Black Gold - What happens when it's gone?

[Drake]

As we possibly hit peak oil this year, we should start thinking about that question.
Will the modern civilisation devolve and we'll see the start of a new dark age, relatively at least?
Will we find a new exploitable primary energy source?
What will happen when the shortages start? Will we see oil/gas wars between the western society and its rivals, maybe even nuclear proxy wars?

[Firefly]

Future looks gloomy right now, new oil deposits are out there but its high time that our collective science concentrated on an alternative to oil for fuel at least. Mind you some people are making a lot of money out of oil so its not going to happen soon I dont think.

[Man of Stoat]

"Peak oil" is one of those myths like "the population bomb".

Given that the new Khasak field being set up by Shell, Agip, etc has, on its own, enough oil to last many hundreds of years, it's not going to run out very soon.

Fast forward a few hundred years to when alternatives become economically viable, they will come online. Who will be in the forefront? The current oil/energy companies.

Right, now where's my nuclear powered car then?

[Librarian]

Absolutely correct, my dear Mr. Man of Stoat. However, it seems that already created severe societal damage, shaped by different, basically economic rationales, will be remunerated thanks to some truly scientifically devoted, and community-conscious personalities:

http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr52.html

Right, now where's my nuclear powered car then?

In the archive of the Ford Motor Company, as well as within the chancery of the Ministry for Medium-Scale Mechanical Constructions of the former USSR. American variant is already presented on-line. Please, just follow this link:

http://www.seriouswheels.com/def/Ford-Nucleon-Concept-Car.htm

But those other bold wonders of unrestrained poetry of mechanical engineering are still capped in some… pretty hidden places. :)

[Rising Sun*]

"Peak oil" is one of those myths like "the population bomb".

Yes, and no.

Peak oil seems to be presented now as some sort of disaster point. It's not. It's just the point where oil production peaks.

That's a consequence of geological, geo-political and local issues.

There's a lot of oil on the planet. Some of it's not readily accessible yet, at least to the world at large, e.g. central Asian oilfields, which coincidentally have some bearing on the invasion of Afghanistan on some interpretations.

If 2007 is peak oil, we'll have gradually dwindling supplies and at some stage there won't be enough for our wants, even needs. That ain't gonna happen the year after peak oil.

Getting panties in a twist over the peak oil year, which can only be determined retrospectively, is like trying to work out which year is peak life year for a human - 15, 25, 35 45????

[Drake]

Rising Sun explained what Peak Oil means, maybe I should've done it.
It's of course not an immediate point of disaster, but we have an increasing demand and soon a dwindling production. So it's like New Years Eve a good point to look back and forward and think a little.

[Drake]

And another point I'd like to add is that it's not just about what we put in our cars, that seems to be a common misconception. The fuel is just a tiny proportion of what we need oil for. The real kicker is our electric energy. And there could be a potentially unlimited amount of oil in khazakstan, the problem is how quick we can get it out of the ground and if we still have a positive energy bilance in doing so (which is the limit to the "technological improvement theory").
If the oil production drops from 200 million barrels a day to say 20 million barrels from this single source, we're in the shit already, even if this 20 million barrels would be there for millenia.

[Rising Sun*]

Rising Sun explained what Peak Oil means, maybe I should've done it.
It's of course not an immediate point of disaster, but we have an increasing demand and soon a dwindling production. So it's like New Years Eve a good point to look back and forward and think a little.

But there comes a time when one's had enough New Year's Eve's, the liver's less able to handle the fun, and it's harder to get out of bed.

Forget all the deeper issues about oil.

Just focus on your motor car.

What proportion of local commerce and industry, just in your suburb never mind Detroit etc, relies upon these things? Petrol station. Mechanic. Panel beater. Auto electrician. Air con mechanic and regasser. Tyres. Brakes. Clutches. Auto parts. Tow trucks. Car insurance. Businesses that supply all of the foregoing, like auto paint, bake ovens, hydraulic hoists, mechanics' tools, computer chips, computer testers, printers, office suppliers. And those that supply the businesses that supply the businesses. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Leaving aside the fact that we won't be able to get around like we do now, what sort of impact would it have in your area if everything related to motor cars shut down over the next two years?

About twenty to fifty per cent of the local economy, I'd say.

Add in the difficulties in getting around, what happens to the supermarket and hardware warehouse etc that you go to now that you won't when you have to walk?

1920's stores, or nothing?

[Man of Stoat]

RS, given that most goods are transported by road, I would wager that the percentage of the economy as a whole is much much higher.

In discussing all this "peak oil" stuff, remember that a large proportion of the world's output is currently essentially rationed by the OPEC countries to keep the price high. if it weren't for this cartel, oil production would be much higher and oil prices would be much lower.

[Rising Sun*]

RS, given that most goods are transported by road, I would wager that the percentage of the economy as a whole is much much higher.

Agreed.

I stuck to the local effect because people can always understand it.

And it's simple, like me.

At larger levels, we get into road transport as you said, but also fuel for ships and planes, not to mention fuel used in countless production exercises and support for those exercises.

I'd hazard a guess that there's as much, probably more, oil used in getting a litre of petrol into our car than we actually put in.

In discussing all this "peak oil" stuff, remember that a large proportion of the world's output is currently essentially rationed by the OPEC countries to keep the price high. if it weren't for this cartel, oil production would be much higher and oil prices would be much lower.

Definitely.

And if we relate some of those countries to activities that are useful to a harmonious and productive world, do any come up as being a waste of space?

And what relationship is there between such countries like, say, Saudi Arabia and other problems in the world like, say, radical Wahabbism?

The best thing the West could do is come up with an alternative energy source ASAP, but that's a bit awkward given the reliance upon oil of all sorts of Western corporations.

Why does the name Halliburton spring to mind?

[Drake]

Limiting production just moves the turning point for a certain oilfield a few years back and it actually results in a lower production maximum. You only get a flatter hubbard curve.
They maybe could produce 20 mio barrel a day now and do only 15, but the result is that in a few years they can potentially produce 17 million (which will then be the all time max) instead of 13 Million if they went to full production now. In the same time the other oil fields run full production however and their drop will be significant.
So you are right to an extend. Opec manipulates the price now and they'll get a good portion of money out of it in the future, but the underlying problem cannot be compensated by this behaviour.

[Man of Stoat]

RS, Halliburton et al will be at the forefront of economically viable alternatives when they indeed become economically viable. This is because there will be lots of money to be made, and they already have the infrastructure.

Frankly, we have better things to do with oil than burn it (plastics, pharmaceuticals etc), but while it remains relatively cheap and plentiful it will remain the fuel of choice. And given that the enviros object so vehemently to nuclear power, it will remain the fuel of choice for the foreseeable future unless governments turn round and say "screw you environmentalists, we are building more nuclear again".

Given that bio fuels are turning out to be a complete and utter con (I had high hopes, particularly if Africa could get its sh1t together and grow fuel crops, but it appears that it's the developed second world countries who seem to be chopping down lots of rainforest for it who seem to be in the forefront, as well as first world countries turning existing agricultural/fallow land over to it, but in any case the energy balance seems to not add up), "renewables" such as wind are a complete waste of time (unpredictable, unreliable, expensive, requires conventional backup, and grotesquely subsidised by the taxpayer, and produce 4/5 of bugger all energy), hydrogen is still produced by steam reformation of methane, and fusion has been "10 years away" for the last 30 or years, the only option for the mid-term is to build new generation pebble bed reactors.

Oh, and a quick message to anyone who wants a hydrogen economy but objects to nuclear power: I want some of what you have been smoking...

[1000ydstare]

The one reason why alot of "alternative" sources are not exploited properly is because the oil companies pretty much cancel them out.

A solar powered power station was pretty much sh1t canned when the Bush pulled all of the tax breaks on it, as it became uneconomical. Despite the fact that it had allowed an almost Tripleing of the efficiency for solar cells.

It is high time that the cost to the planet, ie fossil fuel burning, was factored in to the financial cost of things. Then we may see a return to local businessses supplying local needs, better. In place of some huge globabl corperation that sees its client base as its servant not the other way around.

[Firefly]

Here here 1000 yd stare...

[Librarian]

Although traces of the fundamental elusiveness of human-made predictions may possibly be traced into The Year of Our Lord 1125, when William of Malmesbury favorably compared economic perspectives of the kingdom by means of evaluation of the number and productivity of the vineyards of England with those of France, the concept of peak oil and subsequently induced societal change definitely represents an overworked expression, that repetitively pronounces the doomsday perspective of the humankind.

Even though in the past there have been warnings that we are running out of oil or that it is becoming extremely scarce, perhaps never before in the human history projections of energy supply were not so depressing. Excellent historiography about this issue you will be able to find here:

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=47276

And here:

http://www.energyseer.com/NewPessimism.pdf

However, one fundamental question - is there actually any rational basis for such an apocalyptic outlook? – was almost totally neglected. And the answer is – no, not at all, honorable ladies and gentlemen. The only thing that surely will be changed is our confidence in the present model of livelihood and human economy, our confidence into deeply embedded tenets of economical faith that the gold collars finally will justly suffocate the blue and the white ones.

Simplifying assumptions generally help people to understand a presumed common set of rules, controls and motivations guiding human economical behavior. General assumption, for example, is that people are economically rational; that is, given the right information at heir disposal, they make positional, production or purchasing decisions in light of a perception of what is most cost-effective and advantageous. From the standpoint of producers or sellers of goods or services, it is assumed that each of them is intent upon maximalization of profit. To reach that objective each of them is completely free to consider a host of production and marketing costs and political, competitive, and other limiting factors, but the ultimate goal of pure profit seeking remains clear. Finally, we assume that in commercial economies the best measure of correctness of economic decision is afforded by the market mechanism. The Holly Grail of the system – General equilibrium is marked by the price at which supply equals demand, satisfying the needs of consumers and the profit motivation of suppliers.

The only problem, honorable ladies and gentlemen, is that all previously mentioned postulates are only partially accurate. You don’t believe this? No problem, we have a plethora of sufficiently convincible real-life cases.

Route 837 connects the four United States Steel plants stretched out along the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh. In the late 1960s 50.000 workers labored in those mills and route 837 was completely choked with the car traffic and steel hauler trucks. Railroad investments were generally abandoned, due to high construction and operating costs and supposed economic drain caused by underutilization, although the general patterns of energy utilization have indicated that railroads are more energy-effective, essentially nonpolluting, adapted to steady flow of single commodities between two points, and with known possibility of railroad routes and nodes to provide intervening development opportunities. Lower terminal costs, and individualized service of the highway carriers were more appreciated, although energy efficiency of the transportation was notoriously low.

