While the "smelly" part isn't all that great, having a dumbass for a boss... so long as that boss recognises the fact that he/she doesn't know shit about the in-depth aspects of what you do. I wouldn't say my boss is clueless... he knows enough to tell if I were jacking off and not working hard, but he also knows enough to let me do my job as best I see fit, and offer assistance in constructive ways (overtime, equipment budget, etc)
No shit, man. I worked in a brake shop for awhile, and the sales manager there didn't know jack shit about brakes. He was only worried about selling the work. He could tell when I was fucking off, and usually left me alone, because whenever he had to deliver a technical explanation to a customer and he didn't know what he was saying, I was always there to back him up.:) (It helps that I can string some pretty good bs together on the fly, but we never sold an unnecessary brake job)
When it came time to fix brakes, he'd stand there, smoke cigarettes, and tell us all how he thought we were great because we could do it and he couldn't.
He was cooler than shit. The only way to ever get freedom from your boss (besides self-employment) is when your boss doesn't know jack, and they know they don't know jack.:)
I hate to be the one to point this out, but these aren't plans, these are "options". A plan would tell us where our power is going to come from. What you've given isn't much different than what I've given, which is a few things that we could do about it.
Also, I don't know how hard Russia's married to oil, but the US is pretty loyal in that regard.:( Alternative fuels are gaining popularity, but not quickly.
Interesting that Germany fought using synthetic fuels in WWII, I was not aware of that.
The soybean oil comes from crushing soybeans. I believe ADM has a virtual monopoly on soybean crushing in the USA, so almost all of the soybean oil comes from/through them. Crushed soybeans are mainly used to make feed for cattle, I believe. The 4:1 positive energy balance for biodiesel includes the energy that it takes to crush soybeans.
So how much energy does it take to grow the soybeans? I think another poster who responded got to the point about energy and agriculture...
We're almost there.:) Thank you for cooling off, I'll follow your example.
In the USA, it currently is made using excess (waste) virgin soybean oil, since that is the cheapest biomass available. However, it can be made using almost any vegetable oil. In fact, Rudolph Diesel's first engine was powered using peanut oil. Biodiesel can also be made using just about any biomass. For mass production of biodiesel, algae is believed to the best option.
Where does the soybean oil come from? I'm willing to believe that refining the oil to biodiesel using biodiesel for the energy works, but where does the oil come from? Obviously it comes from soybeans, but how is it extracted and how much energy does that take? (The rest of your responses, while good, all roll into this one question)
Hmm, the things I'm specifically worried about are the injectors leaking, the rings and bore wearing, and a few other miscellaneous things that make an engine slower to start.
The alternator/starter thing is news to me, that sounds very interesting. Indeed, it asks the question "Why didn't they think of this before? Why didn't I think of this before?";)
Dude, cut the snobby holier-than-thou eco-friendly attitude and fucking think.
I know what biodiesel is. I've even considered cooking some of my own. And I know damn well you can just shove vegetable oil in your tank and it'll run just fine.
But biodiesel doesn't just magically grow on the ground and pool up for you to pump in your tank. It must be processed, refined, and so forth, before you can pump it into your tank. And that entire process requires energy.
So I ask you again, and this time I'd like a straight answer. How does your biodiesel get made? What fuels its production? How does it get to your gas tank? How much energy is involved, and where does it come from? If you can't even think about that question, then you really need to just shut up and let the rest of us solve this problem for you.
I'm not sure how much of this whole problem is just warmed over Malthusianism
Dude, it's like smoking. Only an idiot would have every thought it wasn't bad for you. It doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out that inhaling smoke is bad for you. Same deal here. It doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out that oil won't last forever and we need to work on a solution.
I don't accept the premise that peak production reveals anything meaningful about the remaining supply. Production may fall for so many reasons, including OPEC's machinations, increased fuel efficiency in cars (good grief, that certainly has increased since the 70's), etc.
This is a failure in definition. The buzzword "Peak Oil" refers to the point after which production will physically be unable to grow.
As it has been noted endlessly, there's an enormous supply of petroleum out there given a higher cost of extraction. Not far from where I live in the Fort Worth area, there's a town called Thurber. Thurber has the largest known deposit of bituminous coal on Earth (at least that's the town's claim). Thurber is also notable because it's a really cool ghost town. It's a ghost town because it developed as a mining town, and then far cheaper sources of energy became available. Almost all of that coal is still down there, just waiting for the energy prices to rise to the point where they justify extraction.
Well, how high does the cost have to go? We're not talking retail price here. Price at the pumps is completely irrelevant as far as this discussion is concerned. Price of extraction is everything. If the price of extraction goes up too much, companies will literally go bankrupt pursuing it. I read something (if you poke around this thread you'll find the link I posted) where Bush's energy advisor guy laid it out pretty well what the results have been finding new fields and so forth. It's too simplistic to just point out that "Oh yeah, it'll be more expensive to get out." "More expensive" means "higher risk" when you're talking about looking for new oil fields, and the threat here is the economy going bankrupt because oil becomes too expensive. The threat isn't oil running out. I don't seriously think that'll ever happen. The economy will be bankrupt before that happens.
