contracts are making a bet that the value will go down while people who buy them are hoping that it will go up. Futures are extremely dangerous because they're one of the few types of investments where you can lose more money than you put in -- far more money than you put in. This is not the kind of investment that small-time amateurs should even think about, and many lose their shirts trying to gamble with the exchange instead of buying and selling wisely.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The sun gives us about 1 kw/(m^2) of energy. Regardless of how you're capturing energy, we can't do better than that in the long-long run, and if we're using more than that, we will eventually run out.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Yes, and they're all less efficient.
Black kids in the local public school? "Well, I'd put Johnny in the public school, but, you know, it's so important to get a good start in life, and the private school twenty miles from here is so much better. But it's not racism, you understand, that's only for rednecks in Republican states."
Look, you lefties can tell yourselves whatever you want, but I know hypocrisy when I see it.
The cheap oil is what you can easily pump out, there's lots of fields that are left alone because at $26/barrel it wasn't worth it. As the price and demand goes up, those older fields will get revisited. But on a different idea, instead of working really hard to pump out that last really sticky oil, would it be possible to bio-engineer a bacteria that could partially digest thick oil in place releasing methane or natural gas as a by product. This would solve the problem of pumping it out since the oil would stay in place and only the highly motile gas would be taken. Of course you wouldn't want such a bacteria to be able to live just anywhere since it might start eating oil in other places. Maybe it could be engineered to only like to multiply at very high pressure or in the presence of some unusual trace gas that would only be injected at these types of oil fields.
We had cars and were already using oil before Ford came along and improved efficiency such that middle class people could enjoy mobility that was previously restricted to the rich.
Personally, I agree with a guy who wrote an article a while ago.
"Anything that doesn't lead to us eventually leaving the planet, then the solar system is a waste".
I'm all for 'sustainability', but I want sustainable progress. PRT, nuclear power, eventually fusion can all help with the goal of getting off the planet.
I don't read AC A human right
There is an EXCELLENT book everyone should read called:
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity
by Jerome R., Ph.D. Corsi, Craig R. Smith
They detail the abiogenic theory of oil in which it states that oil is not as "limited" in its supply as people like to think.
It's available on Amazon and other places.
Damn good read.
Libertas in infinitum
My suggested simple h-bridge GI inverter would most likely fail by killing the fuse and blowing the H-bridge, I can't see if going up in flames as there isn't much current to play with. Maybe I'm wrong - I'd have to build one to see...
;)
I agree that using the inverter as a UPS is nice, which is why we used an SW3024. But that's not a realistic replacement for coal, whereas very simple inverters and simple configurations might be quite cost effective.
Yes, we have the SWCA interface, and I even wrote a perl script to download and upload on the configuration data (no idea where the code went).
Not only can you see the phase shift on an oscope, you can actually hear it with the grid (with a genny it's probably too hard to hear), it makes a sort of plinking noise as it rotates.
Feel free to email me if you want to discuss further - slashdot is a fairly poor place to have a chat
also, jabber on njh@gristle.org
Very much true. Recycling will really hit it off once it makes economic sense to due so. I fully expect our dumps to eventually be 'mined' for resources when we develop the technology to make it practical.
I don't read AC A human right
I don't. A giant rock, some freak quaser X-rays, etc. could smash the Earth to smitherines or otherwise sterilize it. Or, if you want to take the long view, the Sun will expand and fry the planet. Anywhichway, EVERYONE living here at that time will be dead. What's your point?
Before you respond, you must refute hihilism, in no uncertain terms. Please google it, if you don't know what that is.
Have a nice day.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
Sure I do - I at least make an effort and am willing to try harder if I can.
So let me just add my, "go fuck yourself, you self-centered bastard", to the rest of the chorus.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
The deal is air quality. Maybe coal can be burned cleaner than oil. My bet is on: probably not.
The government is supposedly working on a coal fired zero-emissions power plant by the name of FutureGen. If you'd rather get an official source, here's the official Dept of Energy page.
My oh my, it's like the Club of Rome never crashed and burned...
Despite his geology credentials, I would join with those who worry that the economics underlying the good professor's model are gravely inadequate*. The "Hubberts Curve" analysis of US 70's oil is badly misleading; US oil production in the 70's was not a closed system; cheap middle-eastern oil had rendered many US wells uneconomic to run. Underlying this problem seems to be a lack of clarity about our definitions.
Perhaps it would be useful to move the debate onto "known recoverable reserves at a given price" as opposed to "total global reserves" (itself a rather problematic concept as the geologists on this board have already pointed out). I can see that this is happening to some extent with posters looking to the end of "cheap oil". A more interesting notion, on several levels.
