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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."
Life has unforeseen consequences.
Engels (as in Marx & Engels) is one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto and largely a lot of the Communist doctrine. To use a quote from him and his research to debate oil usage would be pure suicide on a political realm because your opponent would have an easy time pointing out that a socialist -- possibly one of the earliest socialists -- did research to point out the horrors that Capitalism wrought upon the environment. The resulting suggestion for Cap and Trade or retarding economic growth in the name of environmental consciousness would be taken up by the opposition as the evil socialism from the old enemy of Communist USSR and readily gobbled down by the older American people. Because it's fairly common for the American people to choose to see things in black and white where someone is either 100% wrong or 100% correct. Complete and utter bullshit but that's the logic the summary will invoke and it would be impossible to use this logic in any sort of debate. To further this comparison in the United States at least, you'd do better to just re-research Engels' work looking at Peak Wood instead of trying to quote or cite him.
My work here is dung.
by design; we do not conserve, we consume.
Changing to cultivation is a relatively new thing, and we're really novices at it given things like the dust bowl were only 75 years ago.
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
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource. We can plant more and within enough time for it to be economical there is more timber. For oil to be a renewable resource we are going to have to bury a lot of organic material for a long time.
Enigma
"What lessons from the multiple experiences of Peak Wood can today’s society learn for addressing global peak oil?" - On the surface it would seem that the lesson is that eventually a new resource will come along that made all the worrying about the dwindling resource irrelevant.
Yes, I did read it.
The parallels to the lust of wood with the lust of oil seem to be fairly well made in the whole ravaging thing.
But what I found to be the most unfortunate part of oil vs. trees is that in the past we could always go out and explore because the world wasn't completely explored. Nowadays, we know where most? oil reserves are so the old idea of "Well we're running out, let's go find some more!" doesn't work at all.
Looking at the way we've been treating oil so far, it really seems like people are still stuck in that mindset. Folks just recently seemed to realize that when we're out of oil we're out of oil. And that's probably what hurt us the most in the present day. The article speaks of unforeseen consequences, but we seem to be ignoring the simple, foreseeable consequence of having no oil.
Well, hope solar, nuclear, and all of that turns out well. Wouldn't want to go back to pre-industrial times due to lack of energy.
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.
which is the best story of what happens when human overpopulate and use up all the resources (civilization collapse is the result)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Easter_Island#Pre-European_society
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Heartening than they appear. 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. The exact number varies based on the price and the available technology, which dictate exactly how crazy the techniques are that you are willing to use to get at the stuff; but it is more or less fixed. You can't have "sustainable" oil production by making sure only to harvest adult oil and restore any juvenile oil you accidentally catch back to its natural habitat.
Forests, on the other hand, are a population, not a mineral resource. If you are willing to forgo some short-term profit, you can generate modest returns more or less in perpetuity. If you aren't, you'll find yourself with a fancy new lunar resort. Anyone who destroys a biological resource isn't, as with a mineral resource, simply reaching the inevitable sooner rather than later, they are effectively pawning an annuity for pennies on the dollar.
With oil, the only real questions are 1). "Will we invest some of the convenient energy and chemicals in finding another source of the same before the first runs out?" and 2."How far will we go, in terms of sacrificing other resources(ie. drilling in the middle of highly productive fisheries or digging up large chunks of canada and boiling it down for tar) in order to secure that one?" There is no question of whether or not we will be "sustainable"; because, for mineral resources, there is no such thing, only a question of how fast you want to dig up the supply you have.
Before oil, there was a lot of clearcutting in the eastern US. A USA awash in oil can afford something like Shenandoah National Park and the Blueridge Parkway, with oil-fueled cars loaded with sightseers. If we don't manage to form a proper energy policy, the forest that we have "saved up" there will start to look like what it was in the 19th century: fuel for locomotives.
Of course, that probably won't happen until we blast the top off every mountain in West Virginia to get cola.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Or, someone could read about the idea and see it is considered bunk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
Roland Wright speaks eloquently of another tragedy of the commons involving timber. This one took place on Easter Island, and it is a stark reminder to us all of what may come from presuming that our resources are infinite or necessarily renewable.
Easter Island is barren now. It was once heavily forested. But, as Wright recounts, "The people who felled the last tree could see it was the last, could know with complete certainty that there would never be another. And they felled it anyway."
