Did U watch "CRUDE"

[dazzler]

Hey

Did you watch the show "CRUDE" about oil industry and the environment on the ABC the other night.

For a long time my somewhat fuzzie brain thought that global warming was an issue but running out of oil was much much worse given that it would change the human world catestrophically.

Did I understand it correctly;

We have already used half our oil as of 2006?

If we use the rest of the oil then the amount of carbon in the air will be the same % in the atmosphere that turned the prehistoric seas acidic and basically devoid of most life and this is how the oil was created in the first place.?

If we have used up half the oil in 150 years, and the use is growing exponentially, then we may have as little as 100 years before it is all used up?

And if we use it up then the earth is stuffed cause we rely on it completely and the seas will be stuffed as well.?

Should I be looking for a better cult, religion, sect or life form to join

[Sir Stinkalot]

We have already used half our oil as of 2006?

Something like that ..... problem could be now that the first half was easy to get to ..... the second half will not be as easy.

If we use the rest of the oil then the amount of carbon in the air will be the same % in the atmosphere that turned the prehistoric seas acidic and basically devoid of most life and this is how the oil was created in the first place.?

There will be additional carbon in the air from natural gas and other sources, so basically it doesn't have to be when the oil runs out.

There are alot of people who say that carbon emmisions are just the next Y2K ..... making people spend money to clean things up. Even if it is the next Y2K what harm is reducing emmissions going to do? it can only make things better.

[Glenn_M]

Stinky is right- we already burned the easy half, next have way more expensive to produce.

I think your estimate of 100 years to burn the next half is a little optimistic. With 1billion in China and what 600million in India wanting to drive a car like we do I would think 20 odd years at current rate of consumption.

You may have missed the SBS series Future Focus which had a doco called Crude Impact which talked about the impact of peak oil. Very interesting and a little scary. Showed how everything is related to crude either in terms of chemical components, derivatives or energy and transport. Really interesting doco. I recorded it to watch again.

Also showed what we need to do about it to stop the potential catastrophic outcome.

However, being the pessimist I am I think as a society we are too stupid, ignorant, arrogant, greedy and self centred to give a rats ring about it - until its too late. And of course having a government with the balls to consider any policy initiative with a longer term view than the next election is but a pipe dream.

Ah well, back to building the bunker with my treadle powered tools!

Cheers all,

[lockwood116]

I also watched "Crude" and it answered alot of questions I had about global warming. Another one is Al Gores "An Inconvenient Truth"
I walked from the cinema dumfounded. What hope have we got with the way the world is going. Don't call me a negative person but a realist.

[Zed]

prob a good thing if we exterminate ourselves... however i dont think that will happen, a diff. mode of life for all, sure. but not the end of civilization...

what we need to do is get off the planet and colonise diff planets... theres a whole galaxy out there... surely realistic space travel is not just SCI-FI.... ???

[dazzler]

Does anyone want to hear about my crazy thoughts on what will happen or do I keep them to my self

[AlexS]

Does anyone want to hear about my crazy thoughts on what will happen or do I keep them to my self

yes

[Grunt]

Peak Oil is going to cause the end of the world as we know it. That is every thing about are current way of life is going to change.

We currently use about 85 million barrels of oil per day. Every year from now on we will be able to extract less and less. If we have a depletion rate of 5% per year, in 9 short years we will be extracting only 42.5 million barrels a day. 5% is not hard to imagine considering that the North Sea peaked in 2000 and has been depleting at 15% per annum.

Oil is going to get hideously expensive.

There are no alternatives to oil.

Our food supply is completely and utterly dependant on fossil fuels. We use petrochemicals to fertilise, to make insecticides, to sow, to spray, to harvest, to transport, to process, to transport, to package and to transport again. For every calorie of food we produce, we use 10 calories of energy.

When the price of oil becomes so expensive or unavailable our agriculture system will collapse.

Oil has enabled to worlds population to increase from around 1 and a half billion 100 years ago to nearly 7 billion. Have a look at these graph.



The estimated world oil production from 1900 to 2080 goes like this.




