Cool! I'm off to tell my local bicycle shop that they don't have to charge sales tax.
Hmmm, that brings up an interesting question -- a bicycle requires a routine amount of maintenance. A bicycle also has a very minimal amount of wear on the road. I wonder if the sales tax charged on such essentials as new chains, cassettes, chain oil, tires, brakes, etc are enough to offset any wear on the roads.
It's attitudes like that that prevent people from commuting via bicycle. Let me translate that for you into what people who live in an auto-dominant urban area hear:
When there is one, yes you HAVE to use it, but when there isn't you should trade a small chance of not-likely-to-be fatal physical harm to yourself and other pedestrians to a much, much greater chance of quite-likely-to-be-fatal harm to yourself only.
Actually, sidewalk bicycling is disproportionately risky.
Most vehicle drivers don't expect an object that easily travels 12-15 mph on the sidewalk.
Imagine a driver making a right hand turn. They look right, see no pedestrians. They look left, see no cars coming. They start to turn. In those two seconds the driver was looking left, a bicyclist at 15 mph had traveled close to 50 feet.
P.S. although I love the percetant of bicycle usage in the Netherlands, I do not believe its bike system should be taken as the model, as its system is based on "separate but equal" facilities for bikes, autos and pedestrians (i.e. lots of bike lanes but bikes are generally forbidden to ride on the roads if bike paths are available).
Look at Minneapolis for a model. Specifically south and west Minneapolis.
On road bicycle lanes combined with bike thoroughfares along old rail right-of-ways that have limited at-grade crossings with roadways that act like non-auto superhighways for cyclists.
It's the best of both worlds. First, because if you are using a bicycle for utility, you want to go almost everywhere, and it is impractical to make a dedicated bicycle trail to every workplace, every grocer, every store, every school. So local roads must be used. Plus, the cycling traffic is low enough not to justify a dedicated path to everywhere. On-road lanes in the right location cover neighborhood routes. Then add bicycle "interstates" that cover long distances with a minimum of cross traffic, so it's possible to go across town safely and quickly, and it also provides a place for recreational riders to ride. IMO, it's an efficient use of resources.
My morning coffee hasn't kicked in, so can someone tell me what mistake I'm making?
Wikipedia says: 1.62 kJ/(kmkg) or 0.28 kcal/(milb) for cycling
I weigh 200 lbs (90 kg). I can easily maintain a speed of 15 mph easily (25 kph) for hours on end, on a heavy touring bike which adds another 50 lbs (20kg) to the equation. By "easily", I mean that I'm not exhausted at the end of the day, even after 100 miles.
So, plugging in the numbers, I get 110 kg * 25 km * 1.62 kJ/km*kg = 4455 kJ per hour.
So, 4455 kJ/h = 1237.5 watts, according to google.
That doesn't look right. The units cancel out. But the result is different.
Hmmm, another website points out that the human body is about 20% efficient at turning food into power. That makes the result around 250 watts/hour, which falls in line with what I'm reading a human body can easily do.
There is no question that one is less aware of its surroundings when using a cell phone. The real question is to see whether this lower perception is acually any danger for pedestrians. I have the feeling that when walking and using a cellphone, I am less aware of my distant environment but still keep a keen picture of everything that could hit me directly.
There is a series of British Bicycling Safety ads that ask the user to do a task (such as count the number of passes in a baseketball game), and then has something unexpected show up in the scene.
It's amazing how often one can miss the unexpected thing.
I notice the same for automobile drivers. If a person is focused on catching a break in the traffic for a left hand turn, they won't notice a pedestrian in the crosswalk.
Or if I'm bicycling, I've noticed that drivers will look for a car and not anything smaller while making traffic decisions. There's a bumper sticker in the US that says "Start Seeing Motorcycles" and there is a lot of truth in it. Motorcycles are still "rare" enough that many drivers don't see them.
OTOH, with modern stereos and GPS units, I wonder if cell phones are getting too much blame. People are driving around, fiddling with the radio, or just spacing out, and with a few tons of steel and plastic in their control, that can be deadly.
We tried, we really did. We developed formulae which would account for environmental/nutrure factors. We were very forgiving with the fairness of our methods, and yet the numbers still added up in a way that was unflattering to our hypotheses.
So how do you figure out formulas for environmental/nurture factors?
"Well, group X is more likely to smoke during pregnancy than group Y, leading to lower amounts of blood oxygen, which results in an average difference of 3 IQ points."
