Perhaps they believe that a team of angels and elves live underground and piss out pure oil, so of course we’ll never run out.  But I’ve already gone rounds in comments and offline with conservatives that outright deny that there’s any concern about oil reserves lasting, so we’re already onto that stage of desperation.

Every now and again, I’ll hear the peak-oil denial from wingnuts.  It generally boils down to “There’s enough oil in Canada to power the US for 100 years!” and “I just heard they found a new oil reserve in the Arctic that has half again as much crude as the Saudi Reserve!”  And, of course, there’s the dogged insistence that “Drill, baby, drill!” is a viable energy policy because any oil left in the Gulf is de facto all the oil we will ever need, with the only limiting factor being evil environmentalists more worried about sea otters than the price of driving around in circles in your Hummer.

I also get a lot of “Wind Farms don’t work!” and “Solar Panels in the desert are just as pollutive a coal fired power plants next to the river!”

It’s just pure, straight up disinformation.

Those bullshit “clean coal” and “natural gas FTW!” infomercials aren’t very helpful either.

Doncha know, the latest “talking points” from the climate change deniers cast climate change as a RELIGION and a religious belief.  Since us lefties hate religion, we will just HAVE to believe as they do rather than reason from facts, evidence, and logically predictable outcomes!

See!

Later, he talks up how people who don’t think it’s real will rue it, and they’re wrong, but really, this is just a bad foot to start off on.  It puts the existence of global warming into the “belief” category, when it’s much more in the realm of facts.

It comes from the same “fair and balanced” MSM approach that gives an equal hearing to a tenured biology professor and a snake-handling preacher in a debate over what should be taught in a HS science classroom. These people care more about “comity” and humouring the deluded that they do with facts and evidence.

And one of the DJs suggested that we go to Mars and look for oil there.  I tensed up, because I could hear the sound of a million morons nodding along, but thankfully, the other DJ said, “Um, do you remember where oil comes from?” And then, after a beat, the first one said, “Oh yeah.  Dead dinosaurs.”

Only a matter of time before some moron starts claiming that the presence of water on the moon must mean that dinosaurs once lived there, and therefore it’s filled not with green cheese (how silly!) but sweet, sweet crude.

Perhaps they believe that a team of angels and elves live underground and piss out pure oil, so of course we’ll never run out. 

Sadly you’re not to far off, especially as it pertains to fundie conservatives. We’ve talked about the “If I’m good god will provide” and a lot of the fundie leaders will probably have enough money from bilking the sheep to whether any increase in price on oil/gas, they won’t be shit out of luck. There’s also the Rapture freaks, who think Jesus will come back guns a blazing to take them up to heaven and leave the rest of us to deal with $8 gallons of gas.

Well…to be absolutely persnickety…oil derives from the fossils of billions upon billions of dead plankton, not dinosaurs…but that presumes that the Radical Religious Right is going to admit that the Earth is billions of years old and that little microscopic creatures have been dying for those billions of years.

Ah, but the beauty of Christian conservative thinking is, they don’t care about renewable resources because the goal is to see the Second Coming or Rapture BEFORE we run out of oil, trees, water, clean air, landfills, etc. It’s their temorary thinking that merges with secular greed and corporate short term approach to business that continues to drive opposition in the “environmental debate.” So indeed, I wouldn’t even debate with the believers. Its the sheep on the middle of the fence that need to be convinced.

There will be plenty of oil left after climate change increases the amount of plant matter and creates a lot more swamps.  It will just happen a few hundred million years after we are gone.

they don’t care about renewable resources because the goal is to see the Second Coming or Rapture BEFORE we run out of oil, trees, water, clean air, landfills, etc.

You can find some who take a more proactive view—we NEED to run out of those things, because the second coming can’t happen until we do.

There’s a theory floating around called the “abiotic oil theory”, which holds that crude oil comes not from the decayed remnants of plants and algae (not dinosaurs, confirming what tannenburg said) but from non-living sources, upwellings of hydrocarbons from deep within the mantle. This is sometimes used to discredit the peak oil alarmists.

This theory is absolute crackpottery; every oil reservoir has a known source (usually Paleozoic-era sedimentary rock). Hydrocarbons are not stable at mantle pressure and temperature. Just throwing that out there in case the topic comes up.

If you ask a right-wing christianist to elaborate on why it’s important to believe in God if we can’t really prove that He doesn’t exist, you will get some version of Pascal’s Wager: where the consequences of not believing in a very real but distant God who will send you to Everlasting Torment if you refuse to have faith in His existence outweigh the unpleasant aspects of Christianity (boring church services, likely even more boring afterlife, various other penalties to your sexlife) within a finite life.

