Thread: What about the oil crisis?

Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

if we were camping and I had a big basket full of food behind me and refused to give it to you for free (or even cheap) because I claim it's scarce and we're running out... would you starve for now while you build your own food supply from other sources or would rather see what you can do about the fact that we aren't running out of food and that I'm simply keeping the food from you for my own personal gain?

Let's make the analogy more apt: we've camped mid fertile ground, and I know we are to be camped for years to come. Now I can choose to let you monopolize my food supply indefinitely with your basket, or, with a bit of work and planning, I can grow my own food from the land and fill my own basket.

Perhaps, if I am a lazy person, it may be to my own good fortune that you restrict the basket from me completely, thus leaving me with no other alternative than the better one.

Originally Posted by lightatdawn

I'd most certainly build my own food supply so as not to be dependant on someone who is obviously a severe dink, and cares nothing about my well being. It's irrelvent [to an economy] why the prices are high, only that they are, and that in turn makes other methods more cost effective.

Originally Posted by @nthony

Let's make the analogy more apt: we've camped mid fertile ground, and I know we are to be camped for years to come. Now I can choose to let you monopolize my food supply indefinitely with your basket, or, with a bit of work and planning, I can grow my own food from the land and fill my own basket.

Perhaps, if I am a lazy person, it may be to my own good fortune that you restrict the basket from me completely, thus leaving me with no other alternative than the better one.

Yeah great... but what you're not considering is the fact that the money you're spending on my current price of the food is hurting your well being so greatly that its effecting you ability to not only grow your own food supply but to perform many other necessary actions in your camping survival. You're also not considering that with all the excess money I've been making on my food supply that I have been able to gain leverage in other food supplies. Where are you going to plant your food supply if I've already bought up all the land?

This is what oil companies have done for 30 years. Electric cars were completely viable 15 years ago but the concept disappeared one day when an oil company just bought up the idea. They monopolize the industry because they have so much buying power that any alternative source that threatens the oil industry will be removed from play as it has in the past. Trust me... when all the oil has dried up or has actually become too expensive to drill... Saudi Aramco and Exxon Mobil aren't going to be going anywhere. They'll be pioneering the next big energy source because right now they have all the blueprints that they've bought up in the last 30 years locked up in a desk somewhere.

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 I've been trying to make with there being a larger supply of oil than they make you believe is that... they're going to be standing on their feet for quite a while.

Originally Posted by SlyMaelstrom

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.

Originally Posted by @nthony

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."

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% 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

hahahahahahahaha

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).