X-Message-Number: 20054 From: "Mark Plus" <> Subject: Re: Progress stagnating... Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2002 09:10:09 -0700 In Message #20046, John Grigg wrote, >Last I heard petroleum reserves on this planet will last till at least >2030! lol And we already have alternatives out there, they just need to be implemented. Obviously, the oil mega-corporations would rather not see that happen for quite awhile. When you're in your 40's, as I am, you realize that 30 years don't seem like such a long time, subjectively. If oil is going to get really scarce even in 30 years, that's an emergency we need to deal with TODAY. For some scary but scientifically plausible scenarios about the consequences of declining fossil fuels production, refer to http://www.dieoff.org . Basically fossil fuels represent sunlight stored from past ages that we've been using in the last 300 years to supplement the sunlight we're receiving now. They've enabled us to circumvent preindustrial limits to our ability to grow food and move and process materials for reorganizing the environment on a vast scale. They are like the capital in a business startup. If a business can't generate enough income to sustain itself after the startup capital is spent, then it will fail. Similarly, unless our civilization can tap into some substantial sources of energy income after the fossil fuels capital becomes increasingly scarce, our civilization will collapse back to a preindustrial level. Making liquid nitrogen won't be a high priority in that sort of outcome. More to the point, it's hard not to conclude from current geopolitical events that the Bush Administration, run by men from the oil industry, takes the depletionist scenario seriously enough to risk hundreds of thousands of American lives in an effort to get the Persian Gulf oilfields under U.S. military control. Considering the massive amount of experience the oil industry has behind it, I think by now these guys have a good idea how to predict the future production of oil, and they don't like what their own experts are telling them. Once again, I refer people to Kenneth Deffeyes's book _Hubbert's Peak_. Deffeyes is a retired petroleum geologist with no ideological agenda that I can detect. Deffeyes uses M. King Hubbert's method for forecasting the productivity of oilfields to argue that we're going to see a permanent net decline in global petroleum production by the end of this decade. Hubbert's forecasting technique is analogous to Gordon Moore's method to forecast the increase in computing speeds, which some Transhumanists consider practically a divine revelation. Predicting oil production is not Nostradamus stuff: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0691090866/ Mark Plus It's not "religious" or "science fictional" if you can do it. _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=20054