we'll grind up democRATS and use them for bio-fuel just like they do turkey guts...
Posted on 08/26/2007 7:02:12 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
When Hurricane Katrina struck two years ago, Americans learned just how ill-equipped the government is to respond effectively to natural disasters. But if you think the government's response to Katrina was inept, brace yourself for peak oil.
Global oil production will hit its peak in the next few years, at which point oil prices will skyrocket and voracious consumers like the United States, China and Europe will quickly drain every last barrel they can afford to buy. Our per-capita oil consumption is double that of most European nations and more than triple Mexico's, and shows no sign of slowing. As supplies dwindle, an economic disaster on a par with Katrina will start to unfold.
Global oil demand is at 84 million barrels a day and rising, and there are at most a trillion barrels' worth still in the ground, most of which is very difficult and expensive to recover. Do the math, and you'll see that the end of oil is, at most, 30 years away.
But long before oil actually runs out, economists and energy analysts warn that extreme scarcity will cause prices to soar so high that it will no longer be feasible to use petroleum on a wide scale. It is the imminence of this supply-demand shortfall that has people like National Petroleum Council member Matthew Simmons and Reps. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., and Tom Udall, D-N.M., worried - very worried - about our economy's ability to withstand the end of oil.
In February, the U.S. Government Accountability Office dropped a quiet little bombshell: a report on peak oil concluding that there is an urgent need for a swift, coordinated government strategy to assess and develop alternative energy technologies to avert "severe economic damage."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The United States has reacted to the threat of peak oil and gas with all the alacrity of its response to climate change. It is ignoring the looming crisis for as long as it can, just waiting for that sledgehammer to land its first blow. Eventually, when a recession hits, tax revenue will plummet, and the government will have nowhere near the money it needs to build an alternative energy and transportation infrastructure. Every year that goes by without an intensive mobilization to build an oil-independent economy diminishes our odds of surviving the end of oil.
States, too, seem to have their heads in the sand. California, considered a leader in efforts to reduce carbon emissions, just cut funding for mass transit by $1.3 billion for the fiscal year. Like most states, it ignores the urgent need to build a transportation network that does not rely on fossil fuels.
At this point, you might be asking yourself: When oil becomes scarce, how will I get food? That's a very good question. Here are a few more: Will my garbage get picked up? How will my water district purify and deliver water and treat sewage without petrochemicals? What if I need an ambulance? What if my home is one of the 7.7 million that rely on oil for heating? Which of my medications are made out of petrochemicals? How will I get to work? Will I even have a job anymore?
But don't just ask yourself. Ask your elected officials, your public utility district and your grocer. Ask the U.S. Postal Service, Federal Express and American Airlines. Ask GM. If you have one, ask your financial adviser or stockbroker which companies will still be in business after peak oil hits. Odds are, he or she will give you a blank stare.
While the United States blindly carries on with business as usual, countries such as Sweden, Iceland and Ireland are taking steps to assess and mitigate peak oil impacts. Oil-rich Iran has begun rationing and has already cut oil consumption by 25 percent. But here at home, demand for oil is ever on the rise, and there is no talk of conserving reserves for essential goods and services or to develop an alternative energy infrastructure.
Instead, we are on course to squander every last drop on long solo commutes, leisure travel, mountains of plastic junk and the senseless transglobal shipment of unsustainably grown food.
That's where local government comes in. Small but growing numbers of municipalities are initiating a process that federal and state leaders should have begun 30 years ago, when domestic oil reserves peaked. They are, in short, figuring out Plan B.
In May, Oakland appointed an Oil Independent Oakland by 2020 Task Force. In June 2006, Portland, Ore., formed its own Peak Oil Task Force, which got busy fast: By March of this year, it had released its first major report, urging the city to "act big, act now," even without further study or analysis. The report prompted the city to pass a resolution to accelerate oil and gas conservation measures to halve Portland's fossil fuel consumption.
Last year, San Francisco passed a resolution to assess the city's vulnerability to oil depletion and to develop a transition plan. Other cities, from Austin, Texas, to Bloomington, Ind., are confronting the stark reality and trying their best to figure out how to soften the blow.
Cities are looking at options such as local food cultivation, urban redesign to minimize transportation needs, locally controlled electricity, rainwater catchment systems (to ensure local access to water for food cultivation), energy-efficient mass transit, and the preparation of emergency plans for sudden and severe food, water and energy shortages. They are embracing bio-regional sustainability - a concept once dismissed as an ecotopian fantasy that is suddenly starting to look like our last best hope.
Erica Etelson is a Berkeley journalist, former environmental attorney and oil independence activist. Contact her at oilindependence@yahoo.com.
