Global warming I think has been seized on as a banner by a lot of different groups and used as a weapon for various agendas - but that doesn't mean it's all nonsense. What's true is that actions taken on a large scale - like the releasing of carbon and toxins into the atmosphere - tend to have large consequences. In a global ecology class I took back in college, we took a cold hard look at the data, not the politics. There is a correlation between humans releasing carbon and global temperature increase - but of course there's more to it than that. Correlation is not necessarily causation. Aside from whether or not global warming is a danger though, I think it's pretty much agreed upon that emissions from internal combustion engines are not a good thing, and not something we can continue indefinitely. It's kind of a moot point anyways since we are approaching, or have already reached, the peak of oil production worldwide.

Nuclear cannot replace oil for several reasons. For starters, when we say nuclear we are really saying, electricity generated by nuclear power plants. Electricity is much more difficult to store than oil/gas, because of the current state of battery technology, which someone mentioned earlier. The amount of energy packed into a gallon of gas blows away any battery out there, pound for pound. Also, nuclear power plants require their own fuel - and though I don't have any links at hand, I've done some reading that indicates that fuel-grade uranium isn't exactly plentiful at this point, and building a ton more nuclear plants will use up the remaining supply all that much faster. Furthermore, constructing nuclear plants takes years - actually, closer to decades. By the time you factor in all the energy and money it takes to build, and later on decommission, a nuclear facility, you're getting pretty close to a negative return on investment. (Just decomissioning a plant costs millions upon millions of dollars.) Then there is the problem of what to do with the waste, which stays radioactive for a very, very long time. Our best solutions for waste disposal up to this point have all boiled down to finding a big ol' hole and burying the stuff. And of course, the safety issues: everybody wants power, but no one wants a nuclear facility anywhere near them. Nuclear is probably safer today than it ever has been in the past, but I'm betting that doesn't really make folks any more comfortable about having those plants near their homes.

So nuclear can definitely ease our transition away from oil, but it can't totally replace it. There's a lot more on this topic at www.theoildrum.com and www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net. The first site presents the info pretty calmly, and the second one presents it in more of a "oh ****!" sort of way. Take your pick.

Anyways I think this thread has veered quite a bit. Apologies to the OP if I hijacked, but I couldn't resist. To bring it back to the math of the new economy: what I think is really messed up is that the "economy" views factors like environment and natural resources as "externalities" which basically means that as long as there is money, there will be oil to buy. That kind of approach seems like nonsense to me since you can't just ignore the world we live in and make up some bullshit imaginary one. It's that kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, and it also leads people into thinking we can just keep throwing money at our problems till they go away. Like I think everyone here has said on this thread, we've got way bigger problems in this country than GM folding.

Damn, I wrote another essay. Sorry guys...
... gets off soapbox and shuts up.

 

I don't really buy into politics, liberals vs. conservatives, or any of that kind of thing, but pulling someone over for a bumper sticker is beyond idiotic and bordering on scary. Free speech needs to be defended.

 

holy ****! A BUMPER STICKER?! there HAS to be more to the story!

 

This is off topic and if we want to discuss it in length we can start a new thread but:

Ok even if peak oil has or will be reached in our lifetime (not proven: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/bu...=2&oref=slogin )

It isn't the doomsday scenario that the eco scaremongers make it out to be: http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/...ex-doomer.html

 

That second article you quoted is really similar to my experience with all this information. At first I went, "oh f**k! we're screwed!" and gradually I remembered that it's rarely that simple. And personally I think just subscribing to doomer-ism without doing anything to change or help the problems facing us is a waste of time. Optimism is definitely a good thing.

Two things remain, and I'll try to be brief: the first is that a lot of the refutations of peak oil and the ideas that are associated with it often have these labels mixed in for the people who discuss those ideas. "Radical environmentalism," "Marxist," are examples from that second link, and you mentioned "eco scaremongers" and others have brought up similar titles. I think that kind of labeling is a barrier to discussion because it divides people into "us" and "them." When really, there is only us. We're all in it together. It's funny how banding together to solve problems these days is often labeled as communism, but when everyone grew victory gardens and recycled tin foil and rationed gas in WWII it was called patriotism.

The other thing is that the really basic issue here is, to get back to your original point, an economic one. We have an economy that is based on endless growth, which requires an endless supply of cheap energy. We no longer have quite such an endless supply of cheap energy - there is a mountain of data to prove that. Speculation alone didn't take oil to 148 dollars a barrel last year. And without all that cheap energy, the economy as we have it set up can't just keep growing - it starts to fail. The effects of that are painful and highly visible - hell, this thread would never have started if you hadn't been noticing these effects yourself.

