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Thread: How long till the end?

  1. #1
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    Default How long till the end?

    Money as we know it has no value without oil. Everything that is made and built has an oil related price tag attached to it. Right now it costs more money to find and produce more oil than the actual value of the oil itself. We're coming to the beginning of the end for life as we know it on this planet.

    Paranoid delusions?

    Call me crazy if you like but only after you read what's on the website.


    SEE www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net


    I was prompted to post this thread after reading this article in the local paper (which led me to the above website):

    Running on empty

    In 'The Long Emergency,' author JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER envisions the end of the fossil-fuel era - and of life as we know it

    06:23 PM CDT on Saturday, July 2, 2005

    Carl Jung, one of the fathers of psychology, famously remarked that "people cannot stand too much reality." What you're about to read may challenge your assumptions about the kind of world we live in, and especially the kind of world into which events are propelling us. We are in for a rough ride through uncharted territory.

    It has been hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. I call this coming time the Long Emergency. Most immediately we face the end of the cheap-fossil-fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that reliable supplies of cheap oil and natural gas underlie everything we identify as the necessities of modern life -- not to mention all of its comforts and luxuries: central heating, air conditioning, cars, airplanes, electric lights, inexpensive clothing, recorded music, movies, hip-replacement surgery, national defense -- you name it.

    The few Americans who are even aware that there is a gathering global-energy predicament usually misunderstand the nature of the crisis. We don't have to run out of oil to start having severe problems with industrial civilization and its dependent systems. We only have to slip over the all-time production peak and begin a slide down the arc of steady depletion.

    The term "global oil-production peak" means that a turning point will come when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce in a given year and, after that, yearly production will inexorably decline. It is usually represented graphically in a bell curve. The peak is the top of the curve, the halfway point of the world's all-time total endowment, meaning half the world's oil will be left.

    That seems like a lot of oil, and it is, but there's a big catch: It's the half that is more difficult to extract, far more costly to get, of much poorer quality, and located mostly in places where the people hate us.


    The United States passed its own oil peak -- about 11 million barrels a day -- in 1970, and since then production has dropped steadily. Today, we have to import about two-thirds of our oil, and the ratio will continue to worsen.

    Now we are faced with the global oil-production peak. The best estimates of when this will actually happen have been somewhere between now and 2010. It will be a permanent energy crisis that will change everything about how we live.

    To aggravate matters, American natural-gas production is also declining, at 5 percent a year, with the potential of much steeper declines ahead. Just about every power plant built after 1980 has to run on gas. Half the homes in America are heated with gas -- and gas isn't easy to import.

    The wonders of steady technological progress achieved through the reign of cheap oil have led many Americans to believe that anything we wish for hard enough will come true. But no combination of alternative fuels will allow us to run American life the way we have been used to running it.

    The widely touted "hydrogen economy" is a particularly cruel hoax. We are not going to replace the U.S. automobile and truck fleet with vehicles run on fuel cells. For one thing, the current generation of fuel cells is largely designed to run on hydrogen obtained from natural gas.

    The other way to get hydrogen in the quantities wished for would be electrolysis of water using power from hundreds of nuclear plants. Apart from the dim prospect of our building that many nuclear plants soon enough, there are also severe problems with hydrogen's nature as an element that present forbidding obstacles to its use as a replacement for oil and gas.

    Solar-electric systems and wind turbines face enormous problems of scale. Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks.

    If we wish to keep the lights on in America after 2020, we may indeed have to resort to nuclear power. Under optimal conditions, it could take 10 years to get a new generation of nuclear power plants into operation, and the price may be beyond our means.

    The upshot of all this is that we are entering a historical period of potentially great instability, turbulence and hardship. Obviously, geopolitical maneuvering around the world's richest energy regions has already led to war and promises more international military conflict.

    Since the Middle East contains two-thirds of the world's remaining oil supplies, the U.S. has attempted desperately to stabilize the region by, in effect, opening a big police station in Iraq. The intent was not just to secure Iraq's oil but to modify and influence the behavior of Persian Gulf states. The results have been far from entirely positive, and our future prospects in that part of the world are not something we can feel altogether confident about.

    And then there is the issue of China, which in 2004 became the world's second-greatest consumer of oil. If China wanted to, it could easily walk into some of these places -- the Middle East, former Soviet republics in central Asia -- and extend its hegemony by force. Is America prepared to contest for this oil in an Asian land war with the Chinese army? I doubt it.

