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'Peak Wood' Offers Parallels For Our Time
Harperdog sends in a piece from Miller McCune looking back at the history of mankind's relationship with virgin timber. Again and again, civilizations have faced a condition of "peak wood," and how they handled it (or failed to) illuminates the current situation with regard to oil. The piece ends with a quote from the 19th-century social scientist and communist theorist Friedrich Engels, who is not generally thought of as an environmental seer: "What did the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down the forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained sufficient fertilizer from the ashes for one generation of highly profitable coffee trees, care that the heavy tropical rains later washed away the now unprotected upper stratum of the soil and left only bare rock behind? ... Let us not flatter ourselves on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first."
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond (who also wrote "Guns, Germs, and Steel") covers several historical cases of societies that collapsed. Deforestation is the main trigger that comes up in most of the stories. He also makes parallels to our current relationship with oil.
First against the wall when the revolution comes
Please stop using "Peak" when referring to non-oil resources. Wood is renewable. The production of wood can be sustained, or can be engineered to increase over time, depending on management resource. You can't do that with a finite resource like oil. And don't use the term for mineral resources either. You can almost always find another deposit, with a slightly lesser yield than the one you just mined. That continues until you are mining the ocean for elements. It's a matter of how economic the resource is to mine. Oil is none of that. You can't find 0.5ppm oil in some soil somewhere like you can with gold or uranium or neodymium or whatever fearmongering element you wish to be afraid about.
In that the societies mentioned were consuming much faster than the resource could renew itself, I think it to be a valid comparison. Nothing mentioned in the article involved replanting of trees, to my knowledge, but maybe someone knows differently.
Or, someone could read about the idea and see it is considered bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
Forests in the US have been increasing for almost the past 60 years. More wood is grown than harvested by a ratio of 3:1, and significant acreage has been returned to forests, in part because more responsible timber farms have been created over the decades. We may have at one time reached peak wood, but usage and growth patterns changed, and that is no longer the case.
Other nations may have problems with their forests, but the US is not one that does.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Not sure where you got your quote from, but it wasn't from the link you gave, and the entire site doesn't hold a single reference to Yukos. Not completely surprising, because it is the webpage for International Continental Scientific Drilling Program - nothing to do with Yukos. Not to mention that drilling a super-deep well has nothing to do with whether the drill probe found an economically viable field.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Look up thermal depolymerisation - changing organic waste into long-chain hydrocarbons can be done using fairly straightforward refinery processes (cycles of controlled changes in pressure & temperature). It's a fairly artificially-accelerated process (since we don't have millions of years to wait for the oil to come out), but it does show how patterns of changes in pressure & temperature can create long-chain hydrocarbons from basic organic waste.
How many of those particles should we find, as a percentage, of any given biological mass? 1%? .0001%? Does that account for the quantities of He found accompanying natural petroleum deposits?
Probably not. There's no need for the oil source to be the same as the Helium source. The most likely source of all the helium in a petroleum deposit is the radioactive material in the rocks in and below the deposit's formation. For example, the amount of Americium found in your smoke detector creates 30,000 alpha particles per second, a kilogram of Uranium ore produces 25,000,000 per second (scroll down a bit to see the activity rates table in the linked reference). Since alpha particles are equivalent to ionized Helium nuclei, ore and mineral deposits that generate alpha particles are basically Helium sources. The Helium migrates upwards until it's trapped by the same formation that prevents the upwards migration of underground hydrocarbons.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I know you were talking about communism, not socialism, but at least according to some measures there's more social mobility in socialist Norway than in the capitalist US. BBC News.
Oil, unless you subscribe to one of the abiotic origins/provided by Jesus to empower the American Way of Life(tm) theories, is in more or less fixed supply.
Some of the theories are pretty crazy. For example, the Brazilians are under this bizarre mass delusion that they're using around 25% renewable oil in their cars.
Norway is not Socialist. It is Social Democratic, that is, the economic and political system can be summarized by the popular catch phrase Capitalism with a human face.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
It has a faint ring of no true Scotsman [wikipedia.org] to it.
Except it's not, so... nice try.
If someone says "some triangles have four sides" and then point to a square, and I say "that's not a triangle, you fucking idiot", that's not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Similarly, communism is *defined* by the works of Marx. He invented it, ffs! So if someone goes and claims the USSR was an example of communism, and I say "no, that's not communism", that's a valid argument because we *have* a complete definition of what communism is, and the USSR never fit that definition, despite what the red scare mongers would have you believe.