Posted on 04/25/2005 8:14:08 AM PDT by cogitator
China sees it coming. They're going nuclear, big-time.
--no, it's not. The price is just going to go up--
Peak Oil. Blah, blah, blah. Been refuted over and over again.
If you look at any old books, we were supposed to run out of oil by 1980.
We will see.
Of course oil companies want us to think we're running out of oil, so they can jack up the prices. We've been hearing this same crap over the past 30 years.
One thing all of humanity can be certain of, everything on the planet that sustains human life is in finite supply.
One thing I keep wondering about is what all the crap we bury everyday as today's trash is going to turn into?
WHEN it runs out is the question. Next year, a thousand years from now, a vanishingly-distant moment in the future?
The price of oil is now high enough, and appears that it will remain high enough, to create market incentives to extract those alternative fuels and wean the U.S. away from imported oil.
Someone please tell me where the crisis is here.
In about 80-120 years, mining sites.
From the article: "The US government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the US office of petroleum reserves last year, "world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the reserves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available."
I'd be interested to see if anyone can provide evidence of a specific case in which the world "ran out of" any raw material or commodity.
nothing new under the sun alert.
Warmed-over baloney.
I echo dirtboy at #9. I predict that by 2050, a few landfills will have already become resource recovery and biomass conversion/biofuels generation sites, and more and more will be converted after that. The start of this trend is the thermal depolymerization process being used on ag waste to produce biofuels.
Coal? I can't fathom what millions of metric tons of used baby diapers and empty tuna cans will turn into. I would think something useful.
The below illustrates a different perspective about the long term availability of hydrocarbon fuels:
"The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills
I don't expect a crisis, but I do expect a crunch with periods of low supply that will stress economic sectors at times. As the article notes, the declining production curve will be a long slow one, and improved energy technologies (like more and more hybrid cars, more nuclear energy, etc.) will extend it.
Dodos, right?
Democratic talking points...
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