Oil Dependency

I was flipin around through Netflix today and decided to watch a documentary called "Collapse", by Michael Ruppert. He used to be a cop and then journalist who uncovered many different govenment and cia coverups. He theorizes that the downfall of modern day civilization lies on the fact that we heavily rely on fossil fuels to fuel our world.

As we all know, fossil fuels A.K.A petroleum is a limited resource, meaning that it WILL end eventually and according to Mr. Ruppert we are past our peak of world wide oil production. This is quite alarming considering that even though there are other energy sources available like Ethanol and Solar Energy (among many others) none of these will be able to come close to replacing petroleum; which is an essential ingredient in many of the products and materials we need, not just gasoline.

Everything from transportation, raw material, energy supply, food, water, etc. relies on Oil for it to function and get to our houses properly. The population has reached such a number that without oil millions would die of starvation, disease, and crime. And those who are left will be living like we used to back in the 19th century, forget about cell phones, personal computers, internet, etc. everything we have come to enjoy and incorporate into our daily lives will be heavily impacted by the consequences of Oil shortage.

Here's a link to the first 40 minutes of the documentary for those who want to watch it

http://www.disclose.tv/action/viewvi...apse__part_1_/

I really am not one of those sensationalist/conspiracy theory kinda guys, but this documentary really stirred something in my brain. So any comments?

Petroleum is not synonymous with fossil fuels... coal power plants account for a greater portion of the US's energy generation, ~50%, than any other single source, natural gas is 2nd supplying 25% of our fossil fuels, and petroleum only supplies ~1% of our electricity.

In a sense, technologically we're not all that far off from getting off fossil fuels completely. If we can develop better batteries or some other energy storage device that could both meet the energy density of fossil fuels and as well as have a peak power output, we could replace all power-generating applications for fossil fuels with solar and some wind. Of course, the problem is that all our attempts to do this have not yet resulted in a commercially viable fossil fuel substitute. That's why the hydrogen power architectures that were being considered in the middle of the last decade were getting so much press: all the manners in which hydrogen would have been used as a fuel source were really ways to store energy obtained from cleaner but possibly intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.

As for the concern over petroleum supply for making things other then fuel, only 15% of petroleum imported to the US goes into making these products. Even though there most likely isn't an inexhaustible supply of fossil fuels that can be converted into petrochemicals, getting off of petroleum as a fuel would make it so we probably wouldn't exhaust our petroleum supply for a very long time. And anyway, in the short term there's far greater concern over exhausting the supplies of metals like copper.

In addition, as far as food is concerned, at least insofar as growing cattle is concerned, there is a growing movement demonstrating that modern techniques of open grazing can actually produce more heads of cattle per piece of land than can industrial feedlot farm which rely on (fed-subsidized) cornfeed grown with petroleum fertilizers. That's just one example, and frankly I don't know if there really is any alternative for artificial fertilizers and pesticides when it comes to growing most crops in the densities that we are able to grow them.

I didn't watch the documentary, but I'll say more if I do.

Kill yourself )))

while i feel i should delete the previous post, i am also incredibly amused by it

spambots are getting craftier every day

For the record, wind and solar are going to do far more damage to the environment than gasoline engine exhaust... though obviously coal power is guaranteed self-destruction and should be discontinued 20 years ago with a lifting of the ban on new nuclear power construction.

What we need is to develop better batteries (or any energy storing device) with longer lives. Once we have that, even things like tidal energy (and there is shitloads of energy in tides we already know how to harvest) become viable in the long run.

also fuck wind energy

For the record, I don't believe that us polluting the environment has caused or will cause global warming... it's pretty natural for the earth to go through climate changes, I don't think we can speed up or slow down that natural process even if we tried.

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Originally Posted by pntBLNK

For the record, I don't believe that us polluting the environment has caused or will cause global warming... it's pretty natural for the earth to go through climate changes, I don't think we can speed up or slow down that natural process even if we tried.

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it is well within our capabilities to overload our atmosphere

weeklong edit: let's casually ignore what improper farming and deforestation did to the fertile crescent

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Originally Posted by Atmoscheer

For the record, wind and solar are going to do far more damage to the environment than gasoline engine exhaust...

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sorry, pardon? i'm not calling you a liar, but you'll need to expand on this.

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Originally Posted by pntBLNK

For the record, I don't believe that us polluting the environment has caused or will cause global warming... it's pretty natural for the earth to go through climate changes, I don't think we can speed up or slow down that natural process even if we tried.