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1285440/posts
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
I hope the stockmarket will price oil properly when we reach the peak. I mean, there's too much money in stake for not doing so. When we'll have higher than 100$/barrel oil for an extended period without hope for it to become cheaper, that will enable green technologies.
Peak Whale Oil, for example. Of course, the rising cost of whale oil led to the development of new technologies and new sources of energy - like kerosene.
There are many, many, many examples of people pointing out the impossibility of then-present trends continuing. Of course, if trends can't continue, they won't.
If you want an American patriot as an example instead of Engels (communism! gasp, shock, horror) take a look at Gifford Pinchot. An early leader of the Conservation movement, first Chief of the US Forest Service, quite a guy. Peak timber, peak ore, peak coal - he wrote about 'em all, back in the day.
While it's well and good to be aware of these things, and the market tends to reward those who make some smart bets on that basis - human beings have always found ways to satisfy their wants. Some are more sustainable than others, but necessity is the mother of invention, and sustainability/entropy is really only a concern when faced with a finite "universe." Technology is the key that gets us out of that box, and if we have to consume resources in order to make new ones available to us, well - such is, has been, and will be life.
Comparing timber to oil is not a valid analogy because timber is a renewable resource.
True. The question is -- if we tend not to do well with even renewable resources, how well are we likely to do with exhaustibles... at least, without some greater discipline than we've got now?
Tweet, tweet.
If you're going to call something bunk, try to cite a reputable resource.
Why is is it that every time there's a weird theory floating around, someone comes up and says "The Russians did it/are using it, so it must be true", without there ever being a shred of evidence for the Russians either having used or done it?
Is it because it is so far away, or because some people can see it from their houses?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
From alpha decay of radioactive isotopes, same as most helium?
Methane atmospheres on other moons and planets, and "organic" molecules found in comets and other extra-terrestrial bodies seems to provide us at least some concrete examples of hydrocarbons without the prior presence of life. Asserting that this theory is bunk seems a bit of a stretch.
I know they've synthesized hydrocarbons using non-organic materials in a laboratory...has anyone ever compressed a dead fish or tree and created petroleum in a lab? I'd be very interested if anyone has a citation for that.
How many radioactive isotopes should we find in a dead dinosaur, on average?
Any time these conversations come up, the only real solution (reducing the population to about 2 billion) is ignored by everyone.
Which means, we really are not going to solve the problem before it blows up in our face.
Reduce the population to 2 billion and the earth becomes verdant and rich within 50 years.
It's possible to peacefully reduce the population to 3 billion in 50 years. Just stop saving people who have more than 1 child per 2 parents and stop providing tax incentives for second children.
But it's not going to happen. We are going to 9 and probably 11 billion people with all the hell that results from that.
By my current math, it happens a little while after I die.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
How about C14 for a start?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
That's what she said!
Liberty.
http://www.gasresources.net/DisposalBioClaims.htm
"C14 results from a high-energy reaction of the nitrogen nucleus, N14, with a high-energy cosmic ray particle."
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?
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.
With diminishing returns to investment in scientific research
Hasn't happened yet and that appears to be a fundamental precept of his argument. The thing people need to remember here is that there are other forces at work diminishing the return on investment for science. For example, the massive use of government funds worldwide, which by definition, allocates funds for political reasons (which often have nothing to do with practical or scientific goals).
"Fossil" fuels may not really be made out of fossils at all.
Yeah, that's what the dinosaurs want you to think.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
they have been doing timber farms for 50 years or more now. you don't know what your talking about
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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
As I get older, I wish I could get peak wood more often.
This is exactly what is happening. As well as exploiting third-world workers in sweat shops we are knowingly exploiting future generations.
The point is this article has the phrase 'Peak Wood' right there in the title, and no one has scored above 3 with a joke about erections as far as I can tell. What the hell happened to slashdot?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So essentially, mountains are the problem. I say level (some of) them. Use the rock to elevate the valleys, so you end up with huge (slightly curved, higher altitude) basins that will be fertile and won't wash away. Of course, you shouldn't be doing this to all mountains, because we like the fact that clean water runs down them and we can use the potential energy of high-up water for the generation of electricity.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
While it is somewhat true to say that the USSR was never a true communism, that is more or less the same as the "No true Scotsman" fallacy. You are right in that it didn't function precisely how it should on paper. However, it is in fact how all communisms implemented in the real world have ended up.
