BikinginSeattle

If you believe riding a bike to work is helping the environment then I say more power to ya. Billions of people have been riding bikes in China for years and they are now switching to cars. The globe is warming and no matter how many laws the gov't passes it will continue to warm.

Zeuser

And just this week we've discovered that China now emits more pollution than America. So what does that tell you?

unkchunk

So sorry schnee. I've been hearing this "the world's going to run out of oil in 20 years" since I was in school in the 70's. I been through the redflag/green flag gas crisis in the 70's and the odd/even plate gas crisis in the 80's... and you claim is because of Bush? I had no idea AWOL National Guard pilots had that much pull.

If you can get passed your blind hate for a moment and consider how different it would be, if just a few of these celebrities who care so much about the environment actually stopped driving and started riding a bicycle 30 years ago. There certainly wouldn't be this "homeless/lost his license because of DUI" stereotype that I have to deal with everyday now. People drive SUV's, because the celebrities drive SUV's. If the rich and beautiful practiced what they preached and actually rode bicycles, we will see more folks rding bicycles. So who's the dumb**** now?

stevelon

We do have alternatives to oil for primary heat sources and even transportation. I'm not saying they are developed but could be. To my knowledge however there is no alternative for petrochemicals. How will we make fertilizer to grow our crops, make carbon fiber epoxy to make light bikes or even cars god forbid. The supply is in fact finite so it makes no difference what the supply is it in fact will end. Will we be under water due to global warming? My position. We must stop using oil for primary heat sources and transportation or we will all be walking, swimming or starving. Comments?

unkchunk

I think what needs to happen is to break the additude that merely talking about bicycling equals actually bicycling.

I know too many people who claim to: care about the environment, think cars pollute, think bicycles are the answer, have bicycles, have MUP's... and won't ride. I've seen "One less car" bumper stickers on SUV's. Polling data suggests that for every car I see driving in my area, I should see about one utilitarian cyclist. But most of the time I feel like I'm the only one. I've seen maybe two dozen bicycle commuters, only one other at the grocery store and none at the post office, bank, etc. At some point, won't people who say we should ride bikes, actually have to ride their bikes?

It doesn't take much effort to believe in something. Either you do or you don't? Atually doing something takes effort. And there's where the problem is. People think just merely believing or saying they believe is the equivalent of actually doing. It's not because the message isn't out there.

JeffS

What's all this live in fear garbage? It sounds like you're saying you don't want to "live in fear", so **** it - you'll do whatever you please. If that's the case, you should really stop trying to play the victim here.

----

On a related note, I'm annoyed that global warming has become known as the problem we're trying to fix. Even if you could absolutely prove global warming was happening, most everyone couldn't care less. So it's 1 degree hotter than it was 20 years ago. Nobody cares. There are a hundred different things we could point to that would be more significant in people's minds than global warming.

krazygluon

Ever hear of Hubbert's Law? It accurately predicted when oil discoveries would peak..back in the 70's. Discoveries have peaked, and are now declining which means we are finding less and less. It *would* have predicted peak production, but the implementation of OPEC did produce an artificial plunge in production rates. All post-OPEC production data however still conforms to the curve and does point to a peak in production.

Sadly not likely. Many of those who disagree are wealthy enough to buy their way out of the worst of the suffering.

Plant oils have generally been in relative abundance throughout history unless you happened to have lived in a region where oil-bearing plants didn't readily grow. (in which case you burned wood, beeswax or tallow)
Whale oil usage died off as fossil fuels came about...it was an entirely economic struggle. all the "save the whales" conflict that you hear about has nothing to do with whale oil and much to do with a few nations' decisions that whale-meat is tasty enough to merit hunting the things to extinction.

Running out of oil is a much more serious issue than you're giving it credit for being. Fossil fuels are the mother's milk of technological civilization. No fossil fuel, no steel (or any other metal beyond bronze/tin/copper and some verrry expensive ironwork) No steel, no modern world. Global warming will be an inconvenience compared to the dark ages that will ensue from running out of fossil fuels instead of phasing them out with the next step.

I for one don't feel like flushing my species down the evolutionary toilet.

jonathan180iq

Wether or not there is a global climate change problem or not does not affect my opinion towards the need to change our social addiction to polluting forms of transportation. (proportionately)
I mean, it's really all about responsibility. Since there are millions of people pouring millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere/ground/water, and we know it, why isn't everyone on the planet trying to clean it up?

