I HATE AMERICA!
POSTED BY: chrisisall
UPDATED: Thursday, February 1, 2007 10:35
VIEWED: 17359
PAGE 7 of 14
Who really knows how much oil is left and who would tell us if they did?
When I was a freshman in highschool my Physics teacher told us that they were saying there was only about 30 years left of oil reserves left.
By that account, there would only be about 16 years left now.
I've often wondered if somebody hasn't figured out how to synthesize oil and that's what we're using in our cars now and the oil is simply a red herring to globalize the world. Probably far from the truth, but I don't believe that thought any less than the thought that there's 100 years of oil left, or 30, or 16... etc.... etc... etc...
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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30 or 100 years left, it is still a finite source of energy, folks. As in, there will be no more one of these days, and the day the last drop combusts isn't the moment to start searching for a solution. That there is potentially more oil in some untapped portion of wilderness doesn't change that fact. Now is the time to give a little more support (financial and otherwise) to the development of alternatives - not just because of the instability of the Middle East, but because that is what the future will require. Continuing to pour money into oil related technologies, companies and protections is throwing it out of the windows. Sadly, this administration doesn't take any of these seriously - hey, it isn't happening now or tomorrow, it isn't their problem right? 
It's a lack of foresight that I find deplorable in those that have been handed the responsibility of guiding the country on a track that will benefit us all in the future as well as the present.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Who really knows how much oil is left and who would tell us if they did?
When I was a freshman in highschool my Physics teacher told us that they were saying there was only about 30 years left of oil reserves left.
By that account, there would only be about 16 years left now.
Your teacher was right (and wrong.) Back in the 1930's when the American oilfields in the Southwest where openning up they started to do a study on oil production. What they found was that production formed a steep bell curve, so once a field hit maximum output that output begins to fall off sharply. This applied to all fields. It had been thought that inprovements in extraction techniques, especially injecting material into wells to keep the pressure up would fix the issue, instead they found it makes things worse. The faster you pump the stuff the sooner it deminishes. That doesnt mean that one day it just stops but you get deminishing returns on these existing wells and need new wells to make up the shortfall. Since oil companies start with the cheapest to exploit fields first, each successive replacement field becomes increasingly expensive and the cost of oil will rise.
So the short answer is yes, the cheap oil is running out, that's not the same as saying that all the oil is running out.
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Interesting point.
Another thing to consider is that when my teacher said there were only 30 years of oil left (back in 1994), I'm pretty sure most of us weren't counting on current relations with China and the fact that they will more than likely need much more power output than us in the near future, given their monsterous population.
Incidentally, if we're going to start curbing enviornmental destruction, China would be a good place to start. They don't care at all about any of their employees or their well being there. What would make anybody think they have any higher regard for the environment.
Of course, this is all hearsay, as I've never visited China to verify this myself. Mabye they all get 2 naps a day and those little milk cartons we used to get as kids at school and are paid twice per capita what we do here and our criminal Media is just making up stories here too. Surely it wouldn't be the first time. "A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Bloody....it's cute that you think Europe is all self sufficient and all. It really is!
ah, taking it to the extreme of what I said, that's mature. nowhere can be completely self sufficient, but I would like to be part of a continent that could do business for what it needed, rather than making up excuses to go to war over over it because they feel they have a god-given right of access to all the world's resources at low, low prices.
--------------------------------------
"I'm an artist, with an e and a beret."
;'>)
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As I heard a Russian comedian once say ( or something like it)
" Joo have freedoms of speak in Jamerica. We Jhave freedoms of speak in Russia too. Jyou can say I dislike president Buch in Jamerica, we can say the jsame. I dislike president Buch in Russia too."
Z
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Quote:We can synthesize many petroleum products including gasoline. We can generate gasoline from vegetable oil or coal, for instance. And there are gasoline substitutes, other volatile fluid compound that can be extracted from natural resources that a combustion engine will or can be made to run on. The reason why we use petroleum is because it’s cheap.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I've often wondered if somebody hasn't figured out how to synthesize oil and that's what we're using in our cars now and the oil is simply a red herring to globalize the world. Probably far from the truth, but I don't believe that thought any less than the thought that there's 100 years of oil left, or 30, or 16... etc.... etc... etc...
And for a hundred years we’ve been told that we were going to run out a gasoline in x number of years, with x usually being some relatively small number like 10-30. Obviously those statistics have never been able to pin down the gasoline crisis as well as it may have been thought, and the reasons for that is in how we characterize what we know, or rather what we don’t know. We assume the number of known oil deposits is all there is, but we’ve been finding new deposits throughout the last century. We assume that our technology will remain constant in terms of the oil problem, and that also has not been true. As our technology and understanding increases we become better at extracting and refining petroleum from existing sources and better at finding new sources.
It’s also important to understand that the oil crisis, much like the global warming crisis, is only certain in the minds of the media, the scientists for the most part understand these limitations to our knowledge. Where it gets screwed up is when the media gets hold of it and starts telling people that the USGS or the department of the interior says we are going to run out of oil in ten years. That’s probably not what they said, but that might have been as much as a journalist with no qualified education of the issue could understand. The same thing occurs with global warming. The Guardian reports that the polar ice caps are melting, but in reality the Antarctic ice cap is actually growing.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Quote:
Originally posted by AURaptor:
Bloody....it's cute that you think Europe is all self sufficient and all. It really is!
Come on, AURaptor. Give some credit where credit is due. The Europeans did manage to keep themselves from being forced to speak German in the 40's and Russian in the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's all by themselves. They also managed to completely rebuild their destroyed infrastructure and feed the tens of millions of their own homeless refugees immediately following that minor inconvenience they'd experienced with that Austrian fellow.
No, wait. I'm sorry, I'm getting their delusions mixed up with reality. I guess you were correct after all.
P.S. America could totally get away from its reliance on foreign sources of fuel if only our own Congress would let us tap the sources we already have right here, in own country.
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Folks forget most plastic is also petrol-based.
The lack of plastic would hurt us as a society far more than a lack of fuel, in all honesty.
-F
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Charlie.
Please don't feed the trolls.
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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