For the past lets say 50 years or so "Oil" has become the hot commodity so much so that Alaska's natural beauty has been ravaged simply to fuel our addiction. Most of you might not know this but we as a society are addicted to oil. If we are addicted to something; the logical thing to do is to take it away. If a person is truly addicted something but it is not a need at first they will try to fight it. After ways they will learn to adapt. For e.g. taking a train, bike riding, and simply walk to your destination. I do understand that the three examples i listed are very limited in there scope but there is another great alternative; An all electric car which is actually cheaper than a gasoline car and just as fast "you could get a speeding ticket" As quoted from Tom Hanks.

Great Documentary, You should check it out. (it should be on youtube)

Sure you use a hybrid car but this is going to be expensive in the long haul. The cost of the battery + labor cost which for a new engine is a whopping 5000 dollars. This cost is expensive that a owner of a hybrid is skeptical on wheter he should buy a new battery. It is stated on the forums that it could cost anywhere from 2000 - 5000 thousand dollars. Doing more research i found that the warranty put on the car is about 100,000 miles or 10 years but as hybrids get older and older people are begging the question how can i replace my battery. But as more and more electric cars age how long will the battery last. I however do actually believe in hybrids and some people have even gone 250,000 miles without trouble but the problem here is that if you don't use you hybrid that much over a course of say 10 years it could easily break down without have saved the cost of the gasoline purchased.

Person Asking for Hybrid Battery Cost

Hybrid Car Replacement Newspost(Don't forget to check out page 2)

Once the oil runs out the next cheapest and most efficient alternative would be bio fuel. I know what you must be saying; Geo thermal, solar, wind, tide, hydro, and all of these other alternatives are great but companies around the world epically in America will think it is too costly and to have a competitive edge in the market they have to be the cheapest. It has been shown in the past 100 years or so that food prices have sky rocketed. This is in part due to diminishing farm land and peoples desire for meat which requires food to feed said animals. This shows that if demand were to offsets the supply of fruit/vegetables then cost will sky rocket. Because this happened over the course of century we know it will happen again and since the oil we dig out the earth is finite and takes millions of years to replenish the only alternative will be bio fuel. Bio fuel will take away supply from food thus causing food to sky rocket. This will cause people in already famine stricken areas to not be able to purchase food. This will cause international uprisings in China, India, Large parts of Africa, and perhaps Mexico.

Wikipedia (Biofuel)

Because food has risen to such a point people will need more water. Unfortunately water is becoming more and more desired, to such a degree
in which neighboring countries have contested about ownership. Because we are in the starting phases of need and wants we at first will compromise but as this resource becomes more wanted wars will be started over it such as the war in the middle east for oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_crisis

A good example of a tense situation is the neighboring counties of India and Pakistan. The main water source for the country of Pakistan is the Indus river of which all or most of the water runs upstream from India. Thus if India were to build dams (which they likely will) to protect their precious water then the flow of water to Pakistan will be limited to such a degree that they will have to blow up the dam or declare war in either situation a large feud will occur.



Water Treaty Article

For however long man has wanted something war was always been the answer for a quick and easy fix. Instead we should look ahead and leave something to behind for a children, our grandchildren, becuase of us we will be thought up as the generation that could.



As par the discussion i have added a cost of electricity cost table.

Electricity Chart

Post has been edited 5 time(s), last time on Jul 15 2011, 2:21 pm by Tempz.

This looks rather interesting, but I didn't have time to watch the videos you included.
Are you looking to discuss issues with oil, water, or energy? The topic says war for oil, but you transitioned somewhere half through to something different...

I live in New York. A massive ammount of area around me is powered by a hydroelectric plant in Niagara Falls.
The problem that lies with this kind of power is the availability.

Maybe we should produce energy based on where we live? Areas with rivers should build hydroelectric plants. Places with high volcanic activity should use geothermal. If you live in the desert you should put up a few solar panels. If you're on a windy plain build some wind turbines. If you happen to find yorself in a rural farmland with lots of agriculture maybe bio fuels are more efficient.
I think it's pretty dumb to think that there would be a one size fits all solution to a problem of this scale.

5 minutes of video, 10 minutes of reading tops...

Umm well i started with idea that resources were expensive but it was getting too long so i cut a majority of the things out.

In retrospect not alot of people know about how precious our resources are so most people wouldn't reply with anything. I should of done a more relate-able and current topic perhaps about rising oil prices.

Ok so I watched the videos (didn't see they were only 2 minutes each before) and I never knew that thing about the electric car. I'm not entirely sure if it's true, but if they could have built an electric car that was more efficient I would have been impressed.
I think the idea died because the primary focus was on global warming and the environment. People just made the argument that it only moved the pollution from the tailpipe to the smokestack, which is still true in many ways. People weren't quite as concerned about the depleting oil.

