Forum

TruthMove Forum

TruthMove Forum » TruthMove Main Forum

What happened to Peak Oil? (15 posts)

  1. truthmod
    Administrator

    Maybe I'm not paying attention to the same sources, but I haven't heard much about it in the last few years. With oil prices diving, there clearly may be less superficial interest. I'm curious what mark or anyone else has to say about the current state of the research and activism around it..

    Peak Oil? Peak Oil Demand

    http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=46390

    “Demand will peak way ahead of supply,” he told reporters in Qatar three years ago. If growth in oil consumption flattens out too soon, the transition could be wrenching for Saudi Arabia, which gets almost half its gross domestic product from oil exports.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  2. mark
    Member

    Post Carbon Institute's resilience.org is a good place to start.

    Peaked oil (past tense) is more accurate.

    I doubt that the Saudis are really worried about the alleged transition to a renewable economy. A crash of the economy that makes it harder to afford oil is probably a bigger problem for them. Those who have what's left on the downslope will have a lot of power.

    Fracking and tar sands have delayed rationing past peak conventional petroleum, but you won't hear any environmental groups admit this.

    We also have peak "renewable" resources. Fish, fresh water, food, forests. Peak Soil.

    A solar powered economy would be a much smaller, steady state economy no longer based on endless growth on a finite planet.

    This comment was typed using PV electricity.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  3. BrianG
    Member

    My impression of the fracking activity and the Bakken/Tar Sands/Oil Trains activity is that the industry is trying to get the stuff out of the ground like there's no tomorrow. Since the oil in the ground isn't going anywhere and is likely to be worth a lot more in the future than it is today, I'm supposing that the producers' panic is an effort to keep alternative energies at bay for just a few more years by making them uneconomic.

    I saw Amory Lovens speak maybe three years ago, and he was quite sanguine about the prospect that civilization would survive the transition from petroleum to renewables. He thought the 20 years of adjustment would be fueled by natural gas.

    The Saudis seem to be engaging in a price war not just to try to put the US domestic producers out of business, but also (I will speculate) to provide an opportunity for their deep-pocketed American allies to buy out poorly-funded US operations cheap.

    It's a real shame that:

    1) computer-controlled fuel injection came along just in time to allow the internal-combustion engine to meet emission standards so we never got the electric cars, the steam cars, and the steam/electric hybrids that we should have had.

    2) millions of American consumers will be motivated by cheap gas to buy shiny SUVs they can't afford, furthering the agenda of the elites who are sucking the lifeblood out of the poor.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  4. BrianG
    Member

    A sidebar I will add: when I was coming up it was a rite of passage for young men to rebuild an old jalopy and make it better than new. In the hippie context it meant keeping Volkswagens alive and driving around in lumbering old schoolbuses and trucks.

    And now it's gone. In my travels in rural America, I've found a few old buses abandoned 20 miles up a dirt and wondered what was their story. And I've been shocked to see so few old cars and trucks on the road. In West Virginia I'd see a few. They'd have a big plywood sign spray-painted "FARM TRUCK" or suchlike that apparently conferred on them some special legal status. But mostly it seems (from my observation) that the rite of passage for young men in America is no longer demonstrating the real-world mechanical skill to improve on an old jalopy. Instead the rite of passage is to qualify for a loan to buy a new (or late model used) car. Young men understand that there's no point in demonstrating mechanical skill. The point is to demonstrate credit-worthiness.

    This is a huge change. It is an anti-democratic change that allows the banksters to evaluate the human worth of America's young men.

    Those old cars and trucks were so simple, there was no reason that any of them ever should have died. The only reason they died was a matter of style, not function. Some industrialist could have created a fuel-injection kit for the old engines. But they didn't--or if they did, they were bought out by bigger players to make sure that their kit never reached the market.

    From can-do spirit we've gone to can-qualify-for-a-loan spirit. We know there are well paid social engineers identifying desired objectives. We can't prove that they make the changes we seem powerless to change.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  5. mark
    Member

    I'm supposing that the producers' panic is an effort to keep alternative energies at bay for just a few more years by making them uneconomic.

    More likely: they're in a desperate scramble to keep the economy going.

    40% of the natural gas in the US is now from fracking. This keeps a lot of cities warm in the winter. Think: frozen pipes in Chicago in January ...

    I saw Amory Lovens speak maybe three years ago, and he was quite sanguine about the prospect that civilization would survive the transition from petroleum to renewables. He thought the 20 years of adjustment would be fueled by natural gas.

    reply: I heard Lovins last shortly after 9/11, he claimed we supposedly have 200 years of nat. gas. I asked him for his sources on this during the question time but he declined to offer details. Conventional nat. gas is in sharp decline (has been for a decade).

    Most of the "renewables" pushed by Lovins and others are not intended to replace "petroleum," they generate electricity. Sorry that I don't see food delivery trucks and airplanes running on electricity.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  6. BrianG
    Member

    I disagree both about the potential for electric food trucks and electric aircraft. One of the founders of Tesla, Ian Wright, is now focusing on heavy urban vehicles because he believes the current economic sweet spot for electric vehicles is those that burn ten times as much fuel per year as the average car, and do so in a stop-and-start urban environment. An ev sitting in traffic is just sitting in traffic--as opposed to a gasoline engine sitting in traffic burning up fuel.

