Beginning of the End?

[American Patriot]

This is an old article, about 5 years old... but as usual, someone is predicting disaster and the end of the world. You will see in a moment (when I post my next message after this article) why this is in Science and not Skeptics.

http://www.livescience.com/environme...il_041214.html

End of Oil Could Fuel 'End of Civilization as We Know It'

By Robert Roy Britt, LiveScience Senior Writer
posted: 14 December 2004 03:28 pm ET
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Opponents in a long-running debate over when the world will run out of oil squared off Tuesday in a crowded room of scientists, reaching only one conclusion: The supply of fossil fuels is fixed and the world economy will eventually have to wean itself from oil.


The most dire and perhaps speculative forecast calls for global oil production to peak next year -- specifically on Thanksgiving.


Others say the end can't be accurately predicted, but that it is likely decades rather then centuries away, and that the consequences will be grave: huge inflation, global resource wars -- China vs. the United States was emphasized as a possibility -- and the end of civilization as we know it.



Other experts at the face-off, held here during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union, said there is nothing to worry about in the short term.


U.S. peaked already


The argument stretches back to a 1956 prediction by M. King Hubbert that oil production in the lower 48 U.S. states would peak in the early 1970s. He was right. The United States now imports nearly 60 percent of the oil it uses.


Kenneth Deffeyes, a Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, has taken Hubbert's logic a step further and predicts the world's oil production will top out late in 2005.


"It's Thanksgiving plus or minus three weeks," said Deffeyes, who grew up in the oil fields and was a researcher at Shell Oil for several years.


Deffeyes second book on the topic, "Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak" (Hill and Wang) is due out in March. His crystal ball is full of complex formulas and, most scientists agree, numbers that are impossible to accurately pin down, such as the amount of oil in known fields and how much more will be found.


"This is not science," said Michael Lynch, a political scientist and energy consultant. "This is forecasting."


Lynch agrees there are problems with relying so heavily on oil, and he sees more price volatility ahead. But he argues that many smaller deposits will be found and they will add up to "a lot of oil" over time. He also faults the running-dry-soon predictions as being based not on geology, but on politics and economics: Oil production in various countries has flattened or fell at certain times for reasons having nothing to do with how much they could produce, Lynch says.


Further, Lynch contends, it is not possible to predict the discovery of new oil fields or the true size of existing in-ground reserves. He likens current oil forecasts to stock market prediction. Charts fit history well, he says, "but they're not predictive."


Alternatives?


Likewise, analyst Bill Fisher of the University of Texas at Austin sees plenty of oil over the next few decades. Fisher sees no reason to panic. He expects the world to gradually transition to an economy based on natural gas during the first half of this century, then to a hydrogen economy before 2100. He pointed out that estimates of oil reserves tend to grow over time, no matter who does the guessing.


The debate got more complex at this point.


Caltech physicist David Goodstein sees little hope for hydrogen, which he said requires fossil fuels in order to extract. And natural gas, like oil and coal and shale (another proposed alternative) are all finite, Goodstein argues.
"The oil will run out," he said. "The only question is when."


Goodstein puts little stock in nuclear fusion, which for decades has been proposed as the cousin of fission with unlimited potential. "Fusion and shale oil are the energy sources of the future, and they always will be," he quipped. Solar energy shows promise, he said, but "we haven't figured out how to use it."


So Goodstein takes a pragmatic approach. It doesn't matter so much when we run out, he argues, but what we do about it.


Global trap


Goodstein, author of the book "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil" (W.W. Norton & Company) sees a looming world crisis that could fuel war and bring society to its knees.


"We have created a trap for ourselves," Goodstein said.


The United States has so far avoided serious consequences from the trap by relying on imports. The country uses about 7 billion of the 30 billion barrels of oil produced annually around the globe. And it makes us rich. Oil consumption equals standard of living, experts agree.


Meanwhile, other countries are beginning to clamor for oil at unprecedented rates, and therein lies the recipe for potential disaster.


China uses a comparatively modest 1.5 billion barrels a year (perhaps 2.4 billion this year) according to some estimates. India consumes less. Both countries' economies are becoming increasingly dependent on oil, however.


China's consumption is expected to grow 7.5 percent per year, and India's 5.5 percent, according to the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.