There are uncertainties in this future; rates of resource substituion/alternative sources, energy saving, price elasticity, and exploitation trechnologies, but they generally point to reasons for optimism that the "problem" will be contained without the end of the world, or even a serious islocation. Supporting this conclusion, the Oil Futures market is still resilient. At the least, doomsayers are not putting their money where their mouth is. Deffeyes may pronounce "by 2025 we will be back in the stone age", but I bet he's got a 20-year mortgage. Let's be honest; part of his alarmism is just to shift copy.
People who proclaim "Ah, but this time its differrent..." should take a close look at the "Ehrlich-Simons bet" to see how the Neo-Malthusians have ended up looking very silly many times before. Are their arguments really novel? How? And if they are true, so what? (A more level-headed projection of possible consequences would also be in order)
And will someone please define for me, in a way that makes sense and uses concrete and measurable criteria, what a "a fair share of the earth's resources" is, and how they calculated the "fair" bit.
- Al
*Incidentally, I haven't seen anyone comment that the current high price for consumer oil products is driven more by globally limited refinery capacity than a lack of crude...
Actually I guess the peak was during the baby boom after WW2, wasn't it? Won't demand die off with the baby boomers?
And what about post-2050 - will the population shrink? Or remain stable?
[ReidNews]
We have plenty of Oil. Its actually all over the place underground.
Why we do not have enough, is because like diamonds, which too there is a huge glut off.
It is artificially being limited.
Why?
Well, because why would you build refineries to drive down the cost of your product when you can keep it high?
It is really simple: It is not good business.
What is happening is not that we are running out of oil, what is happening is oil is in control of a very few ineterest groups in its refining, and this cartel will not be satisfied with any price of oil, at $65, $100, $200 or even a $1000 dollars a barrel.
Alternative energy sources will also not be created.
If someone is foolish enough to create such a alternative energy source and it really does have any kind of impact on Oil use and price, they will be ELIMINATED.
The price of Oil is all about Power and Control.
Armies will rise, Nations will fall and Oil shall remain in control of a very few.
Perhaps the terrorists will make Oil too dangerous to use.
Then perhaps things will change.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
There's an important difference between cheap oil production and oil production, yet few seem to bother noting this when making arguments on this topic.
" Prove how convinced you are by putting your money where your mouth is, and if you're right, you'll amass a fortune."
But what if one don't *have* any money, and if you've exhausted ones creditors??
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Aw, you think you're hardcore conservative coming from San Fran? That's hilarious. Tucker is just a few miles outside of Atlanta, a city which is 60% black and is run by blacks; Tucker is about 50% black. Liberals down here are true dyed in the wool liberals, who marched and rallied alongside King and his wife during the civil rights movement and who fought to keep the black muslim movement from becoming completely homicidal. My best friend's mother was almost killed at a black nightclub back in the day when the extremist part of the black muslim movement came through just started shooting people of the colour white.
Sorry, it's just hard for me to take someone seriously who claims the purity of the republican party coming from a place where republican means confederate flag stickers, guns, and getting into fights at a bar over chicken wings (not even joking). But, fuck it. Can't blame you for being close minded; that's what 99% of the planet is. But America's supposed to be better, and this fighting we do is what makes it so. That's how we make bloody fucking sure what we do is as on the level as it can be.
So this liberal hypocrisy, is it something like falling in love with a woman from the other side of the ethnic line? I didn't think so. Hush now, you sound really silly. Now, I'm not saying there's a bunch of fake liberals out there that are racist when no one with a moral conscience is looking; I'm just saying real liberals do what they fuckin say.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
Your math must be broken. Seriously.
5000 hours of saving say 50W is 250Kwh saved. Are you really saying that the price-difference between the low-energy bulb and the normal one was more than $25 dollars ? If so, I suggest you buy your bulbs elsewhere. Hell, for that price you could have them FedExed from Europe, and it'd be cheaper by far.
In short: I don't believe you.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=177585 &cid=14740465
... is a stark raving bozo. Why does he get a respectful hearing, anywhere?
Dog is my co-pilot.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to meet our increasing energy demands. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(*) Reserves on paper don't necessarily translate to barrels.
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
(*) The market is not omnipotent and has failed before.
( ) It will delay the crisis by two weeks and then we'll be worse off when started
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(*) You base conclusion on 19th century science.
(*) Oil has no economically scalable alternative as of today
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge/Impossible infrastructural investment required to use alternatives to oil
(*) Discovery of new oil sources surpassed by consumption in the 80s and its effects today
(*) Effects of 33 out of the 44 main oil producing countries already in a decline
(*) EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) ratio of alternative energy sources
(*) The amount of energy provided by alternative energy sources vs. the energy needed by global economy
(*) Transportation/conservation issues of alternative energy sources
(*) Alternative energy sources requiring hidden oil investment (shadow power generators for wind energy, fertilizers for ethanol production, etc.)
