1) first they came for murderous psychopaths, but i said nothing because i wasn't a murderous psychopath. 2) ???? 3) then they came for my overdue parking tickets...
it's a different situation with climate change. the solution to using the CFCs that were destroying ozone was just to use a different set of chemicals that were already in the can anyways. it was literally the easiest environmental crisis we've ever had to deal with.
climate change is a whole different kettle of fish. if you had any idea how insanely cheap fossil fuels have been (and still are) you wouldn't be asking for economic alternatives.
even if we had 1/10th the population, we'd still cram animals together in these conditions.
the real root problem here isn't as much 'too many humans' as it is 'just plain ol humanity'. we do this stuff to animals because as a people we really don't give a shit and we save money. two things that when added together make an unstoppable force for destruction.
no. we have large deposits of oil precursor material that can be dug up and processed, at high cost (both pocketbook and environmental).
however, it's basically a huge stripmining operation, which means you can only produce so much in a day. even in situ technologies are very limited in throughput, as they require huge amounts of natural gas and water as well.
ignoring the cost involved, and the terrible EROEI, there's plenty. but it can't possibly make up that much of our current consumption. it's one of those situations where people look at the total amount in the ground and merely divide that by our current consumption, ignoring the physical limitations to extraction.
that site conflates materials, as do many. their numbers include kerogen deposits as 'technically recoverable oil'. kerogen makes up the vast majority of their '200 years' assumption.
kerogen is an oil precursor. it's a heavy, waxy hydrocarbon group with a very large molecular weight. essentially, it's 'precooked oil'. it's what the earth turns into oil over the course of hundreds of thousands of years or more.
you stripmine it and process it, similar to tar sands, only you have to process it even more to get anything remotely resembling oil because it's far less similar to oil as bitumen is. it's more of an environmental nightmare than syncrude, and that's saying something.
it's really more similar to coal than anything else, and nobody points to our coal reserves as 'technically recoverable oil' despite the fact that it too can be turned into liquids. it's hell of costly to produce. and it can't be produced in very large amounts at a time because it has to be dug up and cooked.
you don't point to kerogen and call it 'oil' any more than you point at a cup of flour and call it a pancake.
exactly. even if we were to somehow conserve our way to half our current usage and go full-bore with hydrofracking basins (which wouldn't last long, those basins carry a few billion barrels), we'd still pay through the nose unless we full-on nationalized our oil market and kept it all for ourselves.
we consume about 18 million bbl/day of petroleum liquids. we produce 8, 3 of which is ethanol, and we're not going to just up and double our ethanol production.
assuming, stupidly, that there's no growth whatsoever in demand over the next 2 decades in the US, or that improvements in efficiency and mileage will counter any growth in overall demand, we're going to add about 13 million bbl/day of tight oil in 20 years?
or is natural gas going to swoop in and run all of our cars by then? this doesn't add up at all.
i understand the ability to top saudi arabia, even for a bit; if we really went nuts ramping up tight oil production we could theoretically cross to number 1. but we'd still be importing a ton of oil.
please prove that the commenter is 'full of shit', that this person's body is at least made up of a majority of actual dung. i want pictures of said shit, testimonials from manure experts, or pictures from an MRI or a colonoscopy.
isotope analysis shows increases over time of fossil carbon as a percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
add to that the fact that we pump gobs of fossil carbon into the atmosphere every year, and can find no other natural phenomena doing such on that sort of scale.
Slashdot Mirror
1) first they came for murderous psychopaths, but i said nothing because i wasn't a murderous psychopath.
2) ????