"Well, group Y is less likely to be stressed during pregnancy than group X, leading to an healthier environment for the fetus, which is good for a difference of 2 IQ points."
"Studies have shown that teachers are 25% less likely to call on students of X race, which should be good for a cumulative effect of 12 IQ points?"
I'm kind of curious how this works. And are the effects cumulative? If someone smokes and is stressed during pregnancy, do these two factors slightly cancel each other out? Or do they reinforce each other to cause more damage?
Don't limit yourself to the history of the United States please. There is plenty of shame to go around the World for every empire or power that ever existed. Then you will realize that it wasn't necessarily "The United States did this or did that bad thing" but it is "Humans quest for power has no limits on one another."
Aye. The Native Americans weren't opposed to slaughtering each other for land, and black Africans sold their fellow black Africans into the slave trade.
Our ancestors were quite frequently bastards, no matter where you came from.
Though not for the same reason. You get a complete PC for less than a thin client because complete PCs are made in insanely high volumes compared to thin clients, which are a niche item.
Actually, isn't that similar to bicycles?
The typical big box discount retailer, such as Walmart or Target, orders bicycles in high volume. The bicycles are made for a consumer who may ride only a hundred miles in the lifespan of the bicycle, and wants to pay less than $200.
A $800-$1000 bicycle from a shop may not have any more features than a Walmart bike (and frequently has less, since a lot of those bikes won't have a full suspension), but the components are higher quality, and, with regular maintenance, are designed for thousands upon thousands of miles.
So, to review, a Walmart bicycle is a mass market item, sold in high volumes, but at low quality.
A bicycle shop bicycle is a niche item, sold in low volumes, but the quality is much higher.
So, maybe we can create another class of license plates as well as license. You text and cause accidents or speed too much, and you have to go to court and tell a judge. Then your car gets "texty plates" and everyone around now knows you like to text and drive and cause problems, and the cops can pull you over and check your cellphone to ensure you haven't been repeating the offense.
I dunno. These ideas seem more American to me than making government bigger, and interfering with previously held freedoms.
Or we could enforce the laws *and* suitably punish those who are found to be in unsafe operation of a few thousand pounds of metal and plastic traveling up to, and past, speeds of 75mph.
We seem to take driving for granted in this country, but if you are operating your vehicle in such a way that you may kill someone, perhaps you shouldn't have a license for awhile.
I wish. What I see instead is a large number of credulous people who believe whatever certain pundits tell them is the best way to screw with liberals.
To be fair, AGW tends to be used by the most liberal elements to justify whatever agenda they believe in.
Call me a tad biased, but if manmade global warming was really a "OMG WTF We're all going to die" disaster, I'd expect more people advocating geo-engineering and nuclear reactors.
Am I the only one who doesn't understand the craze for electric vehilces? The problem is sloved. Just moved. Biodiesel, ethanol/switchgass, and plant based fuels make so much more sense.
Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.
Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.
So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.
The reason they are using trading instead of taxing is because taxing takes money out of the system, whereas trading keeps it in there (which is supposedly better for the overall economy).
The non-tax alternative would be a yearly quota on carbon consumed then.
Either way, prices go up.
However, I wouldn't be opposed to a carbon-use tax that would be dedicated for mine cleanup.
They are an attempt to provide an economic incentive to pollute less. Without such incentive, the tragedy of the commons ensures we will wreck our collective selves while seeking individual profits.
Instead of carbon offsets, why not tax carbon directly?
Any carbon extracted from the ground in coal or gas format will be taxed per ton. Carbon derived from recent organic sources (trees, crops) would be exempt from the tax.
Increase the taxes until our carbon use is at some desired target.
The only downside that I see is that, in plastics, carbon use doesn't necessarily translate to carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. OTOH, a manufacturer tends not to be able to show that a plastic container isn't later incinerated. So the system isn't perfect, but it is good enough.
We all know the "the coffee burned me when I spilled it" stories, though, too.
Actually, it was a "the coffee caused 3rd degree burns that required skin grafting" story.
According to the trial, McDonald's coffee was served at a temperature that would cause 3rd degree burns within 2 to 7 seconds, and burns that would require skin grafting in 12 to 15 seconds.
Yes, there is something different. A computer is a durable device that lasts many years. It will build character as it wears. On the other hand, neural implants tend to have synaptic interface fuzziness as it ages. They aren't very durable at all, and are currently locked into a yearly upgrade cycle. Most of us have gotten to the point where we replace them during our yearly medical checkups to a model with better pseudointelligence and more capacity.