By 2060, oil production will have to triple just to meet global population growth and maintain current standards of living, said Stanford University geophysicist Amos Nur.


Yet China's own production has been flat since the 1980s and it now imports 40 percent of what it needs.


'When do we panic?'


"What matters in the short term is, when do we panic?" Nur said. "In my opinion, the point of panic has already taken place."


It's a behind-the-scenes sort of panic. The two largest economies on Earth -- China and the United States -- have already incorporated the finite nature of oil into their national security policies, Nur argues, citing policy statements from both governments reflecting the need to secure stability in oil-producing countries and a free flow of the resource. The war in Iraq, a country second only to politically unstable Saudi Arabia in oil reserves, is another clue, he said.


"There is a huge conflict that might be emerging," Nur said.


Some of the fine points of the various presentations were argued, even resulting in one shouting match over how much oil is in Saudi Arabia. But none of the roughly 500 scientists in the room voiced disagreement with Nur's view of the potential for war.


If the world is sliding toward global conflict over oil, the skids may be pretty well greased, politically speaking.


Governments do not have the political will to prepare for the end of oil, says Goodstein, the Caltech physicist.


"Civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime this century, when the fuel runs out," Goodstein said, adding that "I certainly hope my prediction is wrong."

[American Patriot]

What pushed us from Cave Man to Modern Man from the stone age, and copper/bronze age, through the Industrial Revolution, to the Space Age to here and now, the Information Age?

How are wars fought and won?

What caused computers to exist in the form they are now?

How did we come to be able to fly into space?

How many billions of vehicles have been produced and how many billions of gallons of fuel have we used?

What is it precisely that powers our current technologically advanced society?

How did we get to where we are today, with computers, the internet, cell phones in almost everyone's hand, credit cards and international banking, trade and 7 billion people on this planet?

Think about these questions before you try to answer them because they all have one and only one answer.

If you ask me if I believe there is life "out there" beyond Earth, I will tell you unequivocally that indeed there is. If you ask me a more specific question, "Is there intelligent life out there", again my answer will be "Absolutely".

If, however, you ask me about the number of advanced, intelligent civilizations out there as a long time scholar of all sciences I would have to say "It depends". The numbers aren't firm. We know there are now several hundred known planets orbiting distant stars, some not unlike our own Sol. However we know next to nothing about the planets themselves, except the rare few that are mostly likely like Jupiter and Saturn; completely inhospitable to life as we know it.

So how did all those things happen above? The simple fact is that OIL was the cause of all of those things.

The human race has picked itself up by its proverbial boot straps from a time when there weren't any boots. We started by figuring out fire and energy use, using wood and other things that burn, mostly dead plant life. Using fire and later metals we made weapons of war, things to defend our tiny enclaves against other people, and creatures. Then we discovered iron, and how to convert that into weapons.

Then we figured out that steel was a better metal than iron, harder and it used carbon (charcoal) to make iron harder. Stone axes became copper, then bronze, then iron, then steel. Thrown weapons became pointed spears, then the points were burned in fire to make them harder, then stone was added, then various metals, and soon spears too because bows and arrows which went through similar evolution.

Weapons and tools were utterly dependent upon energy use, everything from plain old blood, sweat and tears to fire, to, eventually nuclear weapons.

Intelligent lifeforms probably exist. But getting to be an advanced intelligence life form absolutely would require the use of energy. If a planet exists with life forms, the chances of that life becoming intelligent and eventually advanced will utterly depend on a ready, reasonable, and useful source of fuel.

We would not have carbon steel without fire and carbon.

We would not have nuclear bombs without having gone through the oil age, industrial age and so forth.

Oil drives the world. Oil comes from the ground. No one truly knows the source of oil and no one, absolutely no one, knows when it will dry up, or if it will dry up.

But, without a doubt, without oil the human population will eventually die off. Sure, we have nuclear energy which brings us back to "boot straps". The very idea of moving vast quantities of materials to build a nuclear plant still relies heavily on the use of fossil fuels. Without oil we can't built power plants. Without oil, we simply can not go into space. Without oil, we can't launch satellites for GPS.

