Except the amount of know oil will not make any difference. Even if they could extract every last drop, it would provide at most a couple years worth of oil.
And if you think more potential oil in 10 years is going to have an affect on prices NOW, then you don't know much about the futures market.
You are assuming energy prices are going to stay fixed, which is a very bad assumption.
To project actual savings you can use historical electrical prices and get an average rate of change. That will give you a better idea of actual savings.
Given that this is California we're talking about, I'd expect breakeven probably in the 7 year area.
"If he is found guilty. He is innocent until proven otherwise*."
*Some restrictions apply. Offer prohibited in some countries. If you are declared a terrorist or enemy combatant or someone in the executive just doesn't like you or on any of the hidden lists various departments have come up with the statement may not apply to you. If you are ineligible, you will be guilty until proven innocent which may take many years since you have no legal recourse to challenge your case.
Most don't know who I am, or why I have so many "aliases". I don't know why I am efficient at killing heavily embedded bugs in thousands of lines of code. I only know one thing: My name is Stephen Bourne.
No, living forever is short-sighted. Do you have any idea of the problems that an immortal populace introduces?
You think we have problems now? We can't even balance our resources with people dying. What happens when the world runs out of resources? How about all those people who can't afford the immortality solution (of which there would be many). How about the fact that without death and generations, we don't evolve which means a single super-virus could effectively eradicate the planet?
And that's just the first few that come to mind. There are reasons all things die. It's an evolutionary advantage. By repealing death, you introduce a whole set of problems that probably haven't been dealt with since the first self-organizing molecules formed.
You see, the dinosaurs were very smart. After millions of years of intelligent design, they had reached a point similar to where we are today.
They soon realized that their CO2 production was warming the Earth and in an effort to keep their climate cool, they embarked on an unprecedented effort to sequester the CO2 from the atmosphere and store into the ground.
Their plan was working well to. Then one day a dinosaur scientist named Jor-El went before the dinosaur council and claimed that a giant asteroid was going to hit their planet and destroy the world. They laughed at him, just like they did when he mentioned that the new life forms they had created as slaves (known as mammals) could possibly overtake them and dominate the planet.
Frustrated by their disbelief, Jor-El prepared a special capsule that would protect his teenage son in a form of hibernation to weather the oncoming asteroid strike.
Just as the dinosaurs had managed to stabilize the climate, Jor-El's prediction came true. The asteroid obliterated the dinosaur population, but amazingly the little slave creatures known as mammals managed to survive. Jor-El's son, Kal-El, wept from within his capsule as he witnessed the destruction of his people. He also gritted his teeth in anger as he saw that the slaves they had created, the mammals, survive the destruction and populate the planet.
Millions of years passed, and through the geological process the massive reserves of CO2 the dinosaurs had placed below the surface changed into coal and oil. Kal-El could only bide his time waiting for mammals to advance to the point where he could control one or two to do his bidding a bring the dinosaurs back to dominance.
The mammals, over millions of years intelligently designed into what are now called humans. Kal-El saw that these man-beasts had developed enough intelligence for him to launch his plan.
Subtley, he began to influence humans in order to develop the knowledge for him to work with. It wasn't long before he directed them to the massive stores of oil left by his ancestors. Humans started burning these back into the atmosphere so the planet would be more comfortable for Kal-El when he re-emerged.
But he underestimated the humans. They began to realize that by burning all this ancient fuel, that they were changing their climate and would end up doing harm to themselves. Kal-El was forced to take action quickly least they unknowingly thwart his plan.
By manually controlling the man-thing George Bush, he put in to motion plans to cast doubt on the research of climate change. He also encouraged the man-leader to cast a general disdain on intellectual pursuits, and to have his followers focus on their primitive mythical god-thing. They already advanced enough for him to use their technology. If he could make them stupid, it would just make it easier.
To his anger, he found the man-leader to be quite stupid already. Kal-El raged inside his capsule until he could stand it no longer. Doning special clothing to endure the cooler climate, he emerged from his capsule determined to repopulate the dinosaurs himself!