The bottom line is this: alternative energy sources are absolutely as well developed as they need to be at this point. The existing petroleum supplies at higher extraction costs provide us plateaus that we will fall to as cheaper sources are depleted. As we fall to those more expensive petroleum alternatives, the alternative sources will become more attractive, and attract development, and fix the problem. There might be some stutters as we drop from one plateau to another, but nothing big.
Look, I'm not trying to make doomsday predictions or anything. I'm not trying to go off about people acting crazy. But ignoring the problem isn't helping either. It's far too simplistic to sum it up on either side of the fence. On the one side, the one that usually gets knocked off as nutty, we have doomsday "The world's going to end!". On the other side we have this. "Oh we don't need to worry, it'll just get more expensive, and eventually we'll solve the problem." It won't just get more expensive, we don't have any way to predict how much more expensive it'll get. All we have right now is the sense to know that it will happen, and the worst-case scenario is really really bad, however unlikely. It is likely enough that we need to be thinking about it, but it is unlikely enough that we don't need to go into crisis mode.
As per your recommendations, I'm always skeptical when micro tries to lead macro. It's just that the effects are so hard to predict. I would suggest that absolutely, if you want a hybrid for the fuel efficiency, you should buy one, but you shouldn't buy out of any larger plan to save the world because the effects are just too complex. For exampl
Please explain how a domestic, renewable fuel that can be made from almost any biomass is a "short-term" solution.
When the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive due to supply and demand), how are you planning on distilling your biodiesel? How are you planning on growing the biomasses that it's made from? Where is the energy going to come from to do that?
Biodiesel is great the preach about, but it has the same problems as methanol as a long-term solution. Another poster in another thread outlined it pretty well (replying to me, in fact). The thing that powers the tractors and various other tools, the energy required in terms of water and oil in order to make the crops from which your biodiesel will ultimately come from is greater than the output of energy we get from the biodiesel. It's a net loss of energy in the system.
For biodiesel and/or ethanol to work in the long-term there has to be energy coming from outside the oil-burning system, and both biodiesel and ethanol can only give us energy by drop-in replacing oil. So we need energy from outside that system, somewhere. Could be sun, wind, water, fission. Any other ideas?
But as far as what happens when the world runs out of gas, your biodiesel isn't going to save you. Not without all the infrastructure required to make it and deliver it to you that depends on the same oil the rest of us just put in our cars.
I suspect that large numbers of people -- a majority -- understand perfectly well that oil is finite, and that we're rapidly consuming the ready reserves, and that crisis awaits us.
You could be right, I'm speaking only of people I know. I'm not trying to extrapolate it to the population as a whole.:)
If the news media (and governments) elevated our energy crisis to the stature, of, say, the Apollo program, then we'd realize that a great many people really do understand the situation. Hell, maybe we'd even take action, while there's still time
I honestly don't think there's time, if we peak anytime in the next 10 years. Hell, I don't even know that we can reasonably replace enough power plants with fission before we peak to possibly stave off one of our largest dependencies. And when it comes down to it, I suspect most people would rather have fission powering their tvs than no tv at all.
Dealing with gasoline in cars is a problem that could be easily taken care of pretty quickly, if we peaked and oil ran up to $5/gallon right away, that is. An ethanol/gasoline blend might help take some of th edge off the catastrophe, but won't work at all for a long-term solution. I don't know of anything besides ethanol that we can easily convert our cars to run on. (Ethanol only requires timing and mixture adjustments, I understand) Natural gas is no solution, it's the same problem, in fact.;) Biodiesel is also only a short-term solution, and only available to diesel customers. Electric cars that run off the power grid are only a solution if we have fission or fusion powering the grid, and even then we still don't have electric cars that are practical. (8 hours of charge time isn't practical for 200 miles of driving distance)
So, yeah, considering that if we're peaking now and this issue is not at the forefront of people's thinking, we're already fucked.
I'm open to suggestions.:) I'm even about to fire up my gashog truck and drive it around this summer to make a living.
You did a fine job of addressing item (2). Thanks for spelling out the issues in your thoughtful post.
No, thank you.:) I'm actually surprised by this post, because when I wrote it I thought people would read it and say "Oh, here's just another nut screaming about oil". Turns out this is the fastest I've ever seen one of my posts modded up to +5 Anything.
But it seriously frustrates me how many people are willing to admit that oil is a finite resource but aren't willing to admit that finite means we'll run out eventually. The thing about the peak oil that I had never considered, though, is that the economic problems associated with using too much oil and depending on it too much happen long before we run out, and in fact we may never run out of oil. We'll be bankrupt long before then, and maybe civilization will collapse.;) (Civilization collapsing is the worst-case scenario, therefore the most unlikely, but the scenario we should be targetting with our solutions)
When I lived in Austin, I commuted to work by bicycle from the corner of 620 and 183 to 360 and 2222. I got to go down this big-ass hill every morning.
Heh. I used to work in that Jiffy Lube right there on the corner of Lake Creek Parkway and 183, in the Target parking lot. Mmm, a couple of lights south of the 620 intersection.