By 1979, however, fires were going out in the furnaces of the aging mills as steel imports from Asia and Europe flowed unchecked into domestic markets, due to inherent requirement of American corporations to financially capitalize their international investments, mainly profitable due to so called spatially fixed costs of production (read: very cheap labor supply) in artificially de-regulated markets. By the mid 1980s, with employment in the steel plants of the Mon Valley well bellow 5000, the relatively freshly built highway was only lightly traveled and only occasionally did anyone turn at the traffic lights into the closed and deserted mills.

http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a137/Langnasen/Steelmill-abbandoned.jpg

Abandoned US Steel mill – Monongahela River

At the same time traffic was building along many highways in the northeastern part of the country. Four-lane Route 1 was clogged with traffic along the 42 kilometers of the "Princeton Corridor" in central New Jersey, as that stretched off-road in the 1980s had more office space, research laboratories, hotels, conference centers and residential subdivisions planned and under construction than anywhere else between Washington DC and Boston. Further to the south, around Washington itself, traffic grew heavy again along the Capital Beltway in Virginia, where vast office building complexes and commercial centers were converting fertile rural land to urban uses. And east of NY City traffic jams were truly monumental around Stamford, Connecticut in Fairfield County, as it became a leading corporate headquarters town with 150.000 daily in-commuters, with an average fuel consumption of 17l/100 km, as anticipated by EPA exploration (VW Golf Diesel drivers, please – don’t cry!).:roll:

By the early 1990s, traffic in the Fairfield County had thinned as corporate takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and corporate reorganizations compounded by a lengthy recession reduced the number and size of companies and their need for both employees and office space. Vacancies exceeded 25% among the office buildings and research parks that had been so enthusiastically built during the 1980s, and vacant "corporate campuses" lined stretches of formerly clogged highways. But simultaneously traffic was building elsewhere in the country as over half a million Americans during the late 1980s and early 1990s gained their new technology related jobs in a series of widely spaced, emerging high-tech hot-spots clustered around new destinations.

It is obvious that projections of energy supply and demand are difficult at best, because the technical, economic, political and societal assumptions that underlie such projections are constantly changing. It is clear, however, that we must continue to research, develop and evaluate potential energy resources to ensure sufficient energy to maintain our society, and we do have some really workable, completely rationally-based alternatives to the peak oil doomsday perspective.

The use of geothermal energy – natural heat from the Earth’s interior – is an exciting application of human knowledge and developed technology. The idea of harnessing the earth’s internal heat is not new – geothermal power was developed in Italy (Lardarello) in 1904 and is now used to generate electricity – indeed, as correctly observed by honorable Mr. Drake, the most important profile of energy – at numerous sites around the world (Iceland), and a few in the western United States and Hawaii. At many other sites of the world geothermal energy is not hot enough to produce electrical power, but it definitely could be used to heat buildings, or for different industrial purposes. True – existing geothermal facilities utilize only a small portion of the total energy that might eventually be tapped from the Earth’s reservoir of internal heat, but the very geothermal resource is abundant. If only 1 % of the geothermal energy in the upper 10 km of the Earth’s crust could be captured, this would amount to 500 times the total global oil and gas resource.

Peak oil problem? Well, not really – basically we are facing the peak of the economic intelligence and human collaborative will. :roll:

[Nickdfresh]

RS, Halliburton et al will be at the forefront of economically viable alternatives when they indeed become economically viable. This is because there will be lots of money to be made, and they already have the infrastructure.

Frankly, we have better things to do with oil than burn it (plastics, pharmaceuticals etc), but while it remains relatively cheap and plentiful it will remain the fuel of choice. And given that the enviros object so vehemently to nuclear power, it will remain the fuel of choice for the foreseeable future unless governments turn round and say "screw you environmentalists, we are building more nuclear again"...

Actually, a lot of the enviros are beginning to break ranks and back nuclear power development, both in the States and Europe. Mainly, because the technology and safety aspects have improved to the extent that things seem more feasible and building new plants will become cheaper and cheaper while coal and oil fired power plants will continue to spew filthy smoke...

[Nickdfresh]

Yes, and no.

Peak oil seems to be presented now as some sort of disaster point. It's not. It's just the point where oil production peaks.

That's a consequence of geological, geo-political and local issues.

There's a lot of oil on the planet. Some of it's not readily accessible yet, at least to the world at large, e.g. central Asian oilfields, which coincidentally have some bearing on the invasion of Afghanistan on some interpretations.

If 2007 is peak oil, we'll have gradually dwindling supplies and at some stage there won't be enough for our wants, even needs. That ain't gonna happen the year after peak oil.

Getting panties in a twist over the peak oil year, which can only be determined retrospectively, is like trying to work out which year is peak life year for a human - 15, 25, 35 45????

I'd like to add, hearing a very good discussion of this subject on overnight radio in the US (formerly hosted by Art Bell) where a pretty succinct definition of "peak oil" was simply that the cost and benefits aspect of production was nearing its peak; meaning that there was still plenty of untapped oil fields, but the technology was such that they were not economically viable for large scale extracting and thus it was getting to be more and more expensive to squeeze out the last drops...

[overlord644]

we've seen the future and the future is ethanol (corn oil)

[1000ydstare]

Nukes are pretty good for power. There are plans in Britain, if it ever happens, to have a couple of Nukes pumping out power for the hydrocells, and the rest will come from wind, solar, tidal, etc.

The idea being if the renewables can't provide power then the Nukes can be turned over to the grid. Most of the problems with nukes are when you try to turn them up or down to meet demand. So a constant load makes them more efficient and safer. The old heat stacks should be torn down and the cooling water sent around local areas, for heating. There is a power station in the UK which heats a farmers greenhouses (for free) as a means of cooling off.

Houses also need to built properly, to avoid the over use of resources. Many houses in the World are designed around the ease of building rather than the benefit of the occupant.

Power consumption should be brought down too. Also has anyone seen how much methane just ONE family of 4 will produce from their own poo?

[Chevan]

Do you search the ideal source of energy?
DO not forget guyes the eny source of energy EXCEPT the Sunny finally warm up of Eaths atmosphere.
So i think that neither metan nor oil , nor even the Uran or Hydrogen do not let us to creat the really ecologically safe source of energy.
So we ALREADY have the brillian, ecological and enought cheap kind of energy - we need just to develop the methods to use it.
Our dear friend Librarian has already introduce you the Other Excellent Natural ecological way to produce the hit energy- geothermal. Howeve the obviouse lack of this way is the fact this excellent way could be used ONLY few places in the Eath ( mostly in the areas of volcanos) i.e. we have to transform the electrical energy developed in such places to the Great distance.Another porblem of such places is very hight danger of the level of seismic activity.
In the territory of Russia - i know just the one place , convenient for the geothermal sources- Kuril ilsands, Kamchatka and Sahalin. I've read about the experiments to use the geothermal station that was used for heating the buildings and producing the electrical energy.
But another matter is Sun ;)
We have it ewerywhere ( well practically in 90% of the Eath land). Besides there were the great land of the Eath near the equator where the Sun transmit the over 1 kWatt enegry per the square metter.
I mean the deserts of Africa , Asia and Australia.
The one of the great experimantal resaulf of using the solar energy was reached in the New Maxico in 1978
http://galspace.spb.ru/index115.file/3.jpg
the NSTTF. Where the 220 mirrows 6x6 metters each focuced the sunshine to the 1.5 metter spot on the 60 metter tower via the special computer focusing system.
This station was used for the Military and technological reseaches not for the producing the energy.
However the other excellent exapmle of of the Solar Stations is the now buiding record 154 MEGAWatts Australians SES in Victoria.The cost of the project 57 million dollars.
http://img.lenta.ru/news/2006/10/25/sun/picture.jpg
The contemporary silicon solar battaries could enought effectively produce the sun energy into the electrical one( from 25- untill 60%)
So as you could see the World energetic problem is not so hard as it try to inspire to us the Oil-oligarh who prefere to spend a 250 billions of dollars EVERY YEAR for the war in the Iraq (i.e for the war for oil) then to
develop the new effective and safe ways to realize the energy;)

[Digger]

Oil is only one part of the equation. Think how many products you see everyday which are a result of the petro/CHEMICAL industry. Virtually every product commercially availabe today owes much t0 oil(remembering most products are made of plastic).

Most pharmacutecals/fertilizers are a product of the petro/chemical industry. Petrochemicals are widely used in the production of foods as well, so in just two areas our pills that keep many of us alive and the food that keeps us walking and talking are reliant on the oil industry.

Any petrol shock/ end game will seriously impact our lives, like it or not, not withstanding any new miracle source for our energy needs.

digger

[Man of Stoat]

Nick, I can't say I've ever seen a fossil fuel power plant "spewing filthy smoke". Not in the West, at any case.

Solar is a waste of time outside of relatively few places on earth -- it's cloudy most of the time in Northern Europe for instance.

Even if the 1 kW per square metre figure at the equator is true, then to replace one old 1 GW power plant, assuming 50% efficiency (which is heavily overstating it) you need 2.000.000 m², or approximately 1 mi.² of generator area.

The current record sits at 42.5% efficiency, and this is experimental and not economically viable at the moment, so let's assume 30% and that we going to build solar instead of a modern 2GW plant. The solar cell area is 6 2/3 million square meters, and that's at the equator! That's 2 1/2 square kilometres! And how much does this stuff cost per square metre? millions?

And then, this is only going to be producing its peak efficiency at midday, and nothing at all at night. So in any case you're going to have to build a conventional power station anyway for power at night and in the morning and evening.

In simple engineering terms, the numbers do not add up for anything other than nuclear (and geothermal where you can do it)

[Firefly]

Great to think of Nuclear fuel being unlimited, the only small problem is that even Uranium isn't inexhaustible.http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2003/pdf/macdonald.pdf

[Chevan]

Oil is only one part of the equation. Think how many products you see everyday which are a result of the petro/CHEMICAL industry. Virtually every product commercially availabe today owes much t0 oil(remembering most products are made of plastic).

Most pharmacutecals/fertilizers are a product of the petro/chemical industry. Petrochemicals are widely used in the production of foods as well, so in just two areas our pills that keep many of us alive and the food that keeps us walking and talking are reliant on the oil industry.

Any petrol shock/ end game will seriously impact our lives, like it or not, not withstanding any new miracle source for our energy needs.

digger
Mate i think the Chemical and other industries are not the main consumer of oil. The main is the transport that need more and more fuel for itself. So if we could decrease or at least limit the of the consumption of fuel via the developing the new tehnologies - we get the great chance to save the rest of the oil for the chemical industry.