So what happened to Kal-El? Well, he didn't make it very far. He was shot to death by Bubba and Joe Bob Smith as he was slogging his way through a swap in Louisiana. His head was mounted on a plaque with a rather unassuming description "GATOR", and currently resides on the wall of Michael Crichton's den.
The moral of the story? Bored people on Slashdot is a bad thing.:P
30 years ago, you're parents were fed a spool of lies by overzealous media focusing on a few fringe nut jobs who never so much as produced a single peer-reviewed article on the subject.
As far as cycles go, you must be discounting those 750,000 year old ice cores showing CO2 levels today are the highest they have ever been.
Cycle or not, we have to be prepared for the consequences.
1. You're an idiot. Climatologist do not think they can control the climate. They are using the data they have to model a complex system to increase their understanding of it.
And they do understand climate. There is a set of equations that can be used. However, when applying that to system the size of the Earth it makes it computationally expensive. You're not going to model every single atmospheric interactions, so scientist employ statistical models to get a good idea of what's going to happen.
They don't pretend to know the exact answers, hence performing what they call RESEARCH. But what they do know based on the best data and models that we have, is that the climate is changing and the largest forcing AT THIS MOMENT is the increase in CO2 of which humans are contributing a massive amount.
Considering these guys spend their entire lives doing this type of research, you might just want to listen to them for a minute. And when I say them, I don't mean Al Gore or the media. I mean go and read their research, download their model code and data sets, run the things and see for yourself. If you happen to be a brilliant genius who can find the errors of their ways and write a radiative transfer model in 5 minutes, then by all means publish your research.
2. All I can say is wow. Just wow.
So let me get this straight. You're willing to take the word of fiction writer who has no climatological credentials at all, has no PhD in the subject, and has performed no published or peer reviewed research over the entire body of evidence and research generated by climate scientists over the past 30 years? o_0
3. Wow. I suppose Mikey boy goes to crystal healers too, since they know more than the aggregated scientific collective on medicine, right?
Sorry, but using Crichton as your base for debunking climate science is like using bible to debunk dinosaurs. I don't see any papers written by him on the subject, nor any of the "data" he mentions backed by a rigorous and peer-reviewed methodology.
Until such time, he is in the same camp as Intelligent Designers.
The other question is, how does natural selection work for us now?
We have many medical advances and morality*. What would be a normal "thinning of the herd" hasn't been happening as much lately.
Of course, this presents problems. From another post, someone used the example of "your daughter will have completely lopsided breasts". Would this be a problem strictly on survivability principles? No. But in our botox-injected version of reality, that may present a problem. So do you select on social traits as well as "survivability" traits? And then, what defines survivability?
"Marriage" is poor term to use with heterosexual couples as well given the historical context.
Marriage was a financial transaction that basically bound the women as a slave to her husband. In fact, if a women displeased her man he could beat her, if not kill her.
The romantic version of marriage (two people in love)is much much more recent.
As a side note, if we took all the cash that's estimated for spending in Iraq and used it to buy solar panels, we would have been able to give each household in the US a 3KW installation.
Well, our so-called democracy today reminds me of the movie "They Live". Unfortunately, we don't have Rowdy Roddy Piper to come in and wake everyone from their apathy.
Apathy kills democracies. When you've been on top as long as the US has, people as a whole begin to get arrogant, over-confident, and careless. At that point, as long as the people are entertained and happy you can pretty much do anything you want. If their not paying attention or are too self-absorbed to pay attention, who's to stop you from mowing down civil liberties.
And that's what we have today, a country pretty much asleep at the wheel. People assume their representatives know what they're doing, and rarely seem to question what they do. In a democracy, that is incredibly bad. The only time they really start to complain is when their wallets shrink, and then it's the government's TOP PRIORITY (even though it was the government that helped create the problem in the first place).
I bet this country could become a total police state and hardly anyone would bat an eye as long as they could keep spending their money and watch American Idol. We could become China, and the only outcries you would hear would be on sites like this (which would be rapidly taken down for the "good of the people").
Now whether this slide is being encouraged actively or just represents the natural decay of a world power, I'm not sure. After all, history is replete with examples of strong nations eventually collapsing on themselves.