If you ask that SAME right-wing christianist to elaborate on why it isn’t important to try to preserve the earth for future generations, of which their own children are part and parcel—who risk a very real and demonstrable future of suffering and miserable death as the climate spins out of control resulting in water shortages, famines, wars, etc etc, then the wager disappears.

It’s sort of like they cashed in all their gambling chips on God for themselves and can’t spare any consideration for the children they supposedly love.

Also, the Mars theory overlooks EROEI, Energy Returned on Energy Invested. How much oil would we need to burn to fly the ships to mars and fly them back? Nobody would spend $5 on a $1 bill. It’s all fiendishly logical if you just… think.

Also, didn’t GWB want to spend federal money to look for oil in space?

I’m trying to remember if any of the cartoons that I watched in the early 80’s involved dinosaurs in space. Does anyone know about a confirmed dinosaur sighting in space?

It’s funny that you mention that because back in the day THE Jerome Corsi cowrote a book that follows that exact line of reasoning called Black Gold Stranglehold:

http://www.amazon.com/Black-Gold-Stranglehold-Jerome-Corsi/dp/1581824890

In Black Gold Stranglehold, Jerome Corsi and Craig Smith expose the fraudulent science that has made America so vulnerable: the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and that it is a finite resource. This book reveals the conclusions reached by Dr. Thomas Gold, a professor at Cornell University, in his seminal book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels (Copernicus Books, 1998) and accepted by many in the scientific community that oil is not a product of fossils and prehistoric forests but rather the bio-product of a continuing biochemical reaction below the earth’s surface that is brought to attainable depths by the centrifugal forces of the earth’s rotation.

This is just proof that we need to get started on building a really, really big Jurassic Park.  Minus the velociraptors.

Great post.

While I certainly understand his logic in doing so, I sometimes question whether or not it was wise for Al Gore to frame the issue of climate change as a “moral issue”.

It’s not that I don’t agree with the fundamental point Gore was making, that addressing climate change is a morally good thing and that ignoring it is a morally bad thing.  My concern is that the words “moral issue” open the door to varying interpretations and ambiguities by crackpots.  It suggests the possibility of debate on a topic in which there really isn’t anything to debate.

There is nothing to interpret, and there’s nothing ambiguous about it.  There is no debate.  Earth is getting hotter, and if it isn’t properly dealt with and mitigated, it will literally lead to our extinction, as in “no more humans, anywhere, period”.  While I suppose this could be considered a good thing if you are a nihilist who wants earth to be destroyed or if you believe in Xtianist “end times” nonsense, the vast majority of humans probably wouldn’t agree with that position.

It’s the same with our diminishing oil resources.  There is X amount of oil in the world, and every day, that amount gets reduced by whatever we use that day.  X will never go up, it will always go down.  At some point, the tap will run dry, and X will equal zero.  While nobody knows precisely when that day will come, it is an inevitability that it will come.  And if it arrives before we’ve built a global alternative energy infrastructure that can power the world, well, goodbye to everything that requires external energy to operate.  Goodbye to all non-animal powered transportation, goodbye to all household appliances, everywhere, goodbye to all ability to communicate in real time to anyone not in your physical presence, goodbye to all modern medicine, goodbye to our entire way of life.

Those are immutable facts, and while some can choose not to accept them, it doesn’t change them in any way, anymore than merely refusing to accept that you can’t walk through walls will suddenly give you the magical ability to walk through walls.

But, the crackpots will continue to promote their fairy tales, and just as many refused to believe the earth was round for a long time, many will refuse to believe in that the planet is getting hotter and that we’re running out of oil for a long time as well.

The other reason that “that’s your business” is a bad place to start is that it really isn’t just their business. Every gallon that’s consumed now is a gallon that won’t be available at a comparable price to be consumed later. And every weird little bit of reserve that has to be exploited by working in very expensive places means fewer resources—money, manufactured materials, smart people—to deal with all the other problems that are on the way. And the aged versions of all of us sane people (and our children) are going to have to live with that, as well as the aged-versions-and-children of the denier assholes.

It’s like a much bigger version of anti-helmet-law assholery. They get the wonderful rush of transgression, we get to pick up the tab for the uninsured skull fracture and the unsupported dependents.

Minus the velociraptors.