And, oh, uh, yeah. I ran out of gas at 360 + Spicewood springs (ran out while the light was red), and believe you me, that hill wasn't any fun to look at when I was trying to figure out where the nearest gas station was. Wound up going to that apartment complex right there and calling a cab.;)
Because our agricultural system is incredibly fuel hungry. Growing food (and industrial crops) requires many gallons/litres of fuel and water per pound of sustenance. It's energy-hungry, and certainly not an efficient way to produce energy (unless you want to replace all those trucks and heavy equipment with 19th century methods).
Two things.:) First, ethanol in place of gasoline is only a stopgap measure, in my thinking. Not a permanent replacement at all, but holds some strong short-term benefits.
Second, this is a solvable problem. The peak oil problem is that oil production will start shrinking after the peak has been reached. Ethanol could provide the extra fuel needed to match peak levels and also the extra fuel needed to accommodate demand growth. As a stopgap measure, it could be mixed with gasoline. More below...
Ethanol burns relatively cleanly, and takes care of overproduction by farmers, which are it's main attractions. It's a net loss when it comes to fuel, ultimately less efficient than gas.
Well, wind and sun are both plentiful resources in the farmlands of America, I understand. Wind is a problem for crop-growing, but sun is a requirement.;) So perhaps wind and sun, both resources we can tap, would provide the extra energy needed by farmers to produce the levels of ethanol we'd need.
Using ethanol is a solvable problem. There are other ways to make it besides farming, it just helps to sell the idea to point to impoverished farmers and say "Look how much money they'd make selling their stuff so we can make alcohol!" However, using ethanol is not and never will be, a long-term solution to the problem.
Agribusinesses are arguably worse. They're called the Life Sciences companies, and they're huge and everywhere. Microsoft is a pussy compared with Cargill or Monsanto.
Heh. My only point had to do with the oil companies' resistance to any technology that would allow us to draw energy from non-oil sources. I'm not sure we can get away from the evil monopolistic companies, but that doesn't mean I won't fight them when needed.;)
But when it comes down to pulling a net profit of energy from farming, ethanol by itself won't work, as you point out. But combined with other methods, it can work. Solar-powered tractor? Well, maybe not exactly, but a tractor with an electrical motor and a big-ass battery could be charged from solar cells/wind turbines. We could also burn wood for the guys.;) (Not the best ecological solution, but we're talking about dealing with peak oil, a situation that threatens civilization as we know it, and anything that might hold a glimmer of helping us to pull through until fusion is real is worth pursuing) When the question is "How do we put energy into farming that doesn't come from farming?" it's easier to answer than "What oil do we burn when there isn't any more to pull from the ground?"
When I visited austin I can't remember there being much transport apart from taxis. Light rail would have been nice. Its a beautiful place though.
Austin's bus system is really good, with three minor caveats. First, it's too centralized. In that I mean it doesn't reach out into the surrounding area well enough. Second, it's downtown oriented, so if you live out of downtown and work downtown, it's perfect. Third, it doesn't run 24 hours. That effectively gives a curfew to anybody who rides.
Would seattle need high speed (faster than 180 mph) rail though? From the map (I have not been there) it looks like medium speed (80-100 mph or so) would be fast enough for the stops you would make between seattle and redmond say.
Seattle to Redmond could use mass transit that doesn't depend on 520. It can take 1.5 hours to get from Seattle to Redmond on 520 in rush hour, the bridge on Lake Washington locks up pretty badly. As far as shuttling people around the eastside and seattle, a high speed train would be extremely useful if it was designed to go around the lakes rather than over them. If it went over the lakes, high speed wouldn't be critical. I'd prefer it not go over the lakes, personally, just because the lakes are pretty.:)
But there's a lot of traffic between Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. I understand there's a lot of traffic from Olympia to other surrounding areas. People are commuting all the way to Seattle from Olympia, and vice versa. Furthermore, there's a lot of islands in the Sound that you have to ferry to get to, making cost of living on those islands expensive (Sure, they have grocery stores and stuff so unless you work off the island you never need to leave, but if I'm going to live my whole life on an island, it'll be an island in the Caribbean;) ). High Speed rail is the only rail system I know of that would make it practical to live on one of the islands and work all the way in Redmond.
See, you have to keep in mind that most major metropolitan areas right now have grown mostly urban highways in between them, and a lot of car travel is happening that didn't used to happen. The same thing happening between Olympia and Seattle is also happening between Austin and San Antonio, and even Austin and D/FW. Albuquerque and Santa Fe, as well. High Speed rail shows its most practical use in these cases, allowing the cities to grow together and having the capability of supporting the population of the combined areas.
High speed rail would be useful cross-country, don't get me wrong, but I think it would be much more useful as arteries between close metropolitan areas that are already naturally growing together.
I never managed to understand exactly why they thought Excel would have been good for it...
Probably because once upon a time Microsoft gave us all MS Works and made us print address labels with the spreadsheet in it. We also had to store said addresses in a spreadsheet, we couldn't put them in a more proper place (like a real addressbook or a home-grown database or whatever).
That would be my guess. It's the same basic task, storing a bunch of names and then printing them on cards.
Well, for really small lists, it's an easy way to store it. Especially when someone with very little computer knowledge couldn't even begin to create an SQL statement.
How's this?