[Chevan]

Solar is a waste of time outside of relatively few places on earth -- it's cloudy most of the time in Northern Europe for instance.

But not a much clouds in the Deserts of Africa, Australia, America and Asia;)
The so caller Solar Territories where the sun shine 70-90% of the year time - are much effective to place here the Giant SES in future.

Even if the 1 kW per square metre figure at the equator is true, then to replace one old 1 GW power plant, assuming 50% efficiency (which is heavily overstating it) you need 2.000.000 m², or approximately 1 mi.² of generator area.

The current record sits at 42.5% efficiency, and this is experimental and not economically viable at the moment, so let's assume 30% and that we going to build solar instead of a modern 2GW plant. The solar cell area is 6 2/3 million square meters, and that's at the equator! That's 2 1/2 square kilometres! And how much does this stuff cost per square metre? millions?

well lets use the mathematic MoS.
The Aussian build the SES the power 154 MegaWatts that costs 57 millions dollars, right?
So the eqvivalent 2 GW should cost the 14 times more i.e 800 mln dollars.
Is it a lot of money on your mind?
For you to know the coast the ONLY Nuclear 1 GW (VVER-1000) reactor in Busher that is building ACCORDING THE CONTRACT in Iran is - $850 MLN .
i.e the WE HAVE the 1GW Nuclear reactor that cost TWICE more then the analogical Australian Solar SES;)
And don't forget the Russian prices are always lower then the Western ones.

And then, this is only going to be producing its peak efficiency at midday, and nothing at all at night. So in any case you're going to have to build a conventional power station anyway for power at night and in the morning and evening.

True
But i do not think this is would unsolved problem in future.
Besides do not forget that the Soal Energy could be used very flexible.
Instead to buld the 1 Giand SES we could build the 1000 the 1 Mwatt little SES in the most convenient places near the energy customers.
Plus do not forget about the Wind Electrical Station - the wind is a particular case of Sun enegry.
http://readonline.com.ua/magazines/sciam/2005/12/40/wind-generators.jpg
Today in the Germay are realizing the program "Solar house"
http://readonline.com.ua/magazines/sciam/2005/12/40/solar-batteries.jpg
The Sun battary in a roof produce the electrical energy that transmitted to the Common Electrical System of GErmany ( and gov pay for it for the owner of such house).
Besides the special Sun shine absorbed elements warm up the water for the next use.

In simple engineering terms, the numbers do not add up for anything other than nuclear (and geothermal where you can do it)
Do you know what i think about ?
If we realy want to solve the energy problems we have made it already.
While the oil coast the 80$ for barrel is the one situation - But when it will coast 150-200$ it would qite another one

[Rising Sun*]

Houses also need to built properly, to avoid the over use of resources. Many houses in the World are designed around the ease of building rather than the benefit of the occupant. Power consumption should be brought down too.

Which leads into the question of whether we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Rather than trying to meet the supposed and ever growing ‘need’ for energy, shouldn’t we be asking people who use energy to justify unnecessary or excessive use?

A pet peeve of mine, which illustrates a larger problem, is those bloody roof air conditioners down here cooling an empty 30 or 40 square open plan house all day so the occupants can be comfortable when they get home. I've survived just fine for close to 60 years by opening windows and using an electric fan. There's plenty of other examples, such as domestic tennis courts and swimming pools and endless Tuscan patios illuminated all night and mains power driveway and path lights on all night in houses that nobody visits after dark. All because it looks nice.

Why not work out what's a reasonable amount for a dwelling and ration power, with anything above the ration at a prohibitive cost, and a cost proportionate to occupants’ incomes so the rich can’t chomp up all the power they want? Obviously need exemptions for people with special needs, e.g. home business, disability.

Same goes for commercial buildings. For example, why are empty office towers illuminated all night? One empty one consumes more power than a town full of several thousand people.

Then there's the wider issue of the world running on the cheapest production cost rather than what's best for the planet and long term survival of the human species.

Remember cobblers? Remember mum turning collars on shirts to double the life, and darning socks and pants? Now it’s all throw away stuff. All that stuff puts a drain on the planet being produced, and decomposing.

Remember Sunday roast lamb and cold lamb and mashed spuds and peas on Sunday night and shepherd's pie on Monday night? Remember the pot of soup that seemed to stay on the stove all winter and had bits of vegetable peelings and scrap meat and barley and rice and whatever else happened to be around thrown into it, that we now throw into the bin? Ever buy a tinned soup that tasted half as good? Why don’t we have it now? Because mum’s too buggered when she gets home after a day’s work to pay for the mortgage and power bill on the McMansion with the bloody air conditioner on the roof that’s been pumping away on an empty house all day while she’s at work, and the bloody gale of cold air from the air conditioner would blow out the gas under the soup pan.

So if mum (or, to comply with equal opportunity legislation and principles, dad)cooks at all she slips into the local supermarket and picks up a bit of meat sitting on a butcher's equivalent of a thin plastic wrapped sanitary napkin on a polystyrene tray covered by cling wrap. Fifty years ago the butcher would have put the meat into new greaseproof paper and, like the fish and chip shop, wrapped his product in newspaper he bought from kids for a few pence. Local recycling. Then some bureaucrat decided that newspapers might transmit disease so now we level vast forests just to make paper for fish and chip wrappers. But mum won't buy meat at the butcher's where it's about twenty per cent cheaper than the supermarket, and about two hundred per cent better quality, because the butcher shuts at the same time she leaves work, a couple of hours from home.

Anyway, she doesn’t have the time after driving the kids all over the local geography to their sporting events etc. Who ever got driven anywhere by their parents in the 50’s or 60’s to anything except family events and other things we didn’t want to attend? Reason it happens now is because every family has at least one car and we have the idiotic situation of kids playing competitions that require parents to drive for anything up to an hour or more to get them there. When everybody didn’t have a car, kids did everything in places they could get to on foot or by bike, with about zero negative ecological impact.

Same with work. Go back to the sixties and seventies and you’ll find, here anyway, newspaper ads for homes for sale and rent with statements referring to local employment opportunities. Then, hardly anybody would contemplate today’s common hour and half to two hour each way commute by car, or public transport, to work.

All our modern ‘improvements’ are like freeways. Build them to solve traffic problems and in no time the bloody freeways are clogged, along with the roads they supposedly unclogged. Crap always expands to fill the space available.

There’s never been anything like all the labour saving devices we have now, and there’s never been, in developed countries, people with so little free time. Because they’re all flat out working to pay for the great homes and labour saving devices and other stuff that they’re too busy to enjoy so they live on take away food and McDonalds and frozen meals because they get home too late and get up too early to cook.

Anyone who spent time on a farm, in Oz anyway, will remember the slop bucket in the kitchen. Everything that couldn’t go into the soup pot went into it. Egg shells, stale bread, off milk from the cow, meat bones, vegetables, plate scrapings. Take it up the back and feed it to the dogs whose kennel was a 44 gallon drum on its side under the pine trees, not far from a shed clad in flattened kerosene tins. Everything was used and recycled by resourceful people, many of whom learnt thrift in the 1930’s, even the 1890's, Depression, and who didn’t have the luxury we have now of throwing away anything that’s a bit worn or approaching its use by date.

Dogs loved the slop bucket tucker, like they love anything that could be food. Kelpies and blueys and border collies would run miles all day on that tucker, working sheep and cattle. Now we have to have specially formulated tinned and dried food to get the exact dietary balance or the poor pooch will curl up its tootsies and die. My dog gets some dry food, but it lives on a lot of dead food from the darker parts of the fridge. It’s still healthy, although on the rare occasions I take it to the vet I get a bollocking for not giving it heart worm medication. I’ve never heard of a dog dying of heart worm, outside posters in vets’ surgeries, but I wasted a lot of money on the last dog shoving a tablet down its gullet every night. Meanwhile some poor kid in Sudan or Chad is dying because even simpler technology and skill could have been used to give them clean water.

Every year or two we have publicity about fruit growers here dumping thousands of tons of fruit, because it’s cheaper to bring in oranges or whatever from California or Brazil or somewhere else on the other side of the planet. Does that make sense, in the total picture? What’s rotting food going to produce? Stuff we’re trying to keep out of the atmosphere.

So, after that rambling stream of consciousness rant, the common theme is: We have got our priorities so back to front under the pressure of profit driven economies that I think it’s an irretrievable situation until the politicians and big money men work out that the planet and people come before profit. Don’t hold your breath. They’ll only work it out when we’re all gasping for breath, by which time it’ll be way too late.



Also has anyone seen how much methane just ONE family of 4 will produce from their own poo?

If my personal beer to methane conversion rate, without poo, is any guide, the planet hasn’t got a chance. :D

And that's the opinion of my family of four. :D

[Man of Stoat]

Even in the "solar territories", the sun does not shine at night. This is insurmountable. Even if you build your 2 GW solar power station instead of your 2 GW nuclear power station, your 2 GW nuclear power station will be providing power 24 hours a day, your solar one will come online very slowly in the morning , peak at midday, and drop off through the afternoon. Your nuclear power station will therefore provide more than double the amount of energy, which shoots an arrow right through your cost benefit analysis.

Wind energy only produces power when the wind is within a relatively narrow range of wind speeds. Not enough equals no power, too much equals no power. all this has to be backed up by conventional, which is turning and burning even if it does not produce any net output.

They also putting those silly solar heaters/solar panels on houses here in the Netherlands, but only because they are being subsidised by the taxpayer. Given how few days a year are sunny here, it is pointless. Likewise Germany.

Energy rationing RS? puh-lease... this is not North Korea.

I suggest the first step is that all the people who think that this is a great world threatening problem should ditch their cars, have their central heating and hot water disabled,buy only locally produced food, and come off the electricity grid. lead by example, what?

[Rising Sun*]

Energy rationing RS? puh-lease... this is not North Korea.

I suggest the first step is that all the people who think that this is a great world threatening problem should ditch their cars, have their central heating and hot water disabled,buy only locally produced food, and come off the electricity grid. lead by example, what?

What's so wrong with rationing?

We have serious water shortages here, but no rationing.

What we can use is determined by task, not consumption.

