Fear mongering is the 2nd oldest profession...
And infinitely more immoral than the 1st...
It's made >>> $100,000,000 for Al Gore.

Jiggs,

As has been pointed out before, human beings are not bacteria in a petri dish.

another hmm...

No, actually it is 2060.
Sir Isaac Newton

And thank you for creating a straw man, and not showing where I said the gas pumps would run dry.

Anyway, you kinda define those limits yourself when you try to suggest the markets will fix everything on their own. Markets entirely dependent on access to cheap energy to begin with.

No one said it would be pleasant. It won't provide what light crude has for mankind, not by a longshot. But it's doubtful industrial nations will really have much choice but to begin a serious push towards renewables... within 10-15 years, by modest estimation. You can poo-poo renewables all you like, and make vague allusions to all the "engineers" you've allegedly met and talked with about it all. But heavier and dirtier FINITE hydro-carbons are not going to do any better meeting demand. Nor will they do much for the global economy, especially when you factor in environmental costs. They are the wrong way. Investment should be poured into finding the technology to make renewables the right way.

And yet you mock the legit concerns of population explosion. Either you don't get how exponential growth applies to world population growth already bursting at the seams, or you do get it and your Frank Drebbin "nothing to see here" approach willfully contradicts basic mathematics.

Ball bearings are not an energy source... and not really a "new" gain.

ball bearings ITT, why didn't anyone else ever think of that JFC!

dont worry everybody, the government has fixed the oil leak

.

i think we've had the technology for workable alternative energy for a long time. Tesla thought he could have built a tower to provide unlimited amounts of wireless electricity for the whole world. the reason these technologies are not being used today is that energy is used as a means of control and the US dollar (petro dollar) is basically backed by oil.

all the car companies developed working, fully electric cars, two decades ago. The EV1 that GM made looked like it was an awesome car that lots of people wanted. so the cars that we had 20 years ago are still not available to the public and since technology has obviousloy improved over the last two decades, the electric cars that we could build today would be a lot better. instead, all we have are things like the Prius and other crap hybrids which don't even reduce the carbon footprint when compared to other cars (not that a carbon footprint matters to me, but some people incorrectly think it's important).

also, i think that oil is a renewable resource. i think that oil is not a fossil fuel and is instead created by chemical processes near the center of the earth and is pushed outward towards the surface where it collects in oil pools.

but there is some promising stuff being done with the more "mainstream" renewable energy alternatives. it might not be too long before solar pannels are powerful enough to proivde electricty to houses. so there really isn't a crisis with respect to energy. there is a ton of oil and natural gas out there and the prospects for developing new sources of electricity look promising.

Wait, there is a debate on how oil is actually formed?

i sense a tinge of sarcasm; or blinding ignorance

yeah, the Thomas Gold abiotic theory has been put to bed a long time ago by peer review. ... either way, not really the point.... because, well, where is it?

really? the IEA, the EIA, the Pentagon, the DoE, ASPO, and countless petrol geologists seem to disagree with you.


is that so? where exactly? in what amount? i've asked this of dozens of posters here... No one can really point to anything more than a few weeks/months of supply in any one location.

More hollow vague allusion...

If you are talking about a few weeks/months supply for the entire planet in one location; obviously not. from what i have read we easily have enough cheap oil in its numerous recoverable forms for the next several decades. obviously we will need to transfer from oil to other forms of fuel for transportation eventually (i say this since we have enough coal for centuries) but the market will better be able to find ways to do this than a politician making mandates.

:tinf oil:

Hell no. It's made from dinosaurs.

PVN poops oil?

I call bull**** on Brian's article:

1. Foreign flagged ships routinely enter US waters.

2. Even if they couldn't, the rig isn't in US territorial waters (within 12 miles of shore)

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

fyp

I read that and it basically said it was crazy russian scientists from 30 years ago that thought this but I guess its still going on.

White people should be banned from voting in elections so Obama can tackle this mess. http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sh...#ixzz0qTxFXnY4

i think there's lots in Alaska, but most of it is not being allowed to be brought to market. Also there's lots in the Bakken.

and as we've seen from what's happening in the Gulf, that basically if you drill deep enough in some locations, you'll find all the oil you could ever want. Russia was the first country to start drilling these super deep wells (but they were smart enough to do it on land, not in the ocean)... and now Russia is the leading oil producer (or close to it afaik).

also, the oil pools that do exist are having their reserves naturally replenished. the peak oil people look at some of the data and they realize that a lot of these OPEC countries report the same reserves year after year, despite the fact that they extract lots of oil from these wells... so the peak oil people assume they are lying about the reserve levels and then go onto make assumptions about how much oil they think really exists in the reserves and the depletion rates.

and i'm not saying that you can't drill an oil well dry.... because this can obviously happen if you extract oil quicker than it refills... but if you come back a few decades later, a lot of oil wells fill back up again.

so if you work under the assumption that there is a finite amount of oil out there and that these known reserves are finite and that we can't find any more big oil deposits, than i can see why people believe in peak oil. but if you think that there's lots of oil out there, and that the wells fill back up again after you drill from them... then there really isn't an energy crisis.

the oil industry is dominated by a few big oil companies who are in bed with governments all around the world. there are lots of smaller oil companies, but they have to get permission from the government to drill. so i think they're creating artificial scarcity to keep the price high. if you can control energy, you have a lot of control... so i believe that they picked oil to use as the main energy source for the global economy because there was so much of it, but the supply was easy to control to create the artificial scarcity

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1115006620100611

Can someone give me cliff notes on what's currently going on down there? Are they trying something new with a cool name like "top kill" or "junk shot"?

No. Current plans are continue with the cap while getting a bigger cap ready. They will also start using the tubes that pumped the mud during the top kill to suck up even more of the oil and burn it. All while trying to drill the relief well.

They are also having to ship in more tankers and such to the area as the flow is so much that the current capacity on sight can't handle it all if they were at peak efficiency.

At least, that's my understanding.