I created a spreadsheet in KSpread (awesome program, that) to plan my menu for Texas Brand Barbecue. So I used it to estimate all of my costs and my gross sales. I'm a perfect example of who this article is about, but I think I'm above the sort of planning the article is talking about.:) (I intentionally went conservative on sales and liberal on costs. I could be wrong in the end, but if I'm going to err, I prefer to err where my error makes profit rather than loss)
Then I needed a list of equipment to start up and to estimate the cost of all this equipment. So I switch to another sheet in the same workbook and create this list. A quick little formula gives me a total.
Aha, so now I wanted to keep all my data in one place, and the next few pieces of data were tabular in nature, but no formula attached. I needed a list of local area farmer's markets, locations, dates and times, market coordinator, and contact phone number (website and email if available). So what did I do? Well, I made a new sheet in the workbook and put my table there. Now I refer to it whenever I need to call someone on the list, or if a market falls through (that process is over, now) I can easily find another market for that day.
Spreadsheets, as another poster put it, are for the presentation of data. For my purpose, I could've taken a couple of weeks to write a program that would have less than half of the functionality of my spreadsheet, but why bother? The spreadsheet is there to do the job.
This isn't saying that I wouldn't like to have something better, and I intend to home-grow a better solution. First I have to write a driver that will let me download transactions from my cash register to my database, though. The program gets complex after that, but the intent is to replace my spreadsheet with it. (And release it as open source, of course. Doesn't give me a competitive edge worthy of note, and others could benefit by it)
Before that when they're new, changing laws to allow autopilot caravans in light-to-moderate / fair-weather conditions so long as the lead car is driving. The other cars just follow at 65mph but only 30 feet apart. I didn't read the whole article either.
no no no no no no. Then the lead car decides to crash everyone into the wall? Fuck no.:)
I realize the human car leading it is a solvable problem, but somebody had to say it.;)
Thus, it's powered by the exact same form of energy as current cars - biological matter conveniently shielded from the energy-sapping effects of oxidation by the atmosphere.
And thus subject to the same problems of oil reserves and so forth that cars suffer from. I guess I should say "natural gas reserves".
This is why it isn't made by water, rather, it's extracted from natural gas (CH4).
Um, a minor problem. Skateboarding, as I recall, got really popular in the late 80s and stayed so into the late 90s. Also, any form of transportation that depends on balance works best if the line you're balancing on is as small as possible, which is why rollerblades have completely offset (?) old-fashioned skates. But the idea doesn't scale well. Most people are afraid to ride motorcycles, and that's where your idea scales.:)
Hubbert, in the 50s (I think it was 1954) forecast that American oil production would peak within 30 years. And it did. Nobody believed him, everybody laughed at him, and in the 70s american oil production peaked.
You might think "peak is good" right? Well, peak is not good when you're talking about oil reserves. Peak is the magical point where after you have peaked, there will be no further production growth, only shrinkage. Peak refers to an oil field reaching approximately half-depletion, but not necessarily. So when oil production worldwide has peaked, after that there will be no production growth. To counter this, all we need (heh, really!) is some new technology that creates a shrinkage in demand, hopefully a shrinkage that is equal to the shrinkage in production.
After oil production peaks, expect the drop-off to be sharp, painful, and to create an economic catastrophe like nothing you'd ever imagine.
Some geologists are predicting peak within a decade. Bush's own energy advisor says we're peaking *now*. He also says there isn't any way to know with current technology when we've peaked until after it happens, and that we have no plan B in place for when it does happen. So that means two things. First, it means we can't predict when oil production will start shrinking. Second, it means that when it does, we're immediately fucked.
The Hubbert reference is important because it's historical precedence for the fact that oil production in a field will peak, and it doesn't take much brainpower to determine that oil production world-wide will also peak. Oil is a finite resource, and without proof of life on other planets we can't even expect space exploration to solve this problem.
Fortunately, this is an area where every single one of us can help, and it doesn't require zealotry to do so. ALl you have to do is realize that oil production will peak, understand that it may be peaking right now (but we have no way of knowing), that oil is a finite resource, and then take action on it. The only action you need to take is with your spending decisions. Spend your money to promote non-fossil power sources of any kind, any time you need to make a power decision. Support companies that promote weaning ourselves off oil, and don't support companies that promote further dependence on oil (yes, that means propane is not a viable alternative, since it's made from byproducts of the oil refinery process). If you're going to buy a new car and there's a hybrid option, take it. And so on and so forth. It doesn't require passion or any of that crap, just pragmatic acceptance that we don't have a plan B for when it happens, and that it will happen no matter what, eventually. Even if it's 100 years from now. (I'm inclined to believe Bush's advisor who says it's happening now) Preparing for the future isn't that hard, if we just spend a minute thinking about it.;)
Slashdot Mirror
"I didn't do it, it must be Crutons from Vegon".
Crugons, they're called Crugons. (sp?)
Um, I don't think he was talking about a programmer at all. Didn't he say 'perl'?
