Ignorance is bliss I guess, but the geological datum on oil is very concrete, in ubiquitous supply, and very hard to dispute. Climate change on the other hand has myriad multiplicative varibles and ramifications.
Peak Oil will is coming to a theatre near you. People who don't know about it better learn soon, the peak will probably come in 2007 sometime from what it looks like, but surely before the end of the decade. Buckle your seat belts people. For more information on Peak Oil and a concise list of the resources out there check my research website http://ospmm.sourceforge.net/research.html
Nothing short of a revolution is going to stop this freight train. Even perhaps a revolution will never change the human propensity of thinking the grass is always greener on the other side. Grass is never good enough so we pave over it. He who dies with the most toys, wins, right? First let me preface what I am about to say with the fact that I used to be a mindless consumer too so I can relate to all you people who will refute this. But I am just going to be blatently honest here - if there really is a God and he created this earth with this tremendously complicated and interdependant ecosystem, then he who dies with the most toys will surely go to hell. If there is a God I belive he sets limits, and we are being tested. The test - can get off the smack? The heroin of all hydrocarbons - oil, bloody oil.
Here in America more than anywhere we are oil, literally.
The people who run our government are oil. The oil industry staged a coup in 2000 and literally stole an election. But It's not just the repubs though, it's almost every politician in Washington, see Robert Baer's book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Sole For Saudi Crude. Condi Rice, while working at Chevron had an oil tanker named after her and Haliburton's CEO is now the brains of our operation. Even the puppet man himself has deep ties to oil, albiet his oil company Arbusto failed, miserably. As a sidenote on the bush dynasty, all you Nascar loving Bush fans realize that Prescott Bush (JR's grandpa) did the banking for the Nazi's in WWII, right? Read House of Bush, House of Saud to find out why the ambassador from Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar has the nickname Bandar Bush.
All the plastics we use are made from Oil. Every tire uses 7 gallons of oil in it. All the fertilizers we use are made from natural gas. All the pesticides are made from Oil. Because we have raped our land, and it is nothing more than a sponge onto which we pour oil to make it arable again, without this production would drop from 130 bushels per acre down to 30 bushels per acre. Transportation of the food on the roads that take tremendous amounts of oil to build and maintain in trucks that burn oil to factories that burn oil to process the food and package it in plastic made from oil then shipped out in more oil burning trucks to McDonald's where we drive our oil burning SUV's through the drive thru and take it home and sit in front of a brainwashing device powered either by coal or natural gas, all so we don't have to conversate with our neighbors. It's an elegant Orwellian scheme really. Not only do we eat oil, we think it.
The fantasy is good for business, but folks, this way of life aint real.
Welcome to the desert of the real. Climate change, destruction of the biosphere, air pollution, water pollution, drained aquafirs, dead coral reefs, wiped out fisheries, no more rain forrests, overpopulation, massive trade deficit leading to more debt that will have to be paid off by your kids because you are an irresponsible fool, dollar collapse, housing bubble burst, pension plans gone, resource wars -iraq is but a prelude to what is coming-,diseases, and mass famine. Subsequent generations 100 generations down the line will hate us.
If you don't belive in the destruction of our environment to the point of not being able to sustain human life then I'll kindly point you to Peak Oil. The Saudi's have an expression for it. My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies in a jet, his son will ride a camel. Peak Oil is going to reverse globalization, yah everyone knows there is plenty of the stuff left in the ground, the problem is oil production follows a bell curve, be it a single well, or a nation's production. After you extract 1/2 of the oil production declines, forever, every gallon of oil is harder to extract and of a lesser quality. Net energy (energy spent for energy returned) gets closer and closer to zero and when it becomes 1:1, the well is put out of production, that is why wells never really get sucke
The current administration in the white house have religious ideologies that fall in line with apocalypse being nigh. They believe that when catastrophe hits, the elect, or chosen, (by God) will be greeted by Jesus from the heavons and provided a new earth, provided Isreal is status quo upon the arival of this doomsday. This is my own belief as to why the administration is living like there is no tomorrow. Even though the pentagon has been doing studies on how global warming and climate change might be the worst security threat we have ever faced, the administration is encouraging business as usual, why? The first President Bush said the American way of life is not negotiable.
