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Trivial Pursuits => History => Topic started by: Arachno-capitalist on October 11, 2007, 04:26:52 am
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Were running out oil? Really? No.
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6:54pm Wednesday, Oct 10 | Edit Note | Delete
Editor, The Washington Times
To the Editor:
Carl Henn makes two astonishing claims (Letters, Sept. 22). The first is that "our fuel of choice oil runs out at exactly the rate we use it."
According to MIT's M.A. Adelman, "At the end of 1970, non-opec countries had about 200 billion remaining in proved reserves. In the next 33 years, those countries produced 460 billion barrels and now have 209 billion 'remaining.' The producers kept using up their inventory, at a rate of about seven percent per year, and then replacing it." Over the same time period, proved reserves in opec countries have nearly doubled from 412 billion barrels to 819 barrels. [From Adelman, "The Real Oil Problem," Regulation, Spring 2004. Available here.]
Clearly, we don't run out of oil "at the exact rate we use it."
Second, Mr. Henn avers that cars aren't important because "our country somehow got along without them for more than 200 years." Well, yes - and Americans in the past also "got along" without refrigeration, indoor plumbing, and antibiotics. Is Mr. Henn content to "get along" also without these things?
Sincerely
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I think the gentleman was referring to the amount of oil in/on the Earth in total, not the amount of Oil we have in reserve.
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Furthermore, it's not how much oil is left. It's how much oil is economically feasible to extract and refine. There will come a point when the only oil left will be in oil sands and shale, which are much more expensive and time-consuming to exploit.
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But if everything else is gone, it will be economically feasible. Wyoming and Alberta have ridiculously huge amounts of shale oil, it's just that at this point in time that it is not cost-effective.
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Well, the flipside of that is... that if we GET to the point where processing oil out of shale is our best option, oh man, will our economy be fucked... considering that pretty much the price of EVERYTHING is predicated on how expensive it is to ship those goods from place to place with oil or gasoline.
Our entire economy would have to be RADICALLY reassessed if our entire transportation infrastructure was run on oil sources that aren't economically feasible today.
Throw out the environmental concerns for a moment...
You think there's economic instability NOW?
You think that all the power in our society is held by the military-energy complex NOW?
Oh boy, oh boy.
Lets never get to that point, huh?
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What he said.
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Go nuclear.
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We could also have Superman throw it into the sun!
...this is how unrealistic it is to talk of spent nuclear fuel as "no big worry". It is just as sane to suggest Superman as your solution.
Atomic pollution's long term effects are in no way known because, y'know, we've only been dealing with it for sixty years.
Oh, and by the way, the more of it that there is, the better shot we have of some kind of insane person making weapons with it.
That's a plus, right?
As a stop-gap measure, we're kind of stuck with it? It ain't going anywhere anytime soon?
But, man, we've gotta use it as sparingly as possible until we can really get our shit in gear on truly renewable energy sources...
Solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc. Maybe even half-crazy Tesla-type stuff. Whatever it takes.
Of course, that stuff isn't as controllable or as profitable so it's not really gonna happen until the government gets behind it and... oil owns the government so... yeah. We're not gonna go down that road until it is long too late.
So yeah. Yeah, we're basically fucked.
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See, if we hadn't've pussed out on a space program we could just burn this joint out and move on.
But I like this planet!
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yeah, for real. Nuclear power is hells of a bad idea. We have enough trouble getting rid of normal industrial waste.
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The main problem with nuclear waste is agreements we have on the books not to reprocess it. If we recycled the spent fuel rods and extracted the (large percentage) of "unburnt" fuel, the volume of waste would go way down. The problem with that is that one of the byproducts is plutonium (though not at weapons grade purity). A year's worth of post-reprocessing waste for an American family of 4 is about a marble's size.