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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (38906)	2/12/2013 12:44:21 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

20 years, minimum. 2050 at the latest, discounting the effects of climate change. Obama has made things marginally better; the R's would have made them much worse. "We had Cash for Clunkers." We did. Tiny. We needed a program which is still ongoing. Ditto with Cash for Appliances and Cash for Caulkers. The Hirsch report, the commonly referred to name for the report Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management, was created by request for the US Department of Energy and published in February 2005. [1] It examined the time frame for the occurrence of peak oil, the necessary mitigating actions, and the likely impacts based on the timeliness of those actions.The report came to the following conclusions: World oil peaking is going to happen, and will likely be abrupt. World production of conventional oil will reach a maximum and decline thereafter. Some forecasters project peaking within a decade; others contend it will occur later. Peaking will happen, but the timing is uncertain. Oil peaking will adversely affect global economies, particularly the U.S. Over the past century the U.S. economy has been shaped by the availability of low-cost oil. The economic loss to the United States could be measured on a trillion-dollar scale. Aggressive fuel efficiency and substitute fuel production could provide substantial mitigation. Oil peaking presents a unique challenge. Without massive mitigation, the problem will be pervasive and long-term. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary. Oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary. The problem is liquid fuels for transportation. The lifetimes of transportation equipment are measured in decades. Rapid changeover in transportation equipment is inherently impossible. Motor vehicles, aircraft, trains, and ships have no ready alternative to liquid fuels. Mitigation efforts will require substantial time. Waiting until production peaks would leave the world with a liquid fuel deficit for 20 years. Initiating a crash program 10 years before peaking leaves a liquid fuels shortfall of a decade. Initiating a crash program 20 years before peaking could avoid a world liquid fuels shortfall. en.wikipedia.org Why 2050? Hirsch: From people in the hierarchy of the DOE. This was true in both Republican and Democrat administrations. There is, I think, ample evidence, and some people in DOE have gone so far as to say it specifically, that people in the hierarchy of DOE, under both administrations, understood that there was a problem and suppressed work in the area. Under President Bush, we were not only able to do the first study but also a follow-on study that looked at mitigation economics. After that, visibility apparently got so high that NETL was told to stop any further work on peak oil. Yes, that was terrible. And it was strictly politics and political appointees—I have no idea how far up in either administration (the current one and previous one) these issues went or now go. People in the Clinton administration had talked about peak oil, including President Clinton and Vice President Gore, and the same thing is true in the Bush administration, and the same is true, to the best of my knowledge, in the Obama administration. The peak oil story is definitely a bad news story. There’s just no way to sugar-coat it, other than maybe to do what I’ve done on occasion and that is to say that by 2050 we’ll have it right and we will have come through the peak oil recession—quite probably a very deep recession. At some point we’ll come out of this because we’re human beings, and we just don’t give up. And I have faith in people ultimately. But it’s a bad news story and anybody’s who’s going to stand up and talk about the bad news story and is in a position of responsibility in the government needs to then follow immediately and say “here’s what we’re going to do about it,” and no one seems prepared to do that. aspousa.org