Peak Oil vs. global warming
As the presidential candidates spew nonsense about energy policy, and T. Boone Pickens's stab at a constructive solution starts to look ever-more shaky, we are faced with this grim reality: Peak Oil is still a "fringe" concept.
More than a year ago, the folks at Energy Bulletin ran a revealing test on Google Trends to see how many people were searching for "global warming" as opposed to "peak oil." The results were disappointing. (Four days later came my way-too-premature prediction that Peak Oil was about to become a household word, but we won't go there now…)
I ran the same test this morning and came up with similarly depressing results. And it's not just people searching on the web. Confirmation comes from that ultimate arbiter of what America's clueless nomenklatura are thinking — New York Times columnist Tom Friedman:
We’ve added so many greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, for our generation’s growth, that our kids are likely going to spend a good part of their adulthood, maybe all of it, just dealing with the climate implications of our profligacy. And now our leaders are telling them the way out is “offshore drilling” for more climate-changing fossil fuels.
Madness. Sheer madness.
Friedman has achieved such mythic status that the Times evidently feels he's beyond any need for an editor. But if he had one, that editor would no doubt ask Friedman what he means by "the way out." The way out of what? Presumably a shortage of fossil fuels. But Friedman makes no mention of a fossil fuel shortage in the sentence preceding. He's talking about "the climate implications of our profligacy."
Sloppy syntax, fuzzy thinking.
Friedman must believe, like Congressional Democrats, that a magical government program can bring about solar-powered cars and jets faster than it'll take to bring new offshore oil fields online. Of course, if the Democrats are clueless, the Republicans are liars, with the repeated assertions that opening up offshore drilling will bring back cheap gasoline within weeks. It won't. But it'll buy us a little more time until something other than oil emerges in another 10-15 years as the transportation fuel of the future. And we're gonna need all the time we can get to forestall catastrophic changes in the way we live.
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The hilarity of the ongoing debate is so outlandish that it takes on the sheen of a sturdy parable. Cheap Fuel, the efficiencies of Industrialism and the financial power of Corporatism have evolved a system of accelerating diminishing returns that is hard to break from because of the great successes during the rise of the system.
Everything from the food we eat to the medical care required by industrialized agriculture to the consumptive sprawl of petroleum- centered development and the gutting of local diversified economies at the hands of centralization ….all of these over-arching aspects of our current way of life are a menace to the spirit and a threat to health, both individually and globally.
When we break away from the notion that Peak oil is a punishment rather than an innovation-prompting gift, we might see an improvement in how the species will operate. Until that time, the self-hate engendered by the system will dwell on destructive thought and fear and we will continue to plunge ever deeper up the dark howling wilderness of our own arses.
Comment on August 6, 2008 @ 11:44 am
The reality is that we need to get government out of the way as far as energy is concerned. For the forseeable future we will need oil and the less government does to hinder this the better. (Witness the ethanol disaster) Having said this, I don’t really see any hope for this happening. When the biggest energy debate is over air pressure in your tires you know that you have a couple of airheads running to be next president.
Comment on August 6, 2008 @ 2:39 pm
Please, would you send me every day the Desidooru Saloon. Two months ago I received it every day, but since then no more.
Thanks for sending again the Desidooru Saloon
Greetings from Canada.
Dr. Hoekman.
Comment on August 6, 2008 @ 6:19 pm
Actually, we can build concentrating photovoltaic solar power stations in a big hurry, because there are no production bottlenecks. We are building two nuclear power stations worth of solar cells every year and doubling this production every few years, more or less, in America. Concentrators are simple to assemble out of materials that are not exactly scarce, so that is roughly two hundred to two thousand nuclear power plant equivalents this year, and more the next.
Substitutes for transport fuels are going to be much, much, harder.
Comment on August 6, 2008 @ 7:54 pm