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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chas. who wrote (2520)	11/22/2003 9:08:18 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Nuclear energy can replace 98% of petroleum based necessities well, i guess there's the theory and then there's the practicality side of things... when was the construction permit issued for the last nuclear power plant in the US? 1973. how many nuke plants are there in California, the greatest energy consumer in the US? they're illegal in California. how about the "Top Ten Lies about Nuclear Power"? culturechange.org there is no political will for nukes in the US. eventually, when oil is over $100 a barrel, there will be some will. but even then, it will be expensive. and this is important: ALL of the petroleum alternatives are more expensive (often MUCH more expensive) on a per-BTU basis than petroleum at $30 a barrel. in ten years, we might be looking at $100 oil and maybe the alternatives are $250 BOE. eventually they will match. but if our society has to pay, e.g., $250 BOE, we cannot afford our current lifestyles or anything approximating them. this means our economy must eventually contract considerably. since our economy runs on debt (which requires perpetual growth in order to be sustained), our economy will probably collapse, imo. this is the highly optimistic "TL/EV" scenario, where the only thing tough is "love" and the only violence is "economic". America will end up like Mexico IAM as there will be two classes...the Ruling Rich and the Working Poor... i agree. right now the working poor are sedated because even they have access to 58 full-time petroleum "worker bees" embodied in our oil consumption, which vastly improves their physical standard of living. but scarcity of these resources will of course hit them the hardest, and given our egregious concentration of wealth among the rich, it seems to me that a Brazil-type arrangement will likely exist at some point in the US future. at least until things get really anarchical, which could be, perhaps, a "Road Warrior" scenario. i have no idea how these things will play out in their particulars--it seems like Science Fiction to try to predict them given the many interdependent imponderables. what is not imponderable are the current depletion rate, the current discovery rate, the current production rate, the historical trends of same, the prospects and net costs (monetary and energywise) of petroleum alternatives, and the attendant, impending bitchslap wending its way toward the face of the US economy and Way of Life, in my humble opinion. have other scenarios but usually get barred from the boards or put on ignore for expressing them hey, there are worse things in life :)... besides, i think russ reads CI, and they are onto the peak oil argument themselves. what are your scenarios?