I can’t bring myself to support a Jurassic Park without velociraptors.  Did you ever see a Jurassic Park movie?  They feed on douchebags.  In fact, if you look at world history, the decline of the velociraptor can be directly correlated with the unchecked rise of the douchebag population.

There’s a theory floating around called the “abiotic oil theory”, which holds that crude oil comes not from the decayed remnants of plants and algae (not dinosaurs, confirming what tannenburg said) but from non-living sources, upwellings of hydrocarbons from deep within the mantle.

And one of the leading proponents of that crackpottery is the racist WND wingnut non-scientist Jerome Corsi, the dude whose life accomplishments include being arrested and deported from Kenya last year when he was on a “fact-finding mission” to prove that Barack Obama was secretly Raila Odinga’s top campaign strategist.

And if it arrives before we’ve built a global alternative energy infrastructure that can power the world, well, goodbye to everything that requires external energy to operate.  Goodbye to all non-animal powered transportation, goodbye to all household appliances, everywhere, goodbye to all ability to communicate in real time to anyone not in your physical presence, goodbye to all modern medicine, goodbye to our entire way of life.

Well, it’s not like there’s a line in the sand after which crossed we go from $2.50 / gal oil to none, anywhere.  The pain will scale up as the resource becomes increasingly scarce, and eventually the cost of oil will exceed it’s usefulness.

The question from there is where do we go?  We actually have some very substantial coal and natural gas reserves.  We’ve also come a long way in telecommunication.  The human civilizations will evolve without petrol.  The only question is whether we want to build wind farms and solar plants now, when filling up the car costs $40, or twenty years from now when it costs $400.

It’s just a question of planning ahead.  Eventually, we’re all going to be living off solar power.  Eventually, we’re going to need to start dealing with a rapidly changing biosphere / sea level / food production rate / etc.  Eventually, people will be forced to adapt.  Is that “eventually” going to today, when everything is relatively painless, or in some distant future when we’re all eating Soylent Green?

The question from there is where do we go?  We actually have some very substantial coal and natural gas reserves.  We’ve also come a long way in telecommunication.  The human civilizations will evolve without petrol.  The only question is whether we want to build wind farms and solar plants now, when filling up the car costs $40, or twenty years from now when it costs $400.

If it reaches a point that it’s more expensive to build the plants than they will provide profits, no private industry would want to. You’d have to get the government to do it.

There’s also the related assumption that energy sources are interchangeable.  On one level, this is true, but petroleum has certain advantages as an energy source that solar and wind don’t.  For one thing, it’s much more energetically “dense”:  you get a lot of energy from a comparatively small amount of petroleum.

Petroleum really is wonderful. And I also like how people talk about how we’ll “invent” another energy sources. Y’know… much like how we invented wood. And we invented coal. And how we invented whale oil. And then how we invented petroleum. I swear, human ingenuity has no limits.

I also get a lot of “Wind Farms don’t work!” and “Solar Panels in the desert are just as pollutive a coal fired power plants next to the river!”

Well, half of that is true.  Wind Farms aren’t a viable source of energy in the big picture, there isn’t enough power in wind to meet the Earth’s power demands as it is, even if we covered the entire Earth in seven kilometer tall windmills.  It’s nuclear, or it’s solar, and while bits of other stuff aren’t necessarily dumb, especially where economical (e. g. geothermal in Iceland), they aren’t every going to be a significant part of the picture.

The wind don’t always blow and the sun don’t always shine…honest.

I keep hearing wind proponents talk about reducing oil imports.  We don’t burn oil, foreign or otherwise, in power plants.

It’s getting colder, not warmer.

We have plenty of oil whether in liquid form or Tar sands or Oil shale.

HOWEVER….

We have passed peak oil production and further investment in claiming the remaining oil supplies (see above) will be ever more costly.  The cost benefit ratio is going to get uglier and it’s going to get uglier quite rapidly.

We have a number of geo-thermal sites that have not been exploited.  Unlike solar and wind they can be counted on spin the turbines and hence the generators 24/7, rain or shine, dark or light.

You can use CO2 to grow algae and make all the bio diesel you want, for ever and ever, amen.

The problem may stem from the fact that they believe that it only took a few thousand years to create the oil, since it must have occurred as a result of the global flood some 4000 years ago.

I keep hearing wind proponents talk about reducing oil imports.  We don’t burn oil, foreign or otherwise, in power plants.

No, but we can run electric cars on solar and wind power.

It’s getting colder, not warmer.

That’s a highly misleading statement.

That’s a highly misleading statement.

From the January 30, 2009 article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s getting colder.”