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I'm speechless. Nary a word about the private sector, with its vast investment resources and human capital, stepping up to solve this problem. And to suggest the problem will happen one Sunday night so we will wake up to no jobs on Monday morning is pure, baseless scare-mongering and demagoguery. My professional experience in the energy industry proved conclusively that, when the government "invests" in new energy technologies, it makes poor decisions and does so much too far in advance of actual need so the investment ultimately goes to complete waste.
Why does this type of reporting surprise you at all? It is just another day of nonsense from the SFC
jas3
We’ll have developed something better long before oil supplies “dry up”.
we'll grind up democRATS and use them for bio-fuel just like they do turkey guts...
Render Michael Moore for whale oil.
Boring. Our children’s children’s children probably will not see the end of oil supplies.
When it becomes economically viable to change to something else, the free market will do it, and do it better than any government on Earth.
How about we drill for the oil that we know that we have instead of worrying about something that we might not have some day in the distant future?
“Americans learned just how ill-equipped the government is to respond effectively”
It’s why our founding fathers believed in limited government.
No where in the Constitution does it say it is responsible for this.
And we're supposed to take her serious??? ROTFLMAO!
The left is unhealthily obsessed with a future of doom and gloom and the destruction of all humanity brought on by the lack of tax revenues crippling government from implementing utopia.
We have billions upon billions of barrels of oil still untapped on this planet.
I have heard this nonsense of doom and gloom from the left my whole life and none of it has even come close to coming to pass.
An excerpt from here. Maybe Erica should chill and stop being so frigging hysterical
We’ve only been using oil as a fuel source for a couple of generations as it is. I suspect that the last generation to use oil is living today but running out won’t be their reason for switching.
I can’t believe this moronic line of questioning.
First, what counts is the price of suitable fuels. That is the only thing that counts. The price gives us a signal, or information about the availability of the raw material used to make the fuel. When the price rises high enough, alternatives become “viable”, a term and concept that liberals like this author are only familiar with when it is useful to try to stop development and progress, but are clueless when talking real world issues.
The US has more hydrocarbons, that are convertible to liquid fuels using proven technologies, in the form of coal and oil shales than Arab OPEC has in the form of crude oil.
This is documented and mapped out in a PDF presentation prepared by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, called the Clean Fuels Initiative.
see:
http://www1.eere.energy.gov/femp/energy_expo/2005/pdfs/t_s4c.pdf
We also have technology that is sufficient developed to project that converting organic waste including sewage sludge can replace most or all of US oil imports. This technology is presently being used to convert the waste from processing Butterball turkeys in Carthage, Missouri into a form of biodiesel liquid fuel for power plants and trucks.
see:
http://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/anything-oil
from the article:
Anything Into Oil
Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end.
by Brad Lemley, Photography by Dean Kaufman
he smell is a mélange of midsummer corpse with fried-liver overtones and a distinct fecal note. It comes from the worst stuff in the world—turkey slaughterhouse waste. Rotting heads, gnarled feet, slimy intestines, and lungs swollen with putrid gases have been trucked here from a local Butterball packager and dumped into an 80-foot-long hopper with a sickening glorp. In about 20 minutes, the awful mess disappears into the workings of the thermal conversion process plant in Carthage, Missouri.
Two hours later a much cleaner truck—an oil carrier—pulls up to the other end of the plant, and the driver attaches a hose to the truck’s intake valve. One hundred fifty barrels of fuel oil, worth $12,600 wholesale, gush into the truck, headed for an oil company that will blend it with heavier fossil-fuel oils to upgrade the stock. Three tanker trucks arrive here on peak production days, loading up with 500 barrels of oil made from 270 tons of turkey guts and 20 tons of pig fat. Most of what cannot be converted into fuel oil becomes high-grade fertilizer; the rest is water clean enough to discharge into a municipal wastewater system....
See: Anything to
Doomed, I tells ya! Just like in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, etc., etc.
Yep, I remember those ads in the ‘70s when I was a kid where that brat was telling “grownups to not be so fuelish” or there wouldn’t be any oil by the time he went to college. That kid has to be about 50 by now.
What’s going to happen? I’m going to take the writer’s bicycle.
Regarding Katrina, responsibility starts at the local level.
http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm
But of course we need to master the nuclear fusion reaction. That's where the real power is. And most environmentalist moonbats do not want to see such progress, or pay the price for it. I would like to see a lot of money and resources invested in developing it as a national strategic priority.
http://www.physorg.com/news3938.html
I still get a kick out of the fact that the majority of people do not realize that oil MAY not be a finite resource,and in fact we do not know how oil is made or how it circulates in the earth's crust.
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