Perhaps it's just the inevitable conclusion. After achieving "top dog" status and no one challenges it, the populace loses their vigor, becomes apathetic, and things start to slide. By the time people realize there are serious problems, it is so big that no one can get the momentum to attack it which breeds further apathy. This eventually leads to a collapse.
Whether people want to admit it or not, we are declining. Our government has some pretty big fiscal issues that no one is touching on. Our populace seems to be lacking the skills/motivation to turn things around. And we have politicians who have been trying (and all to often succeeding) at pushing through terrible legislation.
It's easier if you've been or currently are armed forces. But if you are a civilian who lived in a family that moved around a lot growing up (or moved around a lot while an adult), it can be difficult if not impossible to come up with reliable contacts for them to check out.
And then, of course, there is the polygraph and we all know how accurate those are. If you're a naturally nervous person (or just nervous in such situations), that could hold you up for awhile as well.
The last time I looked into it the time it usually took was 12-18 months and was pretty expensive (for the company). This eliminated me as a possible candidate since the work I had currently been doing was winding down and I needed to hop onto another project. The government was switching to a new system at the time so that could have had something to do with it as well, but some of my coworkers were in clearance limbo for a long time.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer the flamethrower.
~X~
Except the amount of know oil will not make any difference. Even if they could extract every last drop, it would provide at most a couple years worth of oil.
And if you think more potential oil in 10 years is going to have an affect on prices NOW, then you don't know much about the futures market.
~X~
I think you mean North Montana. It hasn't been called Canada in years.
~X~
You are assuming energy prices are going to stay fixed, which is a very bad assumption.
To project actual savings you can use historical electrical prices and get an average rate of change. That will give you a better idea of actual savings.
Given that this is California we're talking about, I'd expect breakeven probably in the 7 year area.
~X~
Well, there's certainly enough pussy in congress these days that it could only help.
~X~
There are some things you don't fucking compromise on.
~X~
And this country-wide orafucked piece of legislation will be trashed by the Supreme Court in 3...2...uh.....o_O
*sigh* Who are we kidding. Lady Liberty was nice until she became a whore.
I think this will be a defining moment in our history. Not a good one, but a defining one. It's all down hill from here.
~X~
"If he is found guilty. He is innocent until proven otherwise*."
*Some restrictions apply. Offer prohibited in some countries. If you are declared a terrorist or enemy combatant or someone in the executive just doesn't like you or on any of the hidden lists various departments have come up with the statement may not apply to you. If you are ineligible, you will be guilty until proven innocent which may take many years since you have no legal recourse to challenge your case.
~X~
Most don't know who I am, or why I have so many "aliases". I don't know why I am efficient at killing heavily embedded bugs in thousands of lines of code. I only know one thing: My name is Stephen Bourne.
~X~
Have you tried Parliament?
~X~
Yeah, you're girlfriend told me. The manly and decisive part is ok, but the lightning fast part, not so much.
~X~
No, living forever is short-sighted. Do you have any idea of the problems that an immortal populace introduces?
You think we have problems now? We can't even balance our resources with people dying. What happens when the world runs out of resources? How about all those people who can't afford the immortality solution (of which there would be many). How about the fact that without death and generations, we don't evolve which means a single super-virus could effectively eradicate the planet?
And that's just the first few that come to mind. There are reasons all things die. It's an evolutionary advantage. By repealing death, you introduce a whole set of problems that probably haven't been dealt with since the first self-organizing molecules formed.
~X~
You see, the dinosaurs were very smart. After millions of years of intelligent design, they had reached a point similar to where we are today.
They soon realized that their CO2 production was warming the Earth and in an effort to keep their climate cool, they embarked on an unprecedented effort to sequester the CO2 from the atmosphere and store into the ground.
Their plan was working well to. Then one day a dinosaur scientist named Jor-El went before the dinosaur council and claimed that a giant asteroid was going to hit their planet and destroy the world. They laughed at him, just like they did when he mentioned that the new life forms they had created as slaves (known as mammals) could possibly overtake them and dominate the planet.
