Re: This One'll Scare The Dickens Out Of You, I Guarantee It. Go Ahead, Read It. I Dare You!

>
>"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 civilization in
>denial."
>
>http://tinyurl.com/xf8c
>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?
>
>Tuesday December 2, 2003
>
>The Guardian 
>
>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 recognize 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 civilization 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.
>
>
>-Romdinstler
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Time to invite some Dutchmen over to build some wind mills.
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