Yes, I had to post it.
Growing a future ping.
Yes, I had to post it.
LOL...I read that as “elephant gas”!
With a free market, a few things are certain:
1) We will NEVER run out of hydrocarbon-based fuels. NEVER. If costs creep up, the increased price of the fuel at the pump will cause people to do what they aways do: adapt, change behavior, substitute and invest in higher efficient uses;
2) The only thing that counts is the PRICE of the finished fuel at the pump. Should conventional sources of hydrocarbons (like from crude oil) get too expensive, alternative sources can be converted, and they will when it becomes cost effective to do so;
3) Our environment is AWASH in hydrocarbons that are suitable for conversion into fuels. Whether it is crude oil, coal, methane hydrates, food wastes, sewage sludge, or even household garbage, anything with hydrocarbons can be converted into liquid fuels. The only issue is the cost of conversion.
4) “Peak Oil” is no more about the price of gasoline at the pump than “Global Warming” is about climate change. Both are far more ideological wrappers for socialist agendas by self-loathing liberals than anything else.
I remember enjoying the old “Riverworld” SciFi series.
In the first book, every human who ever lived finds himself suddenly reincarnated naked on the banks of an endless river with nothing but a food dispenser that operates by some kind of inexplicable alien energy-to-matter conversion. It is clear that this device is meant to satisfy all of their bodily needs, so there is no need for innovation or hard work in order to maintain themselves.
Within a short amount of time, the humans have figured out how to harness the power of the food dispenser to create electricity, and have built armaments, riverboats, airships and all manner of technological marvels.
Human beings will not be kept down. They will not go, willingly, back to the caves. It may be a fond dream of some bunnyhuggers that we all go back to live in the woods, but that is not the Human Way.
If the “Human Way” sounds a lot like the “American Way”, that is no coincidence.
Ethanol is the blindest of blind alleys. The economics of it says it all. It requires subsidies to be produced and uses twice the energy to produce it that it stores.