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Topic:
Oil Dependency, etc.
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Saintheart
Title: Manager and Wandering Swordsman of the RPF
Registered:
Dec '00
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Date Posted:
3/13 5:21am
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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The thing that makes my blood boil about this entire debate is that a truly rational society would have started this debate in a serious way a good twenty to thirty years ago.
I got my first inkling something was up when the BP corporation here in Australia started with its "treehugging" logo and saying how much it wants to help preserve our planet. I came to the strong hunch that the oil/motor companies knew something the rest of us didn't when the first hybrids shifted from experimental to production models. It seems to be an unfortunate fact of our civilisation that humanity doesn't respond too well to distant or near-distant threats; it only responds to things when the crisis is imminent. When car companies suddenly start to make massive changes to change the fuel source of the combustion engine the image that comes to mind is a 300-pound man who's had his first heart attack and goes on an exercise program. Although I suppose we should be glad he hasn't gone on a crash diet.
My personal view -- and I admit I've nothing to back it but hunches and instincts -- is that the oil companies do know their stocks are dwindling and most likely will continue to do so, and they've known it for some time. Having said that, it would be interesting to go and see which corporations are the biggest backers of research into alternative fuel sources: I'd put $5 on it that Caltex, British Petroleum, and the others will be skulking around in there somewhere. And just as important would be finding out how long they've been serious contributors to research in that area. They might not have come to the view that peak oil has passed, but they also don't have to fly to know the sky is blue, either.
On the oil/nuclear/solar debate, as I'd understood it the main reason solar isn't seen as a viable alternative is because the conversion ratio of solar energy reaching the collector to how much electricity is generated is far too low - somewhere around the 5-10% mark, though if someone's got more current data I'm happy to be proven wrong. I would have posited that solar's about the only real longterm energy solution for the planet, given the source is limitless for all intents and purposes, but the problem is getting the conversion rate up.
One interesting side dish to this rather bitter meal that's being cooked up for us: assuming a "Rome burns" scenario and oil production drops off dramatically, it isn't just the fuel oil that's the problem. It's also the petrochemicals that go into plastics which are also important, since they're derived from petroleum. Are there viable substitutes which can be used in place of petroleum for such things like that?
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Darth-Ghost
Registered:
Oct '03
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Date Posted:
3/13 12:07pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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The main issue is food, really. The growing and transportation of it depends on oil and gas, and civilization cannot exist for long without a food surplus. Medicine is the other key concern. I love technology, the integration of the world, all the new discoveries and inventions, but I know I could learn to live without them. I kind of wonder and fanatasize about living close to like how the ancient and medieval people did. And most people would learn to adapt too, after initial major protests and crime spike. It is when food and medicine start disapearing, that is the REAL problem.
On the brighter side... we know alternatives like solar and geothermal energy are not that efficient or cheap right now, and I know solar panels actually need fossil fuels and emit a lot of pollution during production. But looking to the future, how does the ongoing R&D in these technologies looking?
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
3/13 1:00pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
3/13 1:04pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
Jabbadabbado
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Behind all these issues, food and energy in particular, but more broadly resource constraints in general, is population growth, and the per capita consumption of that population. Although China's one child policy has prevented between 250 to 400 million births, the population there is growing at 17 million a year - or more than half the current population of the U.S. per decade. Overlay China's incredible economic growth and the stage has been set for long-term and severe supply constraints on almost any resource you'd care to imagine: food, oil, coal, copper. Drinkable water.
I agree we missed the window 30 years ago to create a sustainable future. By 2012, I believe the world will start to feel critical effects of resource constraints: declining global per capita food, energy and industrial output. Within 20 years of that we may begin to see the first signs of a major global population crash.
About solar power: developments in concentrated solar power are definitely a bright spot. "Desert power" to misuse a term of art from Dune is going to be big within a quarter century. Place a giant array of mirrors in a desert focused on a boiler. Use the steam to generate electricity. With the right design for storing the thermal energy, you can generate power for hours after the sun goes down.
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king_alvarez
Registered:
May '07
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Date Posted:
3/13 1:11pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Saintheart posted:
The thing that makes my blood boil about this entire debate is that a truly rational society would have started this debate in a serious way a good twenty to thirty years ago.
This reminds me of Albert Bartlett who said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
He gave an interesting analogy about bacteria and exponential growth.
Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become 4, the 4 become 8, 16 and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria into an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning, and then observe that the bottle is full at 12:00 noon. There's our case of just ordinary steady growth: it has a doubling time of one minute, it’s in the finite environment of one bottle.
I want to ask you three questions. Number one: at what time was the bottle half full? Well, would you believe 11:59, one minute before 12:00? Because they double in number every minute.
And the second question: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realise you were running of space? Well, let’s just look at the last minutes in the bottle. At 12:00 noon, it’s full; one minute before, it’s half full; 2 minutes before, it’s a quarter full; then an 1?8th; then a 1?16th. Let me ask you, at 5 minutes before 12:00, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space just yearning for development, how many of you would realise there’s a problem?
...Well, suppose that at 2 minutes before 12:00, some of the bacteria realise they’re running out of space, so they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the overthrust belt and in the Arctic, and they find three new bottles. Now that’s an incredible discovery, that’s three times the total amount of resource they ever knew about before. They now have four bottles, before their discovery, there was only one. Now surely this will give them a sustainable society, won’t it?