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your obvious fluency in climate science notwithstanding, you are mistaken. there is, for all intents and purposes, consensus within the scientific community that humans are fucking with the environment and global climate in massive, chaotic and unprecedented ways. yes, consensus between everyone who actually studies the stuff. and sure, mother earth has her mood swings, but mother earth's atmosphere has never been pumped with this much CO2.

it's relatively easy to understand, as well. it's not as if it's some dense scientific theorem that's hard to explain -- it's not even an easy-to-explain theorem that's been cynically or ignorantly mis-explained to millions of people (see entry: evolution by natural selection). greenhouse gases trap in heat from the sun that would otherwise naturally dissipate, causing a net shift towards the warmer across the planet. though the climate changes differently in different specific places, the ice at the poles starts to melt and fuck with things like rising sea levels and salination and other things that from this point on that i haven't really read up on. my brother understood this shit when he was in third grade.

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Originally Posted by gwahir

sorry, pardon? i'm not calling you a liar, but you'll need to expand on this.

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My belief is that the rests mostly in solar and not wind technology. Further, the argument rests over the creation of the technology, not its generation. I find it would be difficult to argue against the negative impact of PV arrays in terms of the electricity produced unless you wanted to complain about the pain a photon may undergo bashing into and energizing an electron with enough energy to pass that fermi level. (or the pitiful efficiencies that are not up to par with what we need... )

In sense, there's some truth when looking at the chemical composition of solar panels, their creation, and the excess waste. The composition of new and upcoming thin-films contains elements like Cadmium and Arsenide which are heavily toxic. My girlfriend monitors a PV company's production as an EH&S consultant, but it only shows that these residual chemicals and their disposal are heavily regulated. Probably the same as, if not more than, an oil company.

As for turbines, I don't see the argument but it probably will take some level of abstraction/extraction. Some say eyesore, but there's something called the Tehachapi pass in California that I've driven through multiple times. that has a windfarm nestled in its hills. Quite beautiful if you ask me. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass_Wind_Farm

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Originally Posted by Atmoscheer

For the record, wind and solar are going to do far more damage to the environment than gasoline engine exhaust... though obviously coal power is guaranteed self-destruction and should be discontinued 20 years ago with a lifting of the ban on new nuclear power construction.

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This is the dumbest thing that atmosfear has ever posted on CD ever and is just him giving into some stupid ass conservative BS propaganda.

Adding solar panels in a location would be a one-time change in albedo, and if one considers current amorphous Si technology panels' efficiency, it would be quite act as a increase in globall warming. However, changing the albedo of a portion of land is like a one time addition of carbon into the atmosphere. You don't have to continuously warm the atmosphere per amount of electricity generated. Furthermore, as solar panel efficiencies increase, the amount of global warming from the panels' prescence would decrease. Also, of course to make solar panels now requires electricity, and that comes from burning fossil fuels, but it's just the necessary start to a bootstrapping process.

As for wind power, yeah if affects the climate if turbines cover massive areas of the globe, on the order of ~10%. But even then studies suggest that its impact on the global climate would be far less than that of other human activities such as deforestation or burning fossil fuels, yes not just coal but also petroleum...


The concern would be over local climate and ecological effects more than global ones. Better turbine design can prevent things like bird death due to turbines or turbulence in the turbines' wakes.

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Originally Posted by TheOriginalGrumpySpy

In sense, there's some truth when looking at the chemical composition of solar panels, their creation, and the excess waste. The composition of new and upcoming thin-films contains elements like Cadmium and Arsenide which are heavily toxic. My girlfriend monitors a PV company's production as an EH&S consultant, but it only shows that these residual chemicals and their disposal are heavily regulated. Probably the same as, if not more than, an oil company.

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What sorts of PV's are these? The only materials I can think of that could be used in PV's with Cd or As are things like CdZe and III-V semiconductors like GaAs or InAs, and I wasn't aware there was any real potential for making marketable solar cells out of these.

Also by girlfriend, I take it you mean a rough job named Mark?


EDIT: Okay I take that back, I HAVE heard of GaAs and other III-V semiconductors used in solar cells, in fact with the highest reported efficiencies ever, but last I heard they were so prohibitively that they couldn't be used practically.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

I don't care what people have to say about impacting the underwater ecology by building these structures, there is no way in hell that it causes nearly as great of an impact as offshore drilling. However, its necessary to consider how an industry shift like that might impact the labor market. I haven't thought much about it but it's something to consider.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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