Also I think the water video paints the U.S. as a little worse than it actually is. Don't get me wrong we still use more water than we should, but I also think the U.S. is at least second to, if not the highest, agriculturally productive country per capita in the world. More crops = more water used to grow food etc.

Really? If anything I would think that stuff like this should be common knowledge. They really overprioritized teaching it in my school.

Electric cars are a temporary solution, and the technology still isn't there. Better public transportation is a far more efficient solution. Oil has peaked and if we ever withdraw from the Middle East our prices will be silly. I still feel that the majority of the issue is caused by people driving massive 5 person vehicles with 1 person in them probably something like 90% of the time. There should be one HOV lane and the rest tiny lanes for mini-cars/motorcycles. America's obsession with luxury/fucking gigantic cars confuses me to no end.


If you're anywhere that's near water besides a big city, build a nuclear power plant. /fin

http://www.thetakeaway.org/blogs/takeaway/2011/mar/14/nuclear-power-reactors-us/

This topic could easily be split into an Oil/Energy thread and a Water thread. I'm only interested in the oil side. Taken a while for a Peak Oil thread to be put up here really - lets see just how many people are in the denial camp.

Note: when he says we are addicted to oil, he is not exaggerating, even a little bit. Oil is not used for just fuelling your car. Oil is used to create plastic. Oil is used to create pesticides. Oil is used to create fertilisers. Oil is put into tractors and farm equipment to grow food. Tarseal/bitumen is made from heavy oils - our roads are literally oil. Absolutely everything in modern life depends on oil.

Cheap oil is running out.

The technology isn't there because oil companies don't want it to be there. It's the same reasoning that caused the rotary engine to be underdeveloped, even though they are theoretically much more efficient than the back-and-forth motion of pistons found in most modern cars (which wastes energy purely by design). Greed has an incredible way of harming a society.

I sometimes cook with oil! But the oil used for making diesel and gasoline is a significant source for our oil consumption, and reducing or eliminating oil needed for vehicles would greatly reduce the rate we consume oil.


Although this will probably never happen, I am a huge advocate for nuclear power. The word "nuclear" seems to be a trigger word that causes people to shun it, even though with the proper regulations, it is one of the safest and most efficient alternative energy sources.

You can also look at this hilarious chart if you think nuclear power is dangerous:
All of the above listed sources of power (even solar power and wind power) have a higher chance to kill people than nuclear power in comparison to the energy they generate. There have only been three major accidents exist for the history of nuclear reactors, and one of those was even completely contained. Keep in mind that this was several years ago with poor regulations to blame.

There are alternatives which will drastically reduce our dependence on oil, but politics, company greed and general ignorance have effectively prevented us from proceeding.

@Roy


Pie Graph (Oil)

Even by looking at the top companies names you can tell that it the majority of oil comes from the middle east about 1/3rd

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Jul 15 2011, 2:20 am by Tempz.

Source, please. I don't trust anything with tinges of "They discovered the cure for cancer, but the evil corporations would rather sell chemotherapy than cure it". It's always bullshit, in my experience, relying purely on truthiness.

On the subject of water, I expect a lot of the third world to be screwed. Probably not China, which will likely get rich before the shortages set in. On the subject of energy, I expect dwindling supplies to temporarily reduce living standards to more sustainable levels, as research and technological progress continues to accelerate and later reverse the trend and raise living standards once more. Or maybe they'll never drop significantly, as we lower our demands, advance renewables, and find new sources of fossil fuels rapidly enough. There is a ton of energy around; we're just going for the easy, less expensive sources first. We'll go for the lower EROI (Energy Return On Investment) later, located deeper underground/underwater, in the form of shale, in the arctic, etc.

The best major countries to be in where/if shortages of anything set in, in my opinion, are the USA, Canada, and Russia. Minor ones like Norway, which has abundant supplies of both water and stored away energy resources for a rainy day, would also make the list if it was larger. All three of the countries above have huge reserves of fresh water (Great Lakes, Lake Baikal), and apart from the United States, are capable of exporting far more energy than they use. And, apart from Canada, which is too geographically isolated to be threatened by any but the US itself, they can defend themselves from outside threats.

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 15 2011, 6:32 am by Centreri.

A 40 year old nuclear reactor got hit by a 9.0 earthquake and a gigantic tsunami, and still barely hit meltdown. 1 person died- due to heart attack. I'm not really sure what else you expect, these things really don't randomly happen anymore, the media just blew this tremendously out of proportion because they're completely fucking inept at handling anything even remotely related to science.

As for it being unrenewable, from what I can tell this is a complete non-issue. Even with no future findings whatsoever, which is absurd, and no improvement of the nuclear process, which is equally absurd, we have 85 years before we have to deal with energy again.

