Oil, energy, and species dieoff.

[Doomriser]

I've been seeing a lot of "We are going to run out of oil and society will collapse" statements on the Internet. I am linking to a major source of such ideas. I would like to hear what educated denizens, or those with knowledge of entropy [Darth Wong?] have to say about this radical idea that is complicating discussions for me on the Internet.

Quote:

"The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet's energy balance.
-– David Price"

http://www.dieoff.org/

[Wicked Pilot]

Although I'm no expert, I'm inclined to say whoever wrote this crap is pretty simple minded. They fail to take into account that science and new technologies continue to allow us to use energy and grow foods more effeciently.

For example, if we were to run out of oil, coal, and natural gas, we'd still have other means of getting energy. There's nuclear, solar, thermal, hydroelectric, wind, etc available to us. Not until the sun collapses will we be really screwed.

[RedImperator]

Horseshit. How many times have we heard this before: we're all going to die unless we do EXACTLY WHAT I AND PEOPLE LIKE ME SAY RIGHT THIS INSTANT! The beauty of the free market (which the tree huggers routinely piss upon) is that rising prices depress demand. Even if they're correct in their prediction that we're going to run out of cheap oil in the next decade, they don't consider that rising oil prices will merely spur research and development of alternative technologies (like the hydrogen fuel cell engine, safer and more efficient fission power generation, etc.). It may be the end of the GASOLINE age, but it's not going to suddenly throw us back into the Neolithic like they're gleefully predicting.

[Joe]

Bah. He should join the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

http://www.vhemt.org

[Lagmonster]

For example, if we were to run out of oil, coal, and natural gas, we'd still have other means of getting energy. There's nuclear, solar, thermal, hydroelectric, wind, etc available to us. Not until the sun collapses will we be really screwed.

Yeah! When we ran out of whales to extract lamp oils from, nobody even freaking noticed.

[Mr. B]

Horseshit. How many times have we heard this before: we're all going to die unless we do EXACTLY WHAT I AND PEOPLE LIKE ME SAY RIGHT THIS INSTANT! The beauty of the free market (which the tree huggers routinely piss upon) is that rising prices depress demand. Even if they're correct in their prediction that we're going to run out of cheap oil in the next decade, they don't consider that rising oil prices will merely spur research and development of alternative technologies (like the hydrogen fuel cell engine, safer and more efficient fission power generation, etc.). It may be the end of the GASOLINE age, but it's not going to suddenly throw us back into the Neolithic like they're gleefully predicting.

Right now the fuel cell car is 10 years at least away. And if OIl gets so expensive that you cannot drive your car in that period the auto industry might collapse. And if you can't get to work becaue the mass transit programs can't keep up. Big letdown in the ecoomy. Would you be able to make your gas car into a hydro car. And how will the rising prices affect the airline and industry. A fuel cell jumbo jet, eighteen wheelers drive by hydrogen. It's is going to be enormously expensive to change our entire economy over to hydrogen. And with the political pressure the oil, auto and coal industries put on govt. change will be slower.

Our govt should be planning and helping the economy change now so that when the oil does run out we will be ready and the impact on the economy is negligeble.

[TrailerParkJawa]

Right now the fuel cell car is 10 years at least away. And if OIl gets so expensive that you cannot drive your car in that period the auto industry might collapse.

Why would that happen? The world's oil reserves are in far excess of 10 years.

Besides fuel cells are no quick fix either. Hydrogen is largely produced from methane IIRC. So, you are still dependent on petroleum wether or not you are using fuel cells or liquid Hydrogen.

Remember folks TANSTAAFL

There Aint No Such Thing As A Free Lunch

Every possible source of energy on has some side effect, good and bad.

[Mr Bean]

Every possible source of energy on has some side effect, good and bad

Wind-Power? Its not very effective but besides that does it have any down-sides?

And what about that crazy idea years back for a gigantic 5000 Mile Large Solar Panel to be Draged behind the Planet and face the sun-year round?

Crazy yes? Crazier? Maybe!

[TrailerParkJawa]

Wind-Power? Its not very effective but besides that does it have any down-sides?

Wind power does have side effects. Anyone from the Bay Area has seen the huge wind farms nears Altamont pass.

1) Wind farms take up a lot of open land. They are an eye sore to some people and they are pretty noisy.

2) Birds are attracted to the spinning blades so they have a direct impact on the local animal population.

3) Like you said they are not very effective.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

Enviromentalist wackos oppose just about all forms of energy. Foosil fuels pollute. Nuclear power is dangerous. Hydroelectric dams displace water nd may flood farmland, displace people, or even worse, kill off a species of fish nobody cares about. The paint used on solar panels is toxic. Windmills kill birds. Anyway, oil supplies will last us a while, and by the time they run out, renewable energy will be cheaper. A few decades back, I think Paul Elrich said that the world would run out of food in the 70s, and we would all starve. I never recall hearing of such a thing.

