Points well taken. It's a dangerous balance. They need our money, we need their oil. If one or the other stopped flowing, there would be a war, guaranteed. I asked a while back if anyone could imagine the Middle-East without oil money in it? What does their society look like without that income? However, what does ours look like without oil? There needs to be a plan to usher this world into an era where we don't rely on oil, so we don't destroy eachother on the way.

 

thank you.

picture a future where biomass produces most of the liquid fuels we need for burning and nuclear produces most of the power that we like to transmit over wires to power the electrical stuff [that we're addicted to ]...

so, what do we need oil for? ummmm... lubricating things that don't like to rub against each other without a slippery film between them... like crankshafts and connecting rods; like camshafts and rocker arms; like piston rings and cylinders.

and that's a lot less oily stuff than we'd need if we were also using the oily stuff to burn.

i think we'll do pretty well in the future. and our kids, too. there's enough of the slippery stuff in the sands in Canada to handle anything OPEC can't or won't sell, and the US has pretty much more coal than anyone else on the planet, and that can be converted to lubricants, too..

enjoy!

 

I'd like to thank plusaf and 'lectronimo for bringing a little science into the discussion intelligently- it's all very well to assert things but no one understands anyone on the other side if it's just a bunch of assertions that don't agree. (not that anyone here would EVER do that! )

To throw in my two cents, I found the article interesting but not particularly careful with its language, as has already been pointed out above, and if the basic point is 'conservation is good,' then I completely agree. As to what effect increasing conservation in America will have on the world oil market, I don't really know. I can speculate, and so can you, and so can the world's economists and OPEC nations, and maybe we'll all be right. All I can say is that, regardless of all of that,- I'd like to try it and see! We should conserve oil for so many reasons, and affecting the eventual price that we pay at the pump is only a part of the picture. Keeping the country running is a bigger part (and cheers to the person who said Malthus was a moron!) and we're going to do that, but the question is how comfortable are we going to be with the consequences of whatever path we take to get there? Sure, we can always burn our coal- we have a lot. But it's dirty to burn it. Mining it isn't pretty, either. There are always going to be energy options, but some of them are not options I like very much.

Are we going to sentence our grandchildren to live in a polluted world with a depleted ozone layer, rising oceans, more and more wars over oil, economic trouble, an unstable political climate, and so on, or are we going to find ways to do things less destructively? I'm hoping for something less destructive.

 

I agree that conservation is not only necessary, but will be imposed by mother nature.

I did some calculations on corn ethanol. Switchgrass may yield 2 to 2.5 times the ethanol. Prepare to be amused.

1 acre = 328 gallons ethanol
1 sq mile = 640 acres
1 sq mile corn = 209,920 gallons ethanol
1 gallon ethanol = 84,200 btu or 24.67 Kwhr
1 sq mile corn = 17.675 billiion btu or 5.179 gigawatt hours annually

US energy consumption of natural gas, petroleum, and electricity = 24,413 TWhrs = 24,413,000 gigawatt hours

It would take 4.7 million square miles of farmland for corn ethanol to supply the current US demand for all combined forms of energy (electricity, natural gas, and oil). The USA is 3.5 million square miles. What a joke!

25% efficient solar panels could do the same job and "only" need slightly more than something the size of Nebraska (this is in the hydrogen economy with 65% efficient electrolysis and 50% efficient fuel cells).

I think it is obvious that given today's technology, conservation will be required. Commuting 40 miles a day in a Ford Excursion is a ridiculous waste of energy. Commuting 40 miles a day in a hybrid is still a non-sustainable use of energy.

Given near-term technology, renewable energy (non crop), and nuclear power are the solutions IMO.

Also of interest, there are limited supplies of U-235 which current nuclear reactors use, so they'll either need to use "fast breeders" to create U-235, or come up with a usable form of fusion or other nuclear power.

 

thanks for the good words, l-b.... will you marry me?.... oops, cancel that: i'm already married...

there are some hopes on the horizon for us and our kids. i read last week about a South African team which appears to have come up with silicon solar cell production techniques that create something like 50% more output and 20% cheaper than today's technology. forgive me if i mis-remembered the exact numbers, but it was something like that. they're licensing production now and cells should be on the market in volume in a year or two.

second, coal can be rendered low-polluting by a variety of means, and the US has a lot of it. hang in there while the technology gets put in place for that.

next, nuclear power plants have evolved a LOT in their design and technology since Three Mile Island. today's best designs (which i think were pioneered in China !) use pelletized fuel, created in a glass-like substance, in such a way that, even if all of the cooling systems fail, the fuel can't melt or go supercritical. it just gets hot. (thermal type of hot). virtually impossible to have a meltdown. (sorry, Jane Fonda...) and the USA also has a LOT of uranium in them thar hills... so that's a nice solution, too, though we may not see those kinds of reactors running for a decade or more. those wheels grind all too-slowly.