(*) Huge reserves of oil in oil sand/shales have very small EROEI ratio compared to traditional oil sources and no sizeable infrastructure is in place.
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Not everyone wants to return to an agrarian/feudal/stone aged civilization
(*) Environmental issues would arise or cause serious problems because of the proposed solution
(*) Ideas similar to yours are often repeated, yet none have ever been shown to be working under the condictions we face.
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
(*) Convincing ourselves that $Deity or $Mysterious_force will take care of our $Problem may be comforting, but is not in our best interest.
(*) Putting faith in the mass wisdom of people when monetary and economic factors are in play is stupid.
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(*) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
(The following form has been adapted by me from the Automated Spam Response form and is in public domain)
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
For economies based on cheap (ie I'm personally happy that it's going away; the sooner the better. The oil industries have a strangle hold on energy policy at the moment (here in the UK tax on bio-diesels is actually higher than on normal diesel, which itself is higher than on petrol. Enviromentally regressive taxation... go figure.), when oil goes away that will hopefully be removed to some extent.
Look at the american and european figures near the bottom. See them grow!
wow what nonsense. I guess things would be different if you explained to the hypothetical non driver how much fuel was needed to power the hummer and the prius? I reckon if aliens landed and observed people filling up their tanks, they would assume that the ones driving a hummer to work were mentally ill. Especially if the aliens were vulcans, as that would be so 'illogical captain'.
Ok I lost it towards the end a bit...
You can make whatever silly arguments you like to justify driving your SUV. nobody with a brain will be fooled though.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
what they think about the beauty of this Right Wing free market economy.
Or better yet, ask their dead ancestors. All 100-200 million of them.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The western world - and china and india - should follow Japan's example:
"Japan, the world's second-largest economy, has no domestic sources of fossil fuel and, facing rising oil prices, has turned energy efficiency into an art form. Japan's oil consumption has remained steady since 1975, while world consumption has risen steadily. It has dramatically diversified its power sources over the years, becoming far less dependent on oil and cultivating a culture of conservation."
The real kicker:
"We recognise that there is an important environmental issue at stake, but economically it has also worked out for us," said Hiroshi Nakashima, a manager at Nippon Steel. "Improved energy efficiency means we need to buy less fuel, and that saves money. Otherwise, we never would have done it."
Save money == increased profits. You got to spend money to create it.
and not a sky elevator in sight.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
If only!
The problem is that without short-term subsidies for alternative energy, the prices of necessary goods will rise before they begin to fall. And alternative energy sources are far too expensive for anybody to afford them: if petrol has to get that expensive first, before alternative fuels become cheaper, then we're shafted. We're seeing this happening already; petrol actually hit a pound {=US$1.74, according to Google} in parts of the UK for awhile last year, though it's back down to about 90.2p {=US$1.57} UK average {source}. This will cause problems. People have to travel to work; for many, increased fuel prices will mean that more of the working day is spent just offsetting the cost of transport there and back, and less money is available for other essentials such as food, clothing and household bills {which will also be more expensive}. For those already on the breadline {and I should know -- I've been there myself}, this may be too much; they will be forced to quit jobs they can't afford to travel to, and they won't even be able to sell their cars -- who is going to want to buy a bottomless pit just to throw money into it?
Now, this situation has been building up gradually, over the years. The Government are not without fault for treating the motorist as a cash cow to be milked whenever they feel like it; fuel tax {which everyone pays; even non-motorists are paying it indirectly through public transport and delivery costs} has been used as a major source of revenue which should have been coming from higher-rate income tax {"from each according to their ability" and all that}. The law begins from the standpoint that car ownership is a luxury and car owners are the minority; but the practical reality of the situation in Britain today is that, outside of London, car ownership is a necessity: non-car-ownership is, to all intents and purposes, a disability. People are forced to commute, sometimes over obscene distances, just because jobs are so scarce and moving house is so expensive.
Capitalism does not work, because it discriminates against the poor in favour of the rich. Imagine a poker table where one player has more chips than the others put together; now that player can be fairly sure of winning all the chips, almost irrespective of what cards are dealt. If you don't play, you can't lose -- but you can't win either. With so many at the table, it's essential to have good cards to open. With so few chips in front of each player, the only way anyone has a chance to win is by going all-in -- at which point our high-roller's losses are limited, even if their cards are only mediocre, and if they're good cards then somebody will be leaving the table.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Yup, as my T-shirt says, "British by birth, English by the grace of God" Just ask any Englishman what he thinks of the French, we've been at war for something like 900 years and at peace with the "entente cordiale" for the past 100 or so. It's not just either, Both the french and Italians, (with whom I work daily) both hate, or at least express a strenuous dislkie of, the French. The Governemnts may get on like a house on fire, not so the normal volk. While you're at it you may want to check the fuel efficiency stats of the beefiest Ford Fiesta in the UK, it's a "hot hatch" beloved of boy racers, and even with a tricked out engine, it'll still give you 50-60Mpg. 30Mpg, is considered laughable in the UK these days, 10-20 years ago consumers may have bought one, but times have changed. So much so that almost everyone I know who dirives in the UK drives a Diesel, they're cheaper and you don't have so many problems with the electrics in cold weather. Still, Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and all that. I don't drive, I walk everywhere or take public transport, since getting married I've been doing a lot of ride sharing with the wife, it's cheaper than the train for long distances generally. Got from Frankfurt to Budapest for 50 Euro's each last New Year.
