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Nate13
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I disagree. Do you really believe petroleum is necessary to be able to feed 7billion people? If so explain how you came to this conclusion. I’d also like to ask why you don’t see the possibility of using oil purely for farming, military, and aerospace applications as a viable option for an extended future?
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StAnastasia
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Seven billion people presently are eating thanks to petroleum, natural gas, and other non-renewable fossil fuel resources used to cultivate, plant, irrigate, harvest, process, transport, and market food. Read Dale Pfeiffer’s Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture (New Society Publishers, 2006)
When affordable oil is used up over the next couple of decades when the global population may be nine billion), there is no scalable substitute that can replace it.
That may very well happen. As cheap petroleum gets used up I imagine we will see the militaries of the world begin to hoard and stockpile it for strategic use. China is already sewing up all the remaining contacts in Africa that it can get. Of course, if the military et al. get the oil, that will leave the working and soccer-mom population suddenly without fuel for their SUVs. The best off will be people within biking or walking or train and bus distance from work, church, hospitals, schools, shops. The worst off will be people in distant suburbs, for whom any errand is a car trip. They will begin to see their home equity plummet like stones. People within reach of public transportation or cycling and walking networks will see their house values skyrocket.
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StAnastasia
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"The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.
Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings:
• The worldwide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40 percent of the photosynthetic capability of this planet.
• The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet’s carrying capacity.
• Studies suggest that without fossil fuel-based agriculture, the United States could only sustain about two-thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion.
“Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, re-localized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world’s population.”
amazon.com/Eating-Fossil-Fuels-Coming-Agriculture/dp/0865715653/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318283893&sr=8-1
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Nate13
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Your denying the fact that alternatives exist. It is already within our capability to create machines to get us from one place to another that travel over 30 mph if not up to 60mph operating solely on human movement. You are making a lot of assumptions as to our capabilities outside of petroleum. I agree that there may be a period of time where times are hard and transportation is difficult, but I believe it would only be a matter of time before it was resolved in an acceptable way. I’d also argue against saying that housing values outside of the cities would plummet. Depending on how hard times get that may be the safest place to be. It is also where food is grown and thus is going to increase in value exponentially if food becomes scarce.
The whole point is that yes fossil fuels helped us get to where we are today. They have allowed us to get to a point where we are able to foresee technologies that would allow us to maintain a living standard that is much much higher than it was before we were using fossil fuels.
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StAnastasia
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Nate, you should know that bearing false witness is against the commandments, and that’s precisely what you are doing to me. I never denied there are alternatives; I said “there is no scalable substitute that can replace it.” And what I said is quite true: there are no alternatives presently known that can replace cheap petroleum sufficient to feed seven billion people. Biodiesel and ethanol take more energy to produce than they yield. Solar, wind, tidal and geothermal all take huge (name removed by moderator)ut of cheap petroleum to manufacture the infrastructure of turbines, windmills, and solar panels.
Of course I’m making assumptions: I do so because to date no one has invented and marketed these dream machines of yours.
This is your magical thinking at work.
When people can’t commute to work any longer, they will have to move close to their jobs, in cities. No one else will be commuting either, so no one will want to buy their houses. The values of houses far from public transportation will crash.
Exactly. And when fossil fuels are gone forever – since they took hundreds of millions of years to lay down – that high standard of living will disappear.
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Elizabeth502
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In which case, he merely misunderstood you. He did not “bear false witness [against The Commandments].”
Stop attributing malevolent motives to people when having understandable disagreements and misinterpretations on a discussion board, for heaven’s sake. There’s no need to engage in moral hyperbole directed at repliers who are merely seeking clarity, and accuse them of mortal sin. You do this as a habit on CAF. Several people have noticed that.
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StAnastasia
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“Your [sic] denying the fact that alternatives exist” is a blatant falsehood. I have been careful not to say this.
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Warrior1979
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It’s nice to see that there are other people out there that “get it.”
As you’ve already noted, it’s not just petroleum; it’s “cheap” petroleum. People simply talk in platitudes regarding this matter, and ignore basic physical principles.
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RaymondJensen
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I think i can answer that. He wants us to have free will. He gave us free will and he doesn’t want to take that back. doing something that will force us to submit to him is taking that free will back.
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StAnastasia
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Warrior, I have a book chapter on this topic coming out in the spring. I am a theologian working with a Catholic physicist and oil developer who has become concerned at the number of holes he’s drilling that are coming up dry.It’s nice to see that there are other people out there that “get it.”
Correct. The law of supply and demand shows that there will always be oil out there, because as the supply declines the price will rise. But how will oil meaningfully be there when it costs $1,000 per barrel on the commodity market? Or when it takes a barrel of oil in extraction costs to extract a barrel of oil? It won’t take much to push us over the tipping point into economic and political chaos. When gasoline hits a certain price point, long-distance commutes from suburbia into cities will simply become unworkable (e.g., Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Boston). What is that tipping point? $6.00 per gallon? $10.00? $15.00?
