I just read some very interesting (and scary) things about Peak oil. I never knew anything about this but is it true that once oil goes so much up in price we could enter into a post industrial stone age? Read more here...http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ If anyone has any more information or news to add mabye we can make this the official thread for related info.
Yeah I have read a bit about the idea of peak oil. If you look at the Iraq war from this standpoint you will see a lot of evidence that the US government is hedging its bets that peak oil is coming soon. If peak oil is indeed happening right now then the coming decades will be ones of extreme financial uncertainty and of more resource wars.
Yeah that is another thing that sprung to my mind, if the stuff on this website is right about peak oil then the USA's ventures into the Middle east make sense, of course that's just joining dots together or mabye a conspiracy but it makes sense, either way that is a seprate issue.... peak oil is crazy if the forecasts are correct
I agree, it would make more sense than what we have been told thus far. This is a very interesting website, and I bookmarked it so that I can read more later. One thing that caught my eye... According to the chart, we have a little bit of time to be happy...
Yes, it is a great website, try to read through it all when you have time. Another thing which amazed me is this - Ultimately, the energy-intensive industrial age may be little more than a blip in the course of human history:
They've been predicting the end of oil since the days of Rockefeller, Based on current discovers we have enough oil it last us 100 years based on current consumption, and that doesn't include all the technical advance that could occur over the next 10 years, An increase of 10% in oil drilling efficiency will increase oil production by 1.4 trillion barrels of oil world wide.
Yes on current consumption, that is the thing though, the world is needing more and more oil by the day, by 2030 we will be using twice as much oil apparently. From the site: "Are We 'Running Out'? I Thought There Was 40 Years of the Stuff Left" Oil will not just "run out" because all oil production follows a bell curve. This is true whether we're talking about an individual field, a country, or on the planet as a whole. Oil is increasingly plentiful on the upslope of the bell curve, increasingly scarce and expensive on the down slope. The peak of the curve coincides with the point at which the endowment of oil has been 50 percent depleted. Once the peak is passed, oil production begins to go down while cost begins to go up. In practical and considerably oversimplified terms, this means that if 2005 was the year of global Peak Oil, worldwide oil production in the year 2030 will be the same as it was in 1980. However, the world’s population in 2030 will be both much larger (approximately twice) and much more industrialized (oil-dependent) than it was in 1980. Consequently, worldwide demand for oil will outpace worldwide production of oil by a significant margin. As a result, the price will skyrocket, oil dependant economies will crumble, and resource wars will explode.
That's a big if, Here is a power point presentation why argues why peak oil is wrong. http://pangea.stanford.edu/eslectures/endofoil/docs/OilDepletionMyth.pdf
I just read somewhere that the new "peak" of oil production just hit in Jan 2008. Seems like the trend is still upward and there is virtually unlimited energy available for any humans who would want to live in and colonize space. Malthusian predictions about the end of civilization due to a lack of resources is as old as civilization itself.
Peak oil. Yawn.... As oil runs out, prices will go up. As prices go up, people will use less oil and look for alternatives. When the price gets high enough, expensive alternatives will gain market share, and then begin to lower in price through competition and technological advancement, replacing oil. There is no magic limit and then everything grinds to a halt. The market doesn't work like that. Peak oil and global warming are two attacks on the global citizenry to get a UN emissions tax or tariff, that will allow the UN to autonomously operate without US funding. It's scaremongering when the science and economics simply don't add up. The idea is to frighten people into making these valid political policy issues. Peak oil. Yawn...
We'll move onto other forms of energy like the sun, but that'll run out soon too. Short solar stocks, they are pretty much doomed? . . .
Nuclear Fusion Energy, which is efficient, plentiful, cheap... is the way to go. Fusion energy is the future. Coupled with Super batteries, and you get a cleaner, greener world, with little pollution from burning dead dinosaurs. Solar Energy is all hype. Unless there is a revolutionary breakthrough, amking it cheap and profitable, it won't succeed.
We still don't have the technology for batteries, the more you condense the plates in batters the high change you have that the batteries will over heat and blow up, example sony and dell laptop batteries.
Its plentiful & many factors more intense outside the atmosphere. We're going to have to go up there eventually anyway, because the solar system it has many thousands of times the resources of earth. In the long run, its the only way to ensure human survival. It wouldn't require any revolutionary technology, just proper incentive.