Also, computers are very classy. A lot of writers still use them for many reasons I've heard. They like the satisfying sounds it makes. They like having to think linearly about a story, and seeing the displayed text. It separates you from the novel. It forces you to sit down at one location and prepare before writing. With the additional preparation needed, one feels more justified in denying an incoming neural call from the office, or checking the latest news headlines...
I have an energy patent that will go live January 2010. Forgetting for the moment that I don't own it - more when it's live - , within about sixty seconds of it being available to read, the scientific community will rip me several new ones until every single one of them can duplicate everything that I've done with their own labs and equipment.
Why worry about the scientific community? Just start building power plants or what not.
Consider the food supply. The population has now reached a size at which the current amount of food is not sufficient for everyone to eat well.
Actually, with the current amount of food grown, everyone could eat well.
But feeding everyone in the world isn't as profitable as growing plants, and feeding the output to animals (wasting energy in the process) to sell to rich affluent first worlders.
It's one of the reasons why people starve. Other reasons why people are starving include war and failed politics. For example, under the current corrupt ruler jn Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe turned from a net exporter to a net importer of food, as the population starves and the economy collapes in such a way that it invites disbelief to outsiders (one aspect was inflation reaching 10000000000000000000000% in 2008).
As for the limiting factor on population, the four horsemen doesn't seem to be the main limiting factor. Instead, the limiting factor, at least in a large part of the world, seems to be affluence. Children shift from being a blessing to an economic burden.
Think of it like a pyramid. A few people at the top know everything. They have their lackies set up a system to control the flow of money, which trickles down to many different front companies, groups and scientists.
It doesn't need to be a conspiracy to have a flawed methodology.
If the consensus says that human-caused climate change is happening, data that contradicts the idea may be assumed to be flawed.
In addition, just by funding investigations into human-caused climate research, we are already biasing the outcome.
I'm not saying that AGW is right or wrong, but scientific research is not as unbiased as one may think.
In 1983, uranium cost $40 per pound. The known uranium reserves at that price would suffice for light water reactors for a few tens of years. Since then more rich uranium deposits have been discovered including a very big one in Canada. At $40 per pound, uranium contributes about 0.2 cents per kwh to the cost of electricity. (Electricity retails between 5 cents and 10 cents per kwh in the U.S.)
Breeder reactors use uranium more than 100 times as efficiently as the current light water reactors. Hence much more expensive uranium can be used. At $1,000 per pound, uranium would contribute only 0.03 cents per kwh, i.e. less than one percent of the cost of electricity. At that price, the fuel cost would correspond to gasoline priced at half a cent per gallon.
How much uranium is available at $1,000 per pound?
There is plenty in the Conway granites of New England and in shales in Tennessee, but Cohen decided to concentrate on uranium extracted from seawater - presumably in order to keep the calculations simple and certain. Cohen (see the references in his article) considers it certain that uranium can be extracted from seawater at less than $1000 per pound and considers $200-400 per pound the best estimate.
In terms of fuel cost per million BTU, he gives (uranium at $400 per pound 1.1 cents , coal $1.25, OPEC oil $5.70, natural gas $3-4.)
How much uranium is there in seawater?
Seawater contains 3.3x10^(-9) (3.3 parts per billion) of uranium, so the 1.4x10^18 tonne of seawater contains 4.6x10^9 tonne of uranium. All the world's electricity usage, 650GWe could therefore be supplied by the uranium in seawater for 7 million years.
However, rivers bring more uranium into the sea all the time, in fact 3.2x10^4 tonne per year.
Cohen calculates that we could take 16,000 tonne per year of uranium from seawater, which would supply 25 times the world's present electricity usage and twice the world's present total energy consumption. He argues that given the geological cycles of erosion, subduction and uplift, the supply would last for 5 billion years with a withdrawal rate of 6,500 tonne per year. The crust contains 6.5x10^13 tonne of uranium.
He comments that lasting 5 billion years, i.e. longer than the sun will support life on earth, should cause uranium to be considered a renewable resource.
Here's a Japanese site discussing extracting uranium from seawater.
Comments:
Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.
He didn't mention thorium, also usable in breeders. There is 4 times as much in the earth's crust as there is uranium. There's less thorium in seawater than there is uranium.
He did mention fusion, but remarks that it hasn't been developed yet. He has certainly provided us plenty of time to develop it.