Here is the cold hard truth - we Americans are living in the 29th day of a lifestyle that is not sustainable, and it will end soon, very soon. The world, as well as basic geology and the second law of thermodynamics is begining to tell us we can't keep living this way. Our consumer driven lives do come at a cost, in economic terms the hidden costs of our lifestyles are called "externalities". These externalities include massive degradation to the environment. 25% of the coral reefs in the world are dead. Most fish is unsafe to eat now because of heavy metal content. Our fisheries are dying out. Rainforrests are becoming a thing of the past.
For those of you who live down in the desert what happens to Las Vegas when the Colordo river stops turning the turbines in the Hoover dam - the flow rate was down 70% below average last year and we have had 2 wet decades and are now entering into a dry era.
The average American meal travels 1300 miles fueled by hydrocarbon energy before we eat it. Every calorie of food we eat requires 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy input to produce it, not including packaging and transportation. All of our fertilizers and pesticides are derrived from oil and natural gas. 90% of an Iowa farmer's costs are directly and indirectly related to the cost of fuel. Every pound of beef produced uses 2500 gallons of water and 16 pounds of grain. Talk about unsustainable. What happens when the fuel runs out? We will we have a couple options, scale back usage, or go to war to procure the remaining scraps of what is left. Our administration chose plan B. Going to war for something that should be left in the ground in the first place.
Right now is a very precarious time in American history and I think war is the last thing we should be pursuing, why? We are is massive massive debt. The trade deficit is gargantuan. Our dollar is financed to the hilt, and it's on the virge of collapse. Petrodollars as they call them now in economics are relying heavily on China buying our t-bonds, the corrupt world bank loaning money to third world nations which will never be able to pay them off (forcing them into credit card debt if you will), and the oil trade being financed in the dollar instead of the euro. That was in fact one of the hidden agendas of the war in Iraq, to get Iraq's oil trade switched back into dollars (it took about one week after the invasion to get that done) because Saddam had changed it over to euros and we weren't going to take it. But, the world is starting to consider switching anyway. We have 800 military bases around the world, fighting multiple front wars, buying, spending, consuming, pillaging, like there is no tomorrow. It's called imperial overstretch, it's why the Rome and the Soviet Union collapsed. If we don't stop imperial overstretch, there will be no tomorrow.
By the way, did you realize that Saudi Arabia -the most intolerant regime on the face of the earth- has 7 trillion in our stock market? The lead the wold in beheadings you know. 15 out of 19 of the hi-jackers who did 9/11 were from, you guessed it, Saudi Arabia.
Additionally the housing bubble is poised to collapse. Houses are WAY WAY WAY overvalued. I hope you didn't just buy a house. And the production of Oil and natural gas is going to start into a permanent decline when both of those peak, as soon as now - 2007.
Hydrogen is a public dillusion which stems from the fear of us running out of hydrocarbon energy, which we will be soon. Hydrogen is a net energy loser, which means it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than the energy you get from burning it. Right now the only practical way to make hydrogen on any kind of scale is with natural gas, something that we are running disasterously low on. The United States imports 15% of it's natural gas from Canada, and that 15% is over half of their production. The United States had it's production peak of natural gas in the 70's.
Oil is used as a feedstock for all commercial pesticides and natural gas is used as a feedstock for all commercial fertilizers. We have turned our farmland into nothing more than a nutrient defficient sponge so without these petrochemicals farming output would drop from about 140 bushels/acre down to roughly 30. Oil is used in plastics for the medical inductry and almost every other kind of plastic you can think of. There are 7 gallons of oil per every single tire we put on our cars. 40 barrels of oil are used in the energy to produce one car. 24 solar panels operating in the Austrailian desert for 24 hours produces only the energy equivalent of 1 liter of gasoline. If we were to remove hydrocarbons from the picture and replace that energy with energy from nuclear powerplants, it would take 10,000 of the largest plants and at that burn rate the uranium supply would last roughly 20 years. The bottom line is that there is nothing that can replace the energy efficiency of cheap oil.