errm.. what exactly is your problem? I took the population of china to be 1.5 billion, 10 percent of which is 150 million (or 130 million as in your case) and 30% of 300 million for the US is 90 million... I think you need to go back to grade school before making stupid comments like that!
Is cycling ok?
Did you make that bike yourself?
Then probably not.
Life is too short to proofread.
.... creates a lot of wealth in the metropoli while making life in the colonies missery.
Those pesky Europeans, so clever and superior they are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Some of us don't even have the luxury of a garden ;)
I suppose the question is, how does this compare to the average amount of farmland per person.
Also, at this point you're supposed to consider either taking out a loan and improving the energy efficency of your house, or consider moving.
If you had bought a car which only got 5 miles to the gallon, would you be arguing along the same lines? Gas used to be cheap enough to drive it, but now it's not. You will have to make some changes.
At this point it's obvious that depending on a limited natural resource is a bad idea. Yet so many people depend on it to cook and heat their house. At least with electricity you can have power plants of various types and sizes that can produce it.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Feh. Civilizatoin wouldn't collapse. Food is still tansferable by train. Nuclear power works just fine. I can do my job just as well at home from my PC, I don't *need* to commute every morning to work, my bosses just want me in the building.
You know, those guys who only communicate by email?
Most towns and citys were founded before the automobile, once gas becomes too expensive for the average person to drive or fly, then you'll see modern communities change to look more like the old cities.
Things change man. Be prepared.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Yes, runaway inflation is bad.
However, the price for a barrel of oil has almost doubled in the past three years.
Inflation for 2005 has gone up...to match what it was for 2000. About 3.4 percent.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Plus the capital cost of the air pumps, pipes and dehumidification gear.
And don't forget operations and maintenance.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Sustainability and energy independence essay
If you are beating your wife, perhaps someone should invade your home.
Of course, you might go ahead and shoot the invader, your wife, and yourself, despite the fact that the long-term results may be worse than just not beating your wife anymore.
I was not aware that they did not operate the same. It seems a much more attractive option for hedging and speculating now that I know that all you can lose is your initial investment.
Of course, finding someone to sell you a call on oil might be a little tough right now with the whole Iran situation.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I should introduce you to the basics of economics some time. Read about specialisation.
Gardens for growing are a luxury everyone should have. The problem is that many people don't want to grow their own veggies, in which case maybe the land is better used at a higher density.
I don't know what the average farmland per person is, I recall it being something like 2ha per person in the US and AU. But that would include animal space and water catchment space and so on.
Anything that doesn't lead to us eventually leaving the planet, then the solar system is a waste
Wow, that's a pretty extreme statement. I wonder -- what exactly is the benefit of getting off the planet? I'm all for progress and I'm a fan of sci-fi, but getting off the planet is incredibly impractical as a short or medium term goal for humanity. Even as a long term goal it's probably not a particularly great idea. It's certainly cool sounding, but I don't see it having a wonderful impact on the fundamentals of human life.
What exactly is our aim in getting off the planet? If it's to find another place to live? Well, not in this solar system. And not in any of the stars that are within a lifetimes' journey. And why do we want to find a different planet to live on? The chances are astronomical that we'd find anything we could live on naturally or convert ourselves or the environment of sufficiently. And even if we did we get... what? More space? More resources? For how long?
Now, one could say "where would we be if the ancient explorers had thought like that?". But it's not really the same thing. The ROI for those kind of efforts were quite favorable in comparison. Exploration beyond our solar system is not a variation in degree, it is a variation in kind. The laws of physics limit us. And the potential payoff is not that great.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or that I don't think it's worth thinking about. But I think the more interesting exploration is in another direction -- understanding the chaotic nature of massive network interactions; like a brain or a society. These are the explorations that will have a greater impact on the human condition.
In the meantime, conservation of this planet is a pretty good idea.
Cheers.
Sometimes it can make sense to own two vehicles, especially if you drive a lot or live in the country. I own a "road warrior" vehicle, a 2000 Accord I brought new and drive almost 30,000 miles a year. It is comfortable and dependable, handles well, has good performance, and gets almost 30 mpg. It definitely has major issues hauling things like lumber, plywood, cow manure, etc, and has real trouble with deep snow.