Bottom line? Cheap oil is a thing of the past. Our expanding economy depended on an ever expanding supply of cheap, portable energy. That goes away when oil goes away. We will transition, no doubt, but a few, maybe more than a few will starve to death before we do and more than a few governments may fall.
Perhaps.
But as far as I can tell, the only thing that is dependant on oil is transportation, specifically cars. The rest, we have alternatives for (coal/nuclear for electricity, natural gas and electric for heating, etc).
Even for cars, hybrids are more common, and plug-in hybrids are coming out. Since cars seem to have a finite lifespan of ten to fifteen years, and since many households have multiple vehicles of varying gas mileage, gas price shocks should be partially mitigated in the short term, and eliminated completely in the long term.
The nice thing about having an economy full of cheap, throw away goods is that moving to different energy sources is easier as a particular energy source becomes scarce. And one of the ironies of this age is that even furnaces and water heaters are disposable goods with a lifespan of a decade or two.
And so we move to an electricity-based energy system, and we can choose between different sources to generate that electricity. Nuclear power seems to be a likely candidate. Considering the amount of uranium and thorium that we can extract, both from the ground and from seawater, we should be good for centuries, if not thousands of years. One nice thing about nuclear power is that the fuel costs are only a small percentage of operating costs, so if the current fuel sources become more expensive, we can extract currently unprofitable sources for 10x the cost and only need to raise electricity prices a fraction of a cent.
And heck, we don't need nuclear power to last for thousands of years. Sooner or later we'll figure out fusion, or have orbital solar satellites beaming energy down, or some alternative that is so unimaginable to us as a nuclear power plant would be to a scientist in 1850.
IIRC, the MOX fabrication cost alone is higher than the current cost of fuel from mined uranium. So even if reprocessing was free, it wouldn't be economic.
AFAIK, current reactor designs do some in-situ breeding of the fuel.
Such technology also probably increases the costs of post-reactor recycling, since some of the potential fuel is already being bred.
The irony is that water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas that currently contributes to most of the global warming in earth's atmosphere. (We'd be something around 25 to 30 degrees C cooler without it.)
CO2 contributes to a minor fraction.
Not that anthropogenic water vapor is a huge factor, AFAIK. But it is interesting that people assume water vapor has no effect on the climate, while CO2 is often assumed to be the sole factor.
Technically there is. The Earth is a fixed size, and no bigger. That is all the wealth that is available to mankind at this point-in-time.
As far as I can tell, wealth is some mix of matter or energy.
How much you can have, how much you can do.
So while in theory, there is only so much wealth in the world, in practice, we are only harnessing a minute fraction of the available matter and energy.
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Cool! I'm off to tell my local bicycle shop that they don't have to charge sales tax.
Hmmm, that brings up an interesting question -- a bicycle requires a routine amount of maintenance. A bicycle also has a very minimal amount of wear on the road. I wonder if the sales tax charged on such essentials as new chains, cassettes, chain oil, tires, brakes, etc are enough to offset any wear on the roads.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case.
Actually, sidewalk bicycling is disproportionately risky.
Most vehicle drivers don't expect an object that easily travels 12-15 mph on the sidewalk.
Imagine a driver making a right hand turn. They look right, see no pedestrians. They look left, see no cars coming. They start to turn. In those two seconds the driver was looking left, a bicyclist at 15 mph had traveled close to 50 feet.
Look at Minneapolis for a model. Specifically south and west Minneapolis.
On road bicycle lanes combined with bike thoroughfares along old rail right-of-ways that have limited at-grade crossings with roadways that act like non-auto superhighways for cyclists.
It's the best of both worlds. First, because if you are using a bicycle for utility, you want to go almost everywhere, and it is impractical to make a dedicated bicycle trail to every workplace, every grocer, every store, every school. So local roads must be used. Plus, the cycling traffic is low enough not to justify a dedicated path to everywhere. On-road lanes in the right location cover neighborhood routes. Then add bicycle "interstates" that cover long distances with a minimum of cross traffic, so it's possible to go across town safely and quickly, and it also provides a place for recreational riders to ride. IMO, it's an efficient use of resources.
My morning coffee hasn't kicked in, so can someone tell me what mistake I'm making?
Wikipedia says: 1.62 kJ/(kmkg) or 0.28 kcal/(milb) for cycling
I weigh 200 lbs (90 kg). I can easily maintain a speed of 15 mph easily (25 kph) for hours on end, on a heavy touring bike which adds another 50 lbs (20kg) to the equation. By "easily", I mean that I'm not exhausted at the end of the day, even after 100 miles.