For me, it doesn't really matter if there is a global oil crisis or if global warming is going to destroy us all.
What does matter is what we know. We know that our current methods are nasty and dirty. Yet we do nothing about it.

It's like the people that live in small villages on a river. The same river that they **** and piss in. They also get their drinking water from that river and wash their clothes in and cook their food with it. Would you live on that river, if you knew what you were doing to it? I wouldn't. I know we don't have the option of leaving this BIG river called the Earth, but you get the idea.

some_guy282

I've been following Peak Oil closely for years, and there have been a few documentaries about Peak Oil to come out in that time. I can say with great confidence that A Crude Awakening is hands down the best documentary about Peak Oil to date. There is a growing consensus that we are nearing (or event past/at) peak right now. The oil production picture for the forseeable future is relatively clear because is takes a few years to bring an oil field into production after you discover it. So when you look at recent discoveries and when they will be coming online, as well as current fields (and how much they will either increase in production or decrease due to depletion) you have a pretty good idea of what production capacity will look like for a few years to come. It's not looking good.

Mexico (the U.S.'s second largest importer) peaked in 2005, and production in their largest field (the 2nd largest in the world) was down by 20% in 2006. If that 20% decline rate continues (which it probably will, unlikely to decrease, more likely to increase) then by 2010 Mexico will be unable to export oil to us anymore. Right now they're sending us about 5 and a half % of our current daily consumption. The oil shock of 73' 74' was caused by a supply shortfall of only about 5%.

Last year the world lost about 3.5 million barrels a day to depletion. It gained about 2.5 mbd of new production. A net loss of 1mbd.

If you'd like to see the film, Netflix has it at the moment. Also, you can buy it here. The price is relatively steep at the moment because the only distributor he can get it from is in Canada and he has to pay a lot for it from them.

substructure

Victim? Of what? People pushing their agenda on us for political or personal gain? Heck, we're all victims don't you think? Eventually we will become a Nanny State and the government will watch and control everything we do. That is a scary thought, but it's closer than we realize. So yeah, I guess I'm playing the victim. It doesn't bother me one bit. Sorry.

ellenDSD

Could ya'll stop b1tch1ng long enough to tell me where to rent the d4mn movie?!

acroy

To your whale oil point: Precisely my point as well. Fossil fuels became cheaper than whale oil, so fossil fuel it is.

To your "oil is a much more serious issue than you're giving it credit for being" point: nah, must disagree. Just as we transitioned from whale oil to dino oil, we'll transition again once something becomes cheaper than oil.

As far as steel plants, etc shutting down: there's a helluva lot of coal left to fuel factories. We can run right out of oil and have plenty of coal for a long time. There's near-infinite cheap, clean, proven nuke power on the sidelines. And likely other alternatives.....

Geeze, you really think scarce oil = end of life as we know it? No "modern world" after oil runs out? Then yessir, we are doomed. Give up now and crawl under a rock. I call that a sad, narrow, short-sighted view. Give us as a race some credit - we're pretty tenacious and inventive.

Zeuser

Blockbuster and just about every other major video rental place will have it.

some_guy282

See the end of my previous post. Netflix has it and I linked to a place you could buy it.



There is no law that says there is always going to be a better more efficient fuel just waiting for us to find it when we start to run out of one. Yes, we've made similar transitions before with wood coal and whale oil. But that's no guarantee we'll be able to do it again with oil.




Alternatives exist at the moment, but people who have studied this issue and actually crunched the numbers conclude that there is no combination of current alternative energies that will allow us to consume energy the way we are consuming it now once oil production peaks. So if there is a "silver bullet" replacement technology for oil, we havn't found it yet. To address the two you mention specifically: yes, coal is abundant. However, it lacks qualities that make oil so desirable: energy density and a high energy profit ratio. The energy stored in coal isn't as concentrated as the energy stored in oil, and it's harder and more expensive to extract the coal both financially and energetically.

Nuclear energy also provides a lot of power, but it's not nearly as great when you look at the process as a whole (as one should for all alternatives). You have to find the uranium, you have to mine it, you have to build the nuclear power plants, you have to store the nuclear waste, and eventually you have to decommission the power plant after it gets to old. All of that takes a lot of energy. Also, nuclear energy doesn't provide a good replacement for liquid fuels (which is what we primarily use oil for). You'd need another technology to efficiently store the electricity created from nuclear to use it for transportation. Hydrogen technology is a total joke right now, and electric batteries would work but they're not very efficient. All that being said, we hypothetically could replace our total fossil fuel use with nuclear energy acoss the planet. Want to know how many nuclear power plants that would require though? 10,000. Yes, ten thousand nuclear power plants. And since uranium is subject to the same Hubbert's curve for extraction (as most all finite natural resources are) we would peak in uranium extraction after only a decade or so of running the world on nuclear power.