    Nor can the U.S. military occupy regions of the Eastern Hemisphere indefinitely, or hope to secure either the terrain or the oil infrastructure of one distant, unfriendly country after another. The U.S. could exhaust and bankrupt itself trying to do this.

    Our national leaders are hardly uninformed about this predicament. In March, the Department of Energy released a report that officially acknowledges for the first time that peak oil is for real and states plainly: "The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary."

    Most of all, the Long Emergency will require us to make other arrangements for the way we live in the United States. We let our towns and cities rot away and replaced them with suburbia. We made the ongoing development of housing subdivisions, highway strips, fried-food shacks and shopping malls the basis of our economy, and when we have to stop making more of those things, the bottom will fall out.

    The circumstances of the Long Emergency will require us to downscale and rescale virtually everything we do and how we do it, from the kind of communities we physically inhabit to the way we grow our food to the way we work and trade. Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are.

    Anything organized on the large scale, whether government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away.

    Food production is going to be an enormous problem. As industrial agriculture fails because of a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will have to grow more food closer to where we live and do it on a smaller scale. This raises difficult questions about the reallocation of land and the nature of work. Readjustment is apt to be disorderly and improvisational.

    The way that commerce is currently organized in America will not survive. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. Commerce will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.

    The automobile will be a diminished presence in our lives. With gasoline in short supply, not to mention tax revenue, our roads will surely suffer. If we don't refurbish our rail system, then there may be no long-range travel or transport of goods at all a few decades from now. The commercial aviation industry is likely to vanish.

    The successful regions in the 21st century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. The process will be painful and tumultuous.

    Some regions will do better than others. The Southwest will suffer in proportion to the degree that it prospered during the cheap-oil blowout of the late 20th century. Sun Belt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas. Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.

    I'm not optimistic about the Southeast, either. I think it will be subject to substantial levels of violence as the grievances of the formerly middle class boil over and collide with the delusions of Pentecostal Christian extremism. The latent encoded behavior of Southern culture includes an outsized notion of individualism and the belief that firearms ought to be used in the defense of it. This is a poor recipe for civic cohesion.

    The Mountain States and Great Plains will face an array of problems, from poor farming potential to water shortages to population loss. The Pacific Northwest, New England and the Upper Midwest have somewhat better prospects. I regard them as less likely to fall into lawlessness, anarchy or despotism and more likely to salvage the bits and pieces of our best social traditions and keep them in operation at some level.

    These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a worldwide power shortage.

    If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom.

    Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

    Adapted from "The Long Emergency," copyright 2005 by James Howard Kunstler and reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, a division of Grove/Atlantic Inc. Mr. Kunstler is the author of "The Geography of Nowhere" and other books. You may
    e-mail him at kunstler@aol.com.

    Greg Caplinger
    Gekka Dojo
    GWBNF/KJJR

    "Shin-gi-tai-ichi"

  2. #2
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    A geologist told me he dosen't think a shortage is imminent. I don't know too much about geology, but at least the shortage theory isn't unanimously agreed to.

    As I read more and more over the course of my life, few things annoy me more than alarmist authors who always turn out to be wrong. Population Bomb, anyone? Snort, snicker.

    Also, if there were no more oil, or oil became too expensive, we'd switch to the next cheapest thing. We have alternative energy means, so it's nothing to worry about.

  3. #3
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    sage,


    ALL alternative sources of energy are OIL derivitive. Every type of construction involves expending oil. Anything that we build would expend oil or would be made out of oil based products. It's a paradox but we are completley dependent on oil for everything. Once again, running out of oil is not the issue. Passing 'global peak oil production' is the issue.
    Last edited by Onmitsu; 6th July 2005 at 20:40.
    Greg Caplinger
    Gekka Dojo
    GWBNF/KJJR

    "Shin-gi-tai-ichi"

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    What did money connect to before we used oil? Wheat and corn?
    Cady Goldfield

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    Eh, just another fear. Population explosion, Global Cooling, Global Warming, red tides, landfills being overwhelmed, and now an end to oil.

    Yawn. Next?
    Rob Thornton

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    What did money connect to before we used oil? Wheat and corn?
    Gold, dancing girls, and Peacock feathers.
    Saburo Kitazono

  7. #7
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    Cady,

    The agricultural age gave way to the industrial age.
    Greg Caplinger
    Gekka Dojo
    GWBNF/KJJR

    "Shin-gi-tai-ichi"

  8. #8
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    Well, maybe we'll return to the dancing girl and peacock feathers age. Where's the problem?
    Trevor Johnson

    Low kicks and low puns a specialty.