While the "smelly" part isn't all that great, having a dumbass for a boss... so long as that boss recognises the fact that he/she doesn't know shit about the in-depth aspects of what you do. I wouldn't say my boss is clueless... he knows enough to tell if I were jacking off and not working hard, but he also knows enough to let me do my job as best I see fit, and offer assistance in constructive ways (overtime, equipment budget, etc)
No shit, man. I worked in a brake shop for awhile, and the sales manager there didn't know jack shit about brakes. He was only worried about selling the work. He could tell when I was fucking off, and usually left me alone, because whenever he had to deliver a technical explanation to a customer and he didn't know what he was saying, I was always there to back him up. :) (It helps that I can string some pretty good bs together on the fly, but we never sold an unnecessary brake job)
When it came time to fix brakes, he'd stand there, smoke cigarettes, and tell us all how he thought we were great because we could do it and he couldn't.
He was cooler than shit. The only way to ever get freedom from your boss (besides self-employment) is when your boss doesn't know jack, and they know they don't know jack. :)
I think you would find a tunnel under the ocean just a little bit expensive to dig.
Heh, I don't think I ever specified how the trains would get across to the islands. ;)
Are the ferries hydrofoils? The Greek islands have a cool ferry system.
None of the ones I've seen are hydrofoils.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but these aren't plans, these are "options". A plan would tell us where our power is going to come from. What you've given isn't much different than what I've given, which is a few things that we could do about it.
Also, I don't know how hard Russia's married to oil, but the US is pretty loyal in that regard. :( Alternative fuels are gaining popularity, but not quickly.
Interesting that Germany fought using synthetic fuels in WWII, I was not aware of that.
The soybean oil comes from crushing soybeans. I believe ADM has a virtual monopoly on soybean crushing in the USA, so almost all of the soybean oil comes from/through them. Crushed soybeans are mainly used to make feed for cattle, I believe. The 4:1 positive energy balance for biodiesel includes the energy that it takes to crush soybeans.
So how much energy does it take to grow the soybeans? I think another poster who responded got to the point about energy and agriculture...
Heh, dude, I didn't claim ethanol was a wonder fuel, I only claimed it could work as a drop-in replacement for gasoline. Reading comprehension....
We're almost there. :) Thank you for cooling off, I'll follow your example.
In the USA, it currently is made using excess (waste) virgin soybean oil, since that is the cheapest biomass available. However, it can be made using almost any vegetable oil. In fact, Rudolph Diesel's first engine was powered using peanut oil. Biodiesel can also be made using just about any biomass. For mass production of biodiesel, algae is believed to the best option.
Where does the soybean oil come from? I'm willing to believe that refining the oil to biodiesel using biodiesel for the energy works, but where does the oil come from? Obviously it comes from soybeans, but how is it extracted and how much energy does that take? (The rest of your responses, while good, all roll into this one question)
Hmm, the things I'm specifically worried about are the injectors leaking, the rings and bore wearing, and a few other miscellaneous things that make an engine slower to start.
The alternator/starter thing is news to me, that sounds very interesting. Indeed, it asks the question "Why didn't they think of this before? Why didn't I think of this before?" ;)
Dude, cut the snobby holier-than-thou eco-friendly attitude and fucking think.
I know what biodiesel is. I've even considered cooking some of my own. And I know damn well you can just shove vegetable oil in your tank and it'll run just fine.
But biodiesel doesn't just magically grow on the ground and pool up for you to pump in your tank. It must be processed, refined, and so forth, before you can pump it into your tank. And that entire process requires energy.
So I ask you again, and this time I'd like a straight answer. How does your biodiesel get made? What fuels its production? How does it get to your gas tank? How much energy is involved, and where does it come from? If you can't even think about that question, then you really need to just shut up and let the rest of us solve this problem for you.
I'm not sure how much of this whole problem is just warmed over Malthusianism
Dude, it's like smoking. Only an idiot would have every thought it wasn't bad for you. It doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out that inhaling smoke is bad for you. Same deal here. It doesn't take a whole lot of brainpower to figure out that oil won't last forever and we need to work on a solution.
I don't accept the premise that peak production reveals anything meaningful about the remaining supply. Production may fall for so many reasons, including OPEC's machinations, increased fuel efficiency in cars (good grief, that certainly has increased since the 70's), etc.
This is a failure in definition. The buzzword "Peak Oil" refers to the point after which production will physically be unable to grow.
As it has been noted endlessly, there's an enormous supply of petroleum out there given a higher cost of extraction. Not far from where I live in the Fort Worth area, there's a town called Thurber. Thurber has the largest known deposit of bituminous coal on Earth (at least that's the town's claim). Thurber is also notable because it's a really cool ghost town. It's a ghost town because it developed as a mining town, and then far cheaper sources of energy became available. Almost all of that coal is still down there, just waiting for the energy prices to rise to the point where they justify extraction.
Well, how high does the cost have to go? We're not talking retail price here. Price at the pumps is completely irrelevant as far as this discussion is concerned. Price of extraction is everything. If the price of extraction goes up too much, companies will literally go bankrupt pursuing it. I read something (if you poke around this thread you'll find the link I posted) where Bush's energy advisor guy laid it out pretty well what the results have been finding new fields and so forth. It's too simplistic to just point out that "Oh yeah, it'll be more expensive to get out." "More expensive" means "higher risk" when you're talking about looking for new oil fields, and the threat here is the economy going bankrupt because oil becomes too expensive. The threat isn't oil running out. I don't seriously think that'll ever happen. The economy will be bankrupt before that happens.