In the end, finding a total replacement for oil is actually the worst thing we could do. That sounds silly to most people, but that's because of the way they envision the problem. Since the industrial revolution began we've been exponentially increasing everything: our population, and our consumption of natural resources. If we were to find a silver bullet replacement for oil, it would just allow us to continue growing our rates of consumption exponentially. Eventually, we are going to hit a ceiling on something there is no replacement for like clean water or arable land. Or maybe we'll totally FUBAR the environment before then with global warming or some other similar disaster. Peak oil is just another chapter in the continuing overshoot of humanity on planet Earth. Our civilization is not sustainable. Period. If you've got a free hour and want to see a lecture that gets to the heart of this problem, I'd highly recommend this video.

https://edison.ncssm.edu/programs/colloquia/bartlett.ram

It's a math professor explaining the exponential function and how things double when they grow at a steady rate. He then applies it to things like our oil consumption and the human population. Earth is a planet with a finite amount of resources. Eventually the growth has to stop somewhere.

some_guy282

Scarce oil absolutely means the end of life as we know it. It would change a great many things. We've developed our entire civilization on the premise that oil will always remain cheap and abundant. When production peaks both of those things will no longer be true. As a result living arrangements we've developed during the cheap oil era will no longer be efficient. Here in the United States for example, we've put more than half of our population in the suburbs, most of which are so spread out and far away from city centers that the private automobile is the only transportation method that works for them. On the international scale we've been turning more and more to globalization, where goods are manufactured very far away from where they are sold. Both of those systems are toast if oil becomes scarce and expensive. And the transition to another system that will be efficient in a world of expensive oil is going to take time and be very painful.

In the 73 oil crisis the price of oil quadrupled because of a supply shortfall of only 5%, because of the inelastic nature of oil demand. In the first year post peak the global supply shortfall will be something on the order of 4-6%, with supply falling 3% and demand increasing at the same time. That shortfall will continue to grow every year as the depletion rate increases.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it means the end of the modern world, but it could be if we don't address the problem rationally. I wouldn't give us that much credit as a race either. The way we've been behaving on planet Earth is disturbingly similar to the way bacteria behaves in a petri dish.

edit: Oh yeah, one more thing. The biggest consequence of Peak Oil once it hits is that economic growth will no longer be possible. Right now we have a financial system set up to demand growth in the economy every single year. Without an increased production of oil to manufacture and ship more goods around, economic growth is no longer possible. That means there will be a financial crisis with growing numbers of people unable to pay off loans who are forced into bankruptcy.

acroy

Alright, guess we'll just have to make the best of living at the peak of cheap energy consumption, and prepare ourselves for the inevitable. What gives me hope is, if there's one constant in history, it's how wrong the predictions of the future were.

An interesting line from Popular Science:
"Largely as a result of technological advances, the U.S. now uses 47 percent less energy per dollar of economic output than it did 30 years ago."

PopSci's entertaining little article is here: https://www.popsci.com/popsci/energy/
Interestingly, they have a bit on Tony Ellsworth in there.

some_guy282

Jevon's Paradox. We've gotten much more efficient at using energy, but this increased efficiency doesn't result in less energy use because we keep expanding our use of energy. Taking the Popular Science example, we are using less energy per dollar than we were 30 years. But how much total energy are we using compared to 30 years ago? A lot, lot more. Increased efficiency is meaningless unless you make a conscious effort to reduce your total energy use, which we have consistently failed to do. It's another one of the complexities of the problem. If become more efficient with our oil use but don't change our monetary system so it stops demanding exponential growth, the efficiency is wiped out...

eofelis 

+1

TimJ

Dude, you are one loud, obnoxious, know-nothing. I've got news for you- people do know things. There are facts in this world and it isn't terribly hard to seperate them from things that aren't facts. All it takes is the ability to think critically. Global warming? No, actually, there really isn't evidence pointing "against it". Putting it in terms of "for" and "against" is basically a false construct to begin with and just points to how you think and the way you see the world and process what you see and hear, not to how the world actually works or what "truth" actually is.

