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Peak Oil - There's enough to fry us all
  • Worrying news! So apparently we have enough oil to last us for a good while according to this article. However the implication this has for the planet are truly devastating. I recently was having a conversation about peak oil with one of my friends and he show me this video The Non Energy crisis which i believed to be hocus pocus but now i'm not so sure any more. The Reality is that we are still consuming oil like there is no tomorrow and i wonder how long it will take before real bad things start to happen.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/02/peak-oil-we-we-wrong

    The non energy crisis http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3340274697167011147

  • 15 Replies sorted by
  • We had the peak "cheap" oil. Oil drilling is getting more expensive which has a high correlation with food price hike. The extreme weather isn't helping either. The food price index is about to pick up the slack. You know... we can print paper money but we can't print foods.

    Before the oil fries us all, if it ever happens, we will starve to death. So don't worry about the frying.

  • It's irresponsible for a journalist to cite a single paper written by an employee of a oil company and then make an unequivocal claim about world oil supply. Some really shoddy journalism out there these days.

  • There will be enough oil to last forever, because it wont be affordable to extract it from the ground. Were past peak "cheap" oil as stated above, I think it peaked worldwide in 2006 according to the IEA.

    So the good news is there is no reason to worry about any sort of climate change, as there is no replacement for cheap oil which has basically been free energy. If fusion is actually possible, that might be an alternative. Solar - wind and all other renewable energy can no way compete with the energy density of oil.

  • That journalist has a misunderstanding about what Peak Oil is, which is about ROI rather than raw production

    @plasmasmp Why don't we have to worry about climate change? We are still pumping more CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And even if we could stop putting anymore in right now, we have already moved the planet into an accelerated part of it's cycle, with the arctic and Antarctic ice sheets eroding.

    The extreme weather we're going through currently is partially the result of climate change and other being the 11 year solar cycle

  • Economic crisis slowed down oil consumption in some countries (in Greece they have to push their cars to save fuel). So for now the situation is rather simple (and impossible to solve ) : either we stay in crisis and see our system collapse...or we repair world economy and see oil consumption boom.

    And like stated in the article, don't worry, there's enough to fry us all, and add to this the huge coal reserves of China, the natural gas reserves, the biofuels (yes, burning biofuel pollutes too).. and once we finished burning all that, we can go back to burning wood. (And eating each other because biofuels will replace food production).

    Anyway, truth is, i think we shouldn't care about this article, it's just speculation. Like before the crisis... loads of people said a crisis couldn't happen, some people said it would..... eventually it did, and result is that nobody knows to whom we can listen for predictions. We cannot trust anybody anymore.

    (In my country, some seaside resorts wanted to sue the main weather prediction website because it forecast a bad summer and they claim it frightens the tourists, which is bad for business...... )

  • @Diffusion33

    Reading short articles in press is good.

    I suggest to look at reports links you can find on blog.

    As for bad things - bad things started to happen quite a time ago :-)

  • When it comes to oil, don't trust ANY number, really the source doesn't matter!

    Nobody knows how much oil is there and especially how much of it can be economically used. The reason is simple:

    All oil producing countrys (OPEC) agreed, to only produce a fixed percentage of there total oil resources. And still they want to make as much money as they can, NOW. So, they where just sending out there geologists to "find" more oil. The scientists also got the clear order to always calculate the biggest possible amount that (in there dream world) could be there. Every country was doing this and every one lied to the other one...so, now nobody knows how much oil there is.

    I wouldn't be surprised, if it does take less than 10 years when shit hits the fan and the oil price is skyrocketing. Its not winter thats coming, its war thats coming.

  • One thing I find interesting is 40 years ago in school I was taught that the oile runs out in 40 years .. my son is now 13, he has been taught at school that the oil runs out in 40 years from now.

    Take it all with a pinch of salt

  • One thing I find interesting is 40 years ago in school I was taught that the oile runs out in 40 years .. my son is now 13, he has been taught at school that the oil runs out in 40 years from now.

    I am pretty sure that both numbers are pretty different from reality that you heard. You just somehow made them in your mind,

    Take it all with a pinch of salt

    Or try to check. Taking something with pinch of sals without any reason is strange.

  • Waiting for Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors to take over ...

  • Meh... come'on, people, the jesus-juice will sustain us forever. Before it runs out we'll be in heaven. So chill, yo!

  • @Vitaliy_Kiselev Well that was depressing : ) Nihlism never looked so good. I have some solutions from the movies Food - Soylent Green, Over population - Logans Run and if we dig up all our dead we can burn them in our steam engines like they did the abundance of Egyptian mummies they dug up at the turn of the last century : )

    On a serious note having been one affected by the economic downturn I've already been practicing some of there suggestions. Farmers markets have been real values where I live fresh food cheap prices and working on that garden.

  • @spacewig

    I doubt I'll be going with the faithful but the elbow room when there gone will be appreciated.

  • Problem is they'll take us all down with 'em