The bottom line is this: alternative energy sources are absolutely as well developed as they need to be at this point. The existing petroleum supplies at higher extraction costs provide us plateaus that we will fall to as cheaper sources are depleted. As we fall to those more expensive petroleum alternatives, the alternative sources will become more attractive, and attract development, and fix the problem. There might be some stutters as we drop from one plateau to another, but nothing big.
Look, I'm not trying to make doomsday predictions or anything. I'm not trying to go off about people acting crazy. But ignoring the problem isn't helping either. It's far too simplistic to sum it up on either side of the fence. On the one side, the one that usually gets knocked off as nutty, we have doomsday "The world's going to end!". On the other side we have this. "Oh we don't need to worry, it'll just get more expensive, and eventually we'll solve the problem." It won't just get more expensive, we don't have any way to predict how much more expensive it'll get. All we have right now is the sense to know that it will happen, and the worst-case scenario is really really bad, however unlikely. It is likely enough that we need to be thinking about it, but it is unlikely enough that we don't need to go into crisis mode.
As per your recommendations, I'm always skeptical when micro tries to lead macro. It's just that the effects are so hard to predict. I would suggest that absolutely, if you want a hybrid for the fuel efficiency, you should buy one, but you shouldn't buy out of any larger plan to save the world because the effects are just too complex. For exampl
Please explain how a domestic, renewable fuel that can be made from almost any biomass is a "short-term" solution.
When the oil runs out (or becomes prohibitively expensive due to supply and demand), how are you planning on distilling your biodiesel? How are you planning on growing the biomasses that it's made from? Where is the energy going to come from to do that?
Biodiesel is great the preach about, but it has the same problems as methanol as a long-term solution. Another poster in another thread outlined it pretty well (replying to me, in fact). The thing that powers the tractors and various other tools, the energy required in terms of water and oil in order to make the crops from which your biodiesel will ultimately come from is greater than the output of energy we get from the biodiesel. It's a net loss of energy in the system.
For biodiesel and/or ethanol to work in the long-term there has to be energy coming from outside the oil-burning system, and both biodiesel and ethanol can only give us energy by drop-in replacing oil. So we need energy from outside that system, somewhere. Could be sun, wind, water, fission. Any other ideas?
But as far as what happens when the world runs out of gas, your biodiesel isn't going to save you. Not without all the infrastructure required to make it and deliver it to you that depends on the same oil the rest of us just put in our cars.
I suspect that large numbers of people -- a majority -- understand perfectly well that oil is finite, and that we're rapidly consuming the ready reserves, and that crisis awaits us.
You could be right, I'm speaking only of people I know. I'm not trying to extrapolate it to the population as a whole. :)
If the news media (and governments) elevated our energy crisis to the stature, of, say, the Apollo program, then we'd realize that a great many people really do understand the situation. Hell, maybe we'd even take action, while there's still time
I honestly don't think there's time, if we peak anytime in the next 10 years. Hell, I don't even know that we can reasonably replace enough power plants with fission before we peak to possibly stave off one of our largest dependencies. And when it comes down to it, I suspect most people would rather have fission powering their tvs than no tv at all.
Dealing with gasoline in cars is a problem that could be easily taken care of pretty quickly, if we peaked and oil ran up to $5/gallon right away, that is. An ethanol/gasoline blend might help take some of th edge off the catastrophe, but won't work at all for a long-term solution. I don't know of anything besides ethanol that we can easily convert our cars to run on. (Ethanol only requires timing and mixture adjustments, I understand) Natural gas is no solution, it's the same problem, in fact. ;) Biodiesel is also only a short-term solution, and only available to diesel customers. Electric cars that run off the power grid are only a solution if we have fission or fusion powering the grid, and even then we still don't have electric cars that are practical. (8 hours of charge time isn't practical for 200 miles of driving distance)
So, yeah, considering that if we're peaking now and this issue is not at the forefront of people's thinking, we're already fucked.
I'm open to suggestions. :) I'm even about to fire up my gashog truck and drive it around this summer to make a living.
You did a fine job of addressing item (2). Thanks for spelling out the issues in your thoughtful post.
No, thank you. :) I'm actually surprised by this post, because when I wrote it I thought people would read it and say "Oh, here's just another nut screaming about oil". Turns out this is the fastest I've ever seen one of my posts modded up to +5 Anything.
But it seriously frustrates me how many people are willing to admit that oil is a finite resource but aren't willing to admit that finite means we'll run out eventually. The thing about the peak oil that I had never considered, though, is that the economic problems associated with using too much oil and depending on it too much happen long before we run out, and in fact we may never run out of oil. We'll be bankrupt long before then, and maybe civilization will collapse. ;) (Civilization collapsing is the worst-case scenario, therefore the most unlikely, but the scenario we should be targetting with our solutions)
I don't know how reliable these fromthewilderness.com people are, but this transcription seriously looks legit. Simmons says we're peaking now, here.
It's a very interesting read, and it's like a year old or something.
When I lived in Austin, I commuted to work by bicycle from the corner of 620 and 183 to 360 and 2222. I got to go down this big-ass hill every morning.