So, plugging in the numbers, I get 110 kg * 25 km * 1.62 kJ/km*kg = 4455 kJ per hour.
So, 4455 kJ/h = 1237.5 watts, according to google.
That doesn't look right. The units cancel out. But the result is different.
Hmmm, another website points out that the human body is about 20% efficient at turning food into power. That makes the result around 250 watts/hour, which falls in line with what I'm reading a human body can easily do.
There is a series of British Bicycling Safety ads that ask the user to do a task (such as count the number of passes in a baseketball game), and then has something unexpected show up in the scene.
It's amazing how often one can miss the unexpected thing.
I notice the same for automobile drivers. If a person is focused on catching a break in the traffic for a left hand turn, they won't notice a pedestrian in the crosswalk.
Or if I'm bicycling, I've noticed that drivers will look for a car and not anything smaller while making traffic decisions. There's a bumper sticker in the US that says "Start Seeing Motorcycles" and there is a lot of truth in it. Motorcycles are still "rare" enough that many drivers don't see them.
OTOH, with modern stereos and GPS units, I wonder if cell phones are getting too much blame. People are driving around, fiddling with the radio, or just spacing out, and with a few tons of steel and plastic in their control, that can be deadly.
So how do you figure out formulas for environmental/nurture factors?
"Well, group X is more likely to smoke during pregnancy than group Y, leading to lower amounts of blood oxygen, which results in an average difference of 3 IQ points."
"Well, group Y is less likely to be stressed during pregnancy than group X, leading to an healthier environment for the fetus, which is good for a difference of 2 IQ points."
"Studies have shown that teachers are 25% less likely to call on students of X race, which should be good for a cumulative effect of 12 IQ points?"
I'm kind of curious how this works. And are the effects cumulative? If someone smokes and is stressed during pregnancy, do these two factors slightly cancel each other out? Or do they reinforce each other to cause more damage?
Aye. The Native Americans weren't opposed to slaughtering each other for land, and black Africans sold their fellow black Africans into the slave trade.
Our ancestors were quite frequently bastards, no matter where you came from.
Actually, isn't that similar to bicycles?
The typical big box discount retailer, such as Walmart or Target, orders bicycles in high volume. The bicycles are made for a consumer who may ride only a hundred miles in the lifespan of the bicycle, and wants to pay less than $200.
A $800-$1000 bicycle from a shop may not have any more features than a Walmart bike (and frequently has less, since a lot of those bikes won't have a full suspension), but the components are higher quality, and, with regular maintenance, are designed for thousands upon thousands of miles.
So, to review, a Walmart bicycle is a mass market item, sold in high volumes, but at low quality.
A bicycle shop bicycle is a niche item, sold in low volumes, but the quality is much higher.
Or we could enforce the laws *and* suitably punish those who are found to be in unsafe operation of a few thousand pounds of metal and plastic traveling up to, and past, speeds of 75mph.
We seem to take driving for granted in this country, but if you are operating your vehicle in such a way that you may kill someone, perhaps you shouldn't have a license for awhile.
To be fair, AGW tends to be used by the most liberal elements to justify whatever agenda they believe in.
Call me a tad biased, but if manmade global warming was really a "OMG WTF We're all going to die" disaster, I'd expect more people advocating geo-engineering and nuclear reactors.
Outside of such radical solutions as living in walkable neighborhoods, bicycling, and using mass transit for daily trips, there is one advantage that electric has over other fuels.
Electric decouples the power source (be it coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, etc) from the vehicle.
So if we discover a practical cold fusion machine tomorrow, an electric vehicle infrastructure doesn't have to change. Instead we start replacing power plants.
The non-tax alternative would be a yearly quota on carbon consumed then.
Either way, prices go up.
However, I wouldn't be opposed to a carbon-use tax that would be dedicated for mine cleanup.
Instead of carbon offsets, why not tax carbon directly?
Any carbon extracted from the ground in coal or gas format will be taxed per ton. Carbon derived from recent organic sources (trees, crops) would be exempt from the tax.
Increase the taxes until our carbon use is at some desired target.
The only downside that I see is that, in plastics, carbon use doesn't necessarily translate to carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. OTOH, a manufacturer tends not to be able to show that a plastic container isn't later incinerated. So the system isn't perfect, but it is good enough.
Actually, it was a "the coffee caused 3rd degree burns that required skin grafting" story.