Climate began to cool again after World War II, for about 30 years. This is undisputed. The cooling occurred at a time when emissions of C02 were rising sharply from the reconstruction effort and from unprecedented development. It is important to realize that.

To anyone analyzing this data with common sense, it is obvious that factors other than CO2 emissions are ruling the climate. And the same applies to other periods of the planet’s history. Al Gore, in his famous movie “The Inconvenient Truth,” had simply omitted to say that for the past 420,000 years that he cited as an example, rises in CO2 levels in the atmosphere always followed increases in global temperature by at least 800 years. It means that CO2 can’t possibly be the cause of the warming cycles.

We don’t burn oil in powerplants?  People really think that?

Um ... too amazing to contemplate how very wrong this statement is.

I don’t think it matters for the purposes of this argument whether oil comes from dinosaurs, or algae or rocks.  The point is, we’re using it up faster than it’s being replenished.  The ancient aquifers aren’t the product of living things, but we’re using them up faster than they can be replenished too.

We have plenty of oil whether in liquid form or Tar sands or Oil shale.

As you stated, it will get much more costly in terms of $$$. What’s not pointed out enough, though, is that it will also be much, much more environmentally costly to get that oil from the tar sands or oil shale. If you thought oil extraction was polluting now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Anybody else read Uglies, Pretties, and Specials?

I don’t have the time or patience to deal with your denialism.  Please read through the talking points in ‘How To Talk To A Climate Skeptic’, particularly the bits about the effect of CO2 on global temperature and the continued rise in global temperature (despite anomalies such as the 1940’s and 1998).

Should’ve said, @Magis.

Every time it gets above freezing in January I conclude that winter is over early this year and I put away my warm clothes. That’s because I’m as dumb as Magis.

(I also believe that the Washington Post is a scientific journal, for the same reason.)

We do not usually acknowledge ALL the things oil/petroleum/hydrocarbon compounds are used for: transportation/heating/lighting power; containers (for food, liquids, blood, medicines, etc); the medicines themselves; building materials; fabric materials (polyester fabric itself and combinations, yarn, thread); furniture and things like appliance cases.  The list probably could be longer—these are things I came up with off the top of my head and just looking around my living room.  We need oil for modern life. The deniers don’t seem to understand that. That’s one reason we need to replace its use in things cars or power plants.  We need it for too much else.

The wind don’t always blow and the sun don’t always shine…honest.

I invite you to watch the point as it flies over your head.  Do you know that there are methods of storing energy?  There’s this crazy idea that we could harvest solar and wind energy, and store the extra energy for when it’s dark and not windy.  Do you really think that the inventors of these things were too stupid to consider the problem of night time or a calm spell?

Let me guess, when Friedman talks about energy “independence,” he just means relying on our own supplies of oil.  That will do squat except vastly increase the price of domestic oil and use up our own reserves that much faster.  What a great idea!

Admittedly, in the long run, it could conceivably work out.  Prohibitive oil prices would force people to conserve, innovate, and switch from oil to renewables, but I unfortunately doubt that’s what Friedman has in mind, not to mention that it’s a political nonstarter.

Wow, this post made me want to call my dad. Good ol’ Dad, firm believer in the Bible he’s never read, denier of the science he doesn’t understand, and completely sure that talking over someone means you win the argument. (I think I’ll take a few shots before calling him, thanks.) I mention him because he’s one of those believers in oil-times-infinity. “The Bible says, ‘The Lord will provide!’” Ask him where, and he simply assures you that it’s in there. God will magic up some more oil and sneak it into the ground, just like with fossils. We live in a country rife with people believing that some magical fairy sneaked fossils into the ground; how much of a stretch would it be to believe that the same fairy could sneak oil in, too?

http://www.energy.ca.gov/maps/power_plant_map_state.gif

This is just California - there are many more oil-fired power plants in the US and the world.

Ms. Kate:

It says oil SLASH gas.  They’re using natural gas.

That’s right, oil/gas does, in fact, mean just gas and not oil.  Or something.

And the fact that oil is only one kind of fossil fuel means that fossil fuels are not limited.  Or something.

I know this is the new secular religion but numbers are numbers.  IF CO2 was the cause then a straight line increase could be expected.  It would not admit of variations.  However, the more you admit that it is only one cause among many the more you must admit that we just aren’t sure what the hell is going on.  If you actually believe in science you’d know we are in an interglacial period and that it’s probably due to end in the not too distant future.