You know what the third question is: how long can the growth continue as a result of this magnificent discovery? Well, look at the score: at 12:00 noon, one bottle is filled, there are three to go; 12:01, two bottles are filled, there are two to go; and at 12:02, all four are filled and that’s the end of the line.
transcript
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
3/13 1:57pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
3/13 2:03pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
Jabbadabbado
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Exactly. If we could have attained zero population growth for the world in 1900 when the population was well under 2 billion, we could have given the human race centuries of breathing room on resource depletion.
What happens to resource consumption at the margins when we add an additional 100 million to the planet every year?
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Saintheart
Title: Manager and Wandering Swordsman of the RPF
Registered:
Dec '00
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Date Posted:
3/17 6:27pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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It's moving a little OT, but I would suspect that the controls for overpopulation will probably be instituted by nature if there's no action by humanity. The ethics of ZPG probably aren't what we're talking about in this thread, so I'll leave them aside.
The only point I'd make is that disease and pandemic remain potent controls on human population. As I understand the science, when about 80-85% of a population is immune to a contagion, an interesting thing called "herd immunity" kicks in: the occurrence of organisms vulnerable to the contagion in question is so low that the disease can't propagate because it can't spread effectively. Ergo the disease doesn't show up. I'd understood this as a secondary but just as important reason for immunisation programs.
As population rises, of course, 'herd immunity' drops, since lower proportions of people are immune to the given contagion. Of course, morons like Oprah suggesting (against all the science) that immunisation causes autism doesn't help, either.
Interestingly, overprescription of medications also feed into the problem as well: you'll kill most iterations of a virus with the newest drugs on the market, but over time and successive generations, eventually some viruses will become immune. Darwin's theory says that these immune viruses then flourish since they are better adapted to survive. Some strains of stapholococcus ("Golden Staph") are like this -- when they get into a hospital it's difficult to get rid of them short of a full-scale fumigation, mostly because it's resistant to many of the current medications that previously stopped it.
I'm not suggesting smallpox is going to necessarily make a comeback (the party line being that the last vials of the disease in storage were destroyed about 10-15 years ago) but I will suggest that Chicken Flu scares of the last few years will probably become more frequent as global population rises, immigration to less-populated areas rises, and globalisation continues its march. Eventually I think you'll get a "perfect storm" of factors which may result in a large-scale loss of life.
And I don't hold great store in Western medical science to hold such a disease back, either. These are the same folks who still haven't figured out how AIDS disguises itself, and who are frantically looking for drugs that will kill the more resistant strains of viruses across the world.
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Michelle: my Italian queen, my angel, my reason, my wife.
Jessica: my little princess, my daughter, born 10 August 2007
Director -- Star Wars: Knighthood
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
3/17 7:49pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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I don't know much about the potential for germageddon. Ebola for example has been a disappointment. It's so virulent it burns out too fast when it hits a human population, so no real chance of pandemic.
Humans are good at taming environments, crushing our biological rivals. But when it comes to outwitting ourselves we run up against some serious obstacles.
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ShaneP
Registered:
Mar '01
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Date Posted:
3/18 12:41pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Jabba
Ebola for example has been a disappointment
Gee, don't sound so down! There's always hope!  ROTFLMAO!
I love ya man.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
3/18 1:00pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Yes, there was a time when I had a lot of hope for ebola.
It's all about finding the most equitable way to bring the human population down to about 1.5 billion. Pestilence seems fair in a way that maybe starvation isn't.
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ShaneP
Registered:
Mar '01
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Date Posted:
3/18 1:51pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
3/18 1:53pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
ShaneP
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Yes, there was a time when I had a lot of hope for ebola.
lol You need a 
edit
This is more about biofuel:
I was told a few days ago that biofuel cannot be piped because it can't be mixed with water ala oil and so it must be trucked at large expense to distributors.
Is this just a massive boondoggle?
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Lowbacca_1977
Title: Senate Moderator
Registered:
Jun '06
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Date Posted:
3/18 1:56pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Jabba, this site might cheer you up, or something along those lines:
http://www.exitmundi.nl/
End world scenarios seem to be what you're after. Well, the less efficient ones, anyway.
Well, I think biofuel may be problematic also because the idea of growing our fuel is going to up the food costs as well.
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ShaneP
Registered:
Mar '01
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Date Posted:
3/18 2:03pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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Apparently, it's already upping the cost of feed for livestock and cereals.
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Jabbadabbado
Registered:
Mar '99
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Date Posted:
3/18 2:07pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
3/18 2:09pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
Jabbadabbado
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ShaneP, I've read that too: ethanol can't be piped in the same pipelines that carry petroleum products. It pretty much has to be trucked around, or moved by barge or rail. That of course lowers the net energy return for ethanol.
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ShaneP
Registered:
Mar '01
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Date Posted:
3/18 2:13pm
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
- Date Edited:
3/18 2:16pm (1 edits total)
Edited By:
ShaneP
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That piping info came from someone who worked on the trans-alaskan. He said it can't be mixed with water and pushed through the lines like with oil.
Can you imagine what that shipping would cost Hawaii?
Speaking of Hawaii, I've also read that sugar cane fuel, like what they're doing in Brazil, would be cheaper and cleaner than corn.
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Saintheart
Title: Manager and Wandering Swordsman of the RPF
Registered:
Dec '00
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Date Posted:
3/19 12:35am
Subject:
RE: Oil Dependency, etc.
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So, fusion power.
Hasn't come up in the thread as yet. Anyone know how far they are from a controllable reaction as yet?
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Jessica: my little princess, my daughter, born 10 August 2007
Director -- Star Wars: Knighthood
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