Re: Bottom of the barrel

The easter Island syndrome, dont worry till down to the last tree.Or the
last boat as with New Englands fishing industry.


"Bring_ALL_the_war_criminals_to_justice"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
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> http://www.guardian.co.uk/oil/story/0,11319,1097672,00.html
>
> Bottom of the barrel
>
> The world is running out of oil - so why do politicians refuse to
> talk about it?
>
> George Monbiot
> Tuesday December 2, 2003
>
>
> The oil industry is buzzing. On Thursday, the government approved
> the development of the biggest deposit discovered in British
> territory for at least 10 years. Everywhere we are told that this is
> a "huge" find, which dispels the idea that North Sea oil is in
> terminal decline. You begin to recognise how serious the human
> predicament has become when you discover that this "huge" new field
> will supply the world with oil for five and a quarter days.
>
> Every generation has its taboo, and ours is this: that the resource
> upon which our lives have been built is running out. We don't talk
> about it because we cannot imagine it. This is a civilisation in
> denial.
>
> Oil itself won't disappear, but extracting what remains is becoming
> ever more difficult and expensive. The discovery of new reserves
> peaked in the 1960s. Every year we use four times as much oil as we
> find. All the big strikes appear to have been made long ago: the
> 400m barrels in the new North Sea field would have been considered
> piffling in the 1970s. Our future supplies depend on the discovery
> of small new deposits and the better exploitation of big old ones.
> No one with expertise in the field is in any doubt that the global
> production of oil will peak before long.
>
> The only question is how long. The most optimistic projections are
> the ones produced by the US department of energy, which claims that
> this will not take place until 2037. But the US energy information
> agency has admitted that the government's figures have been fudged:
> it has based its projections for oil supply on the projections for
> oil demand, perhaps in order not to sow panic in the financial
> markets.
>
> Other analysts are less sanguine. The petroleum geologist Colin
> Campbell calculates that global extraction will peak before 2010. In
> August, the geophysicist Kenneth Deffeyes told New Scientist that he
> was "99% confident" that the date of maximum global production will
> be 2004. Even if the optimists are correct, we will be scraping the
> oil barrel within the lifetimes of most of those who are middle-aged
> today.
>
> The supply of oil will decline, but global demand will not. Today we
> will burn 76m barrels; by 2020 we will be using 112m barrels a day,
> after which projected demand accelerates. If supply declines and
> demand grows, we soon encounter something with which the people of
> the advanced industrial economies are unfamiliar: shortage. The
> price of oil will go through the roof.
>
> As the price rises, the sectors which are now almost wholly
> dependent on crude oil - principally transport and farming - will be
> forced to contract. Given that climate change caused by burning oil
> is cooking the planet, this might appear to be a good thing. The
> problem is that our lives have become hard-wired to the oil economy.
> Our sprawling suburbs are impossible to service without cars. High
> oil prices mean high food prices: much of the world's growing
> population will go hungry. These problems will be exacerbated by the
> direct connection between the price of oil and the rate of
> unemployment. The last five recessions in the US were all preceded
> by a rise in the oil price.
>
> Oil, of course, is not the only fuel on which vehicles can run.
> There are plenty of possible substitutes, but none of them is likely
> to be anywhere near as cheap as crude is today. Petroleum can be
> extracted from tar sands and oil shale, but in most cases the
> process uses almost as much energy as it liberates, while creating
> great mountains and lakes of toxic waste. Natural gas is a better
> option, but switching from oil to gas propulsion would require a
> vast and staggeringly expensive new fuel infrastructure. Gas, of
> course, is subject to the same constraints as oil: at current rates
> of use, the world has about 50 years' supply, but if gas were to
> take the place of oil its life would be much shorter.
>
> Vehicles could be run from fuel cells powered by hydrogen, which is
> produced by the electrolysis of water. But the electricity which
> produces the hydrogen has to come from somewhere. To fill all the
> cars in the US would require four times the current capacity of the
> national grid. Coal burning is filthy, nuclear energy is expensive
> and lethal. Running the world's cars from wind or solar power would
> require a greater investment than any civilisation has ever made
> before. New studies suggest that leaking hydrogen could damage the
> ozone layer and exacerbate global warming.
>
> Turning crops into diesel or methanol is just about viable in terms
> of recoverable energy, but it means using the land on which food is
> now grown for fuel. My rough calculations suggest that running the
> United Kingdom's cars on rapeseed oil would require an area of
> arable fields the size of England.
>
> There is one possible solution which no one writing about the
> impending oil crisis seems to have noticed: a technique with which
> the British and Australian governments are currently experimenting,
> called underground coal gasification. This is a fancy term for
> setting light to coal seams which are too deep or too expensive to
> mine, and catching the gas which emerges. It's a hideous prospect,
> as it means that several trillion tonnes of carbon which was
> otherwise impossible to exploit becomes available, with the likely
> result that global warming will eliminate life on Earth.
>
> We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on
> every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the
> planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation
> collapses.
>
> The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age
> and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our
> farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive
> political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for
> austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to
> consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching
> tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people
> would choose the tableware.
>
> In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing
> to do with oil is simply preposterous. The US attacked Iraq (which
> appears to have had no weapons of mass destruction and was not
> threatening other nations), rather than North Korea (which is
> actively developing a nuclear weapons programme and boasting of its
> intentions to blow everyone else to kingdom come) because Iraq had
> something it wanted. In one respect alone, Bush and Blair have been
> making plans for the day when oil production peaks, by seeking to
> secure the reserves of other nations.
>
> I refuse to believe that there is not a better means of averting
> disaster than this. I refuse to believe that human beings are
> collectively incapable of making rational decisions. But I am
> beginning to wonder what the basis of my belief might be.
>
> =B7 The sources for this and all George Monbiot's recent articles can
> be found at www.monbiot.com.
>
>
> ---
> > This message was posted via two or more anonymous remailing services.
>
> Why? This is one reason
>
> > November 28,2003: (ICH) In a precedent-setting case, the IRS wielded
> > new power to punish the political speech of those who espouse views"
> > the government considers "inconsistent" with government-held beliefs.
>
> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5313.htm
>
> ---
>
> -=-
> This message was posted via two or more anonymous remailing services.
>
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