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Topic:
Oil Dependency, etc.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
5/21 1:39pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
5/21 1:45pm (3 edits total)
Edited By:
Jabbadabbado
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Actually, yes. This is plausible with existing technology. Fill the desert with CSP plants. Mirrors focus on piping filled with some kind of liquid used to store heat. The heat is used to create steam which turns a turbine which generates electricity which then potentially could be exported. If you do it right, you can store up enough heat during daylight hours that you can keep generating electricity even after the sun goes down. The real challenge would be building the infrastructure to export the power over long distances.
In terms of "moisture farming," CSP tech has great potential to power, for example, water desalination for Saudi's domestic use.
I think in the mid term, this would be a great way for Saudis to reconfigure their domestic energy mix to free up as much oil as possible for export as their oil production goes into decline. Another thing they are doing now is building up an advanced petrochemical industry to capture more of the value add of oil. Instead of exporting crude oil, why not export refined products, plastic and chemical feedstock, and so on?
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Darth-Ghost
Registered:
Oct '03
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Date Posted:
6/9 5:23pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080609/ts_afp/europeinflationprotestenergytransport
70,000 truckers across Western Europe (mostly around the Spanish borders with Portugal and France) are in strike over rising fuel prices, and the national everage for gas has finally hit $4 in the United States with some saying $5 or even $6 by November. Saudi Arabia has called an emergency meeting to "discuss" the alarming explosion of oil prices, but I doubt anything will come from it.
I sound extremely pessimistic and resigned saying this, but, at what point do you think strikes and protests may turn from peaceful to not-really-peaceful? I know my dad has said that he wouldn't be able to afford going to work anymore if gas ever went into the $6-9 dollar range for a gallon of gas, and some are saying that's right around the corner and we're heading straight into it. This summer is looking to become the time when society really wakes up and realizes not only how dependent we are on oil and gas, but also we might realize the Everest-sized hole we have dug ourselves into with this mess.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
6/10 7:45am
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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The long haul trucking industry is not going to survive in the U.S. or Europe. There's nothing that can be done to save it short of massive government subsidies. And that would be a tragic mistake. The better route would be some kind of economic assistance package for displaced truckers through improved unemployment benefits, retraining subsidies, etc.
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LordNyax113
Registered:
Oct '07
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Date Posted:
6/10 1:59pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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So basically we're screwed, eh?
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
6/10 2:08pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Are you a trucker? If so, yes.
Other people may be less screwed. The people who are most screwed are probably the ones who were already most screwed to begin with.
High gas prices hit poor people hardest. On average nationwide in the U.S., people pay 4% of their incomes for gas, rapidly approaching the 4.5% people were paying around 1980 at the peak of the oil crisis. If you're a wealthy Chicagoan, you're paying far less than 1%. If you're a poor rural family in Mississippi, it might be 15%.
At the global level, the developing countries take the first big hit on high food and energy prices.
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LordNyax113
Registered:
Oct '07
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Date Posted:
6/10 2:35pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Jabbadabbado posted:
Are you a trucker? If so, yes.
Other people may be less screwed. The people who are most screwed are probably the ones who were already most screwed to begin with.
High gas prices hit poor people hardest. On average nationwide in the U.S., people pay 4% of their incomes for gas, rapidly approaching the 4.5% people were paying around 1980 at the peak of the oil crisis. If you're a wealthy Chicagoan, you're paying far less than 1%. If you're a poor rural family in Mississippi, it might be 15%.
At the global level, the developing countries take the first big hit on high food and energy prices.
No as a normal joe schmoe.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
6/10 2:47pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
6/10 2:48pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
Jabbadabbado
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Yes, I think we're screwed. At least in the medium term. The pain of high energy prices and economic retrenchment is going to be severe.
In the long term there's a better than zero chance of a successful dizfactor-esque transition to a prosperous and sustainable future of alternative energy and careful resource conservation.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
6/17 7:54am
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Suburban Blight
I've been an advocate of "walkable urbanism" for a decade, but I was never able to convince many of my friends, who all bought bigger houses with bigger yards in suburbs that required them to drive an hour to work.
What they bought into has now become an accelerating suburban collapse. Foreclosures and excess inventory and tightening credit terms have depressed the market, forcing people to abandon the outer edges of suburbia. The homeowners left behind, even the solvent ones, face a mounting crisis because their own home values decline even further as the community becomes depopulated and unkempt and crime-ridden. Others at the outer edges who might otherwise be able to afford their mortgages are finding that they can no longer afford the cost of commuting by car. This drives more people away and accelerates the suburban collapse.
As people move away, the suburban retail locations suffer. This in turn compounds a localized recession that affects employment, further accelerating the suburban decline. Municipal government services suffer too, and school systems begin to decline, which again fuels the decline of the community. It's perhaps most pronounced in California at the moment, but you can also see this process happening in the far Chicago suburbs where many of my friends and acquaintances live.
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Saintheart
Title: Manager and Wandering Swordsman of the RPF
Registered:
Dec '00
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Date Posted:
6/18 12:46am
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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The suburban model of city planning and development was, energy and communitywise, one of the most wasteful concepts of the twentieth century, and the US led half the Western world down the same path. The idea that this model of city living was not sustainable has been talked about for decades and decades, but, as always with humanity, we are learning about it through one hell of an object lesson to establish it.
I'm not sure, though, that it amounts to a collapse of the suburban structural idea. We have a similar problem in Australia: suburbia reigns supreme, and every second show on the TV screens is how to make your geraniums flower even better on the edges of that unused green expanse they call the back lawn.
I suspect it's only temporary and not a permanent shift away from suburban lifestyle because poverty and developers move around. If the middle class can't support the mortgages out in suburbia and property values decline so far they begin to move away into the city, the poor will move in. Crime and poverty rise; eventually the social system breaks down so significantly you have a small population in that area.
Which is where the developers come in. The article, I notice, talks about gentrification of rundown areas. That cycle will simply start itself again; the middle class moves out, the poor move in, eventually the neighbourhood hits rock bottom, and developers start seeing opportunity rather than dollars in the loss column. And at this point you'll see the city become unpopular again because the poor and the criminal will move in, just as they did in the sixties and seventies - and thus the cycle begins again.
This is not a shout of hope, incidentally. It's more a pessismistic observation on how money still runs things.
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