According to the trial, McDonald's coffee was served at a temperature that would cause 3rd degree burns within 2 to 7 seconds, and burns that would require skin grafting in 12 to 15 seconds.
But hey, keep ranting if that helps you. ;)
Yes, there is something different. A computer is a durable device that lasts many years. It will build character as it wears. On the other hand, neural implants tend to have synaptic interface fuzziness as it ages. They aren't very durable at all, and are currently locked into a yearly upgrade cycle. Most of us have gotten to the point where we replace them during our yearly medical checkups to a model with better pseudointelligence and more capacity.
Also, computers are very classy. A lot of writers still use them for many reasons I've heard. They like the satisfying sounds it makes. They like having to think linearly about a story, and seeing the displayed text. It separates you from the novel. It forces you to sit down at one location and prepare before writing. With the additional preparation needed, one feels more justified in denying an incoming neural call from the office, or checking the latest news headlines...
Why worry about the scientific community? Just start building power plants or what not.
Actually, with the current amount of food grown, everyone could eat well.
But feeding everyone in the world isn't as profitable as growing plants, and feeding the output to animals (wasting energy in the process) to sell to rich affluent first worlders.
It's one of the reasons why people starve. Other reasons why people are starving include war and failed politics. For example, under the current corrupt ruler jn Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe turned from a net exporter to a net importer of food, as the population starves and the economy collapes in such a way that it invites disbelief to outsiders (one aspect was inflation reaching 10000000000000000000000% in 2008).
As for the limiting factor on population, the four horsemen doesn't seem to be the main limiting factor. Instead, the limiting factor, at least in a large part of the world, seems to be affluence. Children shift from being a blessing to an economic burden.
What were white men doing two or three generations ago?
While some of them were probably benefiting greatly from institutionalized sexism and racism, others were part of the poor, downtrodden masses.
Even today, there are places that are very white and very poor, where there is little opportunity, and crime and poverty runs rampant.
So why do we assume all white men don't need any additional help?
Is it because of the color of their skin and their gender?
It doesn't need to be a conspiracy to have a flawed methodology.
If the consensus says that human-caused climate change is happening, data that contradicts the idea may be assumed to be flawed.
In addition, just by funding investigations into human-caused climate research, we are already biasing the outcome.
I'm not saying that AGW is right or wrong, but scientific research is not as unbiased as one may think.
From here:
Economists have predicted twelve out of the past three recessions. ;)
Perhaps.
But as far as I can tell, the only thing that is dependant on oil is transportation, specifically cars. The rest, we have alternatives for (coal/nuclear for electricity, natural gas and electric for heating, etc).
Even for cars, hybrids are more common, and plug-in hybrids are coming out. Since cars seem to have a finite lifespan of ten to fifteen years, and since many households have multiple vehicles of varying gas mileage, gas price shocks should be partially mitigated in the short term, and eliminated completely in the long term.
The nice thing about having an economy full of cheap, throw away goods is that moving to different energy sources is easier as a particular energy source becomes scarce. And one of the ironies of this age is that even furnaces and water heaters are disposable goods with a lifespan of a decade or two.
And so we move to an electricity-based energy system, and we can choose between different sources to generate that electricity. Nuclear power seems to be a likely candidate. Considering the amount of uranium and thorium that we can extract, both from the ground and from seawater, we should be good for centuries, if not thousands of years. One nice thing about nuclear power is that the fuel costs are only a small percentage of operating costs, so if the current fuel sources become more expensive, we can extract currently unprofitable sources for 10x the cost and only need to raise electricity prices a fraction of a cent.
And heck, we don't need nuclear power to last for thousands of years. Sooner or later we'll figure out fusion, or have orbital solar satellites beaming energy down, or some alternative that is so unimaginable to us as a nuclear power plant would be to a scientist in 1850.
AFAIK, current reactor designs do some in-situ breeding of the fuel.
Such technology also probably increases the costs of post-reactor recycling, since some of the potential fuel is already being bred.
The irony is that water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas that currently contributes to most of the global warming in earth's atmosphere. (We'd be something around 25 to 30 degrees C cooler without it.)
CO2 contributes to a minor fraction.
Not that anthropogenic water vapor is a huge factor, AFAIK. But it is interesting that people assume water vapor has no effect on the climate, while CO2 is often assumed to be the sole factor.
As far as I can tell, wealth is some mix of matter or energy.
How much you can have, how much you can do.
So while in theory, there is only so much wealth in the world, in practice, we are only harnessing a minute fraction of the available matter and energy.