Enter my other vehicle, a 12 year old 4WD F-150 with 180.000 miles on it that is hard to park, gets about 15 mpg, and drives like -- a truck. I only drive it 3 or 4 thousand miles a year, either when the snow seriously starts to fly, when I need a ton of gravel, organic fertilizer, or to haul a big load of stuff home from Home Depot. It also makes an adequate backup vehicle when my other car is in the shop, so I don't have to rent a car or pay a premium for someone who will fix it fast, when I could fix it myself given a little time and something to run around in in the meantime. Adequate pickups for second vehicle status can be had for a couple of thousand bucks or less.
The big thing that stinks about one person owning two vehicles is that the DMV and the insurance companies seem to think that you should pay almost as much for the second vehicle as the first even though you can only drive one at a time. Regrettably, there isn't much you do except pay cash for the old truck to avoid having to shell out for collision coverage.
This strategy works better out in the country, where parking is plentiful and insurance rates are lower. In more crowded urban areas, insurance and parking costs tend to make owning 2 vehicles a less attractive proposition.
removes huge amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Not by itself it doesn't. I wondered where that 10,000 gallons/acre figure came from. Obviously it comes out of a smoke stack.
You might say this system prevents carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, but even that isn't honest. More like, it delays carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere. That would be honesty.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Deeper drilling for oil has pressure limits. Below 15,000 feet, the pressure is high enough that there's usually only natural gas, not oil. The deepest oil well currently producing in California is 14,570 feet deep. Occidental once drilled to 24,426 feet, but it was a dry hole.
Now, I'm all for not buying more vehicle than necessary, but expecting the masses to convert to bicycle is not realistic. Sure, I'll pull the bike out for a trip to the convenience store, but I cannot commute to work without traversing a glaciated valley on a high-speed arterial; a bicycle commute would take 4 hours a day. I would very much like the option, but any home within a practical bicycle commute would subject my family to high crime rates and abysmal schools.
My wife's job (and less often, mine) frequently requires meeting people at the airport, so less than a mid-size sedan is simply not practical for us. I favored compact cars before, but now drive my wife's high-odometer cast-offs when they are too superannuated for her use, but not quite junkers yet.
OK, so I was lashing out at the French before but you English deserve a whack as well. To me the English are the most malicious and sarcastic people of Europe (But not without a sense of humour). Example: Last time I went on a flight to London Heathrow, this English bloke takes off his laptop backpack and hits the American college backpacker behind him. The American politely asked him to be careful to which the English guy (now very annoyed) replied that he (the American) should try to learn some manners and speak proper English. I was gobsmacked. So was the American.
:-).
But your comment on the fuel efficiency of European cars is dead on. Coincidentially, I had my 100 hp Fiesta (2nd car) delivered yesterday. Finally (13 years too late), I can make by boy racer dreams come true
It's an extremely long term goal. His point is simple: The Earth is eventually going to become uninhabitable, whether it be by human action or enviromental(giant asteroids count). Eventually our sun will die, taking out the earth in the later stages if it hasn't already been lost.
It came up in a discussion where a guy was talking about how we should return to 'sustainable' living, which in his mind was native american level technology, with few exceptions. He was really against the science program.
Please note that he and I are very loose in our definition of 'Anything'. For example, one could argue that a PRT system or fission plants 'aren't doing anything to get us off the planet', but in our minds, it's an advance, a more efficient use of resources, technological advancement, more research. Ethanol, Biodiesel, they may not be the fuel of space, or even of the future, but it'll let us keep working when the oil runs out.
What exactly is our aim in getting off the planet? If it's to find another place to live? Well, not in this solar system.
Midterm, and I'm talking millennium here, I do want to see us getting off the planet. It is going to be expensive, but we can colonize Mars. We have most of the science needed already. While we're at it, we might as well put a test colony on the moon. Heck, they can put satellites in geosync for us cheaper(in launch energy terms) than we can. At least once they can make them from native materials.
Long Term? Well, as long as we escape the solar system a safe time before it goes up, or is eaten by a black hole, etc. I'm happy.
what? More space? More resources? For how long?
Until they run out, or we discover the 'reset' switch, a way to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, or that I don't think it's worth thinking about. But I think the more interesting exploration is in another direction -- understanding the chaotic nature of massive network interactions; like a brain or a society. These are the explorations that will have a greater impact on the human condition.
Good for you! But see above, we don't measure 'worthy' development as only space related ones. Anything that improves the human condition is a step in the right direction. Eliminate Alzheimer's disease? Great, we don't loose as many scientists to it. Heck, a greater understanding of the brain and it's networks can only help with crew selection and psyiological health during a long isolated mission.
In the meantime, conservation of this planet is a pretty good idea.