Now for the bad news, we are peaking or about to, very soon, in both oil and gas, and that means the production slope of both begins on a slide down an irreversable decline. Demand will soar while production will slowly sink lower and lower with every subsequent barrel extracted. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination as to what effects this will have on the economy.
http://ospmm.sourceforge.net/ is a project I am creating to wake people up. Check the research section and read the reviews of the books if you don't believe me. Also I suggest viewing the award winning documentary http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ for a primer on what is about to come down the pipe. The movie is laiden with credentialed industry experts, geologists, and urban planners. This shit is for real people, we are living our lives way beyond what is even remotely sustainable, wake the hell up!
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Ignorance is bliss I guess, but the geological datum on oil is very concrete, in ubiquitous supply, and very hard to dispute. Climate change on the other hand has myriad multiplicative varibles and ramifications.
Peak Oil will is coming to a theatre near you. People who don't know about it better learn soon, the peak will probably come in 2007 sometime from what it looks like, but surely before the end of the decade. Buckle your seat belts people. For more information on Peak Oil and a concise list of the resources out there check my research website http://ospmm.sourceforge.net/research.html
Here in America more than anywhere we are oil, literally.
The people who run our government are oil. The oil industry staged a coup in 2000 and literally stole an election. But It's not just the repubs though, it's almost every politician in Washington, see Robert Baer's book, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Sole For Saudi Crude. Condi Rice, while working at Chevron had an oil tanker named after her and Haliburton's CEO is now the brains of our operation. Even the puppet man himself has deep ties to oil, albiet his oil company Arbusto failed, miserably. As a sidenote on the bush dynasty, all you Nascar loving Bush fans realize that Prescott Bush (JR's grandpa) did the banking for the Nazi's in WWII, right? Read House of Bush, House of Saud to find out why the ambassador from Saudi Arabia, Prince Bandar has the nickname Bandar Bush.
All the plastics we use are made from Oil. Every tire uses 7 gallons of oil in it. All the fertilizers we use are made from natural gas. All the pesticides are made from Oil. Because we have raped our land, and it is nothing more than a sponge onto which we pour oil to make it arable again, without this production would drop from 130 bushels per acre down to 30 bushels per acre. Transportation of the food on the roads that take tremendous amounts of oil to build and maintain in trucks that burn oil to factories that burn oil to process the food and package it in plastic made from oil then shipped out in more oil burning trucks to McDonald's where we drive our oil burning SUV's through the drive thru and take it home and sit in front of a brainwashing device powered either by coal or natural gas, all so we don't have to conversate with our neighbors. It's an elegant Orwellian scheme really. Not only do we eat oil, we think it.
The fantasy is good for business, but folks, this way of life aint real.
Welcome to the desert of the real. Climate change, destruction of the biosphere, air pollution, water pollution, drained aquafirs, dead coral reefs, wiped out fisheries, no more rain forrests, overpopulation, massive trade deficit leading to more debt that will have to be paid off by your kids because you are an irresponsible fool, dollar collapse, housing bubble burst, pension plans gone, resource wars -iraq is but a prelude to what is coming-,diseases, and mass famine. Subsequent generations 100 generations down the line will hate us.
If you don't belive in the destruction of our environment to the point of not being able to sustain human life then I'll kindly point you to Peak Oil. The Saudi's have an expression for it. My father rode a camel, I drive a car, my son flies in a jet, his son will ride a camel. Peak Oil is going to reverse globalization, yah everyone knows there is plenty of the stuff left in the ground, the problem is oil production follows a bell curve, be it a single well, or a nation's production. After you extract 1/2 of the oil production declines, forever, every gallon of oil is harder to extract and of a lesser quality. Net energy (energy spent for energy returned) gets closer and closer to zero and when it becomes 1:1, the well is put out of production, that is why wells never really get sucke
Here is the cold hard truth - we Americans are living in the 29th day of a lifestyle that is not sustainable, and it will end soon, very soon. The world, as well as basic geology and the second law of thermodynamics is begining to tell us we can't keep living this way. Our consumer driven lives do come at a cost, in economic terms the hidden costs of our lifestyles are called "externalities". These externalities include massive degradation to the environment. 25% of the coral reefs in the world are dead. Most fish is unsafe to eat now because of heavy metal content. Our fisheries are dying out. Rainforrests are becoming a thing of the past.