Frustrated by their disbelief, Jor-El prepared a special capsule that would protect his teenage son in a form of hibernation to weather the oncoming asteroid strike.
Just as the dinosaurs had managed to stabilize the climate, Jor-El's prediction came true. The asteroid obliterated the dinosaur population, but amazingly the little slave creatures known as mammals managed to survive. Jor-El's son, Kal-El, wept from within his capsule as he witnessed the destruction of his people. He also gritted his teeth in anger as he saw that the slaves they had created, the mammals, survive the destruction and populate the planet.
Millions of years passed, and through the geological process the massive reserves of CO2 the dinosaurs had placed below the surface changed into coal and oil. Kal-El could only bide his time waiting for mammals to advance to the point where he could control one or two to do his bidding a bring the dinosaurs back to dominance.
The mammals, over millions of years intelligently designed into what are now called humans. Kal-El saw that these man-beasts had developed enough intelligence for him to launch his plan.
Subtley, he began to influence humans in order to develop the knowledge for him to work with. It wasn't long before he directed them to the massive stores of oil left by his ancestors. Humans started burning these back into the atmosphere so the planet would be more comfortable for Kal-El when he re-emerged.
But he underestimated the humans. They began to realize that by burning all this ancient fuel, that they were changing their climate and would end up doing harm to themselves. Kal-El was forced to take action quickly least they unknowingly thwart his plan.
By manually controlling the man-thing George Bush, he put in to motion plans to cast doubt on the research of climate change. He also encouraged the man-leader to cast a general disdain on intellectual pursuits, and to have his followers focus on their primitive mythical god-thing. They already advanced enough for him to use their technology. If he could make them stupid, it would just make it easier.
To his anger, he found the man-leader to be quite stupid already. Kal-El raged inside his capsule until he could stand it no longer. Doning special clothing to endure the cooler climate, he emerged from his capsule determined to repopulate the dinosaurs himself!
So what happened to Kal-El? Well, he didn't make it very far. He was shot to death by Bubba and Joe Bob Smith as he was slogging his way through a swap in Louisiana. His head was mounted on a plaque with a rather unassuming description "GATOR", and currently resides on the wall of Michael Crichton's den.
The moral of the story? Bored people on Slashdot is a bad thing. :P
~X~
30 years ago, you're parents were fed a spool of lies by overzealous media focusing on a few fringe nut jobs who never so much as produced a single peer-reviewed article on the subject.
As far as cycles go, you must be discounting those 750,000 year old ice cores showing CO2 levels today are the highest they have ever been.
Cycle or not, we have to be prepared for the consequences.
~X~
1. You're an idiot. Climatologist do not think they can control the climate. They are using the data they have to model a complex system to increase their understanding of it.
And they do understand climate. There is a set of equations that can be used. However, when applying that to system the size of the Earth it makes it computationally expensive. You're not going to model every single atmospheric interactions, so scientist employ statistical models to get a good idea of what's going to happen.
They don't pretend to know the exact answers, hence performing what they call RESEARCH. But what they do know based on the best data and models that we have, is that the climate is changing and the largest forcing AT THIS MOMENT is the increase in CO2 of which humans are contributing a massive amount.
Considering these guys spend their entire lives doing this type of research, you might just want to listen to them for a minute. And when I say them, I don't mean Al Gore or the media. I mean go and read their research, download their model code and data sets, run the things and see for yourself. If you happen to be a brilliant genius who can find the errors of their ways and write a radiative transfer model in 5 minutes, then by all means publish your research.
2. All I can say is wow. Just wow.
So let me get this straight. You're willing to take the word of fiction writer who has no climatological credentials at all, has no PhD in the subject, and has performed no published or peer reviewed research over the entire body of evidence and research generated by climate scientists over the past 30 years? o_0
3. Wow. I suppose Mikey boy goes to crystal healers too, since they know more than the aggregated scientific collective on medicine, right?
Sorry, but using Crichton as your base for debunking climate science is like using bible to debunk dinosaurs. I don't see any papers written by him on the subject, nor any of the "data" he mentions backed by a rigorous and peer-reviewed
methodology.