Read above about ethanol, biodiesel, PRT, nuclear power.
If you read my posts, you'll find that I support conservation, it's just that I believe in technological solutions, and that we really can have our cake, and eat it too in this case(cause we've made more than one). I'm really fond of the PRT system, I'd like to get a pluggable hybrid(no gas for my commute!), I'd like to shut down the coal plants and go all nuclear for the baseline. For that matter, there's industries that could operate on a stuttering fashion to flatten out the power curve even more so you don't need as much burst generation capacity. We're getting better with ethanol and biodiesel, so make my hybrid an alternative fuels vehicle.
I don't read AC A human right
That's not an argument.
Yes, people specialize.
That's really peripheral. Point is, there's no way you're buying a bike whose production didn't involve the consumption of "non-renewable" resouces.
The only way that's going to be avoided is if you build it yourself using carefully selected materials.
Life is too short to proofread.
"No one anticipated what a catastrophe George W. Bush would be as President. But now is not the time for the blame game"
More accurately, those who did were silenced by those who could.
If now is not the time to not only blame, but demand accountability, then when? After they've gotten away with it?
After their propaganda machine has re-written history and made their collosal blunders smell like roses?
The Neo-Con approach has been to cheat their way into power,
re-write the rules of the game to get "No one anticipated what a catastrophe George W. Bush would be as President. But now is not the time for the blame game"
More accurately, those who did were silenced by those who could.
If now is not the time to not only blame, but demand accountability, then when? After they've gotten away with it?
After their propaganda machine has re-written history and made their collosal blunders smell like roses?
The Neo-Con approach has been to cheat their way into power,
re-write the rules of the game to get away with their crimes for as long as possible, cloud what they do in secrecy and calls for patriotism, then, like the 12-step addict, loudly out-scream any objections with denials, lies, and pointed fingers until some other incident takes them off stage and back into obscurity.
(How can anyone take their spokespersons seriously anymore?)
All this effort has been centered on keeping Elites in power and above the laws that are driving the rest of society into the shithouse. Not just above the law, but beyond it's reach in the push to transnationalize as global privatized overlords.
Our governmental and media Institutions are either complicit or cowards.
When the privilidged and wealthy abdicate their responsibility to those on whose backs they aquired their status they forfeit any entitlements. In other times these ruthless elites got trampled by the masses, a la tzarist Russia.
The global success of Capitalism has brought greater in-equity than ever before. The "Ownership Society" is as big a myth as Shrubs' "Responsible Government". As the wars over resources like Oil and Water heat up, as the lies become evermore transparent, as more and more of the world reject the "American Dream" as one that only works for Americans at everyone elses expense, blame is the one thing you can count on. Unfortunately, by that time the people responsible will be beyond reproach, having set up some poor schmuck to take the fall for them. (Chavez anyone?)
Massive protest is the reactionary expression of pointing blame.
Blame for stealing our votes, for stealing our hard-earned money, for stealing our precious resources, for stealing our future.
To paraphrase one of the characters in "Kite Runner"; there is only one sin and that is theft. Theft of the truth, of life and liberty, of one's human rights.
Our Country is in the hands of theives and pirates, they've got the sheriff and judge in their collective pockets and have extended their reach worldwide (Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman" ) Welcome to the Coup.away with their crimes for as long as possible, cloud what they do in secrecy and calls for patriotism, then, like the 12-step addict, loudly out-scream any objections with denials, lies, and pointed fingers until some other incident takes them off stage and back into obscurity.
(How can anyone take their spokespersons seriously anymore?)
All this effort has been centered on keeping Elites in power and above the laws that are driving the rest of society into the shithouse. Not just above the law, but beyond it's reach in the push to transnationalize as global privatized overlords.
Our governmental and media Institutions are either complicit or cowards.
When the privilidged and wealthy abdicate their responsibility to those on whose backs they aquired their status they forfeit any entitlements. In other times these ruthless elites got trampled by the masses, a la tzarist Russia.
The global success of Capitali
resist propaganda
Specialisation is an argument, it's a very strong argument, indeed, it's the basis of modern (agricultural) society. It is often not possible for a generalist to make something as efficiently or as efficient as a mass produced device - why don't you make your own computer, I bet that produces more CO2 and wastes more oil in its production and use than my (much heavier) bike? 100W for a year is equivalent to 100 gallons of oil in energy alone.
There is no point is me trying to hand craft a bike from scratch - I will waste far more resources (due to faulty designs, tooling up, chasing up suitable materials, taking small deliveries of parts) than buying a commercial one. If you were serious about your position you wouldn't have had time to post that message, as you would be too busy organising food.