From other sites:



Now, combine the two: what will happen when nuclear power plants become more widespread? Simple economics says the demand will increase, and thus the price. This in turn will lead to increasing supplies of uranium through exploration and discovery, and then in turn to improving more efficient technologies (breeder reactors). On top of that, we already know where tons of deposits are, it's just not worthwhile to actually mine from them because demand isn't high enough to sustain such an investment.

Another option- fast reactors:



Here's a complete article that gives the argument very clearly: http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.aspx

Long story short: we should have been done with humanity's energy crisis 50 years ago. Fuck people.

Yeah, I was going off of memory, and I've probably just built a bias for this attitude. You can look up Wankel engines and find some interesting points, particularly regarding General Motors:
I remember hearing about GM buying multiple rotary patents only to not use them (I couldn't find a particular source to highlight this, however). General Motors is actually a great company to examine to support my point, though. They have a peculiar history with electric cars, as well - Tempz's linked video "Who Killed the Electric Car" points some fingers at the company and oil companies (although the reason the car was discontinued is more likely because the EV1 was very costly to manufacture).

I was under the impression that breeder reactors are banned in the US. And the NZ government is even worse; to appease the grown up hippies they've banned all nuclear power in NZ.

Er, a hell of a lot more than 1/3. You have to go more than 3/4 of the way around before you even find a 1st world country, and Venezuela is the only non-Middle East prior to that.

Those are reserves, not actual production numbers.

Note that OPEC members have kept their reserve numbers static for decades now. That is, they said back in 1989 that they had 100 billion barrels of oil. 20 years later after having produced 40-50 billion barrels of oil, they still claim to have 100 billion barrels of oil, despite new discoveries not adding up to anywhere near that figure. Improved extraction from new technologies does increase the recoverable barrels over time, but the figures produced by OPEC countries are generally distrusted by those in the oil industry.

The reason OPEC countries lie about their reserves is because they have a production quota system, where the countries with the largest reserves get to produce the most. Production = money, so it is in all of their best interests to inflate their reserve figures. Similarly it is in all of their best interests not to reduce their reserves over time, because if they start at 100 and decline to 50, and their neighboring country just stays at 80, over time they'd end up being able to produce less, as per OPEC's rules.

This is just another reason why cheap oil is fast running out - OPEC are lying to us about how much they have left.

From what little I read on Wikipedia, "They don't use them because they're evil corporations" doesn't fit. They have advantages and disadvantages, just like any other piece of technology. The same applies to electric cars.

As for nuclear energy, I support it, but it's not cheap, either. All of that "We should've been done with the energy crisis 50 years ago" crap is idiotic. As much is built as is economical, except when a government is turned against it. As far as I know, thankfully, the United States has not been stupidly influenced in this manner. But there are alternatives, even so.

Um, yes it is?


Not even close. Do a bit of research- R&D nevermind production of nuclear plants is not even remotely charting a normal growth for a new technology.

Nuclear power, if it were actually implemented to it's fullest extent using modern engineering and techniques, would be very cheap and clean.

The problem is that we're stuck with all of these old designs that are inherently unsafe - storing spent fuel rods in pools of water that are essentially exposed to the atmosphere, which is a big problem at Fukushima and a standard design across America.

Another issue is essentially the politics of it all - the public have generally been so concerned about nuclear issues, that politicians have encumbered plant operators with so many regulations and safety measures that it makes the plants cost hugely more than they should, both to build and to operate, as well as far longer to get consents before they can begin construction. These huge costs encourage the operators to cut corners and put everyone's safety at risk (Japanese plant operators have covered up radiation leaks and other problems in the past, as well as forged safety checks).

If we had modern nuclear designs, as well as a regulatory environment that was actually sane and allowed re-processing of fuel, then nuclear would be very cheap and solve a lot of our problems. Unfortunately since the Fukushima disaster, nuclear power has been set back hugely around the world.

@Faz
Hmm point taken; i guess was worked up by the media hype.

But i will volunteer the fastest land transport vehicle (its not a train >:O) in the world and its clean... (i would suppose its cheap but i have nothing to back my statement but since its essentially a train that has magnetic levitation so it probably has less drag then a train but the magnets are a key factor as well)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29

Imagine this, you live in New York and want to have a lunch in china with the estimated speeds it could go you'd be able to travel to china for a quick snack and come back from your break...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 15 2011, 1:38 pm by Tempz.

Source for nuclear power being cheaper than extracting fossil fuels, Faz. And yeah, no shit it doesn't follow the normal technological development path. That's because each nuclear plant costs billions of dollars, making a nuclear plant a very long-term investment.

Lathanide, I don't think that the specifics of reactor designs is anything anyone on SEN knows enough about to make such statements. Saying "Oh, yeah, Wikipedia says it's very cheap and clean, they're just doing it wrong" sounds very stupid.

Electricity Chart
Hope this is enough however its complicated ;O (only 2 variables that matter the 2 right most)

Of course this chart is a estimate based on our current fuel consumption.