Steve 41oo wrote:George..re dino sceptics...thanks
There are several competing sometimes complementary themes going on here. Our standard of living is supported by our consumption of energy. Both have risen dramatically in the last 100 years with the exploitation of petroleum resources. Conventional oil is marvellous stuff. Its cheap (ok it may not seem so but considering what it
does for us its a bargain) plentiful, yields a very high EROEI and is the feed stock for so many products/fuels that without it our lives today would be almost unrecognisable. No wonder we are addicted to it.
The problem is 4 fold. Other people are queuing up in their 10s of millions wanting to share our addiction and our living standards. Demand for oil has never been higher and is set to increase. But oil supply (while there is still a lot of oil about) is going to peak fairly soon (some say might have done so already). A few years back very few people had heard of Peak Oil, now there are magazine articles all over the place. Third, burning all that fossil fuel and releasing into the atmosphere (in a geological blink of the eye) billions of tons of CO2 which had been trapped in the earth for eons, is disturbing the atmosphere and changing the climate. Fourth there is no obvious alternative energy source to oil. Everything else has either much lower EROEI or has harmful environmental consequences, or is inconvenient to use or will take decades to get the infrastructure up and running. We should have got wise to this 20+ years ago.
Now we face both climate change and energy shortage. Whether we reduce oil consumption for environmental reasons or not, we
will be burning less oil in future because we just wont be able to extract it at the rate we used to as depletion bites after Peak.
The trick is to make the transition to the post oil world as easy and relatively painless as possible. I believe it is already too late on both energy shortage and climate change to make that transition without a great deal of pain.
Sadly the one country that could give world leadership on this pressing issue, your own, doesnt seem to even recognise the problem.
Well said. I agree with nearly all of it.
I would make only the following qualifications;
I am more optimistic than you about the prospects for the natural economic response to the relatively higher price of fossil fuels - that has already occurred and, by all measures will continue - to achieve the greater efficiencies in the use of energy that are generally recognized to constitute about half of the desired response to the issues. (I dread however, the authoritarian types who wish to impose their prejudgements on human freedom and creativity - they are more likely to stifle a solution than accelerate it.)
We already have many of the technologies that will provide the solution. In particular we have hardly tapped the useful potential of nuclear power. The problems associated with the, relative to other forms of power production, trivial volume & dispersion of waste produced by nuclear power are entirely manageable: the waste is long-lived, but highly concentrated and easily managed. The barrier here is the irrational response of fear mongers.
The forced imposition (through regulation or taxation) of unready or ineffective technologies (such as solar) can have seriously adverse economic consequences that could harm the economic and technological creativity and vitality that will ultimately provide us the solutions. Again the barrier here are the authoritarian impulses of the zealots who wish to control the behavior of others.
We do face continued climate change, but we really don't know what it will be or which of the many factors that influence observed changes will dominate. The earth is not now, and never has been, in equilibrium. The eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Phillipines a decade ago alone caused a temporary global cooling of the same order of magnitude that is alleged to be assiociated with a century of the warming associated with a century of the industrial age.
I have a very different view of the supposed appetite of the world for American leadership on this and other issues. Those who call for American leadership on issues they favor tend often to be the most vociferous opponents of it on others. What they really want is American followership - not leadership. In general American leadership is resented, not desired. Our part of the world is no longer united by fear of major common enemies, and it has no natural leaders. The wise course for America is to compete and thrive, avoiding unnecessary entanglements wherever possible.