When people can’t afford to commute, they’ll either lose their jobs or abandon their now worthless suburban homes and more into city rentals. When independent truckers can no longer afford the skyrocketing diesel costs they’ll idle their trucks and supermarket shelves will begin to look bare;m we’ll all suffer, not just those living in suburbia.
Let’s pray, hope, and strategize for the future.
StAnastasia
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Nate13
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The other options don’t have a market yet because no one takes the problem seriously. I don’t know how long that will take but I believe it would only take 4 years to get other options on the street. However even if it took other alternatives time to get on the street in bulk I don’t believe it would affect a majority of people. The average commute is 24 minutes. I believe its a safe assumption that most people could make that commute on bike in twice that time if not less. How many people drive cars in China to get work everyday? The transportation argument is moot in my opinion. Gasoline prices will eventually soar and people will give up their cars and most will make do by other means. Some with longer commutes may be punished but a vast majority of people will get by.
Article on commute times:
usgovinfo.about.com/od/censusandstatistics/a/commutetimes.htm
If the government is smart, they at some point will not allow gasoline to be used in cars for normal travel based on national security reasons. Trucks carrying goods, mass transit, air travel, and military applications will be the only ones allowed to use gasoline. The longer they wait to do it once gas prices start soaring, the more pain we will feel because of it. Stupidity could rain here, so who knows you might be right and we get to feel quite a bit of hurt, because it takes us too long to prioritize our use of oil.
The biggest hurt will be from how oil is currently being used in other applications. I think this argument makes a lot more sense, considering how many other uses for oil we have besides powering our cars. If we prioritized our uses for oil quickly enough I think you could minimize damage to the overall economy. $6 a gallon would be when I would throw in the towel and set a date by which in the near future gasoline use for normal travel would no longer be allowed.
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Nate13
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I’m sorry if you felt I was not being fair to you. My point was that we don’t need to fully replace what we currently have. A vast majority of people don’t need a vehicle that can travel 60mph to get to work. I think a case could be made that trucks that are responsible for the distribution of goods around the county might need 60mph capability, but I already talked about that solution above. I think we disagree on what would be considered an acceptable replacement, which is why my statement came on so strong. While you didn’t deny their are alternatives, as far as I can tell you deny that they are good enough to prevent a catastrophic collapse and overemphasis the affect that not having oil for daily transportation will have. If we saved oil for where it is needed we could probably get it to last us another 1000 years, which would be plenty of time to continue research into finding more viable solutions.
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StAnastasia
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Nate, it’s easy on this kind of forum to trash another’s arguments and leave hurt feelings. For my part, I apologize if I came on too strongly with you. I would reply at length but I’m scrambling to prepare a talk for a confernece in Mexico next week. For now, here is an intriguing opening to an article:
Peak oil - are we sleepwalking into disaster?
Submitted by Mikael Höök on Sat, 2011-07-23 10:13.
“Governments and oil companies have been silent over the ramifications of fossil fuel depletion, but we have now reached the moment for urgent debate on a future without cheap oil. Like climate change, peak oil is often perceived by the more pessimistic analysts as one of those apocalyptic conundrums where we are already past the tipping point – meaning that any solutions human ingenuity can deliver will simply mitigate the worst-case scenario. Certainly, oil-field discoveries have been in sharp decline since the 1970s. And there is a consensus that peak oil has already been reached, at some point between 2004 and 2008. This does not bode well at a time when huge emerging nations like China and India are experiencing energy-hungry industrial revolutions. China’s economic growth was 11 per cent last year and in India, it reached 9 per cent. Increased demand could soon outstrip depleted supplies…”
peakoil.net/headline-news/peak-oil-are-we-sleepwalking-into-disaster
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buffalo
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Have you not been following the extensive petroleum and natural gas finds?
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StAnastasia
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Yes, I do follow those.
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buffalo
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What? Then your posts make no sense.
Plenty of fossil fuel in the ground? Yes or No
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Warrior1979
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The amount of fossil fuel is not the only issue. To keep is simple, Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) is the issue. If it costs $10 to obtain $5 worth of energy, the amount becomes irrelevant for widespread distribution.
FWIW, I’m also fortunate enough to have a professional peer that is geologist and trained in the oil/natural gas industries. One of the things he repeatedly notes is how the yields of these new find turn out to be much smaller than predicted, and how fast they peak.
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StAnastasia
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Yes, they make eminent sense.
For the next couple of years, perhaps. For the next thousand years, no. The undeniable point related to this thread is that Homo sapiens will reach zero population growth like any other species on a finite planet. This will happen whether we choose to reach that point or not.
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Nate13
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Please explain how not having petroleum is going to make feeding 7 billion people+ impossible?
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