The worlds population is in overshoot. That is we have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the earth because of the availability of oil. The population will be reduced to somewhere between .5 billion and 2 billion over the next 30-50 years. That will mean somewhere between 380,000 and 600,000 people will need to die every day to meet that rate of population reduction. 250,000 people died in the 2005 tsunami.

Have a look at this post at The Oil Drum
And this post on Peak Oil and why there will be a die-off.

Check out this primer on peak oil

I've spent a great deal of time over the last 18 or so months looking at and preparing for peak oil. It is real.

[dazzler]

Okay here goes, straight jacket and big men in white coats at the ready...

A superpower will pre-emptive strike against the world with a bacterial or viral weapon with vaccines only available for its population.

Wipe out most of the world - problem solved.

"Would you like to go calmly or kicking and screaming sir?"

"oooh, kicking and screaming pleeeease "

"Ahhhhhhhhhh"

[Grunt]

Oh, and yes I did see Crude and it was very good.

For those who didn't see Crude and want to you can here.

[Grunt]

A superpower will pre-emptive strike against the world with a bacterial or viral weapon with vaccines only available for its population.

Wipe out most of the world - problem solved.

Resource wars are a distinct possibility. No, actually they are a reality, were involved in one now.

[javali]

I guess someone has to present a different view.

Doom prophecies have been with us for as long as we have written history, and probably even before that. Fortunately they never come true. The war of Gog and Magog has not happened, and computers all over the world did not stop working on the turn of the century.

Peak oil theory is possibly true, however it is very unlikely. It relys on too many assumptions that if any of them is wrong the whole theory collapses.

Disasters will happen. Economy will collapse. Wars will be fought. In retrospect we will be very wise and know why this will have happened. It is highly unlikely that today's fears will come true.

[echnidna]

here we see the Pessemist and the Realist

[Glenn_M]

The reliance on petrochemicals has two impacts:

1. The reliance of much of the world's economy and population on its supply in terms of energy and products.
2. The reliance of the world ecosystem on its supply in terms of annihilation through the effects of global warming.

Running out of oil would help every species on the planet except ours?

Peal Oil is about running out of a finite resource. The only thing to argue about is the timing. As population grows so does the appetite for oil. It will run out. The only question is when.

That relates to point 2. Will it run out before or after we have done irreversible (to our species) damage to our habitat?

Look at Grunts charts. Our population is in the middle of a hydrocarbon fuelled blip in the population history of the planet.

I have heard quoted that if everyone lived as we do, then we would need 4 earths to feed our resource needs. With Chinese and Indian populations going through economic expansion their resource requirements are exponentially growing. And who can begrudge them this. We have been more wasteful for longer.

I do not know what the future is - but it must be very different from our present lives. I might be bad, I hope its not for my kids sake.

Peace

[javali]

here we see the Pessemist and the Realist

The question is who is what...

Peal Oil is about running out of a finite resource. The only thing to argue about is the timing. As population grows so does the appetite for oil. It will run out. The only question is when.

The question is not even when we will run out of oil. The question is what will happen when we do. My view is that as oil prices go up more people would switch to other energy sources. As more people switch to other energy sources their price will come down (economy of scale), and suddenly we will find out that we are using more nuclear, wind, solar or NZ sheep butane than oil.
Honduras mahogany was the main timber in the furniture industry some 150 years ago. Did we stop building furniture after deplating most of the sources of honduras mahogany?
Nuclear energy reserves are enough to sustain the current world consumption for 5000 years. The amount of solar energy that hits the earth on a single day is more than 10 times the world annual energy consumption. If we tame only 1% of the solar energy that hits the earth we can increase our energy consumption by a factor of 60, and still rely on renewable energy. There is no energy shortage in sight.

That relates to point 2. Will it run out before or after we have done irreversible (to our species) damage to our habitat?

We have already done that.

Look at Grunts charts. Our population is in the middle of a hydrocarbon fuelled blip in the population history of the planet.

I looked at the chart. Everything after 2007 is an assumption. How do we know we are at the peak? Maybe the peak will come in 20 years, or 50? Maybe by then we will be able to commercially use wave, solar or wind energy?

I do not know what the future is - but it must be very different from our present lives. I might be bad, I hope its not for my kids sake.

Very true, regardless of oil production.