What it all winds up leading to is that we have to live within our means, which I'm comfortable with, because that's the way the natural world works, and really it's a good old fashioned American value. The idea that we can just consume everything with no consequences is not an idea that has ever led to anything good in human history. And it's certainly not something the founding fathers had in mind when they created this country. And I know we're all in agreement that the vision and values they set forth formed a constitution we need to remember and defend.

That's what I think is really ironic about this: if someone calls himself a "conservative" but is comfortable with a level of consumption of oil that debilitates our nation and makes us dependent on hostile foreign nations, then what exactly is that person conserving? That's holding on to a way of life that really took off in the 50's, but holding on to it so hard that we lose the values of thrift and independence that this nation was built on. Or if someone calls himself a "liberal" but then drives a huge expensive SUV to the big box store, all alone, to buy one piece of plastic crap shipped all the way from China... you see where I'm going. That's one example of why I think terms like "conservative," "war-monger," "liberal," and "treehugger," are all kind of pointless now. They're just tools to keep us divided so the REALLY big boys on the the top of the pile can keep this silly system going. The big boys make me laugh, too, since they have yet to realize they are in the same boat as all of us when it comes down to it.

Anyways yeah we've probably gone beyond the original scope of the thread but I'd be happy to keep this going in a new thread. Thanks for the links and let's keep rolling.

I will say for the record, I'm probably coming across as quite the "bleeding-heart" or whatever but as much as I love the sound of wind through the trees, I love just as much the sound of my devil high mounts at about 3k RPM.

 

More often than not the folks complaining about "endless growth" are same ones insisting we leave our border open to "endless third world immigration". With amnesty, welfare food stamps etc. for all. So they can buy cars and have 8 or 10 children who will buy cars.

But for massive immigration the U.S. population would have stabilized at about 225 million. Instead we've now got over 300 million.

More often than not the folks who bitch the loudest about "foreign oil" are the ones who won't let us drill our own or build more refineries.

Won't build more nuke plants 'cause they're scary.

Won't burn coal 'cause it's dirty.

Won't build more hydro electric dams 'cause it's bad for the fishies.

Even bitch about windmills now 'cause it "pollutes" the view from their beach front property and is bad for the birdies.

They don't want to produce any more energy but demand we continue to invite in millions of the world's poor and uneducated and that we subsidize their baby making.

What was once a sincere and pragmatic environmental movement has been hustled and co opted and is now a fraudulent front for the statist left and its goal. A "nation" of ignorant, brainwashed peons, babbling in 12 different languages. All dependent on the Almighty Government for their daily bread.

 

Babel ... looks like its Babel all over to me.
Divided we stand, United we fall.

 

Here I disagree, it costs about $1 to $2 per barrel to get oil out of Saudi Arabia and about $16 to $20 to get the "unavailable" oil out of the "empty" reserves. (see first link I provided above)

Sure the oil companies won't bother with the $16 to $20 oil while the $2 oil is available, but when oil goes up or we run out of the cheap stuff we will switch to the "expensive" stuff.

So yes peak oil will be reached some day, and yes the price of oil will go up, but it was speculation that drove oil up to $150 last year, and it went back down to $40 and now is up to $70.. But it still only costs $1 to $2 a barrel to get out of the ground and we are still using less than we produce.

 

I'm gonna go through this line by line.

If we're going just for anecdotal evidence, I have never heard anyone complain about endless growth and also claim we need to fling the borders open. Immigration is obviously a contentious issue and I don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole - but I don't think subsidizing babymaking or car buying is a good idea for any country or any people. Whether or not the gov't is actually subsidizing that is another debate. I know for a fact that they are subsidizing the oil and corn industries, which are both happy for us to consume huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup, get fat as hell, and stay fat as hell as we exercise our "freedom" by driving around in huge cars endlessly, burning expensive oil and ruining air quality.

There is no secret group of all-powerful green freaks who "won't let us" drill our own oil or build more refineries. There are many good reasons why oil exploration in the US has slowed down, way too many to get into here, but most of those reasons have to do with petroleum geologists acknowledging that the US, in all likelihood, just doesn't have a whole lot more oil to find - and what is there is increasingly costly to recover.

Nuke plants are worse than "scary" for all the reasons I outlined in an earlier post. In short: they're expensive to construct and decommission, there's nowhere to put the waste, and yeah, nuclear accidents are scary as hell. Can I see a show of hands for folks who are willing to have a nuclear reactor anywhere near you and your family?

"Dirty" isn't really adequate to describe the effects of generating electricity with coal. Unless they figure out carbon sequestration or otherwise scrubbing the emmisions, but that's going about as fast as the battery technology race is.

