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Gold/Mining/Energy : PEAK OIL - The New Y2K or The Beginning of the Real End? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wyätt Gwyön who wrote (65)	2/14/2005 12:18:30 PM
From: kryptonic6	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1183

Darffot, You are absolutely correct: the EROEI ratio varies from each individual well, what i meant is i thought the average EROEI for conventional oil was around 30 to 1, but I would have to look it up. What i know for a fact is that the EROEI of oil is astronomically higher than every alternative system currently in existence, and that is the main point i wanted to get across. I also want to say that i know practically nothing about the stock market/investing. I don't know what a CL is. I'm only 20 and the first time I traded a stock was last December. I learned about Peak Oil one year ago, and have done an enormous amount of reading about it, and decided that I wanted to at least profit from the oil crash since there's nothing we can do to stop it, and most importantly, nobody knows or cares about it. I have talked to so many people here at University of Michigan, at my grocery store job, at my DOD job, in my dorm, friends, family, friends on the internet, strangers on the internet. No one, not my graduate student instructors, not even my P.h.D. professors know about Peak Oil. When the faculty and student population at one of the most liberal Universities in America don't have any idea of whats going on, you know we're screwed. My I/O Psych professor tried explaining that the decision to invade Iraq was based on the groupthink phenomenon. Almost everyone, even the most brilliant, are so hardwired and invested in the current paradigm that they cannot consider this information even when you go to great lengths to explain it to them. One of my residents (I'm a resident advisor in a dorm) who identifies as liberal told me that I was reading too many "conspiracies" after i tried explaining how integral oil was in every aspect of our society, and that the effects of oil depletion would be devastating. So, the beauty of this whole thing is that people (including most investors) are lethally ignorant, misinformed, and apathetic. In the next decade, I think hordes of people will throw money/capital into these alternative energy systems in the search for a techno-messiah to replace oil. Long-term, none of these alternatives can replace oil, or the sheer amount of energy we get from oil, or the 500,000 consumer products we make from oil, or the food we grow from oil - but the American people are either unwilling or unable to realize that. They will buy hydrogen cars, if they're built, even though 90% of current hydrogen fuel cell energy is derived from methane. They will invest in biofuels and thermal depolymerization and the rest. Based on these popular fantasies, these alternative energy ventures could be very profitable short term, but they will never be available to more than a select few. Remember, it's not that we CAN'T invest in these alternatives, conserve, and make substantial efforts to ease the transition to a world without oil - it's that people are simply not going to sacrifice voluntarily, and most don't even understand the need to. Bill Clinton knew damn well about peak oil, and he refused to inform the American people. He proposed an energy tax in 1993 but did not use his veto power to demand it. We've needed brilliant leadership to address this problem head on for decades, and we still don't have it. Now we're screwed. "i am curious what might be systemic bottlenecks for large-scale switchgrass-based ethanol refining." You need arable land to grow switchgrass. The Earth is a finite sphere, and most of the arable land on the planet is currently being used for food production. Any land you devote to switchgrass production is land you can't grow food on. This is a problem: "White House can't explain lurking trade imbalance" "2005 will be the first year in nearly 50 that America will not turn an agricultural trade surplus." pjstar.com So basically you would need to ask millions of Americans to stop eating, so we can hijack the farmland that feeds them to grow switchgrass to fuel our cars. Again, you could literally plant the entire continent with switchgrass and the resulting biofuel would not even come close to matching the 20 million barrels/day of oil energy we currently consume. Unless you starve most of the population in order to use the land to grow this stuff, you couldn't even make a dent into our current levels of energy consumption. For more information on these issues, I would highly encourage you to read "Eating Fossil Fuels" by Dale Allen Pfeiffer: fromthewilderness.com Also, check out: "Nine Critical Questions to Ask About Alternative Energy" fromthewilderness.com These two articles should give you a pretty good idea of the bottlenecks involved. Jesse