[Darth Wong]

Fallacies about various forms of energy:

• "Wind power is freely available everywhere": in reality, certain nations are "wind-rich" while others are not. There are certain global wind currents that guarantee certain nations a strong ocean wind year-round (I believe Denmark is a good example), which could be easily harnessed for power generation. However, inland regions do not have this resource.
• "Geothermal power is freely available everywhere": again, there are severe limits to the use of geothermal power in many regions. If you happen to live in a region of thin crust, geothermal power is plentiful, and you probably have lots of hot springs in your vicinity. If, on the other hand, you live on a big thick piece of solid crust, you have to drill down for miles and miles before you can extract geothermal power worth anything. Geothermal power, like wind power, is an unequally distributed resource; why else do you think geothermal power research is done in places like Hawaii, which is a volcano?
• "Solar power can satisfy all our energy needs". Not on the ground. We can't store energy in magnitudes large enough to deal with daily fluctuations in the amount of solar energy reaching the ground (never mind a few straight weeks of cloudy skies), so you would need enough normal power plants to pick up the slack, which means that you can't dismantle a single conventional power plant even if everyone uses solar. It is also unevenly distributed (obviously, the equatorial regions get more), although not as badly as wind and geothermal.
• "We're about to run out of fossil fuels". Whenever people say that, what they really mean is "we're about to run out of easily harvested fossil fuels. There are huge reserves we haven't even begun to tap into yet because of cost, but we would tap them if sufficient incentive existed.
• "Nuclear power is dangerous". More dangerous than coal-fired power plants, which spew their cancer-causing toxins into the atmosphere to the tune of millions of tons every year rather than just the occasional leak from the most poorly built plants? Anti-nuke sentiment is based on blind, unreasoning fear of that which people don't understand.

At this point, there are only two viable sources of large-scale energy production: fossil-fuel and nuclear. Everything else is small-potatoes and parlour tricks, suitable for demonstrations which bring "oohs and aahs" from reporters but are utterly worthless for large-scale high-availability power generation. Of the two, nuclear is better.

The only alternatives on the horizon are space-based solar collection (solves the atmospheric interference problem at enormous initial cost, but then you have to find a way of safely beaming hundreds of gigawatts of power to Earth without posing a public safety risk) and nuclear fusion (if they can make it viable, it's the best overall method). Both would receive more attention if we actually started running out of fossil fuels; necessity is the mother of invention. But as long as fossil fuels are cheap and plentiful, we can keep putting things off.

[Mr. B]

Maybe instead of giving huge subsidies to oil gas and coal. They should put it into developing space based solar or nuclear fusion. But they don't.

[Solid Snake]

Hey, lets just find some ways to turn shit into oil, and we'd never have to worry again... Until, of course, humans evolve into non-corporal life forms with no ass.

[Darth Wong]

Hey, lets just find some ways to turn shit into oil, and we'd never have to worry again...

We can do that ... it just takes a reeaaallly long time

Until, of course, humans evolve into non-corporal life forms with no ass.

Doubtful. One truism about humankind is that there will always be assholes.

[Enlightenment]

Hey, lets just find some ways to turn shit into oil, and we'd never have to worry again... Until, of course, humans evolve into non-corporal life forms with no ass.

Wong beat me to this, but...

Even if some portion of humanity transitions into a non-biological existance there are enough pure-ass subspecies of humanity (e.g. homo sapians creationistus and homo sapians Republicanus) around to produce more than sufficent quantities of shit to meet humanity's energy needs from now until the sun turns into a red giant.

[Crown]

Personally, I wrote my entire year 12 Chemistry paper on alternative power generation because of all our [easily] accesable fossil fuels are vanishing. And I suggested the CANDU reactor

However, the Canadia scientist, and I hope I get his name right here, David Suziki (?), had this special on SBS discussing alternative power supplies. Basically IIRC Denmark is leading the charge in wind power generation devices, and everyone there agrees, that the trasition from fossil to alternative will occur slowly and overtime.

However they don't discount the possibility of having continuing conventional plants, so that they can pick up the slack of our fickle environment. Did I make sense?

[Doomriser]

The CANDU? Heheh, seems like everyone we give the CANDU to manages to reverse-engineer it to produce material for nuclear weapons.

[Asst. Asst. Lt. Cmdr. Smi]

How long will it take until a space-based solar plant becomes reality? Long enough for the environmentalist wackos to make an excuse not to use them, and use windmills instead? Perhaps instead of -powered plants, we can power a turbine with flatulence!

[TrailerParkJawa]

"The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet's energy balance.
-– David Price"

http://www.dieoff.org/

I went to the website and its such an amazing collection of clutter that I did not bother to read it. I think these guys need a lesson in basic design.