Until such time, he is in the same camp as Intelligent Designers.
~X~
The other question is, how does natural selection work for us now?
We have many medical advances and morality*. What would be a normal "thinning of the herd" hasn't been happening as much lately.
Of course, this presents problems. From another post, someone used the example of "your daughter will have completely lopsided breasts". Would this be a problem strictly on survivability principles? No. But in our botox-injected version of reality, that may present a problem. So do you select on social traits as well as "survivability" traits? And then, what defines survivability?
Not easy questions to answer.
~X~
"Marriage" is poor term to use with heterosexual couples as well given the historical context.
Marriage was a financial transaction that basically bound the women as a slave to her husband. In fact, if a women displeased her man he could beat her, if not kill her.
The romantic version of marriage (two people in love)is much much more recent.
~X~
Unless that impact happens to be up your ass. I'm pretty sure you'd notice that.
~X~
Packets would need to be routed around France.
~X~
That is the response I usually expect from a self-zeigleblantamous spurion migitar-analphlaxis.
~X~
ANWAR? Offshore? Oh you mean the places that have only a few years worth of oil in it and will take years to come on line?
How will that solve ANY problems?
Nuclear will take years to deploy. While we wait for that, more incentives for solar, wind, etc. would go a long way to helping out.
But more oil? O_o
Oh...oh please...I...I just need one more hit...just one.....please....I...I have an SUV...and...it hasn't had a full tank...in months....
~X~
As a side note, if we took all the cash that's estimated for spending in Iraq and used it to buy solar panels, we would have been able to give each household in the US a 3KW installation.
Makes one think.
~X~
Well, our so-called democracy today reminds me of the movie "They Live". Unfortunately, we don't have Rowdy Roddy Piper to come in and wake everyone from their apathy.
Apathy kills democracies. When you've been on top as long as the US has, people as a whole begin to get arrogant, over-confident, and careless. At that point, as long as the people are entertained and happy you can pretty much do anything you want. If their not paying attention or are too self-absorbed to pay attention, who's to stop you from mowing down civil liberties.
And that's what we have today, a country pretty much asleep at the wheel. People assume their representatives know what they're doing, and rarely seem to question what they do. In a democracy, that is incredibly bad. The only time they really start to complain is when their wallets shrink, and then it's the government's TOP PRIORITY (even though it was the government that helped create the problem in the first place).
I bet this country could become a total police state and hardly anyone would bat an eye as long as they could keep spending their money and watch American Idol. We could become China, and the only outcries you would hear would be on sites like this (which would be rapidly taken down for the "good of the people").
Now whether this slide is being encouraged actively or just represents the natural decay of a world power, I'm not sure. After all, history is replete with examples of strong nations eventually collapsing on themselves.
Perhaps it's just the inevitable conclusion. After achieving "top dog" status and no one challenges it, the populace loses their vigor, becomes apathetic, and things start to slide. By the time people realize there are serious problems, it is so big that no one can get the momentum to attack it which breeds further apathy. This eventually leads to a collapse.
Whether people want to admit it or not, we are declining. Our government has some pretty big fiscal issues that no one is touching on. Our populace seems to be lacking the skills/motivation to turn things around. And we have politicians who have been trying (and all to often succeeding) at pushing through terrible legislation.
WE are the minority.
~X~
Well, at least this units aberration didn't cause some poor tree to incinerate in the atmosphere of another planet.
*cheap, I know*
~X~
It's easier if you've been or currently are armed forces. But if you are a civilian who lived in a family that moved around a lot growing up (or moved around a lot while an adult), it can be difficult if not impossible to come up with reliable contacts for them to check out.
And then, of course, there is the polygraph and we all know how accurate those are. If you're a naturally nervous person (or just nervous in such situations), that could hold you up for awhile as well.
The last time I looked into it the time it usually took was 12-18 months and was pretty expensive (for the company). This eliminated me as a possible candidate since the work I had currently been doing was winding down and I needed to hop onto another project. The government was switching to a new system at the time so that could have had something to do with it as well, but some of my coworkers were in clearance limbo for a long time.
~X~