    As to airplanes, I don't think the potential for capacitive storage or lightweight batteries has begun to be addressed. If you add in the possibility of in-flight refueling from service drones, I don't see why electric aircraft should be out of the question.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  7. mark
    Member

    Kerosene has a much better energy content to weight ratio than batteries, even lithium batteries.

    The only "electric airplanes" are going to be drones or perhaps very light weight single person aircraft. Electric Boeings full of tourists and businessmen are about as likely as the technology claims of Star Trek.

    The obsession with techno solutions is a reason we're failing to meet the challenge. Relocalizing food makes more practical sense than pretending the vast fleets of long distance trucks are going to be powered by solar powered electric batteries. Delivery trucks in a neighborhood might see some with electric power, but not intercontinental food deliveries.

    Entropy is not a good idea, it's the law.

    www.oilempire.us/peak-airplanes.html

    Posted 9 years ago #
  8. BrianG
    Member

    I agree that the techno solutions only falsely support the present vectors. Thus I am reluctant to put energy into them.

    I'm working on the issue of the oil trains in the Feather River canyon. I have a lot of techo-solution ideas to mitigate the dangers. But I recognize that advocacy of those solutions only dilutes the efforts of the anti-trains advocates.

    Entropy is The Law, and that's how engineers know that the Official Story about 9/11 at Ground Zero makes no sense.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  9. mark
    Member

    The world's engineers think that the demolition claim is nonsense. A very few promote this, but it's a rounding error (and a factual error). But science fiction fantasies are more popular than investigative reporting, it's part of the sickness of our culture.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  10. BrianG
    Member

    Ummmm, the First Law of Thermodynamics is not a "rounding error".

    Posted 9 years ago #
  11. mark
    Member

    The rounding error is the number of technical experts who believe the thermite fantasy.

    The controlled demolition was of the 9/11 Half truth Movement, not of the buildings.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  12. truthmover
    Administrator

    Again, I agree with Mark entirely. CD was an injected honey pot. Anyone highly invested before 2005 saw this clearly. I learned about that second hand as my time involved began just as the subterfuge was moving into high gear. But I do remember how little credence people gave WingTV at my first rally, with their CD banner that had been torn up by so many other truthers and retaped together by them over and over again.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  13. BrianG
    Member

    To sort all this out would be an extensive discussion requiring much patience, probably impossible patience, from all of us.

    I admit that NIST may have given us dishonest, incomplete, unbelievable, and unscientific reports in an attempt to give a thousand conspiracy theories room to bloom. I have always suspected that the government's refusal to provide the video evidence of flight 77 hitting the Pentagon was an effort to engender conspiracy theories that could then be easily slapped down by releasing the videos. Maybe, given increased computer power, NIST could release a credible report explaining the collapse of the skyscrapers. As it is, they claim they did not analyze the collapses of the towers. How can you explain the collapses of the towers without analyzing them?

    Since one of NIST's lead writers, Dr. John Gross, was one of the world experts in progressive collapse--and he surely had access to ALL of the world experts on progressive collapse--it's kind of surprising that he would not address the issue of collapse. So right there we can reasonably suspect that he did in fact analyze the collapse, and could not provide an explanation satisfactory to the government, and so chose to bow out.

    My college studies of physics and chemistry and architecture, my experience in construction, and my experience as an employee in high rise buildings makes me take note when serious and courageous and educated people (a dozen AIA Fellows, 40 highrise architects, 80 structural engineers, 3 PhD structural engineers, 11 Stanford engineers) are not satisfied with the NIST report.

    When you glom these worthies together with believers in earthquake machines and overunity, you are doing a disservice to them directly analogous to the disservice of those who sneer at the 9/11 widows, claiming that they reside in Area 51 to ask the questions they do.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  14. mark
    Member

    Some of the dumbest people I've ever met have PhD's ... Piled Higher and Deeper.

    The collapse of the skyscrapers is not a mystery to 99.99% of the worlds building professionals.

    It's fortunate the towers withstood the impacts, since that allowed most people below them to escape.

    Sorry I would not trust AE911 "truth" to design a garden shed.

    Posted 9 years ago #
  15. BrianG
    Member

    I wouldn't call PhDs "dumb". Really smart people have very advanced skills in self-deception. Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

    The collapse of the skyscrapers is not a mystery to those who have not examined the mysteries of the collapses, who have not examined the shortcomings of the official investigations, and who are willing for their own convenience to indulge in the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" logical fallacy and therefore assume that because the plane hit the building therefore the plane caused the building to fall down.

    That fallacy is the same as the belief that because I prayed for the medical recovery of my elderly aunt and burned a candle in support of that prayer, therefore my aunt's recovery was cause by my prayer and my candle.

    Unjustified inferences based on unjustified assumptions are not good science.

    Posted 9 years ago #

Reply

You must log in to post.