So, I can't top up my swimming pool but the bloke next door can, and does, water his garden to the maximum several times a week. Neither of us can wash our cars. I've never watered a lawn in summer, but the bloke next door spends hours watering his by hand several times a week during permitted times, to replace the amount he used to use before the latest restriction when he had a sprinkler running every day that represented about twenty times what I could possibly use to top up my pool in a week. If I topped up my swimming pool now I'd still use vastly less than the bloke next door still will keeping his lawn green in the height of summer, but I'm not allowed to. We've got four people in my house using less water than my neighbour with two in his house, but I still can't top up my swimming pool. I'm perfectly happy to let my swimming pool go, because I've got a roof system that got me through last summer and probably will this summer. I've also rigged up a grey water system that keeps my plants, apart from the lawn, alive, which my neighbour hasn't. So my neighbour consumes vastly more of a dwindling resource than we do, because he's too bloody lazy and tight to set up his own grey water system for his garden and expects to be able to use drinking quality water for his bloody grass.

We're not rationed at all. The result is that Blind Freddie can see that there's not any fair or sensible basis to the restrictions, the way they're applied, and the results.

So guess why I don't take this any more seriously than other bureacratic bullshit like 40 km/h zones outside schools that apply 24/7 365 days a year. And why a hose will go into my pool if the roof system fails. Because there's no limit on what I can use. As long as I don't get caught using it on a prohibited task, like topping up a swimming pool with about as much water as my neighbour will pour onto his grass for just one night this coming summer .

That wouldn't happen if we had a rationed amount.

[Rising Sun*]

P.S.

When it gets past the luxuries of swimming pools versus lawns, down to survival, rationing will suddenly appeal to weak governments which didn't want to make the hard decisions when they were hoping for more rain.

Not unlike weak governments in WWII which imposed rationing in part because they hoped that Hitler would go away, and didn't make the hard decisions earlier to deal with the threat, including building up and provisioning their armed forces.

Governments can always be relied upon to react to predictable disasters after they've occurred.

[Man of Stoat]

Apart from the obvious questions of who decides how much each person is permitted and on what basis, you instantly create two things:

A huge extra government bureaucracy to administer it
a black market

It doesn't matter whether it is water, food, fuel, whatever, these things always spring up.

In the case of fuel, you instantly put the brakes on the economy. Where, then, does the money come from for all those "people before profits" things? What you also ensure is that the less well-off get hit worst: better off people will always be able to afford to buy enough "fuel credits" to do whatever they want, whereas people on low incomes will suffer. What about those poor sods who have to commute through no fault of their own? They can't afford to move, so they have to commute. Limit their ability to do that, and they just won't work, as welfare will be the more lucrative option. That's a further brake on the economy.

Currently oil is plentiful, so any rationing would be arbitrary. if it's based on "Oh my God we have had a trivial increase in mean surface temperature in the 20th century some of which may (or may not) have been caused by fossil fuel use increasing the amount of a trace gas essential to life in the atmosphere by approximately 0.01% of dry air volume, and I've got a computer model which draws a pretty line which says that this is going to kill us all (but if I give the computer model a realistic value for the absorption of carbon dioxide then it says we're having an ice age tomorrow at four o'clock) ", then you are staking an awful lot (modern civilisation) on the trivial effect of an unproven hypothesis.

[Man of Stoat]

PS -- if they ration water where you are , lots of people would just cheat

[Cuts]

Right, now where's my nuclear powered car then?

Been done.
In fact they had nuclear powered flying cars about sixty-two years back.

Quite a few of them were about, albeit very briefly, in a couple of Nip cities.

[Rising Sun*]

PS -- if they ration water where you are , lots of people would just cheat

They already do.

Even if you're not cheating, it can get ugly with people with green gardens from tanks or rainwater systems having houses and gardens damaged, or at the extreme it ends up with a death
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22683996-662,00.html

I think it'd be pretty hard for the average person to cheat on a ration. You'd need to bypass the meter, as the hydorponic commercial cannabis growers do with electricity, or tamper with the reading. That's beyond the capacity of most people.

Or we could save water by some simple expedients, such as recognising the natural cycle so that we don't keep grass green in the cities in the middle of summer when it's brown all over the rest of the country.

The problem, like energy, isn't so much a shortage per se but the way we choose to use the resource.

[Drake]

Rationing as in wartime is not the way to expand our timeframe to find a solution for the basic problem, but the population and the economy can pretty easily be encouraged to save energy by making it very expensive, so taxes are a way, though I hate to admit that. The problem is that this has to be done on a global scale, if f.e. only germany rises energy taxes like 300% it only damages it's economy, if everyone does, nothing happens except that suddenly it's worth the effort to streamline energy efficiency in all places. Part of the problem is not the energy we use, but the part that we waste (which is a huge portion), though we could already do a lot better.
There is a model about the technological advancement of a civilization based on energy efficiency, and in that scale, we're still in the starting grid.

[Nickdfresh]

Nick, I can't say I've ever seen a fossil fuel power plant "spewing filthy smoke". Not in the West, at any case.
...


Well, I admit to hyperbole here. But the plants nevertheless inject CO2 into the atmosphere and contribute to smog considerably in many American cities...

[Man of Stoat]

Nicky, compare the very occasional mild smogs of today in the US with those of even 20 years ago which were frequent, and thick.

On this side of the pond the last notable smog was over 50 years ago.

Energy taxes: if the whole world they did it would just affect the whole world economy. Make energy more expensive to any large degree and in the colder countries you are going to get a hell of a lot of less well off people dying in the winter because they can't afford basic heating. it's already a significant problem amongst pensioners in the UK, for instance.
__________________

[Drake]

Nicky, compare the very occasional mild smogs of today in the US with those of even 20 years ago which were frequent, and thick.

On this side of the pond the last notable smog was over 50 years ago.

Energy taxes: if the whole world they did it would just affect the whole world economy. Make energy more expensive to any large degree and in the colder countries you are going to get a hell of a lot of less well off people dying in the winter because they can't afford basic heating. it's already a significant problem amongst pensioners in the UK, for instance.

You're missing the point, they probably can't afford the amount of oil they need to heat, but we need to get to the point where we need much less oil to heat each m². Then they could afford the lesser amount at a higher price, but the lesser amount is the aim. And that "expensive energy would only affect the whole world economy" is actually a non argument, we merely trade a good growth today against a giant problem later, while we could have a little minor growth (and technological improvements on large scale cause the industry always maxes profit) and a smaller problem later.

[Chevan]

Even in the "solar territories", the sun does not shine at night. This is insurmountable. Even if you build your 2 GW solar power station instead of your 2 GW nuclear power station, your 2 GW nuclear power station will be providing power 24 hours a day, your solar one will come online very slowly in the morning , peak at midday, and drop off through the afternoon. Your nuclear power station will therefore provide more than double the amount of energy, which shoots an arrow right through your cost benefit analysis.

The Australian SES had the average power output is 154 Mwatt i.e. this is average power in whole years on days and nights.
The Peak power is midday at least 2-3 times more.
And MoS i did not tell we could use ONLY the solar energy.
But if you know - the peak of Eletrical consumtion is on day. In the Night this value decrease in times.
So the Solar Statons could help a much to cover the day's shortage of energy.
Besides the surplus of energy in midday could be used for production of hydrogen from a water that could be used in the Hydrogen-Electrical batteries for electrical car for instance.
So indeed it should be the System of SES that operated as a union system that could solve a lot of energetical problems of mankind.
Today the scientist offer the new kind of transformic electrical energy- through bunchs of microwave radiation. In this way we could effectively transform the great quatity of enegry from the spase and even from the Moon.

They also putting those silly solar heaters/solar panels on houses here in the Netherlands, but only because they are being subsidised by the taxpayer. Given how few days a year are sunny here, it is pointless. Likewise Germany.

I think this is not so stopid - this help to test the different kinds of Solar and Save-energy technologies.
Sure for the while this has rather experimental meaning that useful.But who know- when the oil and gus will seriously rise in price- may be this will very effective.

[Man of Stoat]

How exactly do these less well-off people afford to modify their house so that they need less heating?

Affecting the whole world economy is an argument, screwing everyone equally does not mean that no one, on balance, gets screwed.

Trading good growth today definitely causes a major problem today against what is only possibly a major problem later. the bookies must love you down at the racetrack if you apply the same logic to the horses!

Technology always advances and find solutions, a lot of these arguments rest on technological stasis. Should your ancestors 100, 200 years ago have sacrificed their standard of living to potentially mitigate what were then perceived as the problems of the day so that you now can enjoy a better standard of living? A potential example would be should your ancestors have walked everywhere and not travelled to mitigate the problems of horse droppings on the streets so that you can enjoy a present where the problem of horse droppings on the street is not as bad as it might have been?

Each generation is shortsighted in viewing its own problems as the ultimate problems, and the above analogy illustrates this.

There was a very excellent article written on a blog far more eloquently than I can phrase it a little while back, the conclusion of which is that dead men don't owe you anything (and it is indeed extremely selfish to expect that they do), hence you don't owe anything to people not yet born.

In any case, oil for personal transport will die out when a car is produced which:

Runs on electricity, and can do 400 km of motorway driving at motorway speeds on a single charge;
can be charged to full capacity at a motorway service station in less than half an hour, and at home overnight;
costs the same as a family car today.

Energy storage technology is advancing at an incredible rate, and once batteries/super capacitors can achieve the above specification, people would be mad to buy a car running on liquid fuel.

[Rising Sun*]

dead men don't owe you anything (and it is indeed extremely selfish to expect that they do), hence you don't owe anything to people not yet born.

Perhaps, but don't we as parents owe it to our born kids, who've got another 80 or 90 years from the birth we imposed upon them, to apply to the planet what we apply to everything else we try to do for them?

Give them a better life than we had?

Rather than sucking up all the resources for ourselves and leaving our kids and our descendants with diminishing resources?

We're the first generation in history with that potential as far as natural resources go.

[Man of Stoat]

But resources are not diminishing in the way the scare mongers would have you believe. How many of the doomsday predictions of this, that is, or the other resource running out by such and such a date have been even close? None of them.

It is pointless to cripple ourselves on the basis of a nonproblem (or something that may become a problem in hundreds of years time) just because it makes us " feel good" about doing something for "the children". The cure is often worse than the supposed disease -- for instance, DDT was banned on the basis of some extremely wonky research, and millions unnecessarily died from malaria as a result. It is now being reintroduced, but are those responsible for the damage caused by banning it being held responsible? No. Are they even being made to say sorry? No.

[Rising Sun*]

But resources are not diminishing in the way the scare mongers would have you believe.

Unless they're being replaced at a rate equivalent to or greater than the rate we're using them, they're being diminished.

Oil and coal can't be produced naturally in a fraction of the period we've converted our lives to depend upon extracting them from the ground.

They have to be diminishing.