You see, we have oil spilled all over the Gulf of Mexico and people are complaining about the environment (don't get me wrong, it is certainly a mess and is killing animals who are innocent in the whole thing) but that oil is a natural byproduct of this planet that is escaping due to short sightedness of mankind. That oil is being wasted on the order of somewhere between 5000 and 60,000 barrels per day (by various estimates - a barrel of oil is 42 gallons). That's a lot of oil no matter which estimate you take.

The goal now is to simply plug it. A later goal is to recover what's left. Another goal should be to salvage what is lost simple to keep the environment clean, but more importantly, that oil is the key to the survival of the human race.

If you don't believe that last statement, turn off your computers, cell phones, electricity and stop driving. Eat only food you can grow, or kill yourself and do this while the entire city around you is doing the same thing and killing off every rodent and pigeon in the city next to you. Then continue to do this until winter, when you start burning the neighbor's fence and objects in your home in your little-used-gas fireplace.

After two years of living hand-to-mouth without the use of electricity, hearing the nightly news, texting your friends and reading on the internet you will only, barely scratch the significance of the statement I made above.

Without oil, there can be no civilization, no human race, no intelligent race, and certainly not 7 billion alive, active people on the planet. Wars over resources and land mass will kill most of the 7 billion people, rather quickly. The trees will be chopped down and killed for wood and building fires, bullets will run out, guns stop working, and swords will be the way of the future.

Eventually mankind will have come full circle. A small group of humans pushing their way out into the world, through high technology and space travel, all the way back to scattered, and demoralized enclaves trying to protect themselves against some other tribe of people attempting to take your food from you.

Society, indeed civilization will fall to nothing. Humans will become just one more wandering creature, eating what they can, being eaten by those predators strong enough to defeat a human.

That, my friends is the truth and the future of the human race. Unless we push hard and heavy to improve nuclear power, solar power and to get ourselves off this planet to locate other resources in our solar system. If we do not, and if the oil dries up, this is our bleak and dark future.

[Segestan]

Check out ... http://www.ecomotors.com/

The Oil shortage or peak may not be so serious.

[American Patriot]

Still uses electricity.

Sure we can create batteries... but be serious. When you lose all the oil, it's gone. When it's gone the effect will be on a grand scale, perhaps not affecting you directly right away. But in a few years, no one has any reserves left and your electric car isn't going to work any more either.

Without oil you're not going to be able to sustain a civilization, unless you sustain it with a different fuel.

[Malsua]

Captain Zero seems intent on driving us out of oil use. He just shut down 1/3 of the US refining capacity. He's against all forms of energy that work and for all that don't.

In other words the US is on fire and he's pouring on gasoline. I'm not being facetious here. This man wants to bring us down to agrarian levels but we've got too many people now.

We;re doomed, or rather someone is doomed, make sure it isn't you.

[American Patriot]

Captain Zero seems intent on driving us out of oil use. He just shut down 1/3 of the US refining capacity. He's against all forms of energy that work and for all that don't.

In other words the US is on fire and he's pouring on gasoline. I'm not being facetious here. This man wants to bring us down to agrarian levels but we've got too many people now.

We;re doomed, or rather someone is doomed, make sure it isn't you.

That was the purpose of my article.

We do NOT currently have an efficient source of energy that can replace oil.

The "Greenies" of the world (ALL of them for the most part trying to dissuade capitalism in the first place, and whom place emphasis on the word "EVIL" when calling corporations evil) want to shut down the use of most energy sources including but not limited to oil.

Other countries are seeping into the gaps the US is leaving behind by pulling out our oil drilling rigs. That means other countries grow, while we slowly die by lack of power.

Even IF we and they use all the oil we can, we still have to find another efficient source of energy. If we do NOT and oil really does dry up, we die. Not just the US, or China, or Russia. ALL of us.

Any country dependent upon technology like we are will be the first to collapse.

The very fact that our own President is trying to close down the oil industry is nothing more than politics on his part. It's a way for him to push his own Socialist agenda even harder. The more quickly this country falls apart, the better for him and his Socialist cronies.

So, America is being hit from the highest offices in the land and forced to comply, slowly, albeit surely. The better they take down America from inside, the easier for the other evil empires to move on us.

Oil, however, is still the key.