Everything is non-renewable, as everything is powered by increasing entropy. One day the universe is going to coool down, and there'll be no more work, and there'll be no more heat. Yeah, that's entropy man. I don't care about using non-renewable resources, I care about using an unsustainable rate of non-renewable energy. If western (and developing) societies weren't so busy burning oil we'd have millenia of oil available, and most of what we used could be reused and recycled over and over. When my bicycle dies I'll probably use the steel frame for some project, or send the whole thing to a scrap merchant who'll recover 80% of the initial energy as new metal.
If you made a company that sold 100% sustainable (defined as say carbon neutral, 100% post-consumer recycled) bicycles with comparable features to a mass produced one, I'll buy one from you.
Finally, a bicycle is about 5 times as efficient as a person walking, even on compacted dirt. A human produces about 100W riding a bike, which would be equivalent to 500W walking at the same speed (or realistically, for 1/5 as long), Thus riding 1 hour each day corresponds to producing 0.4kWh (this is the same calculation people use for renewable energy). This means that me riding to work each day might produce 100kWh a year, equivalent to 11 gallons of oil made per year over walking.
Yes, it's worse for the environment to walk than to ride!
I feel like I'm on the show "Sliders", GWB, Lovelock, and me agree on nuclear power, what's next, dogs having sex with cats?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The thing is that if you want to find more crude oil, you will have to go offshore out into the Continental Shelf areas of the oceans. That isn't cheap, but at current per barrel prices it's actually now profitable to do it.
But exploiting oil-laden algae could become the next big thing. Because oil-laden algae grows so fast and it's easy to process these algae into diesel fuel and the closely-related heating oil, with the right production process we could essentially have an unlimited supply of these fuels.
Gothca. I see where you're coming from. I guess that if you cast the net that wide, then I agree. I am a big fan of technology, and I think it's the key to surviving our population growth and making the quality of life better for everyeon. I tend to think far more in short to mid term goals, but you're probably right that all that progress will eventually add up to leaving the planet.
Cheers!
1) people working less
2) corruption/market inefficiency
3) crime
In the end, you're working for nothing -- maybe a few posessions and nice clothes and being able to go out every weekend, but really just nothing. And don't think, if you do have a nice job, your job can't be outsourced or automated. At the cost of energy and the price of foreign labor, you can always be replaced. You can expect it to come right before you have your mortgage paid off.
So, in the end, I'll accept your argument that cities justify themselves. And I'll just say "we'll see". When the oil runs out and we realize coal is slowly killing us, we'll see how many cities make it on their own, how many whine to the government for aid, and how many get planes flown into their tallest buildings and collect the insurance.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
We are sarcastic, I'll give you that, but that's just part of the culture, sarcasm is humour, it's just part of daily life. We don't have the politeness thing in the UK. If somebody says "have a nice day" in the UK, we assume you're either trying to be ironic, which may or may not be funny. and/or you're "taking the piss" which again may or may not be funny depending on the mood and the day.
5 9
But malicious I think is the wrong word, larcenous, devious, even anarchistsic, yes. But we rarely do things to intentionly harm others. If we mean to hurt you we will acknowledge and revel in the fact that you feel agreived. Now admitedly most of the rest of the "English speaking" world dont understand the brits, becuase they're never sure when we're joking or not, most of the time we are, just as most people don't understand the joke.
I guess you would have to be a brit, or at least spend a few years in the UK, before you fully understood why we behave the way we do. We loathe (with a passion) people who try to be sincere, (whether real or not) people who try to speak from the moral high ground, (like our prime minister for example) public piety will be ridiculed. We know people are crap, so attempts to holier than thou, are frankly, "just asking for it"
The truth is, we don't like being mistaken for Americans, and we're very territorial about our language, it would be OK, if the rest of world understood that you speak American, which is not English. But by and large they don't. So much as with the hacker/cracker debate and the geek/nerd thing. We get annoyed and a little testy about it, especially in times of stress. Fellow brits will understand this. The correct way to deal with a pissed off brit is to be sarcastic. Because we can take it, just as well as we can dish it out. Most people however, are just not used to such robust banter. It's common in the UK, to address your best mates using the two worst swear words in the English language, (tw*t & c*nt) As in "hello you tw*t" This is not malicious, this is a fraternal greeting. I apprecite that you don't undertand this, but it is true.
I would urge you to try and get hold of some UK magazines, or even some UK books that deal with popular culture, this one is recent and a good place to start: http://eatsshootsandleaves.com/
Similarly, this one is also good: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/03408188
Having said that, my wife is "a foriegner" and having read the book, doesn't believe it, more I think because she doesn't understand it. But so it goes, you can lead a horse to water and all that.
Should you ever got bored of the Fiesta, try a VW Golf, they're good too.
Oh, a constructive comment on borderline flamebait! Sorry, but I had to add you to my Friends list.
;-).