The reason is because communism does not take real people in to account. Real people are lazy and greedy. There are exceptions to this in various circumstances and for various people but over all, yo find this is true. As such, any economic/social system has to take this in to account. If you give everyone free choice to do whatever they want, and have all their needs met, well then many will choose to do nothing.
The only solution in a communist system is to force people to do what is needed. You tell them "You must work or the state punishes you." Then, to make them work hard you tell them "You must meet these quotas or the state punishes you." Net effect? Low personal liberty, low motivation, and the perfect environment for a police state to grow in. The government has to be involved in everything since the state owns everything and has to keep tabs on people. In that controlling environment, a dictatorship/police state is easy to grow.
So sorry, communism may sound nice on paper but it has never worked in the real world on a large scale. As such, without evidence to the contrary, I'd say it is pretty safe to say it won't work. Capitalism, at least when subject to some regulation and control, works. It allows for societies with high individual liberties and where most people have their needs met. It's not perfect, but no endeavor involving humans will ever be.
Also if you really think that social class per Marx exists in America today, it tells me you spend far too much time absorbed in a philosophy you want to be true, and not enough time examining the evidence. The biggest difference is that there is complete class mobility. Nobody tells you that you are limited to the class in which you are born. Doesn't mean you can move up the economic ladder with ease, but it does mean you can. There are countless examples. This is far different from the system of nobility you saw in places like Czarist Russia where if you were born a noble, you were one and could more or less do nothing to lose it, and if you were born a peasant, you could never rise above that. In the US people can move up and down depending on what they do in their life. You can go from living on welfare to super rich, and indeed it has happened.
Another difference is that there is not a "rich/poor" divide. For sure there are rich people, who can have a kind of life normal people cannot, and there are poor people, who lack basic necessities. However most people are neither, they are somewhere in the middle. They have their needs met, have some autonomy and independence, but still work for a living. The middle class is where most of America is. You can also further divide that middle class in terms of how stable someone is in it, how many assets they have and so on. It is not a bourgeoisie / proletariat divide.
Finally there is the simple issue of definitions of rich, middle, and poor. What they talked about when they talked about poor was abject poverty, lacking in even the barest essentials. That is exceedingly rare in the US. Our poor are not, by the standards of much of the world and history. They do not have everything we consider essential, and they must rely on help, but they are not attempting to live through subsistence farming (which happens in much of the world).
To me, it sounds like you've spent far too much time reading philosophy and not enough time looking at the world, and its people. Communism is a neat idea, but it is not a better system.
Methane is CH4, so by chemist's definition, it is organic.
But that word doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means.
For trees to be renewable you have to replant them. Waiting for a forest to regrow on its own, especially if the soil has been washed away is going to take a while, they are still waiting for the Sahara to regrow its forests.
Peak wood is not an unknown issue, there was a real problem at one time with finding the right trees for constructing sailing ships. Ever needing to be bigger you needed good long solid trees for the keel and especially the masts. And such trees take a long time to grow, longer then it takes to cut them down for the next armada.
And don't think that peak oil is just a matter of cars. We can work around petrol, but plastic? All those electric cars got tons of plastics in them, and that requires oil as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It's not as if it grows on trees.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
After all - it is all just carbon atoms.
The only problem is that the catalyst necessary for the reaction is rather expensive.
There are also trademark and patent issues, so right now only it is only used on the Coca-Cola trademarked racing track.
Now... When we DO run out of oil, and if we DO find a natural source of cola that MIGHT bring the costs down enough for the whole thing to be economically viable.
Also, by then, most patents on the Coca-Cola car should run out.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Engels (as in Marx & Engels) is one of the authors of the Communist Manifesto and largely a lot of the Communist doctrine. To use a quote from him and his research to debate oil usage would be pure suicide on a political realm because your opponent would have an easy time pointing out that a socialist -- possibly one of the earliest socialists -- did research to point out the horrors that Capitalism wrought upon the environment. The resulting suggestion for Cap and Trade or retarding economic growth in the name of environmental consciousness would be taken up by the opposition as the evil socialism from the old enemy of Communist USSR and readily gobbled down by the older American people. Because it's fairly common for the American people to choose to see things in black and white where someone is either 100% wrong or 100% correct. Complete and utter bullshit but that's the logic the summary will invoke and it would be impossible to use this logic in any sort of debate. To further this comparison in the United States at least, you'd do better to just re-research Engels' work looking at Peak Wood instead of trying to quote or cite him.
