Thread: What about the oil crisis?

  1. #16
    Woof, woof! zacs7's Avatar
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    Well in 1970 they did say that petrol would all be gone by the year 2000. Guess what baby? I'm still riding my 2-stroke and driving my car

  2. #17
    (?<!re)tired Mario F.'s Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bubba
    So to all the 'ivy league' all-knowing investors who said it wasn't an oil bubble either they need a huge lesson in economics or were saying it wasn't a bubble just to cash in.
    We all discussed this then on these boards and we pretty much agreed the whole thing was only the result of abject, unlawful, speculation.

    What ........es me off is not seeing the confirmation, but witnessing that it went unchecked and no one is looking for the culprits. As always the financial markets run rampant. And contrary to the news, I don't give a rat's arse to the message that is being passed that a new market is going to be born from the current financial crisis. Lies!
    Originally Posted by brewbuck:
    Reimplementing a large system in another language to get a 25% performance boost is nonsense. It would be cheaper to just get a computer which is 25% faster.

  3. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom View Post
    You can't simply allow corruption to exist and try to work around it. It will keep kicking out your legs as long as it has its own feet to stand on and the point
    If it stands in the way of progress, then by all means do not ignore corruption; however under no circumstances will I promote or eat from your corrupted food-basket once your corruption ceases to be.
    The aim is not to take down oil corruption so that we may gain more oil and bury ourselves further in a dead-end future. The aim is to release their hold so that we can make progress in other areas, such as electricity or hydrogen fuel cells.

    In any democracy, government is a reflection of the people. So the oil tycoons are just as much to blame for the destruction of the EV1 as your average SUV-driving American idling in their monster-truck-converted Escalades.

  4. #19
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by master5001 View Post
    The prospect of running out is a very realistic threat. It will happen. Its a matter of how soon. We have a few years to go yet, but even then we will still be subject to the woes of being duped by policy and scare tactics. Its an effective tool. If someone needs a war, why not make all of the citizens shout "Nuke those towel heads!" If you want to join a world war, make the country-side scream "Kill whitey!" Its a cycle.
    Oil production capacity wont peak for another 3-4 years. Even when it peaks it will be a steady supply for at least 50 years before it begins to decline.

  5. #20
    Devil's Advocate SlyMaelstrom's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by @nthony View Post
    If it stands in the way of progress, then by all means do not ignore corruption; however under no circumstances will I promote or eat from your corrupted food-basket once your corruption ceases to be.
    It does stand in the way of progress as it has for the 20-30 years and it will continue to stand in the way of progress long after every affordable drop of oil is burnt up on this planet. Oil has gotten so powerful that those who control the flow of oil have to ability to control the flow of all future alternatives to oil. ... and they will. ... and you're going to find that the very same people will use the very same tactics to hike up the prices of the next fuel source that they did with oil. This is my biggest fear with nuclear energy (even though I support it) ... being that the technology is so complex to the public eye that those who control it can do and say whatever they please to manipulate the prices they charge to put it in your home. Costs of storage, costs of maintenance, costs of disposal are all variable factors that can lead to price manipulation with nuclear power. Solar, water, and wind power are of course free of this burden as people only have to go outside to see the abundance of all three of these resources. Anyway... that was a bit off topic. The point is that those who run oil will run energy long after oil is gone. The corruption must be fought because as you put it, "it stands in the way of progress."
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  6. #21

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    The thing that most of you forget who use the legendary Shell engineer's bell curve as a mantra is that he did not account for new discoveries in his equations. According to him we should have run out in 2002. Not out as in scarce...out as in completely 100&#37; out. It just did not happen.
    Do you mean Hubbert's peak? I'd like to see the source for where it said we're 100% run out by 2002. Hubbert's peak already occured in the United States around the 1970s. New discoveries tend to stretch the bell curve, but the production for any system with a finite resource still ultimately follows the statistical bell curve. We *are* still making new discoveries, namely by going deeper and deeper offshore (I worked in the thunderhorse and atlantis oil fields in the gulf this summer, the first and third largest offshore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico), but those new discoveries only tend to stretch the curve, not change the fundamental trend. Also note my careful wording: "Hubbert's peak occured for the United States in the 1970s." We're still able to satisfy our growing demand by increasing imports.

    Also, I see such a bell curve as a blessing, because it means we can use the economy as a warning signal as to when it's 'running out,' because what happens before the oil actually 'runs out.'???? It becomes economically unviable to continue using oil, and this'll gradually stranglehold us to develop other energy sources.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:U...20_to_2005.png

    http://www.hubbertpeak.com/summary.htm

    My take on the situation: Oil prices crashed because of our economic crisis. Hopefully that means Capitalism and free market has some credence, that when we need the cheap oil badly, the price of oil goes down (which will help us rebound). The trouble is OPEC will still do what they can to maximize profits, which means put less oil on the market.

    I want to invest every last american dollar into controlled thermonuclear fusion: no healthcare, no military, no teachers, just fusion. Everything else isn't that important. Fusion is sweet, and seems like the only 'alternative' energy that can actually yield enough energy to sustain our industrial society without fossil fuels...and solar panels aren't violent enough for my tastes.

    a severe dink
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    Last edited by BobMcGee123; 10-21-2008 at 05:07 PM.
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

  7. #22
    Malum in se abachler's Avatar
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    Fusion doesnt work on a small enough scale to meet our needs. Theres no research needed. We can already make fusion reactors. The physical properties of the universe just keep them from being tiny affairs. No Mr. Fusion on the back of a delorian. Who wants to foot the $100 trillion price tag.

  8. #23

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    That's why you use the copious amounts of energy that can be produced from the fusion process (fusing a gram of tritrium and deuterium yields 80 billion calories) to feed into the power grid, synthesizing other fuels (e.g. hydrogen and oxygen gas), or just plain having all vehicles be electric (electricity would cost nothing).

    No gigawatt powerplant is small, but the vast majority of the space is taken up by the turbo machinery, not the boilers, and it's been suggested that the fusion reactors can actually forgo the turbo machinery because the gas that the fusion burn takes place in is ionized to begin with (so, we may no longer need to boil steam, pass it through a turbine to spin magnetic fields inside a conductor).
    Last edited by BobMcGee123; 10-23-2008 at 09:16 AM.
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

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