Forests are being destroyed all over the world, notably in places like South America and South East Asia, with giant fires that pollute the atmosphere, to the extent that it's a major issue between Indonesia and Malaysia. It's the planetary equivalent of smoking cigarettes flat out and chopping out alveoli in our lungs every second of the day.

Whatever the reason, the polar ice caps are melting.

Nobody thinks they can live on a creek and throw their garbage and pour their sewage into and it'll still be okay downstream, but those who assure us that there is nothing wrong with the planet assume that we can do the same to the planet on an immensely larger scale and none of the shit will ever clog up the planet's systems.

I don't think one needs a Ph. D. in anything to work out that every system gets overloaded if crap is constantly pumped into it. It's just a question of whether one wants to accept that, say, the river has had a fatal dose of crap because dead fish are floating on the surface; no fish are caught there any more; the algal bloom kills things in the water and people who drink it because deforestation or irrigation diversion etc upstream has destroyed natural flows to flush the river; or it's just an aberration that will pass when the missing El Nino pattern restores itself.

How many of the doomsday predictions of this, that is, or the other resource running out by such and such a date have been even close? None of them.

It is pointless to cripple ourselves on the basis of a nonproblem (or something that may become a problem in hundreds of years time) just because it makes us " feel good" about doing something for "the children". The cure is often worse than the supposed disease -- for instance, DDT was banned on the basis of some extremely wonky research, and millions unnecessarily died from malaria as a result. It is now being reintroduced, but are those responsible for the damage caused by banning it being held responsible? No. Are they even being made to say sorry? No.

I share your scepticism, but without the scienctific knowledge to evaluate the risk. Which puts me in the same camp as about 95+% of science educated people. And the other 5% can't agree.

I remember the Club of Rome in the 1970's predicting disaster not too far off. And sundry books about impending catastrophe, some written by scientists.

I'm not convinced that global warming is even an unusual event. We've only had records for less than the blink of an eye in human occupation of the planet, which isn't even the blink of an eye in the planet's history. The current experience may just be part of large scale normal processes over geological time unrelated to human activity.

It might also be a consequence of human activity, and common sense suggests that human activity has at least contributed to it.

So I think we'd be stupid to continue as if there's no risk.

We can't do any harm by taking a risk-reduction approach, except on an economic basis.

Which comes back to my consistent point that economics, money, whatever people want to call it, ain't the be all and end all of existence. Although if we don't wake up to ourselves it might be the end all of existence.

[Man of Stoat]

Point of order: Antarctica is not melting. The temperature trend for the Antarctic as a whole is -0.07 degrees per decade (according to the satellite data) the tip of the Antarctic peninsular (which is not within the Antarctic Circle) is getting warmer, and this seems to be all we hear about. the net ice balance is currently positive. this Antarctic winter has just seen the largest recorded sea ice extent (which has been conveniently ignored by the mainstream media who would prefer to bleat about the opposite situation in the Arctic summer this year caused by wind and current patterns).

Anyhow , back at the plot. yes, of course resources are being depleted. But the question is over what timescale are we talking before this becomes any serious issue? Frankly, I could not give a damn about timescales larger than several hundred years (which is really what we are talking about), because if the human race cannot adapt and develop alternatives within hundreds of years, then it does not deserve the name Homo Sapiens.

Look how we have developed technologically since 1800. Technological progress is happening now faster than it ever has in the past, So where will we be in 2200? Of course, nobody knows (but if you throw a few million at me I will make you a computer model which draws you a nice line and tells you what you want to know, complete with flying cars powered by alien space technology) but it is safe to assume that the difference in technology will be at least as great.

[Man of Stoat]

We can't do any harm by taking a risk-reduction approach, except on an economic basis.

Which comes back to my consistent point that economics, money, whatever people want to call it, ain't the be all and end all of existence. Although if we don't wake up to ourselves it might be the end all of existence.

But don't you see, economy is everything, all these nice things you enjoy in life, the clean air you breathe, your electricity and running water are all a consequence of a strong economy. so is your health.

What you are suggesting is that we should DEFINITELY sacrifice EVERYTHING now because of something which MIGHT or MIGHT NOT be a minor problem at an indeterminate time in the future.

[Drake]

How exactly do these less well-off people afford to modify their house so that they need less heating?

You could give them financial aid for that. Btw. you will never find solutions to any big scale problem by argumenting on a personal level, you will always have someone who is screwed and doesn't deserve it.


Affecting the whole world economy is an argument, screwing everyone equally does not mean that no one, on balance, gets screwed.

Trading good growth today definitely causes a major problem today against what is only possibly a major problem later. the bookies must love you down at the racetrack if you apply the same logic to the horses!

Technology always advances and find solutions, a lot of these arguments rest on technological stasis. Should your ancestors 100, 200 years ago have sacrificed their standard of living to potentially mitigate what were then perceived as the problems of the day so that you now can enjoy a better standard of living? A potential example would be should your ancestors have walked everywhere and not travelled to mitigate the problems of horse droppings on the streets so that you can enjoy a present where the problem of horse droppings on the street is not as bad as it might have been?

Each generation is shortsighted in viewing its own problems as the ultimate problems, and the above analogy illustrates this.

There was a very excellent article written on a blog far more eloquently than I can phrase it a little while back, the conclusion of which is that dead men don't owe you anything (and it is indeed extremely selfish to expect that they do), hence you don't owe anything to people not yet born.


You are comparing oranges and hmm salty rocks. You cannot compare 1900 to today, there were even still white marks on the maps by that time. There is a fixed amount of fossil energy ressources on this planet, this is an unalterable fact and our society already taps every single one of them on a huge scale, coal, gas, oil, uranium, whatever. I don't know with certainty how much there is or was, but we can assume, that we have already found quite a percentage of the total amount.
Where metals for example can be recycled, these sources cannot, once they're gone they're gone. And of course this "gone" won't happen overnight and is possibly still far away, but what we'll see with certainty is a decline of amount available at every given point in time compared to the amount needed. And there is also a limit in the "technology advances" theory and it's not a financial one, it's an energetic. When you need to put more energy into aquiring something than you get out of it, you're done with that ressource as an energy source. Oil will probably still be used for various things in millenia, but not as our primary energy source (should mankind still be around by that time).
Limiting our consumption buys time, nothing more, nothing less. But sooner or later we will have to find something completely different and given that the rate of consumption rises constantly I would assume rather sooner than later.
And a personal comment:
That "don't owe anything to those not yet born" is most likely the most stupid thing I've ever heard and that guy pretty much disqualified himself for membership in the human race. The dead men from the past were so nice, or maybe they just didn't have the opportunity to screw us like we do future generations now.


In any case, oil for personal transport will die out when a car is produced which:

Runs on electricity, and can do 400 km of motorway driving at motorway speeds on a single charge;
can be charged to full capacity at a motorway service station in less than half an hour, and at home overnight;
costs the same as a family car today.

Energy storage technology is advancing at an incredible rate, and once batteries/super capacitors can achieve the above specification, people would be mad to buy a car running on liquid fuel.

You're funny, and where do you expect the electricity to come from? The energy carrier is not really an issue, the source is, and today we're running on an oil battery, which is stored solar energy from the past. And it behaves much like a battery in a flashlight, too. The current will get weaker to the point where the lights go out, even if there is still plenty of energy inside.

[Man of Stoat]

You could give them financial aid for that.
who pays? "The taxpayer". That bottomless pit of money. And when the economy declines such that an enormous number of people require this financial aid, when that runs out, I'm sure there's the magic money tree.

Your next paragraph is imbued with the arrogance which afflicts most generations, in that everything worthwhile has been discovered. It was mooted around 1900 that almost everything that could be invented had been invented, so the US patent office could be wound down. We don't come close to knowing how much resources we have and where they are, we are just a bit less ignorant than those who came before.

On your personal comment, we have no more ability to screw future generations now than we ever had in the past.

You're funny, and where do you expect the electricity...

Nu-cu-lur

[Rising Sun*]

Point of order: Antarctica is not melting. The temperature trend for the Antarctic as a whole is -0.07 degrees per decade (according to the satellite data) the tip of the Antarctic peninsular (which is not within the Antarctic Circle) is getting warmer, and this seems to be all we hear about. the net ice balance is currently positive. this Antarctic winter has just seen the largest recorded sea ice extent (which has been conveniently ignored by the mainstream media who would prefer to bleat about the opposite situation in the Arctic summer this year caused by wind and current patterns).

Interesting. I'll have to look into that.

You realise that you're challenging my faith in an independent and reliable press. :D

Anyhow , back at the plot. yes, of course resources are being depleted. But the question is over what timescale are we talking before this becomes any serious issue? Frankly, I could not give a damn about timescales larger than several hundred years (which is really what we are talking about), because if the human race cannot adapt and develop alternatives within hundreds of years, then it does not deserve the name Homo Sapiens.

How do you accommodate the enormous appetite for resources and energy of the developing economies, notably India and China, which I don't think use them that well?

As a simple example, China is flooding the world with incredibly cheap power tools of minimal and inconsistent quality, at least until it revalues its currency and frightens the Christ out of the rest of the world.

These tools use about the same quantity of materials, such as copper, mercury, aluminium and so on and cost exactly the same to transport as a good quality tool.

But they last maybe 10%, 20% if you're lucky, as long as a half way decent tool that used to be made in Western countries or Japan. Or even in the Philippines or Thailand for Western countries or Japan.

Sure, they're often between a third and two thirds of the price of a decent tool, but in X years we're going to have five to ten times the quantity of resources, including embedded energy and resources, dumped because these cheap tools don't last even anywhere near the proportionate third to half of the time of a decent tool.

Look how we have developed technologically since 1800.

Look how we haven't developed since 1960. Then I knew a lot of people who ran chooks in their suburban back yards and grew their own vegies and fruit trees. Now the chooks come frozen in freezer trucks from half a continent away, and the fruit and some of the vegies in refrigerated containers from half a planet away. None of that energy was required when we went into the back yard to get our meal.

I think we've lost the plot, big time, with globalisation etc. It serves the corporations who are buggering the planet for profit, but not the people who live on it.

[Man of Stoat]

To reinforce the point about the economy being everything, you need look no further than examples in the past (and indeed present) where economy was sacrificed for ideology: the communist states. Whole populations reduced to effective serfdom, with shortages in even the most basic needs.

It wasn't totalitarianism that did this, it was economic policy in force by said totalitarianism.

[Rising Sun*]

But don't you see, economy is everything, all these nice things you enjoy in life, the clean air you breathe, your electricity and running water are all a consequence of a strong economy. so is your health.