Heh. I used to work in that Jiffy Lube right there on the corner of Lake Creek Parkway and 183, in the Target parking lot. Mmm, a couple of lights south of the 620 intersection.
And, oh, uh, yeah. I ran out of gas at 360 + Spicewood springs (ran out while the light was red), and believe you me, that hill wasn't any fun to look at when I was trying to figure out where the nearest gas station was. Wound up going to that apartment complex right there and calling a cab. ;)
Because our agricultural system is incredibly fuel hungry. Growing food (and industrial crops) requires many gallons/litres of fuel and water per pound of sustenance. It's energy-hungry, and certainly not an efficient way to produce energy (unless you want to replace all those trucks and heavy equipment with 19th century methods).
Two things. :) First, ethanol in place of gasoline is only a stopgap measure, in my thinking. Not a permanent replacement at all, but holds some strong short-term benefits.
Second, this is a solvable problem. The peak oil problem is that oil production will start shrinking after the peak has been reached. Ethanol could provide the extra fuel needed to match peak levels and also the extra fuel needed to accommodate demand growth. As a stopgap measure, it could be mixed with gasoline. More below...
Ethanol burns relatively cleanly, and takes care of overproduction by farmers, which are it's main attractions. It's a net loss when it comes to fuel, ultimately less efficient than gas.
Well, wind and sun are both plentiful resources in the farmlands of America, I understand. Wind is a problem for crop-growing, but sun is a requirement. ;) So perhaps wind and sun, both resources we can tap, would provide the extra energy needed by farmers to produce the levels of ethanol we'd need.
Using ethanol is a solvable problem. There are other ways to make it besides farming, it just helps to sell the idea to point to impoverished farmers and say "Look how much money they'd make selling their stuff so we can make alcohol!" However, using ethanol is not and never will be, a long-term solution to the problem.
Agribusinesses are arguably worse. They're called the Life Sciences companies, and they're huge and everywhere. Microsoft is a pussy compared with Cargill or Monsanto.
Heh. My only point had to do with the oil companies' resistance to any technology that would allow us to draw energy from non-oil sources. I'm not sure we can get away from the evil monopolistic companies, but that doesn't mean I won't fight them when needed. ;)
But when it comes down to pulling a net profit of energy from farming, ethanol by itself won't work, as you point out. But combined with other methods, it can work. Solar-powered tractor? Well, maybe not exactly, but a tractor with an electrical motor and a big-ass battery could be charged from solar cells/wind turbines. We could also burn wood for the guys. ;) (Not the best ecological solution, but we're talking about dealing with peak oil, a situation that threatens civilization as we know it, and anything that might hold a glimmer of helping us to pull through until fusion is real is worth pursuing) When the question is "How do we put energy into farming that doesn't come from farming?" it's easier to answer than "What oil do we burn when there isn't any more to pull from the ground?"
heh. Does anybody ever call you the Gangster of Love? Maurice? :)
When I visited austin I can't remember there being much transport apart from taxis. Light rail would have been nice. Its a beautiful place though.
Austin's bus system is really good, with three minor caveats. First, it's too centralized. In that I mean it doesn't reach out into the surrounding area well enough. Second, it's downtown oriented, so if you live out of downtown and work downtown, it's perfect. Third, it doesn't run 24 hours. That effectively gives a curfew to anybody who rides.
Would seattle need high speed (faster than 180 mph) rail though? From the map (I have not been there) it looks like medium speed (80-100 mph or so) would be fast enough for the stops you would make between seattle and redmond say.
Seattle to Redmond could use mass transit that doesn't depend on 520. It can take 1.5 hours to get from Seattle to Redmond on 520 in rush hour, the bridge on Lake Washington locks up pretty badly. As far as shuttling people around the eastside and seattle, a high speed train would be extremely useful if it was designed to go around the lakes rather than over them. If it went over the lakes, high speed wouldn't be critical. I'd prefer it not go over the lakes, personally, just because the lakes are pretty. :)
But there's a lot of traffic between Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. I understand there's a lot of traffic from Olympia to other surrounding areas. People are commuting all the way to Seattle from Olympia, and vice versa. Furthermore, there's a lot of islands in the Sound that you have to ferry to get to, making cost of living on those islands expensive (Sure, they have grocery stores and stuff so unless you work off the island you never need to leave, but if I'm going to live my whole life on an island, it'll be an island in the Caribbean ;) ). High Speed rail is the only rail system I know of that would make it practical to live on one of the islands and work all the way in Redmond.
See, you have to keep in mind that most major metropolitan areas right now have grown mostly urban highways in between them, and a lot of car travel is happening that didn't used to happen. The same thing happening between Olympia and Seattle is also happening between Austin and San Antonio, and even Austin and D/FW. Albuquerque and Santa Fe, as well. High Speed rail shows its most practical use in these cases, allowing the cities to grow together and having the capability of supporting the population of the combined areas.
High speed rail would be useful cross-country, don't get me wrong, but I think it would be much more useful as arteries between close metropolitan areas that are already naturally growing together.
I never managed to understand exactly why they thought Excel would have been good for it...
Probably because once upon a time Microsoft gave us all MS Works and made us print address labels with the spreadsheet in it. We also had to store said addresses in a spreadsheet, we couldn't put them in a more proper place (like a real addressbook or a home-grown database or whatever).
