Just saw Kenneth Deffeyes speak on CSPAN tonight about his new book Beyond Oil. Bottom line: we've reached the most amount of oil that we can get out of the ground, or we've found about 94% of all of the oil that is in the world and we don't have anything lined up to take care of our energy needs once this runs out. Take a look at the Summary of the oil production and use over the course of it's discovery.
Conserving won't extend it to the degree that we use energy.
This message needs to get out to the public.
1 comment:
Agree completely.
Pricing on energy (fossil fuels) is based on cost of production. That means the traditional concept of intrinsic value is ignored in the pricing equation.
Since petroleum is produced in the ground by extremely slow processes, and the rate of comsumptionn outstrips the slow rate of creation,, then the total supply is PLUMMETTING. This should lead to geometric (and possibly even exponential) increases in the instrinsic value and thus cost as well.
This country (and many other) is poised for a REALLY big 'OH SH*T! We're out of oil...." at some unknown point in the not too distant future.
Of course, calculating the intrinsic value of petroleum woulld require knowing exactly how much there is and what the annual rate of regeneration is (I'm thinking not too much). But this seems very similiar to the Hiesenberg uncertainty principle- how do we KNOW how mcuh there is?
Because of this, it seems that significant resources need to be channeled to developing and Energy Plan B....
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