The privatised electricity and water companies here have nothing to do with any free market or rational economic activity but enjoy monopolies granted to them by governments, which bailed out to make their budgets look better. The privatised companies' charges don't relate to market issues and they don't invest in infrastucture like the previous government services did, which is why it takes longer to get problems fixed.

They are in fact the antithesis of any rational economic system, where farmers have to pay for irrigation water they don't receive in drought years as if they had actually received the allocation they're charged for when the water company can't deliver the water to grow the crops for the farmers to pay their water bills because they haven't received the water they're forced to pay for.

My health is not a consequence of a strong economy. It is a consequence of being lucky enough to avoid an ailing hospital system run by the same state that charges farmers for water they don't get, and which runs hospitals by appointing accountants to manage hospitals by bullshit numbers which reward hospitals for people not dying there, which is why they go on ambulance bypass to send the critically ill and injured to the next hospital. If they do this for a year, the hospital managers get big bonuses. Meanwhile the same managers fund their bonuses by getting rid of things like cleaners, which is why our hospitals are infection palaces.

As far as our economy delivering water, electricity and health, it's all bullshit.

[Drake]

You could give them financial aid for that.
who pays? "The taxpayer". That bottomless pit of money. And when the economy declines such that an enormous number of people require this financial aid, when that runs out, I'm sure there's the magic money tree.


Well, then they'll just have to freeze.


Your next paragraph is imbued with the arrogance which afflicts most generations, in that everything worthwhile has been discovered. It was mooted around 1900 that almost everything that could be invented had been invented, so the US patent office could be wound down. We don't come close to knowing how much resources we have and where they are, we are just a bit less ignorant than those who came before.


There is a significant difference between "everything invented" and "everything of a certain type found in a fixed amount of space" and if you don't see it, I can't help you.


On your personal comment, we have no more ability to screw future generations now than we ever had in the past.


We do have, even if you wouldn't count technology, by sheer numbers.


You're funny, and where do you expect the electricity...

Nu-cu-lur


Same dead end. Very limited supply. We buy more time with it, though, but it's no solution.

[Rising Sun*]

To reinforce the point about the economy being everything, you need look no further than examples in the past (and indeed present) where economy was sacrificed for ideology: the communist states. Whole populations reduced to effective serfdom, with shortages in even the most basic needs.

It wasn't totalitarianism that did this, it was economic policy in force by said totalitarianism.

I'd dispute that, in part.

Most of the major communist societies assumed power over pre-existing serfdoms anyway.

Revolutions were, and are, run by doctors, lawyers, teachers, etc. Precisely the bourgeois elements they're committed to removing.

So, the first thing they do when they get into power is get rid of the other doctors, lawyers, teachers etc, and anyone else they think might be a risk because they have some influence in society, such as the kulaks.

It's more about removing threats to political power than an economic issue, although the targets have economic significance and there are economic consequences of getting rid of them.

[Man of Stoat]

RS, the experience up this end of the privatised electricity and water companies is that they are infinitely superior to the nationalised companies they replaced. Sorry it didn't go your way. In any case, it doesn't matter whether the economy is public or private, that is irrelevant to the point at hand. as is the failure of socialised medicine, we've got the same problems in the UK, and since it was more or less privatised in the Netherlands we don't have it so bad here.

The point at hand is that the economy (whether public or private) has provided you with a water supply -- paid for by wealth generated by you and others operating within the economy. Otherwise, where did it come from? where did the money to pay for it come from? The economy as a whole. Likewise electricity. likewise pharmaceuticals/medication that you can self medicate with to keep yourself away from hospitals. A strong economy enabled people to have enough money to pay for the research and infrastructure to provide for it, produce it, transport it to where you can buy it, and enabled you to buy it. don't believe me? try buying paracetamol in Cuba (outside of a hard currency shop for foreigners and party bods.

The economy is something which permeates every aspect of your life (unless you live in a cave and never interact with another soul) and it is something that we in the West take for granted and no longer appreciate. Tell a Zimbabwean that economy is not everything when comrade Bob has wrecked it so that people can no longer buy basic foodstuffs, let alone guarantee that they can turn a tap and get running water.

Drake, your first point seems to me like you would happily let people die to possibly mitigate something which may or may not be a problem in the future. Nice.

Second point: they have not discovered everything of a certain type found in a fixed amount of space, do you really think the entire earth's surface has been prospective using modern prospecting techniques for all known minerals /oil/ etc? It hasn't. There is much still to be found, otherwise prospectors wouldn't be doing such a roaring trade.

Nuclear: thousands of years worth of supply. Are you really worried about what happens thousands of years into the future? And if they ever finally manage to get fusion online (it's been 10 years away for the last 30 years), then it's practically unlimited.

[Man of Stoat]

Most of the major communist societies assumed power over pre-existing serfdoms anyway.


This may be the case for Russia, but this was not the case of any of their East European satellite states, nor Cuba.

This is getting off topic, but Marxist economic policy is based on a false understanding of how economies work, and how people interact within them. This is why communist countries universally have weak economies. they of course like to blame it on counter revolutionaries, spies, wreckers, or whatever, because Marxist economic dogma is an article of faith in such a government.

The relatively few non Marxist authoritarian/totalitarian economies did not suffer in the same way (Pinochet's Chile, Nazi Germany, nationalist Spain, modern Singapore, prewar Japan, Fascist Italy, Batista's Cuba), since they had much more realistic economic policies.

[Drake]

Never said anything about dying, just freezing. And they will freeze eventually anyway, energy prices will rise, if only for increased demand by china and india.
Of course they have not discovered everything (though a lot already), but there won't be and haven't been that many significant findings to compensate for the drop of production from already long established sources (a factor which can be calculated). And I can only repeat about the "we get better extraction technology" part: The more difficult it gets to get it, the less net energy + we get. So even if we managed to uphold the current extraction, if we need to put 2 or 3 times the energy into getting it, we already have significantly less energy elsewere.

Nuclear, uhm no, not that much, U235 is actually pretty rare.
Should we get hot fusion to work on industrial scale we're the winners, no argument about that. My experimental physics professor on the university was actually a capacity on that area and he was quite optimistic about it, but he also colourfully described the enormous theoretical and practical difficulties involved. Judging them by the "will work in 10 years for the last 30" is actually a bit unfair, as they have to fight pretty hard for funding, which explains a lot. No one can say with any certainty when we'll really have figured it out.

[Man of Stoat]

If you go for fast breeder reactors instead of plain old reactors, there is thousands of years worth of fuel.

As for funding, given the numbers of billions of public money which are thrown at various "research projects" because they happen to have a few key trigger words in their grant proposals, it is absolutely shocking if fusion research is strapped for cash!

[Drake]

Sure fast breeders increase fuel efficiency 60 times. But still won't be thousands of years.

[Nickdfresh]

Nicky, compare the very occasional mild smogs of today in the US with those of even 20 years ago which were frequent, and thick.

On this side of the pond the last notable smog was over 50 years ago.

MOS, I lived in Buffalo, New York most of my life. An industrial city now in America's rust belt that rarely ever had "smog alerts" when I was child. When I left there two summers ago, "smog advisories" were a common summer occurrence on humid days over when it reached over about 29C - largely the result of US coal fired power plants in the Midwestern United States. So yes, smog is still a very significant problem. You may attribute some of that to more vigorous reporting and air quality standards. I don't know, but smog continues not only to be a problem in the US despite the decrease in industrial base, largely because of the greater demand for power. The reduction in smog in some US cities has as much to do with tightened emissions standards for automobiles as it does with coal or oil fired power plants...

Energy taxes: if the whole world they did it would just affect the whole world economy. Make energy more expensive to any large degree and in the colder countries you are going to get a hell of a lot of less well off people dying in the winter because they can't afford basic heating. it's already a significant problem amongst pensioners in the UK, for instance.

A large proportion of the worlds population may soon be dying, or at least displaced, from problems resulting from global warming such as rising sea levels and incremental increases in temperature make certain areas less sustainable...This has an economic impact all its own.

[Nickdfresh]

...
Plus do not forget about the Wind Electrical Station - the wind is a particular case of Sun enegry.
http://readonline.com.ua/magazines/sciam/2005/12/40/wind-generators.jpg
...

Wind power is a great, almost ideal, option; unfortunately, there is a huge "not-in-my-backyard" aspect that makes people reject the construction of huge wind combines in their communities...

There was talk of creating an ocean "wind-farm" in US territorial waters off the Massachusetts (MA) coast not to far from in the MA island of Martha's Vineyard. But the wealthy owners of summer cottages and vacation homes there have blocked it thus far.

Even in a depressed farming community East of Buffalo, NY (about 650km from New York City), the wind-farms (which would bring cheap electricity and money to an area that needs it) generated much controversy and infighting between the residents who are afraid of the noise and the large, protruding field of wind mills churning in the distance ruining their bucolic paradise of shit smelling dairy farms.

[Drake]

Wind, tidal and solar energy will definatly play it's part, so will geothermal.
Problem with wind specifically is, that it's so unsteady. You need to store the energy, if get it when you don't need it and you need backup plants if you need it and can't get it, so such a grid is pretty complicated. As particularly the US east coast had to discover, a glitch in the power in a small part of a grid can lay waste on a normal, if not somewhat old power grid on a huge scale.
And what I also don't like about wind (besides the look) is that they are not as environmentally friendly as it seems. They kill birds and not just a few, mostly the big ones who already have enough difficulties like falcons and eagles. And as we should have realized by now, we shouldn't fiddle around to much in the food chain, we always get diminishing returns. I wouldn't be too surprised about a sudden rat and mice infestation on the fields in a high windmill density area.

[Firefly]

Your not wrong with this RS

Look how we haven't developed since 1960. Then I knew a lot of people who ran chooks in their suburban back yards and grew their own vegies and fruit trees. Now the chooks come frozen in freezer trucks from half a continent away, and the fruit and some of the vegies in refrigerated containers from half a planet away. None of that energy was required when we went into the back yard to get our meal.

I think we've lost the plot, big time, with globalisation etc. It serves the corporations who are buggering the planet for profit, but not the people who live on it.

Prawns, caught on the West Coast of Scotland are frozen, shipped to China, processed by Chinese and then shipped back here for sale. If thats not madness I dont know what is. All to same a few pence the local processing plant gets closed and these things are shipped twice around the globe.

[Rising Sun*]

Your not wrong with this RS



Prawns, caught on the West Coast of Scotland are frozen, shipped to China, processed by Chinese and then shipped back here for sale. If thats not madness I dont know what is. All to same a few pence the local processing plant gets closed and these things are shipped twice around the globe.

Mate, that is beyond madness.

What's lost sight of in the endless quest for cheapest labour and production is that you still get what you pay for.

