Thread: Oil Dependency

Originally Posted by TheGreatSocrates

First off, I'm fairly positive that fossil fuel includes coal, petroleum, natural gas, etc. So by saying we are dependent on oil is incorrect, we are dependent on fossil fuels.

Fucking duh.

But oil is special because we use it nearly exclusively for fueling transportation. The other fossil fuels are nearly used exclusively for generating electricity.

Anyway, I think you cannot talk about a viable alternative to fossil fuels without considering the economic impact of such a shift. The supply of oil that we so heavily to criticize comes from the Waziristan/Afghanistan/Pakistan area.

Wow, you are really mistaken here. Before you spout off "facts" that can easily be verified with a Google search, you should take the minute or so necessary to confirm what you think you know.

Considering US consumption, Pakistan is not a significant source of oil at all, and neither is Afghanistan.

You want to know where we get our oil from?

1. Canada: 707 million barrels per year
2. Mexico: 400 million
3. Saudi Arabia: 360 million
4. Venezuela: 352 million
5. Nigeria: 281 million
6. Angola: 164 million
7. Iraq: 164 million

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/1...-oil-importers

Only one of these countries, Iraq, is anywhere NEAR the area you're mentioning, and it isn't even really close to Afghanistan or Pakistan.

There is heavy debate as to who owns the rights to distribute, pump and sell the oil as it spans across 3 or 4 countries. This debate sparks the unrest that causes the ignorant masses to spout the unrealistic ideals that by removing the dependence on foreign oil we would be reducing the power that those unbalanced nations have on us.

This is false, because other than wind turbines, all other forms of energy generation requires other components that are equally as rare and found in roughly the same areas. Compounds like lithium, all your complex-named chemicals to make solar, that kind of shit (I group as "rare-earth") is just as hard to come by. And guess where the largest supply of it is....Afghanistan!

So to me, the arguments that say "reducing our dependence on foreign oil is a matter of national security" is just ridiculous. But as I digress, that isn't the topic of this discussion.

Lol... lithium is NOT a rare earth metal. It is FAR from the rare earths, and is in fact the lightest element that at room temperature/pressure is a solid and is the THIRD element on the periodic table. The rare-earth elements, i.e. the Lanthinide and Actinide series, are all very heavy and near the bottom of the table. Incidentally, Chile is the main producer of lithium, not Afghanistan, and most other significant lithium deposits are found in South America. And there is domestic extraction of lithium as well.

In addition, Afghanistan is HARDLY the biggest supplier of rare earth metals... CHINA IS. And the only reason why we don't have more domestic suppliers of rare earth metals is because demand for them used to be so low that extraction efforts shut down in the US, especially in light of China's very cheap supply. However, now that rare earth metals are becoming much more technologically relevant, and China is keeping more of its supply of rare earth metals for domestic use, these caches have gone up in value. Restarting rare earth mining operations in the US is underway again, but for the time being we are quite reliant on China's exports of these elements.

The question at hand is, can we effectively reduce our consumption of fossil fuels to both reverse (or halt) our impact on the environment and produce a healthy society (see: Erich Fromm)?

To me this is impossible without a dramatic shift in social pathology. We, as a society, are addicted to consumption of goods, and this addiction comes at the cost of production. In order to consume we need to produce. The methods of production are so inefficient (with regards to environmental impacts) that what we pump out from our cars is not nearly the amount that the factories in countries like china and Indonesia continue to excrete daily (I have absolutely no facts or figures to back this up, but I'd guess that I can't be far off).

So to reduce dependency it must come at a price of changing the values and ideals that society holds.

A shift in social pathology, eh? So dropping one pathology for another?

Also, yes it is very obvious that you have no facts or figures to back up your false claims:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...ansport.usnews

Considering carbon dioxide alone and its impact in global warming, US cars produced 50% of the world's carbon dioxide output in 2006. I would hazard to guess that it is less now since more people probably drive more fuel-efficient cars, but it is probably not less by enough.


Of course the other side of the question is what are the main sources of other air pollutants? That I cannot say, but I would agree with you that most likely factories are a greater source of air pollutants. That said, you have to consider how much of this pollution contribution comes from their use of electricity vs. whatever pollution is produced directly by the manufacturing process.

I agree that Americans should probably consume less on average, but you're over-simplifying things, and what you're claiming isn't really true.

As for wind farms, I've read studies that I will look for after this that indicate that there is little to no impact of turbines on ecology. Birds are no more likely to hit it than a sky scraper, and placed in the ocean have absolutely no impacts on the underwater ecology. In Massachusetts they are developing "Cape Wind" off of Nantucket, and it is supposed to place somewhere like 130 turbines in the ocean. This is the kind of energy that we need to invest in.

Google "skyscraper bird deaths" and then tell me that skyscrapers aren't significant bird killers.