For those of you who live down in the desert what happens to Las Vegas when the Colordo river stops turning the turbines in the Hoover dam - the flow rate was down 70% below average last year and we have had 2 wet decades and are now entering into a dry era.
The average American meal travels 1300 miles fueled by hydrocarbon energy before we eat it. Every calorie of food we eat requires 10 calories of hydrocarbon energy input to produce it, not including packaging and transportation. All of our fertilizers and pesticides are derrived from oil and natural gas. 90% of an Iowa farmer's costs are directly and indirectly related to the cost of fuel. Every pound of beef produced uses 2500 gallons of water and 16 pounds of grain. Talk about unsustainable. What happens when the fuel runs out? We will we have a couple options, scale back usage, or go to war to procure the remaining scraps of what is left. Our administration chose plan B. Going to war for something that should be left in the ground in the first place.
Right now is a very precarious time in American history and I think war is the last thing we should be pursuing, why? We are is massive massive debt. The trade deficit is gargantuan. Our dollar is financed to the hilt, and it's on the virge of collapse. Petrodollars as they call them now in economics are relying heavily on China buying our t-bonds, the corrupt world bank loaning money to third world nations which will never be able to pay them off (forcing them into credit card debt if you will), and the oil trade being financed in the dollar instead of the euro. That was in fact one of the hidden agendas of the war in Iraq, to get Iraq's oil trade switched back into dollars (it took about one week after the invasion to get that done) because Saddam had changed it over to euros and we weren't going to take it. But, the world is starting to consider switching anyway. We have 800 military bases around the world, fighting multiple front wars, buying, spending, consuming, pillaging, like there is no tomorrow. It's called imperial overstretch, it's why the Rome and the Soviet Union collapsed. If we don't stop imperial overstretch, there will be no tomorrow.
By the way, did you realize that Saudi Arabia -the most intolerant regime on the face of the earth- has 7 trillion in our stock market? The lead the wold in beheadings you know. 15 out of 19 of the hi-jackers who did 9/11 were from, you guessed it, Saudi Arabia.
Additionally the housing bubble is poised to collapse. Houses are WAY WAY WAY overvalued. I hope you didn't just buy a house. And the production of Oil and natural gas is going to start into a permanent decline when both of those peak, as soon as now - 2007.
Hydrogen is a public dillusion which stems from the fear of us running out of hydrocarbon energy, which we will be soon. Hydrogen is a net energy loser, which means it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than the energy you get from burning it. Right now the only practical way to make hydrogen on any kind of scale is with natural gas, something that we are running disasterously low on. The United States imports 15% of it's natural gas from Canada, and that 15% is over half of their production. The United States had it's production peak of natural gas in the 70's.
Oil is used as a feedstock for all commercial pesticides and natural gas is used as a feedstock for all commercial fertilizers. We have turned our farmland into nothing more than a nutrient defficient sponge so without these petrochemicals farming output would drop from about 140 bushels/acre down to roughly 30. Oil is used in plastics for the medical inductry and almost every other kind of plastic you can think of. There are 7 gallons of oil per every single tire we put on our cars. 40 barrels of oil are used in the energy to produce one car. 24 solar panels operating in the Austrailian desert for 24 hours produces only the energy equivalent of 1 liter of gasoline. If we were to remove hydrocarbons from the picture and replace that energy with energy from nuclear powerplants, it would take 10,000 of the largest plants and at that burn rate the uranium supply would last roughly 20 years. The bottom line is that there is nothing that can replace the energy efficiency of cheap oil.
Now for the bad news, we are peaking or about to, very soon, in both oil and gas, and that means the production slope of both begins on a slide down an irreversable decline. Demand will soar while production will slowly sink lower and lower with every subsequent barrel extracted. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination as to what effects this will have on the economy.
http://ospmm.sourceforge.net/ is a project I am creating to wake people up. Check the research section and read the reviews of the books if you don't believe me. Also I suggest viewing the award winning documentary http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ for a primer on what is about to come down the pipe. The movie is laiden with credentialed industry experts, geologists, and urban planners. This shit is for real people, we are living our lives way beyond what is even remotely sustainable, wake the hell up!