Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

We've solved, or at least mitigated, a lot of the old things that killed us. They were and potentially still could be (when more of them develop immunity to the drugs we develop, and they are doing that) really, really deadly. But we are also creating new things to kill us off-- tobacco, for example, which was used sparingly, largely as a sacrament, by Native Americans. It took Europeans to turn it into a killer. Air pollution, for another--which was greatly reduced by government intervention, you will notice, okie, not by any sort of business competition or action, which was just making it worse. And industrial pollution--there are thousands of chemicals being used out there, and much as at Love Canal, given the passage of a few years and a couple corporate changes of ownership, and sometimes government stupidity (like a lot of what the town of Niagara Falls did at Love Canal), no one knows what's there, corporate memory dies off, and some fairly horrible things can happen. And there has been virtually no research on what effects combinations of those chemicals can do to us. It's a potentially toxic broth we're cooking up (look at concentrations of mercury in fish we eat for example).

Which is why Kyoto is important. Nobody thought it was a solution, but it was what everyone knew it to be, a start, an attempt to look at the problem, engage it, and start to work out more comprehenive solutions.

You're right Okie. Let's the people dance and pray for the rain when drought comes (what about human sacrifice to please the weatherman-sorcerer ?).

Tony Blair will warn today that the world will reach "catastrophic tipping points" on climate change within 15 years, unless serious action is taken to tackle global warming.

"The most common question I get is, 'When are we going to run out of oil.' The correct response is, 'Never,'" said Eric Cheney. "It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon."

Other myths that he wants to dispel include:


Only basic extraction and processing costs affect economic geology. That fails to account for such costs as exploration, transportation, taxes and societal and environmental programs.

Production always damages the environment. Accidents do happen, Cheney said, but much of the perception is based on problems of the past and don't reflect current reality. "It's inevitable that there are going to be oil spills, just like tere are traffic accidents on the freeway," he said. "We hope we can manage them, but nothing is risk free."

Mineral deposits are excessively profitable. Despite widely reported huge oil company profits in the last year, Cheney notes that as a percentage of company revenues oil profits lag far behind those of some major software and banking companies.

Transportation costs are trivial. In fact, the retail cost of building materials such as sand and gravel are largely driven by the cost of moving them from one place to another, particularly in crowded urban areas. Moving quarries and pits farther away from where people live only increases those costs.

Ore deposits are uniform. While a valued ore can be found in a large continuous deposit, often it is mixed with other kinds of minerals and extraction becomes more expensive.

Resources are randomly distributed and so, if human population encroaches, a mine or quarry should simply be able to relocate.

Here is some bad news for the AGW theorists and good news for those who know that the world and its economy run on oil and we will likely need to find ways to effectively live with that reality.

Foxfyre wrote:

Here is some bad news for the AGW theorists and good news for those who know that the world and its economy run on oil and we will likely need to find ways to effectively live with that reality.

I don't understand how the article you posted warrants that statement. As far as I understand it, all the article says is that oil will always be available, even if the price for a gallon might be $100. Given the reality of supply and demand, that makes sense.

However, it says nothing about the effects of burning fossil fuel or the contribution of CO2 to global warming - so why would this be "bad news for the AGW theorists"?.
And it isn't really good news for someone who accepts the fact of the current dependency of our economies on oil (as everyone on this thread does, I would presume) either - quite the contrary. It's rather a strong argument to research alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels.

1. AGW theorists generally want us to get out of the oil (and all fossil fuels) business altogether and the sooner the better. They often cite that the world will soon run out of oil anyway, so we better go to alternate fuel sources now. They have nothing good to say about oil or those who produce it. An unlimited supply is not good news.

2. Others take the pragmatic view that we are in no imminent danger of running out of oil, and the world should rather be at least as focused on ways to use oil in effective (and environmentally friendly) ways for a long long time to come. An unlimited supply is reassuring that we have time to adapt.

My point again is that we should accept the reality and be giving equal time to working on ways to use oil in environmentally friendly ways along with developing alternate forms of energy.

I frankly admit that I failed to see this point in your previous post.

Even though I clearly said it in my remarks prefacing the Cheney piece?

Here is some bad news for the AGW theorists and good news for those who know that the world and its economy run on oil and we will likely need to find ways to effectively live with that reality. The latter group also knows that effective long term solutions to any problem are rarely developed overnight.

My point again is that we should accept the reality and be giving equal time to working on ways to use oil in environmentally friendly ways along with developing alternate forms of energy.

In most discussions people make a point and expand on it as the discussion progresses. Or at least that's the way I and most people I talk with conduct a discussion. Maybe it's different in Germany? Naw, probably not.

I failed to see this point in your previous post

I would think that somebody who firmly believes that CO2 and the burning of fossil fuels causes global warming would want this to stop because of the perceived dangers of global warming, not because we are running out of fossil fuel. Whether the supply of oil is unlimited or not is therefore quite immaterial to his argument.