If you fight our current system of depletion and debts, you will meet an opposition that will call you a socialist or a commie no matter what... You also will have to fight arguments which are not real arguments against your points, but merely statements meant to discredit you in person... Calling you a communist is a pretty good one.
You may as well just keep your references in tact and pretend to know a little history. If you plan to change the public opinion with facts, at least do it properly.
If you plan to do it any other way, I would propose a different strategy altogether. Scaremongering, attacking your opposition, oneliners and lies are the way to go then. Not a new objective research.
Somehow those two concepts just poped-up linked in my mind.
Just because methane can be made from enchiladas doesn't mean it can only be made from enchiladas.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
has anyone ever compressed a dead fish or tree and created petroleum in a lab? I'd be very interested if anyone has a citation for that.
Not just in a lab, it's been done on a commercial scale.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2005/02/01/8250633/index.htm
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Q: Why is starting a comment in the Subject: line incredibly irritating?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Not just Easter Island either. Scotland USED to have quite a dense pine forest until it was cleared for farming by humans. That meant the soil got poorer and now many places are UNABLE to support trees where there used to be loads of them.
Out of my underpants. Thanks and good night.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
You can plant trees and reap the timber in just a few decades. You can plan to create new oil, but the process takes 50 million years. There's a slight difference in practicality between the two.
We've become exceedingly good at forest management (except in California where they're so concerned about saving the poor underbrush that they'd rather burn down the entire forest, along with San Diego, than properly manage their forests). Timber is a renewable resource, whereas we are pretty sure oil is not.
We can manage timber to avoid "peak wood," but we cannot manage oil to avoid "peak oil," if such a thing exists.
Abiotic petroleum is not a good argument for using petroleum, though. Especially if you're a carbon-worrier: if the oil comes from deep within the earth, that means its carbon was never in the biosphere to begin with. It also doesn't bode well for renewability, since it suggests even longer timescales to produce.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
"History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man."
The issue is not the term "peak" I believe, the issue is the definition of renewable. We think of things like wood as renewable resources, but if you overuse a renewable resource, you can indeed collapse the population. We saw with whale oil in the 19th century, its production peaked in 1845. The reason for this was that whale populations had collapsed, and to this day they have not quite recovered for many (most?) of the species that were hunted. There was also that petroleum oil thing for which they started to drill.
The point is that whether a resource is renewable or not is a relative term. It's relative to the rate at which you are consuming it and the rate at which it is replenished. Petroleum oil, on a geologic time scale, is renewable. On a human time scale it is not. Whales were being consumed much faster than they were reproducing, so the resource became non-renewable (each year there were fewer and fewer whales). Wood is the same way, you see it again and again in ancient societies, that the ability to sustain themselves is dependent on availability of wood. Once the population gets too big and consumes all the wood in easy transport distance, the civilization is finished.
Do you see any hope that the U.S. can transition itself off of petroleum oil? I have my doubts, but I have no doubt that sometime in the first half of the next century oil production will stop increasing, if it hasn't already. Here's hoping for massive wind farms, solar arrays and good batteries (and nuclear).
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc.
Wait a second. You can harvest poor people to fuel my Hummer? My opinion of the viability of Green Technologies has just changed. Starting my soylent green corporation tommorrow!!!
For the topic at hand ("Peak Wood"/"Peak Oil") it doesn't really matter if there's actually abiogenic petroleum.
What matters is how fast that petroleum is created, and how fast we are consuming it. So far the evidence is the rate of consumption is far higher than the rate of production, otherwise the wells won't be running dry, and it wouldn't be harder and harder to find new places to drill.
Alpha decay of radioactive isotopes, such as uranium - an alpha particle is identical to a helium-4 nucleus. The helium's trapped in the same sort of impermeable rock that traps oil and natural gas.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
A couple of things here:
Every day we delay fixing our energy problems, the consequences get worse. But hey, at least ExxonMobil, et al, are making a lot of money, so there's that.
This is probably not the best time in history to be pointing out the wonders of capitalism. Between global financial meltdown, widening income inequality, and environmental devastation, capitalism has not exactly been covering itself in glory lately.
I was trying to make the same point -> comparing timber to oil is a valid analogy when talking about "peaks", because they are both renewable resources with capacity constraints. I think the real question, though, is when will we "peak", and what will that do to civilization. Far out enough, our prospects look pretty good (after all, we survived the wood "peaks" of the past).