The Chinese are notorious for squeezing every last cent of profit out of things, such as by using cheaper materials than the ones specified regardless of health consequences at their end or ours. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mattel-recalls-more-toys/2007/09/05/1188783320078.html?s_cid=rss_news

Major supermarkets here flog Vietnamese prawns, at about a half to a third of the price of the local bigger and better product. They're astonishing in several respects, notably their bright orange colour and the pervasive chemical taste which prevents you tasting any prawn. And there are other longstanding doubts about them.

http://www.food.gov.uk/news/pressreleases/2002/mar/51374

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22186347-601,00.html

http://www.campylobacterblog.com/tags/fda/

I wouldn't knowingly eat prawns processed in China or any other developing country.

[Rising Sun*]

Prawns, caught on the West Coast of Scotland are frozen, shipped to China, processed by Chinese and then shipped back here for sale. If thats not madness I dont know what is. All to same a few pence the local processing plant gets closed and these things are shipped twice around the globe.

It'd be interesting to see a full analysis of the energy and environmental
components of that.

If they were processed in Scotland there's no fuel oil and exhaust and bilge water etc for ships to and from China.

Processing in Scotland would be from energy run on cleaner standards than in China.

It's hard to see how this could be better from an energy or environmental viewpoint than local processing. It just works on the dollars because labour and, presumably, energy in China is cheap enough to overcome the cost of transport to and from Scotland.

I'd take a punt that other reasons it's cheaper in China are because there aren't the same environmental controls on the processing plant and health and safety requirements for workers and so on, that all add to the cost of Western production.

[Chevan]

.

I'd take a punt that other reasons it's cheaper in China are because there aren't the same environmental controls on the processing plant and health and safety requirements for workers and so on, that all add to the cost of Western production.
Actually this is becoming a seriouse problem today.
Two years ago the dastard Chineses drope the 100 tonns of liquid danger chamical product to the river that runs near the russian city Habarovsk. The all fish immediatelly die but the most importaint problem was the lack of fresh water in the city for the month.
Althought the China bring official appologies and has realised the clearing of the river coast- there is no any guaranties it wll never happen again.
It seems that Chinas gov do not even try to worry about environmental controls.

[Chevan]

And what I also don't like about wind (besides the look) is that they are not as environmentally friendly as it seems. They kill birds and not just a few, mostly the big ones who already have enough difficulties like falcons and eagles. And as we should have realized by now, we shouldn't fiddle around to much in the food chain, we always get diminishing returns. I wouldn't be too surprised about a sudden rat and mice infestation on the fields in a high windmill density area.

Oh what a great thing the " Wind-farm": double effect- the energy for the heat , and the birds for a dinner:D

[Man of Stoat]

Let's quash a few myths here: wind power is not cheap, which is why it is heavily subsidised. It is not reliable. Anyone who believes otherwise should pay the full unsubsidised price for it, and should not get any when the wind is blowing too softly or too strongly.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age at more or less a constant rate, they are not rising any faster now than they were early in the 20th century (in some places they were rising faster then), and some other places such as the Maldives has seen sea level drops of around a foot in the last 30 years (most likely due to ocean currents). I live below sealevel, so I should know. all these enormous estimates of sealevel rises are based on the flawed computer models mentioned above, and political exaggerations.

Yes, it's crazy shipping prawns from Scotland around the world and back, no arguments. I'll make no comment about workshy jocks though (thought I'd add that into rile firefly:D)

[Rising Sun*]

Actually this is becoming a seriouse problem today.
Two years ago the dastard Chineses drope the 100 tonns of liquid danger chamical product to the river that runs near the russian city Habarovsk. The all fish immediatelly die but the most importaint problem was the lack of fresh water in the city for the month.
Althought the China bring official appologies and has realised the clearing of the river coast- there is no any guaranties it wll never happen again.
It seems that Chinas gov do not even try to worry about environmental controls.


Chinese river mysteriously turns red

BEIJING - A half-mile section of China's Yellow River turned "red and smelly" after an unknown discharge was poured into it from a sewage pipe, state media said Monday.

The incident in Lanzhou, a city of 2 million people in western Gansu province, follows a string of industrial accidents that have poisoned major rivers in China over the last year, forcing several cities to shut down their water systems.

It wasn't immediately clear what was tainting the section of the Yellow River. Environmental protection officials took samples and were trying to determine whether the sewage was toxic, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"Residents were alarmed to see a sewage pipe pouring red water into the country's second longest river" on Sunday between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., the agency said.

A news photo from the local paper showed a resident in the city center by a stretch of the river — a drinking water source for millions — that was rose-colored instead of the usual milky brown. Other photos showed patches of bright red and pink.

http://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20061023/capt.xgb80110231253.china_yellow_river_polution_xg b801.jpg

An official from Yellow River Water Resource Committee in Lanzhou confirmed the pollution. He said they were still analyzing the sample and had not determined what caused it. Like many Chinese officials, he gave only his family name, Wang.

Environmental protection has taken on new urgency for Chinese leaders following a November 2005 chemical spill in the Songhua River in northeastern China which forced the city of Harbin to shut down its water supply for days and sent toxins flowing into Russia.

China's cities are among the world's smoggiest, and the government says its major rivers, canals and lakes are badly polluted by industrial, agricultural and household pollution.

Hundreds of millions of people live without adequate supplies of clean drinking water. Throughout the country, protests have erupted over complaints by farmers that uncontrolled discharges by factories are ruining crops and poisoning water supplies.

"The Yellow River is the mother river of our country," said one bulletin board posting Monday on Sina.com, a major Chinese news Web site. "See how it has been ruined!"

Said another: "Let the mayor of Lanzhou drink the water and then they will immediately have measures in place to deal with the environmental pollution."

Kang Mingke, an official with the city's environment protection bureau, said there were no chemical plants located nearby, according to Xinhua. He said the red water could have come from central heating companies who dye their hot water to prevent people from diverting it for their own use, the news agency said.

John Hocevar, an oceans specialist for Greenpeace USA, said that the photos he had seen of the spill might indicate a "red tide," a burst of toxic plankton in the water, spurred by the presence of nutrient-rich waste from the sewage spill.

Alternatively, he said industrial toxins could have caused the red color. "It's too early to say what's exactly in this," he said. "It could be just about anything."

Noting that local government officials have said there is no industry in the area, Hocevar said if the discoloration is the result of industrial waste, it would have to come from illegal dumping.

"For a spill this size to have this kind of effect, it would have to be illegal," he said. http://bbs2.people.com.cn/bbs/ReadFile?whichfile=102183&typeid=15


Before getting too excited about the red river, when I was a kid in the mid 1960's we used to swim in the Maribyrnong River where tidal flows made it as red as the one in the picture, and green at other times, from discharges a mile or so downstream, probably from the government ammunition factory complex. We thought it was funny swimming in coloured water (and climbing power poles on the tramway bridge to get a higher jump into the river). No idea what the chemicals were, but they couldn't do it today.

China isn't doing any worse than a lot of other countries did. It just has the misfortune to be doing these things a lot later as it develops its 'catch up' economy when much of the rest of the world has moved on to much higher standards. Which is what makes China, and India and other places, so attractive to the money men in the countries with higher standards. There's a fair chance that whatever made the Chinese river red, people in developed countries got some benefit from it in some product(s), as we do from much of China's activity.

Which is why we need global energy and environmental practices, and why we're probably not going to get them because the rich nations are trying to dictate terms to the poorer nations that arrived too late to enjoy the same practices that made the rich nations rich.

Not unlike Germany and Japan arriving too late to get the profitable colonies that the European powers had grabbed (including in China and India), and we all know where that led.

[Digger]

While it may not be a problem, because the Chinese are doing the same as major industrialized nations 30, 40, 50 years ago, they are polluting on a massive scale. Realistically China could produce enough material to supply the entire world market if every other factory in the world closed down. They have the capacity to expand their industrial base rapidly, the political will and the disdain to ignore all enviromental controls.

Very interesting a US report tabled today lists coal fueled power stations in NSW as the worst polluting power stations in the world. Gobblycock! The report must have been funded by Al Gore and published by Senator Bob Brown!

digger

[Drake]

It'd be interesting to see a full analysis of the energy and environmental
components of that.

This is one of the problems of "globalization". We get some things "cheaper" but only because a lot of the costs are equally distributed on all of us and do not actually cost money, but environmental damage.

[Rising Sun*]

Realistically China could produce enough material to supply the entire world market if every other factory in the world closed down.

They could, except that sooner or later they're going to grab the benefits of their economic growth and revalue their currency, which will make them less competitive. They could end up like Japan, originally a similar cheap labour industrial powerhouse that by the 1980's was looking for cheap labour markets, of which China became one. Or just do another crazy backflip and decide to squander it all with a new cultural revolution to put the hardline commos back in the driver's seat.

[Drake]

Let's quash a few myths here: wind power is not cheap, which is why it is heavily subsidised. It is not reliable. Anyone who believes otherwise should pay the full unsubsidised price for it, and should not get any when the wind is blowing too softly or too strongly.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age at more or less a constant rate, they are not rising any faster now than they were early in the 20th century (in some places they were rising faster then), and some other places such as the Maldives has seen sea level drops of around a foot in the last 30 years (most likely due to ocean currents). I live below sealevel, so I should know. all these enormous estimates of sealevel rises are based on the flawed computer models mentioned above, and political exaggerations.

Yes, it's crazy shipping prawns from Scotland around the world and back, no arguments. I'll make no comment about workshy jocks though (thought I'd add that into rile firefly:D)

The sealevel will only begin to rise significantly when big land iceshields melt, the ice that is already swimming doesn't really count. You should start worrying only when greenland actually becomes green again.
But the dutch are always welcome here in germany :mrgreen:

[Rising Sun*]

This is one of the problems of "globalization". We get some things "cheaper" but only because a lot of the costs are equally distributed on all of us and do not actually cost money, but environmental damage.

Which raises the question of whether, ignoring the practical difficulties in implementing it, there should be a form of environmental currency attached to money currency to balance these problems out.

[Drake]

While it may not be a problem, because the Chinese are doing the same as major industrialized nations 30, 40, 50 years ago, they are polluting on a massive scale. Realistically China could produce enough material to supply the entire world market if every other factory in the world closed down. They have the capacity to expand their industrial base rapidly, the political will and the disdain to ignore all enviromental controls.

Very interesting a US report tabled today lists coal fueled power stations in NSW as the worst polluting power stations in the world. Gobblycock! The report must have been funded by Al Gore and published by Senator Bob Brown!

digger

The chinese face much worse consequences than germany, britain, france, the us etc, because they're doing a crash programme. Where the aforementioned nations all had time to adapt to only a few problems at a time china faces in a decade all the problems the others had in a century and they interact and magnify each other.