That would be my guess. It's the same basic task, storing a bunch of names and then printing them on cards.
Well, for really small lists, it's an easy way to store it. Especially when someone with very little computer knowledge couldn't even begin to create an SQL statement.
How's this?
I created a spreadsheet in KSpread (awesome program, that) to plan my menu for Texas Brand Barbecue. So I used it to estimate all of my costs and my gross sales. I'm a perfect example of who this article is about, but I think I'm above the sort of planning the article is talking about. :) (I intentionally went conservative on sales and liberal on costs. I could be wrong in the end, but if I'm going to err, I prefer to err where my error makes profit rather than loss)
Then I needed a list of equipment to start up and to estimate the cost of all this equipment. So I switch to another sheet in the same workbook and create this list. A quick little formula gives me a total.
Aha, so now I wanted to keep all my data in one place, and the next few pieces of data were tabular in nature, but no formula attached. I needed a list of local area farmer's markets, locations, dates and times, market coordinator, and contact phone number (website and email if available). So what did I do? Well, I made a new sheet in the workbook and put my table there. Now I refer to it whenever I need to call someone on the list, or if a market falls through (that process is over, now) I can easily find another market for that day.
Spreadsheets, as another poster put it, are for the presentation of data. For my purpose, I could've taken a couple of weeks to write a program that would have less than half of the functionality of my spreadsheet, but why bother? The spreadsheet is there to do the job.
This isn't saying that I wouldn't like to have something better, and I intend to home-grow a better solution. First I have to write a driver that will let me download transactions from my cash register to my database, though. The program gets complex after that, but the intent is to replace my spreadsheet with it. (And release it as open source, of course. Doesn't give me a competitive edge worthy of note, and others could benefit by it)
Before that when they're new, changing laws to allow autopilot caravans in light-to-moderate / fair-weather conditions so long as the lead car is driving. The other cars just follow at 65mph but only 30 feet apart. I didn't read the whole article either.
no no no no no no. Then the lead car decides to crash everyone into the wall? Fuck no. :)
I realize the human car leading it is a solvable problem, but somebody had to say it. ;)
Thus, it's powered by the exact same form of energy as current cars - biological matter conveniently shielded from the energy-sapping effects of oxidation by the atmosphere.
And thus subject to the same problems of oil reserves and so forth that cars suffer from. I guess I should say "natural gas reserves".
This is why it isn't made by water, rather, it's extracted from natural gas (CH4).
:) So, no solution at all, then.
Um, a minor problem. Skateboarding, as I recall, got really popular in the late 80s and stayed so into the late 90s. Also, any form of transportation that depends on balance works best if the line you're balancing on is as small as possible, which is why rollerblades have completely offset (?) old-fashioned skates. But the idea doesn't scale well. Most people are afraid to ride motorcycles, and that's where your idea scales. :)
For further info google "peak oil hubbert"
Or you can read my post. :)
Hubbert, in the 50s (I think it was 1954) forecast that American oil production would peak within 30 years. And it did. Nobody believed him, everybody laughed at him, and in the 70s american oil production peaked.
You might think "peak is good" right? Well, peak is not good when you're talking about oil reserves. Peak is the magical point where after you have peaked, there will be no further production growth, only shrinkage. Peak refers to an oil field reaching approximately half-depletion, but not necessarily. So when oil production worldwide has peaked, after that there will be no production growth. To counter this, all we need (heh, really!) is some new technology that creates a shrinkage in demand, hopefully a shrinkage that is equal to the shrinkage in production.
After oil production peaks, expect the drop-off to be sharp, painful, and to create an economic catastrophe like nothing you'd ever imagine.
Some geologists are predicting peak within a decade. Bush's own energy advisor says we're peaking *now*. He also says there isn't any way to know with current technology when we've peaked until after it happens, and that we have no plan B in place for when it does happen. So that means two things. First, it means we can't predict when oil production will start shrinking. Second, it means that when it does, we're immediately fucked.
The Hubbert reference is important because it's historical precedence for the fact that oil production in a field will peak, and it doesn't take much brainpower to determine that oil production world-wide will also peak. Oil is a finite resource, and without proof of life on other planets we can't even expect space exploration to solve this problem.
Fortunately, this is an area where every single one of us can help, and it doesn't require zealotry to do so. ALl you have to do is realize that oil production will peak, understand that it may be peaking right now (but we have no way of knowing), that oil is a finite resource, and then take action on it. The only action you need to take is with your spending decisions. Spend your money to promote non-fossil power sources of any kind, any time you need to make a power decision. Support companies that promote weaning ourselves off oil, and don't support companies that promote further dependence on oil (yes, that means propane is not a viable alternative, since it's made from byproducts of the oil refinery process). If you're going to buy a new car and there's a hybrid option, take it. And so on and so forth. It doesn't require passion or any of that crap, just pragmatic acceptance that we don't have a plan B for when it happens, and that it will happen no matter what, eventually. Even if it's 100 years from now. (I'm inclined to believe Bush's advisor who says it's happening now) Preparing for the future isn't that hard, if we just spend a minute thinking about it. ;)