If anything, the "peak" question is a Rorschach test -> pessimists will see it as impending doom because ancient civilizations went through collapses, optimists will see it as hope for the future because humanity survived those collapses.
Actually, abiotic petroleum relieves a lot of the pressure of the doomsayers simply because of vast scale of natural petroleum compared to the predicted biomass for "fossil" fuel. People thought the 70s, 80s and 90s were going to be "peak" oil, and a lot of people lost their shirts betting on ever increasing petroleum prices. My rough guess is that "peak" scares are ways of increasing petroleum profits.
Insofar as carbon-worriers, they've got a lot more to learn about a) the benefits of a warm world and b) the negative feedback effects of water vapor.
I think in the end, natural petroleum gives us a good hundred, maybe two hundred years of cheap energy to get on the ball with nuclear and fusion (and yes, one day we'll even run out of hydrogen, as abundant as it is). I'll be as supportive of "green" tech as the next guy as soon as it becomes commercially viable on its own without government subsidies or anti-competitive taxes placed on its competitors.
You can't plant more oil.
So sorry, communism may sound nice on paper but it has never worked in the real world on a large scale.
Maybe you should check in on REI? Bunch of communists and their outdoor equipment. How about Employee Owned Companies? Dirty communist organizations fail all the time. (SAIC anyone?)
How about **many** organized religions. Many Budhists, Christian organizations practice communist living.
How about Farm Cooperatives? Those crazy farmers have ruined us all with their shared processing/sales facilities...
US people can move up and down depending on what they do in their life.
Maybe after WW2, but not anymore. How would they do this?
Access to higher education has been cut off by shifting the cost of tuition onto the students. Public education is universally derided in the U.S. and therefore resource starved.
Innovation has been constrained by intellectual property law.
Real wages have only gone down for the bottom 50% over the last generation.
Another difference is that there is not a "rich/poor" divide.
Distribution of wages and assets is fundamental to a stable economy and social system. Pretending it doesn't exist harms the political and social fabric of a country.
Our poor are not, by the standards of much of the world and history.
Lack of basic medical care? check.
Lack of food? check http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/FoodSecurity/food_frequency.htm
Lack of housing? check http://www.misd.net/homeless/statistics.htm http://www.hcd.ca.gov/hpd/homeless0508.pdf I won't bore you with other states, but all 50 have the same issues.
Wait, I know, these are damned lies and statistics designed to steal your Tax dollars right?
You have no awareness of the consequences of your views. None. Please, just accept you are horribly misguided and go volunteer at a homeless shelter or a children's hospital.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Sure, over the course of geologic time, oil is a renewable resource. Unfortunately, our lifespans (and, in fact, the lifetime of all of human civilization so far) are considerably shorter than the period required to form any significant quantity of oil. So practically speaking, there is a finite supply of oil. This entire line of argument has been rehashed about a billion times already both on Slashdot and elsewhere - so what's the purpose of your comment?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
Looks like a bit more than simply pressurization -> the analog to buried dead fish and trees seems a bit faint. The steps listed out by CWT:
1) high temp and pressurized, mixed with water;
2) lowering of the temp and pressure, flashing off water and minerals;
3) again high temp and pressurized;
4) lowering of the temp and pressure, then centrifuge to separate water.
It seems like if this was the genesis of "fossil" fuels, we'd be able to make some predictions as to what kind of markers we'd see in natural petroleum deposits. Not sure if anyone has really taken a look at that.
It also notes that this process only breaks down longer molecular chains into smaller ones, which wouldn't explain longer chained natural petroleum, unless you also buy into the fact that mantle zone methane could percolate up and condense into longer chains in an abiotic fashion. Granted, a lot of folk out there don't have a problem with the theory of *some* abiotic oil, they simply assert that it is in scant, non-commercially viable quantities.
Thank you for the reference, CWT looks like it's doing some really interesting work!
Exactly -> it's quite possible to have organic molecules with an abiotic origin. Organic != of biotic origin.
Sounds a lot like the argument abiotic oil theorists make about "biological" markers in natural petroleum -> it's contamination, not part of the genesis of the material.
My bet is that both abiotic oil and biotic oil are possible, but abiotic oil probably has a greater natural regeneration rate, and a longer timescale upon which it has operated (maybe +1 billion years). In any case, predictions of doom generally trigger my false-apocalypse alarm -> it seems like a common human activity to predict the imminent end of the world, religion or no religion.