[Chevan]

[Not unlike Germany and Japan arriving too late to get the profitable colonies that the European powers had grabbed (including in China and India), and we all know where that led.
Oh mate i fear to think what could it led if China will want a its own colonies in for instance Syberia;)

[Drake]

Which raises the question of whether, ignoring the practical difficulties in implementing it, there should be a form of environmental currency attached to money currency to balance these problems out.

Definatly, a mature world society would have to actually bilance all costs, not just those on bank accounts. There is a grain of truth in the agents(matrix) analysis that we behave like a virus today; if we are not careful, we might very well manage to kill our host in a century or two, at least for us as a species. It sounds hippie style, I know.

[Drake]

Oh mate i fear to think what could it led if China will want a its own colonies in for instance Syberia;)

They would only go there if they found oil in .... wait a minute, they did :mrgreen:

[Chevan]

There was talk of creating an ocean "wind-farm" in US territorial waters off the Massachusetts (MA) coast not to far from in the MA island of Martha's Vineyard. But the wealthy owners of summer cottages and vacation homes there have blocked it thus far.

.
Unfortinatelly this is a tupical situation today Nick when the the few rich owners or "green peace" activist ( behind which are usially hide the Oil-companies lobby) blocked the realy usefull ecological projects.
The sad reality of mothern world.
In fact today the Oil owners try to limite of stop the developing of the new Energy-production technologies via the buying up wholesale the patent of research.

[Chevan]

They would only go there if they found oil in .... wait a minute, they did :mrgreen:
But i hope the West will not leave us alone to face the China if the war will inevitable right?;)

[Digger]

But i hope the West will not leave us alone to face the China if the war will inevitable right?;)

Let's hope it will not reach this stage Chevan. The problem is, as China's economy expands and the demands for raw materials increases, so will the costs. I think this is when the Chinese will embark on gun boat diplomacy at least.

The one resource most at threat for the Chinese is water. The water supply for the country has been deteriorating in quality for years now and there is the very real possibility their quest for economic expansion may stuff up what water they have left.

digger

[Rising Sun*]

Let's hope it will not reach this stage Chevan. The problem is, as China's economy expands and the demands for raw materials increases, so will the costs. I think this is when the Chinese will embark on gun boat diplomacy at least.

Which is where you and I come in, mate, as inhabitants of one place that China needs for its resources.

Will it be the sequel to the pre-WWII exercise where we were negotiating with Japan to give them access to the north west minerals etc and, on one view, might have been able to do a deal that made us less of a target? From memory (don't have the book) there's a decent treatment of this aspect in Bob Wurth's Saving Australia: Curtin's secret peace with Japan,.

Why is China expanding its navy 'to protect its trade routes'? Who's threatening them?

The one resource most at threat for the Chinese is water. The water supply for the country has been deteriorating in quality for years now and there is the very real possibility their quest for economic expansion may stuff up what water they have left.

Sounds racist, but it's not intended to be. That's par for the course in much of Asia.

Again, it's no different to what the West was doing until pretty recently, treating rivers as carriers for waste and the ocean as an inexhaustible dumping ground.

[Chevan]

The one resource most at threat for the Chinese is water. The water supply for the country has been deteriorating in quality for years now and there is the very real possibility their quest for economic expansion may stuff up what water they have left.

digger
That's bother me especialy Digger.
Yea the lack of fresh water could force the CHineses to search the expansion way to the Syberia- where in fact the a lot of fresh wather rivers and lakes ( for instance the World biggest Lake Baikal).
The wood, oil, water, territory - they everything is enought in SYberia.
Althought for the while the China-Russian relations in the most friedly stage for last 50 years - who know what will happened later when limit of the resource would slow down the "China progress"
So i think we need to develop the our nuclear forces VERY hard - to prevent the possible agression of enemy that has at least 10 times popultion superiority.

[Rising Sun*]

So i think we need to develop the our nuclear forces VERY hard - to prevent the possible agression of enemy that has at least 10 times popultion superiority.

Which is the way all nations, and the selfish leaders of all nations, think.

But not necessarily the way all people think.

Most people just want a good life with their families.

I've never met anyone who prefers war to peace, even including a few borderline psychotics in the army. And out of it.

If we could learn to share our resources for the common good, we wouldn't have these problems.

Yeah, I know, it's never going to happen.

But it'd be best for all of us if it did.

[Chevan]

In any case, oil for personal transport will die out when a car is produced which:

Runs on electricity, and can do 400 km of motorway driving at motorway speeds on a single charge;
can be charged to full capacity at a motorway service station in less than half an hour, and at home overnight;
costs the same as a family car today.

Energy storage technology is advancing at an incredible rate, and once batteries/super capacitors can achieve the above specification, people would be mad to buy a car running on liquid fuel.
Well i do not think the liquid fuel is the so bad .
The ethanol or liquid metan is enough good fuel. Besides the scientist promised to creat enough cheap the Fuel-elements that produce the electric enegry fron a hydrogen or a spirit( kinda used on the Space Shuttle).
The other effective way to solve the transport problem is to use the new materials for the bodyes of the cars - for instance intead steel - the carbon and plastmass compaunds. In fact the modern average car weight is over 1 tonn- used for transporting of the 1-4 peoples i.e. no 50-300 kg. i.e. they effectivety of transportation just 5-20% . The rest spend for the wind ( i.e to the atmosphere).
If to create the car at least 500 kg from the new materials- you get the rise of effectivety in twice!!!
However the peoples prejudices toward those "little cars" - they want to drive a Jeeps and Minivens( especially this is lovely hadit of Americans)
So we have indeed a lot of technical ways to improve the effectiveness of using the fuel ( i.e. to decrease the consumption).
We need just to solve this problem insteal to tell about it.

[Chevan]

Which is the way all nations, and the selfish leaders of all nations, think.

But not necessarily the way all people think.

Most people just want a good life with their families.

I've never met anyone who prefers war to peace, even including a few borderline psychotics in the army. And out of it.

If we could learn to share our resources for the common good, we wouldn't have these problems.

Yeah, I know, it's never going to happen.

But it'd be best for all of us if it did.
That's holy true...
However do you know the proverb : Want a peace - be ready for a war?;)
Besides as youmay be guess there a lot of nations who prefer to "share" the resource of their neigbours instead to let the own resources for to use

[Rising Sun*]

That's holy true...
However do you know the proverb : Want a peace - be ready for a war?;)
Besides as youmay be guess there a lot of nations who prefer to "share" the resource of their neigbours instead to let the own resources for to use

Here's a test.

Let's say Russia and Australia are in dispute over Russia wanting more prime kangaroo meat with koala butter and us wanting more blonde Russian brides for ugly fat Aussie slobs who can afford better than the Filipino mail order brides they usually buy.

1. Would you rather resolve it by agreement or war?

2. Do you want to die over it?

3. Do either of us really care about our fat ministers for kangaroo meat and Russian bride export having a pissing contest that could send us to war?

If your answer to any question is no, or yes, that's why we're going to be fighting each other in a war we don't believe in caused by our politicians who'll send us to the death over any of the three questions.

Stupid, huh?

[Chevan]

Here's a test.

Let's say Russia and Australia are in dispute over Russia wanting more prime kangaroo meat with koala butter and us wanting more blonde Russian brides for ugly fat Aussie slobs who can afford better than the Filipino mail order brides they usually buy.

1. Would you rather resolve it by agreement or war?

2. Do you want to die over it?

3. Do either of us really care about our fat ministers for kangaroo meat and Russian bride export having a pissing contest that could send us to war?

If your answer to any question is no, or yes, that's why we're going to be fighting each other in a war we don't believe in caused by our politicians who'll send us to the death over any of the three questions.

Stupid, huh?
Mate i think to die for meat of kangaroo or brides is not the worstest think in the our life.:)
But usially we die for nothing ...for personal wishes of our politicans, their lack of their sexual life and ets, and simply for thier personal wishes to demonstate thier power over us.
Usially the situations is much worsen - the our stopid politicans even could not explain WHY they send us to die.
How could they explain the war in Iraq or in Checnia for instance- is it for the meat of camels or for Taliban brides:D;)

[Nickdfresh]

Let's quash a few myths here: wind power is not cheap, which is why it is heavily subsidised. It is not reliable. Anyone who believes otherwise should pay the full unsubsidised price for it, and should not get any when the wind is blowing too softly or too strongly.

That depends. Buffalo sits on the shore of the great lakes in the Northern US/Southern Canada and receives almost constant, abundant wind coming in off the lakes. I really don't know enough about the topic and am a bit too busy to research it. But I think the turbines need not run 24-7 in order to be a net positive gain to the power grid.

Sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age at more or less a constant rate, they are not rising any faster now than they were early in the 20th century (in some places they were rising faster then), and some other places such as the Maldives has seen sea level drops of around a foot in the last 30 years (most likely due to ocean currents). I live below sealevel, so I should know. all these enormous estimates of sealevel rises are based on the flawed computer models mentioned above, and political exaggerations.

Yes, it's crazy shipping prawns from Scotland around the world and back, no arguments. I'll make no comment about workshy jocks though (thought I'd add that into rile firefly:D)


I'm not sure really where you're getting your information from, but in fact the arctic ice sheets and numerous glaciers are melting. For instance - I think Canada has had serious problems with its polar bear population dying off, getting smaller in size, and generally becoming gradually more and more isolated. And it seems unlikely to me that the vast majority of scientists, absent the few hacks who take bribes from the oil and gas industry, would perpetuate a continuance of "flawed computer models"...

I do know where the money is, and I know who stands the most to gain/lose from research and gov't action or inaction into global warming, and who are just people doing their jobs...

As indeed, there is no more real scientific debate as too whether the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by human activity for the past 10,000 years, since the rise of organized agricultural societies, has had an effect on the environment. The only real debate is what we can do about it...

[Chevan]

As indeed, there is no more real scientific debate as too whether the CO2 pumped into the atmosphere by human activity for the past 10,000 years, since the rise of organized agricultural societies, has had an effect on the environment. The only real debate is what we can do about it...
As far as i know the stientist still not sure that the CO2 punmed by human activity for the lates time have serious influence to the Global warming.
If you wach to the history of Eath - for the last 1 millions years there were at least several global cycles of Ice ages and Global warmings.
There are a great cyrcles that limits with the Global changing of Eath weather ( even with the ecological catastrophe like the death of all dinosaurs) and temp