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    Greg,
    I figured that. So, wheat and corn ... and land... were what gold was backed by.
    Cady Goldfield

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    Eh, just another fear. Population explosion, Global Cooling, Global Warming, red tides, landfills being overwhelmed, and now an end to oil.
    I'm not trying to be an alarmist but I'm not kidding myself. I half expected off the cuff replies like the above. I also really didn't expect most people to make an intelligent rational argument against what the author on the website (www.aftertheoilcrash.net) has to say. Is there anyone else out there?

    Anyone? Bueller?
    Greg Caplinger
    Gekka Dojo
    GWBNF/KJJR

    "Shin-gi-tai-ichi"

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    I'm very aware of our current dependance -directly and indirectly- on oil and its derivatives (which really are too many to mention) and I suppose a large part of me would appreciate a return to a simpler lifestyle, eventhough I accept the fact that I might get my skull bashed in by someone who wants to steal from my vegetable patch...
    Joost van Schijndel

  12. #12
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    oil

    I can't really see the issue here, all the information in the article above is old information. It's been known for several years that at some point that the fossil fuel supply is going to run out (sooner rather than later).

    What's the use of writing articles like this one? People aren't really going to do anything anyway, we're all going to wait untill politicians come up with a solution.

    rising water levels

    This is another issue that no one ever worries about, the current estimate is that due to rising sea levels about half of the Netherlands will dissappear beneath the sea by 2030. Rising sea levels will have this affect on other countries as well. Aren't certain cities in the US built beneath the sea level?

    pinch of salt

    I think that we really need to take all these "way of life" threatening issue with a pinch of salt. About ten years ago people were screaming that in ten years the world as we know it was going to end.

    During the time that humanity has inhabited this world there have always been threats. Humanity has been smart enough to overcome most obstacles, I'm conviced that the current ones will be overcome as well.
    Rogier van der Peijl

    REAL SCOTSMEN WEAR KILTS because sheep can hear a zipper at 500 yards!

    Originally posted by Cady Goldfield
    Ah, what a cutie, Rogier. I'll bet a lot of ladies in Netherlands are mourning because you are out of circulation now!

  13. #13
    Mark Darrah Guest

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    The fact is that none of these things have been implemented because there has been no need. Necessity is the mother of invention. When (if) the threat becomes real, advances will take place. The reason they haven't yet is that too many large political and commercial interests rely on oil. When that business model is threatened, there will be a paradigm shift.

    So in short, don't panic. If you feel you need to do something, lobby your local politicians to push an energy alternative agenda. I would post more but I have to drive my Ford Expedition into town and get some groceries.

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    The fact is that none of these things have been implemented because there has been no need. Necessity is the mother of invention. When (if) the threat becomes real, advances will take place. The reason they haven't yet is that too many large political and commercial interests rely on oil. When that business model is threatened, there will be a paradigm shift.
    Mark,

    I don't know about you but my experience with local government and corporations has always been a lot of knee jerk reactionary. They're primarily concerned with two things; the bottom line and covering their hind ends against liability. Forgive me if I sound paranoid but I don't trust politicians and "the commercial interests that rely on oil" (which is just about everybody by the way). No one wants to be the one to say "the sky is falling". The powers that be know what's going on and are quietly preparing for the inevitable. Meanwhile as far as the public is concerned it's business as usual. Mass panic and hoarding would ensue if everyone knew the truth of the seriousness of our situation.

    Many people berate Bush and accuse him of war-mongering in the name of oil.
    I think that what we are seeing is "Necessity and the mother of invention" in action. Bush is scrambling to stabilize and secure the oil rich regions that are strategicly within the grasp of the U.S. military power. Meanwhile we're gearing up for the likely possibility of going toe to toe with our biggest competitors for the world's resources. Any idea of who this might be? Hmmm?
    Greg Caplinger
    Gekka Dojo
    GWBNF/KJJR

    "Shin-gi-tai-ichi"

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    The most important thing to remember is that....

    THE SKY IS FALLING, THE SKY FALLING!!!!!!

    Seriously, I once read 10 or 15 years ago that there is an entire town in Norway that is completely fuled by the ocean tides. The article I believe was in National Geographic. It's old news that oil will one day run out, it is after all a non-renewable energy source. But the encouraging thing to remember is that humans are curious creatures, and that there have been many inventions and discoveries that will and are already beginning to replace oil.

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