We're not building alot of hydro because there are not that many more places left where it makes a lot of economical sense to do so. Hydro plants also get clogged up with silt after decades of use (and many of our plants are that old) which can cause huge problems and make the plant unable to generate electricity.

Those guys on cape cod pissing and moaning about the offshore windfarm, even running to Ted Kennedy to try to get it shot down - those hypocrites can suck it, I'm with you there. Unfortunately those kind of "have my cake and eat it too" fake greenies are everywhere these days. It's frustrating.

Again, I don't see anyone asking for more energy AND free/open/uncontrolled immigration. Obviously, you can't have both of those. I'm still a bit lost on how babymaking is getting subsidized, but regardless, there are a whole lot more crappy things that the gov't subsidizes. Oil, corn, and now Wall Street. There are hundreds more.

Who is the "statist left" and what's this about their goal being to make us all "ignorant, brainwashed peons?" Seriously, if there really was some kind of powerful environmental illuminati calling the shots then we would never have gone to Iraq. Period. We'd all be wearing those Jimmy Carter sweaters and using a lot more solar. But we're not. Because that enviro-nati group has never really existed.

There is no "left" and no "right" anymore, not in the sense of what those words meant in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. (Even the word "conservative" doesn't mean **** now except for REAL conservatives like Ron Paul, who I actually admire a lot.) Those terms are now just tools for the elite to keep the common man divided and weak. Talk about Babel? Talk about different languages? This is Babel. Keep one group speaking the language of "conservatism" and the other group speaking the language of "liberalism." Keep everyone convinced that the other guys are up to no good. Pump the populace full of fear and sugar and distrust and prescription drugs. That's how the truly powerful stay in power.

And I'm not saying all this because I think we should fling the gates open and just give away everything we've got - I love this country and I love the freedom that it's based on. Trapping us into a bullshit red state vs. blue state, liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right argument is an attempt (so far a very successful attempt) by those in power to CONTROL us and DESTROY OUR FREEDOM by keeping Americans at each other's throats, distracted from rich fatcats dipping into the taxpayer's money.

Divided we fall.

Anyways, this is the last post I'm making on this topic because I think I've said MORE than enough. Hell I hang around here to talk bikes not politics! Hope I'm not making any enemies, I like this board and just wanted to throw in my 2 cents, or 8 cents I guess. Thanks for listening.

 

Didn't see this post before.

It's true that oil that's tough and expensive to get becomes more attractive as the price rises, but a high price of oil also damages the economy. Oil getting so expensive last year definitely helped kick off the recession.

It's also true that recovery techniques are getting more sophisticated, like pumping steam or water into wells to increase output. However, having to pump millions of gallons of water into an oil well to get the output we need to keep oil prices manageable is not a workable long term situation. Water is a precious resource too, and fresh water is increasingly scarce. The price of getting the oil out, while still fairly low, can't help but rise. When it rises, we all suffer. It would help if we could keep the speculators out of the picture but the fundamentals are still not looking good from a long-term perspective.

Peak oil isn't really about running out of oil entirely - that probably won't happen in our lifetimes, if ever. It's really about oil getting so expensive that it blows up the economy. Speculation aside, the price has still gone up, and will continue to do so. That plus the perpetual growth economic model that we use, adds up a system that can't keep going. Throw in a heaping handful of reckless greed from Wall Street and it's a perfect storm. Something's gotta give. It already has.

Sounds depressing but I think it's in opportunity to rearrange things for the better - not communism or wealth distribution or anything like that, just limits on consumption, pollution, corporate greed. Maybe limits on the government's ability to tax us, if it comes to that. I dunno. Just seems like things are going to change whether we like it or not, so we might as well try to make something better out of all this.

 

Sierra Club sellout on immigration.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16520


http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/p08s03-comv.html



http://michellemalkin.com/immigratio...04/09/06:41.pm


From the man who gave Sierra Club 100 MILLION DOLLARS;

"I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they did come out anti-immigration, they would never get another dollar from me."

David Gelbaum


http://forests.org/shared/reader/wel...x?linkid=35903

 

Liquidogged you are saying alot, without really saying anything. I agree with RK1's 2cents.....but I am confused as to what the hell you are getting at.

 

I think we are all going to die.

 

That's interesting, I hadn't seen that. I stand corrected. And it's a good example of how a big pile of money tends to make people forget their moral compass. It's worth pointing out that America's population is actually incredibly stable when you compare it with to India or China, just based on growth rates. I don't have much to say on immigration except that it's a sign of deeper and larger problems.

J shizzy, to boil it all down I'm saying that our dollar economy is not based on the actual real world that we live in, and that's causing problems. The recession is the most visible sign of that. That's basically it.