W.r.t. English popular culture, I'm all with you there, Hell, I even have Black Books 1-3, Coupling 1-3, Bottom -an arse oddity, Father Ted 1-3 (don't know if that counts), Extras 1, Doctor Who New Series 1 (This one really makes the new Battlestar Galactica look like a soap opera. Once you meet the doctor, you can't turn back). I could even impersonate a northener, back in the time I had daily contact to one. So I do understand the sarcasm and the resentment of public piety, which I share with you.
But I always had a hard time accepting what I seem to have interpreted as malice. Another example: I was attending a summer course in Oxford and was surprised to see how much piss-taking the Irish were exposed to from the English. I felt a bit bad for them, but they seemed to ignore all the comments completely. Apparently, there was another layer of the discussion which I didn't understand. I guess I stand corrected, and a lot of situations make sense, now.
In the interest of self-critisim, here's a link to a book written by a handful of British authors exiled in my country. It contains some brilliant bits which I interpreted as malice up until now. My wife (she's also a "foreigner") laughed her head off.
Well, I'll be off then, you old w*nker
Friends list?!? (oh the shame of it... :)
:) does indeed count.
:)
:P
The Brits have a deep respect for the Irish, not least for the fact that they setup "Irish pubs" all over the world, which the expat brits happily drink in. Because a pub is not a bar. This is something that is lost on most people, but not on the people of Great Britian and Ireland. But I digress... The Irish are the butt of many jokes, I imagine the Americans have a race who are the butt of such humour, just as the Germans take the piss out of the "ossies" (east Germans) and every other race I've ever met, does the same to somebody else.
If you want real brit humour, try "the office", the brit version, not the watered down US variant. Then there is "the league of gentlemen" Which is perverted, bizzare, sadistic, and outrageously funny. Though Father Ted "Girls! Arse! Feck!"
As for the Danes, yes, I've known a few, and the xenophobes books are great, got those for my wife too, the one about Germans is a hoot
W*nker, moi? Surely you jest
I guess we all have our scapegoats. In Luxembourg all the foreigners make fun of the Luxembourgish. The place _is_ way out in the boonies (slightly rural ;-)with the accompanying mentality and that makes them easy victims of homesick foreigners.
The Office is one of my favourites. David Brent (Gervais) makes my toes cringe to the degree that I need a rolling pin to straighten them out again. But after the Dr. Who tardis ed. & Father Ted box set purchases in just one month, my account for useless toss needs a rest.
I used to watch League of Gentlemen when it was broadcast on Danish telly, which was bizarre and great in the beginning, but after a couple of episodes, the bizarreness (?) of it all caught up with me and left my head slightly spinning. And I thought I could cope with abstract humour.
The xenophobe's book mentions the literate-mindedness of the Danes. I guess that prevented me from understanding how deep British sarcasm actually is.
Btw. the reason I went for the Fiesta was the price, engine power vs. weight ratio, equipment and mileage. The VW Golfs are a bit pricey around these parts and they always have at least 100000 km on the clock. Also, I need to start my new job next month and a used car hunt can be quite time consuming. Especially, if you need to wind down all the activities/doing hand-overs in your old job at the same time.
Cheers, you old toss pot. Somehow tw*t and c*nt don't seem appropriate...
My wife just doesn't understand "the office" she refuses to watch it as "the people are so crap" but then she's of the "endless improvement" mindset, I think it bothers her that people should find such crapness, funny :)
:)
:P
:) Ah, the memories. [sigh] :)
"the league of..." doesn't always work, some of it is just so grotesque and bizzare, but when it works it's a thing of beauty. Like the guy who wants the top shelf magazine about "dogs arses", the transexual taxi driver, and the monstrously unsympathetic unemployment officer
Sarcasm, irony & understatement are the meat and drink of daily life in the UK, which is why, "not bad" is the highest of compliments. But like I say, if ever you're wondering if the brits are joking, it safe to assume they are, unless they're about to hit you...
Toss pot! I've not been called that in years!
throwing away 4 others...
It's not like we really had them to begin with. It's like, there are 5 barrels there that we could have with a more efficient process, but we only get 1.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Might want to peruse some of my other comments. Believe me, I'm all about the accountability. The .sig is an ironic riff on the statements made during Katrina. Specifically, Jon Stewart's quip one night that those who don't want to play the "blame game" are typically the ones to blame.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
That might be good advice, if not for the trend toward hybrid vehicles. The secret of hybrids' efficiency is that the gasoline engine almost always runs at whatever number of RPMs maximizes efficiency for that engine. At low speeds, when that much power is not needed, the surplus power goes toward charging the battery. When the car needs more power than can be generated by the gas engine running at the optimum RPM, intead of throttling up the gas engine, it sends some volts to the electric motor[s].
The smallish gas engines in hybrid vehicles work fine with our current octane ratings. It wouldn't make much sense to add a turbocharger to a hybrid.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.