I meet dudes like you all the time and your creedo seems to be: They are all the same. Doesn't matter who it is or what the issue is, you see a couple sides and to you they're competetors. They have no integrity except to themselves because they both just want to win

Well the world often doesn't work like that. Take global warming, for instance. Guess what? There's only one "side". If "they" just want to win to fullfill a personal agenda, then the only "side" is the various advocates who deny global warming. Why are "they" a side and not the various global-warming-is-real people? Because the global-warming-is-real people are akin to the gravity-is-real people. Gravity isn't a debate or a competition or a goal, gravity is a natural phenomenon. Gravity has been studied, observed and tested by many scientists over many years and did you know, they still don't completely understand gravity? Yeah, the exact mechanics and manifestations of gravity aren't completely understood, but you're not going to find anyone arguing against gravity and for "angels hold us on the ground" because that would be completely ********, of course gravity is real.

So's global warming. It's something that's been studied for a number of years by a lot of scientists and pretty much every single scientist on the planet who works in a field related to climate science agrees so-called "global warming" is a real phenomenon, it is occuring, and it is most likely largely a product of human activity. They aren't a "side", they are people who observe, study and test discreet bits of the world in order to understand it better. The presence of advocates or celebrities or "hippies" getting all riled up and in yo' face has absolutely nothing to do with global warming as a natural phenomenon. Now, as for the one side, why are they a side? First of all, they're a side because they're arguing gravity is a hoax. Second, they're a side because they happen to corner the market on "I don't know about you, but my feet stick to the ground because angels hold me down" t-shirts. They're a side because their position is purely political (I'm using that in the broad sense). It isn't based upon any conclusion you could ever reach by carefully studying and testing the world as it is, it's a position you can reach only by denying the world as it is. That's why they're a "side". But, your mind doesn't think critically so you can't see that, you just see two "sides" of people screaming at each other.

Another example, to beat this horse good and dead, would be evolution. There's only 1 side there, the people who deny evolution. Why do they deny it? All kinds of crazy reasons but they all seem to boil down to some religious basis. Why aren't the people who claim evolution is real a side? Because all they've done is observe and test, and the end result of their observations and tests is a description of what the world has told us about how life works. There is no agenda to the theory of evolution (You know what? Gravity is a theory too. Doesn't mean it's not also a fact). The theory of evolution is just the most perfect description of how life works given the facts. All those stupid Darwin fish don't change the fact that there is no agenda to evolution.

The very nature of what science is means there is no agenda to scientific concensus. Scientists can have agendas, proposed theories or examples of tests can be agenda driven, but science already assumes that so that's why anything any legitimate scientist or scientific group proposes or claims is subjected to the scientific process itself in the form of peer review. Global warming isn't a side, you loud, confused, angry young man, it's a description of one aspect of the world, nothing more. The fact that a bunch of paid hit men, business interests and politicians can get people like you to even think of it as a case of "he said she said" and that the truth is probably somewhere else entirely (the idea that the truth is always in the middle is probably the stupidest idea mankind ever came up with) is... really f'ing sad. And pathetic. And makes me sure that we're freaking doomed.

TimJ

I've been trying to figure out what this is and for the life of me I can't. Nothing is being done about oil usage because celebrities are hypocrites?

Can you expand on that idea? Does the illuminati make an appearance? Or Dan Brown, perhaps?

thimblescratch

What TimJ said,
+11 (this one goes up to eleven)

thimblescratch

substructure, I used to be in the 'all sides of politics are evil so I don't believe one or the other' but then I started learning about the issues, formed my beliefs, and now I have found that I do indeed have a passion - not an apathy - towards politics, with a big side of tentative abhoration of politicians themselves. Like anything else, it's the people that make the stuff evil. You have to look past that, to the issues. "Apathy is a cold body."
So read up on the issues and form an opinion, it won't hurt! Actually, it may if you find the truth. Cuz it aint pretty...

JeffS

For some reason, that quote annoys me. As if economic output were any sort of scale for how much energy you should be using. Sounds more like a way to make the overconsuming americans feel better about themselves.

mwrobe1

Wow.

+1

I hear ya. I mean really. I recycle what I can. I ride a bike to work more often than not. I plan my trips in my car to reduce traffic and decrease gas consumption. I have one vehicle that gets 30mpg a minivan that I can squeeze 22mpg out of. I'll be healthier, a little richer, and be a little less wasteful as a result of it. If others follow my lead...great...if they don't...the world won't come to an end. (sorry to those who disagree on this point)

These are all my choices...made by ME...by my own reasoning...WITHOUT any guilt trips or propaganda from the media, hollywood, politicians or any other extremist kook group passing out pamplets.

mwrobe1

You know...there is a whole separate forum for this type of screed...just FYI.