3) then they came for my overdue parking tickets...
wait, redstate isn't a science blog?
it's a different situation with climate change. the solution to using the CFCs that were destroying ozone was just to use a different set of chemicals that were already in the can anyways. it was literally the easiest environmental crisis we've ever had to deal with.
climate change is a whole different kettle of fish. if you had any idea how insanely cheap fossil fuels have been (and still are) you wouldn't be asking for economic alternatives.
this researcher is going to get quite rich off guessing the location of the remains. he'll say "the hunch paid off!"
not for long.
plenty of species out there without fur or feathers.
sounds like you're strainin' to do a little explainin'.
and don't get me started on the fact that we're the only species that wears clothes.
humans drinking cow's milk may not be natural, but by that end cooking food isn't natural either. no other creature does it.
even if we had 1/10th the population, we'd still cram animals together in these conditions.
the real root problem here isn't as much 'too many humans' as it is 'just plain ol humanity'. we do this stuff to animals because as a people we really don't give a shit and we save money. two things that when added together make an unstoppable force for destruction.
oh noes! your backpack was swabbed? the humanity!
I'll come at you and yours with a different kind of metal
what, a gurney?
likewise, if greenland were ice-free 1000 years ago, then sea levels would have been about 7 meters higher then.
i think we'd know if sea levels were that much higher in 1000 AD.
now we know what really causes those gamma ray bursts we detect from time to time.
actually, it's "...that's filled with a few bags of coca plant seeds, and scream 'yeah! we're saved!'
no. we have large deposits of oil precursor material that can be dug up and processed, at high cost (both pocketbook and environmental).
however, it's basically a huge stripmining operation, which means you can only produce so much in a day. even in situ technologies are very limited in throughput, as they require huge amounts of natural gas and water as well.
ignoring the cost involved, and the terrible EROEI, there's plenty. but it can't possibly make up that much of our current consumption. it's one of those situations where people look at the total amount in the ground and merely divide that by our current consumption, ignoring the physical limitations to extraction.
that site conflates materials, as do many. their numbers include kerogen deposits as 'technically recoverable oil'. kerogen makes up the vast majority of their '200 years' assumption.
kerogen is an oil precursor. it's a heavy, waxy hydrocarbon group with a very large molecular weight. essentially, it's 'precooked oil'. it's what the earth turns into oil over the course of hundreds of thousands of years or more.
you stripmine it and process it, similar to tar sands, only you have to process it even more to get anything remotely resembling oil because it's far less similar to oil as bitumen is. it's more of an environmental nightmare than syncrude, and that's saying something.
it's really more similar to coal than anything else, and nobody points to our coal reserves as 'technically recoverable oil' despite the fact that it too can be turned into liquids. it's hell of costly to produce. and it can't be produced in very large amounts at a time because it has to be dug up and cooked.
you don't point to kerogen and call it 'oil' any more than you point at a cup of flour and call it a pancake.
exactly. even if we were to somehow conserve our way to half our current usage and go full-bore with hydrofracking basins (which wouldn't last long, those basins carry a few billion barrels), we'd still pay through the nose unless we full-on nationalized our oil market and kept it all for ourselves.
we consume about 18 million bbl/day of petroleum liquids. we produce 8, 3 of which is ethanol, and we're not going to just up and double our ethanol production.
assuming, stupidly, that there's no growth whatsoever in demand over the next 2 decades in the US, or that improvements in efficiency and mileage will counter any growth in overall demand, we're going to add about 13 million bbl/day of tight oil in 20 years?
or is natural gas going to swoop in and run all of our cars by then? this doesn't add up at all.
i understand the ability to top saudi arabia, even for a bit; if we really went nuts ramping up tight oil production we could theoretically cross to number 1. but we'd still be importing a ton of oil.
please prove that the commenter is 'full of shit', that this person's body is at least made up of a majority of actual dung. i want pictures of said shit, testimonials from manure experts, or pictures from an MRI or a colonoscopy.
make people put down the sippy cup of bile and fucking think for once in their miserable lives. it can't do that, apparently.
isotope analysis shows increases over time of fossil carbon as a percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere.
add to that the fact that we pump gobs of fossil carbon into the atmosphere every year, and can find no other natural phenomena doing such on that sort of scale.
a line invasion? let me guess, you really hated geometry.
apparently you're watching some real doom porn coverage or something. out here in NYC things aren't half as bad as your whinging makes it sound.
it's hard to find gas, but that's about it. but yeah, totes worse than katrina. today the bus was 5 minutes late!
your tears are delicious, loser.
now, imagine these guys running FEMA.
yikes.