There's a lesson in this message, both mine and the one from 2004

[vector7]

If there is an oil shortage it's being progressively induced as Florida Sees New Threat to Its Beaches from Cuba Deep water Drilling and Venezuela seizes 11 oil rigs from U.S. company.

While Obama grinds gulf drilling to a halt and kills 33% of the country’s oil refining capacity and promising to bankrupt coal that will cost Midwest jobs.

[American Patriot]

No Oil.

Hydro power... sure, it works fine. But what happens when you can't move trains, planes and trucks to move equipment to repair or build hydro plants? It won't get done.

What happens when there is no oil and existing places begin to fail, and there are no plants producing copper wire any more?

What happens to cities dependent - absolutely, utterly dependent upon transportation based on gas/diesel for food and supplies?

What happens to people who can't get food?

What happens to the batteries that begin to fail that can't be repaired because there's no lead, acid or way to move new ones in place?

Coal can certainly be converted. However, in our country even digging up coal has been shut down in many area, and my state of Colorado has shale oil that could be extracted from the shale in large quantities. Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined. Enough oil to supply the US for an entire century.

Our state shut down any exploration in the regard of shale oil.

The Obama administration has pretty much shut down the idea of coal. They have place huge difficulties in the way of companies trying to dig up coal.

Remember, we had a huge accident recently here in the coal mines. There was talk of shutting them down as well.

Nuclear energy? Forget about it. It's not going to happen. Even though everyone else KNOWS that we could do it, we're not going to be ALLOWED to do it.

The Green Peacers and similar groups have effectively put a stop to anything that might be scary, or produce power. We have oil, but our government is trying to shut even that down now.

[American Patriot]

As Vector is pointing out, five of our largest states are being "attacked" in one form or another so far.

[American Patriot]

You guys are so short sighted.

I'm not talking next Thursday if oil runs out, I'm talking decades.

I don't care how many hydroelectric plants exist (and yes, I know they are there, they exist). I also know it costs money and energy to maintain them.

If there are power plants and we have no more oil, then you have no way to move equipment to repair concrete cracks and breaks. You have no way to bring in new generators when the old ones break.

You have no energy for the factories that produce the transformers, copper wire, and varnish that cover the wires wound around the cores.

You have no energy to forge the soft steel that makes up the transformer cores, or melt and make steel.

You guys don't get me wrong. *I* don't think oil is going to cease flowing either. Unless shut down by Obama, and he is trying his damnedest to do so.

I'm just pointing out something that most people do not consider.

We would not EXIST as the civilization that we have now, were it not for oil. Coal fired plants would not have taken us as far as oil has, and we'd surely not be driving around internal combustion, coal powered cars. We might still be driving around steam powered devices, but certainly not internal combustion.

Without oil, NO COUNTRY would be much higher in technology than any other and certainly there would have been no atomic bombs, no air power and bombers, there'd be no lasers, no laser eye surgery and many, many other things that we take for granted.

Radio would still be, for the most part, HF type systems with spark gap generators or at best amplitude modulation only.

Transistor wouldn't have been invented.

[American Patriot]

We simply do not know if there is going to be a "peak Oil" or if it is "continuous oil" - an idea I would insist is probably more accurate simply because no one knows where oil comes from.

When I was a child I was taught that oil was made from dinosaurs (and of course plant life) and while this certainly could be one way to make oil, I'm more of a mind that other materials are heated and pressured until certain chemical reactions occur and you get the hydrocarbons from the rock.

Remember oil is nothing more than hydrocarbon atoms, and the planet is full of water, full of carbon and full of heat and pressure down deep. It might take a lot of years to produce a particular reservoir of oil, but I suspect that going back to those same locations in a few years will yield more oil. I'm surprised that this hasn't been accomplished of late.

I suspect both governments, Michael, like you of complicity in this as well. They know something we don't and are trying to keep that a secret while vying for position.

[American Patriot]

Numbers are well and good, but:

1) They are estimated
2) No one knows the right numbers
3) The amount of oil there isn't the point.

[American Patriot]

https is secure site. Should work though.

[American Patriot]

I know the meaning. You're right, it's a secure server. But that doesn't always mean a password either.

[American Patriot]

I connected fine.

[American Patriot]

Ah, I had and understood the peak definition to be different than the one you used. NOW I see where you are going.