Yeah, someone gave the link to CWT's Thermal Conversion Process in another comment -> very interesting stuff, but it looks like it has some complexity that might not reflect in the deposits of natural petroleum we commonly find.
That being said, this is probably more an argument about proportion than absolutes -> even the sharpest critics of abiotic oil don't deny that it could happen, they simply assert that it does not happen nearly as often as biotic oil (and vice versa).
Once again the guy I lease my farm ground to cannot bring himself to understand why I make him leave 10 yard untilled perimeters around all my fields. To him that is just leaving money in the fields.
Send him over to your local USDA Soil & Water Conservation District office. There's one in every U.S. county not paved over with city. They'll explain it to him.
I hadn't thought about it in terms of game management, though I can see where that is significant. It's also a very important, cheap way to improve soil conservation. You don't clear to the edge of your streams for the same reason--leave a belt of forest along the stream banks.
Here's the money part that your thick friend might get: good topsoil that washes off your land has to be replaced, and/or you have to use more of expensive agricultural chemicals like fertilizers to make up for the loss.
---dragoness
Environmentalism is a byproduct of prosperity. If people were living at a sustenance level they would not care about the environment at all. There is a nearly direct coloration between prosperity and economic freedom. A more socialist type system (less economic freedom) will tend to lead to less prosperity which will eventually lead to less concern for environmental stewardship. A balance must be found as regulation is certainly needed to keep the BPs of the world under control, but sway to far the other direction and you end up with far worse.
Soil depletion was a critical economic and political problem in Marx's day, and influenced Marx and Engels significantly. They understood nature as cyclical processes, and the relation between culture and environment as dialectical processes. Changes in one changed the other, as parts of a larger whole.
One of the best accounts of materialist thought, on this very subject, and one of the best books I've ever read, is Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature, by John Bellamy Foster.
One of the major problems with socialists in the US is that most are so afraid of redbaiting that they won't admit they're socialists, and use elaborate workarounds to present socialist ideas. This cowardice gets us nowhere. It's really rather absurd, when in the US we rarely have more to fear than harsh criticism -- as opposed to imprisonment, brutality, and death that socialist activists often face elsewhere. And hiding makes it look like there are fewer socialists around than there really are.
As far as redbaiting goes -- yeah, people will denounce your socialist ideas. But, as is well known, people will denounce the socialist ideas of people who are not socialists at all. Moderate liberals are denounced as socialists. Moderate conservatives who endorse an occasional moderate political reform are denounced as socialists. And what do those denouncements amount to? A public announcement to conservatives that they don't like you. Big deal. It may cost you the Rotary Club endorsement, but that's it. Why worry about it?
So, yes, Marx and Engels were concerned about ecology. They were also concerned with labor organizing, universal suffrage, and abolishing slavery. They had more to say on those subjects than they did on Five Year Plans. Maybe it would actually help our discussions if we neither sanctified M&E nor demonized them, but actually referred to them as the insightful and interesting, if imperfect, thinkers and activists they were. Maybe mentioning some of the political issues they actually worked on and wrote about would help clarify both those issues and how they may be interrelated.
It was the perception that a lot of good causes were taken up by socialists that led to my being a socialist.
Really, it'd be nice if we opened up the popular political debate, in such a way that it actually referred to the actual political questions in our atomized individual heads, instead of the absurdly narrow and constrained political discourse we're stuck with.
The poor in the western world really do have it well considered what the poor have in china. Plus the gap between rich and poor is vastly greater than in the west as well.
This coupled with an additude that its their own fault for being poor doesn't help either.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Apparently this fellow hasn't heard of the Sawfish?
The Sawfish is powered by electric motors, sports eight video camera eyes as well as sonar, and uses “biodegradable and vegetable oil-based hydraulic fluids.” Triton estimates that British Colombia alone has five billion board feet of salvageable lumber submerged underwater and that the number could exceed 100 billion board feet worldwide. The estimated value of these some odd 300 million submerged trees is $50 billion. (From Treehugger)
Also, commercial grade cannabis-the kind that doesn't get you high when you smoke it-can provide 42% of our current lumber needs by eliminating the need to use lumber for paper products. Not to mention the other commercial products you get from it, such as clothing, food and solvents for use in paints, thinners and other industrial processes. To top it all off, you get several crops per season, rather than one crop per every two decades.
So anyone saying "peak lumber" should just paste a cutout of Glenn Beck on their face and call it done.
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