[Malsua]

Peak Oil is when the maximum amount of oil (per period, year?) produced has been reached. We are at or near this point. This simply means that the cheapest to produce oil has been produced. Prices can only rise over time and production will drop as demand drops. This does not mean oil disappears. It just gets more expensive.

When it takes a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of oil, all reserves are essentially depleted. We will never reach this point. Ever.

What will happen long before that is oil will get expensive, very very very expensive. Alternatives that don't make sense at $150/barrel make all sort of sense at $300 a barrel.

[American Patriot]

When it costs a barrel of Oil to extract a barrel of Oil....That's when a peak has been reached certainly, in my mind.

and

Peak Oil is when the maximum amount of oil (per period, year?) produced has been reached. We are at or near this point. This simply means that the cheapest to produce oil has been produced.

Are not the same thing.

Of course, MY thinking of "peak oil" from what Michael was trying to say was of course an assumption on my part. That the peak amount of oil being pulled from the ground is the most that will be produced EVER. Peak meaning, we have reached a point where we will only be pulling less and less oil from the ground (we being the human race in general, not a particular country).

So one of you is saying "peak" is when it is cheapest.

The other is saying "peak" is with it is most expensive.

[Malsua]

I'm saying it's when the most is produced and the most is produced because the cost per barrel is lowest.

His definition is the end of oil.

[American Patriot]

Here's my thinking - and this is absolutely what I believe.

1) There is no shortage of oil except that produced by mankind (OPEC for instance) by reducing the amount of oil pulled out of the ground.

2) Oil is abiotic. That is, it is not produced by biological remains over centuries but rather by other chemicals that are found naturally in the planet, heated by the core of the Earth through nuclear radiation (which of course drives pretty much all of the forces acting internally to this planet including quakes, plate tectonics, volcanoes, the Gulf Stream and so forth). That oil is CONSTANTLY being produced from these forces and chemical reactions, the heat, immense pressure and perhaps other factors we don't yet understand completely.

These are my assumptions. Basically this means that:

1) We will NOT run out of oil for centuries.
2) There will not be an "oil crash" as I described in the first postings.
3) My posting was not something that I am concerned about but merely a possible (not probable) scenario that I wanted to discuss.

I'm sorry I was more clear initially, but sometimes trying to get you guys to talk instead of just post news articles is difficult to do! lol

With that said....

My scenario remains. IF we were to run out of oil... it dries up. Just stops flowing. We can't suck any more out.

1) The price of oil will increase geometrically rapidly as it runs out.
2) Products that require oil somewhere in the process (plastics in many cases) will cease being produced.
3) vehicles will stop moving.
4) planes grounded.
5) trucks, trains and cars - no more.
6) Power plants that use oil to generate power will shut down until converted to coal or nuclear energy.

Problems associated with this.

You can't build a power plant (nuclear or anything else) without some way to move heavy equipment, parts, supplies and so forth and if we're without vehicles, it's simply NOT GOING TO HAPPEN.

Large quantities of food can not be moved from farms without trucks, trains. (Small amounts with horse drawn trailers can, but the price will increase drastically as well).

Farms can no longer even FARM large areas. Farmers in my grandfather's day were usually limited to a few large areas they could work. Three or four forty acre plots were pretty much "it" in those days. Much beyond that required an immense amount of man power (and thus farmers had LOTS OF KIDS).

Cattle, large numbers, will have to be driven to market by cowboys, again.

There are many other examples of things that will occur, SHOULD we happen to suddenly go dry on oil.


Yes, I KNOW we get it from over seas. Yes I KNOW we have a lot here. Yes I KNOW we have many, many barrels to be pulled from shale (right here in Colorado in fact) but there is NO move on to produce oil from these methods. In fact, the idiot that went to DC from here (former Senator from Colorado, Ken Salazar) has stopped any such attempts at every turn. As a Senator and now as Secretary of the Interior. The man is a hardcore, Left Wing Environmentalist. He thinks ELF and Greenpeace are the greatest thing to happen to this planet. He's so pro-EPA that he ought to have been put in charge of that group instead....

All of this aside... this scenario and discussion is about "When the oil dries up" - you all don't have to convince me that it won't happen, I already know this.