The data are just in from the National Climatic Data Center and they show that for the year 2008, the average temperature across the United States (lower 48 States) was 1.34ºF lower than last year, and a mere one-quarter of a degree above the long-term 1901-2000 average. The temperature in 2008 dropped back down to the range that characterized most of the 20th century.
Figure 1 shows the U.S. temperature history from 1895 to 2008. Notice the unusual grouping of warm years that have occurred since the 1998 El Niño. Once the 1998 El Niño elevated the temperatures across the country, they never seemed to return to where they were before. Proponents of catastrophic global warming liked to claim that is was our own doing through the burning of fossil fuels, but others were more inclined to scratch their heads at the odd nature of the record and wait to see what happened next.

Go visit this site.

I invite you to watch the point as it flies over your head.  Do you know that there are methods of storing energy?

I invite you to give me a price quote on the new ‘national battery.’  I invite you to tell me how much you are willing to have your power/heating bills increase.

Here’s one for you.  Because solar and wind are so iffy, there has to be a back up source.  Since we don’t have have a national battery we use our good old fashioned steam plants.  Since they can’t be fired up at a moments notice the boilers have to be kept hot and so you’re buring coal and emitting carbon for NO power.  So wind and solar aren’t carbon free after all.  Now there are some savings in emissions and it doesn’t apply to nukes and hydros obviously but it something no one ever thinks about.

Seebach Wins the THread!

Petroleum really is wonderful. And I also like how people talk about how we’ll “invent” another energy sources. Y’know… much like how we invented wood. And we invented coal. And how we invented whale oil. And then how we invented petroleum. I swear, human ingenuity has no limits.

IF CO2 was the cause then a straight line increase could be expected.

The stupid, it burns. Thankfully, it doesn’t release greenhouse gases while doing so.

I invite you to tell me how much you are willing to have your power/heating bills increase.

Oh Honey, my bills will increase no matter what, and so will yours.  Fossil fuels won’t last forever.

I think it’s pretty hilarious when fundies claim that climate change can’t be real, because God would never let something bad happen to the Earth…

So wind and solar aren’t carbon free after all.

Only the voices in your ass (conveniently located directly around your ears) ever said it was.

It’s not fucking FREE, jackass, it is just RENEWABLE, whereas oil is not.

er, sorry, “CARBON FREE”

Thanks for that link, jackalopemonger.  See, who says nothing of value comes out of participating in conversations like this?  I wouldn’t have seen that site otherwise.

I fully the support the more velociraptors=less douchebags formula.

As for the rest of this, I don’t waste time with babbling assholes.

  Because solar and wind are so iffy, there has to be a back up source.

Yeah, and it’s nuclear.  Nuclear is the only power source that’s both economical and can meet the world’s energy demands for the next hundred years.  Solar does the latter, but probably not the former.  Other things do the former, but not the latter.  Oil, gas won’t.  And we need ‘em to make plastic and whatnot anyhow.

Magis, you really are stupid.

Just stupid.

I work in the AIR POLLUTION and public health research industry.  OIL fired plants have a different AIR POLLUTION profile than gas ones.  I assure you, as does this EPA NAAQS REPORT that I am providing feedback on, that there are MANY OIL FIRED POWER PLANTS in the US that contribute to the criteria pollutants that fall under the proposed rulemaking.

In fact, there is one not one half mile from where I currently sit.  There is another that runs on oil in the winter, natural gas in the summer, just across the harbor. 

Sorry if FACTS interfere with your imaginitive reality, but if you can’t sort that out, well, nobody here is going to be able to help your magic thinking ass.

Too bad we can’t use renewable stupidity and endless vinegar and water generation as energy resources.  We’d be fixed for eternity!

Wow!  The average temp dropped for ONE YEAR!  That must be a trend ... never mind that most of the last ten years were the hottest on record ... we are all set!  Who needs to understand basic statistical concepts of variance when we gots us sum numburrs fer us!

Brian, if nuclear is so economical, how come it has failed economically?

Take your time dear.

(cue the “blame everybody for not letting us kill more Navajo workers and have more accidents” crowd)

Brian, if nuclear is so economical, how come it has failed economically?

I just worry if we’re going to keep dithering and do nothing on the energy front, nuclear will be the only option that will be realistic in order to keep our energy needs met.

Kind of like air bags and a roll cage and seatbelts in an edsel ... when we could have a much less expensive and more efficient new car.

Now, I can already hear a bunch of wingnuts mocking me as a “peak oil” nut.

As someone whose whole education was geared toward making me an oil industry slave, I feel like I need to make a point on this one.  I am neither a wingnut nor a fossil fuel enthusiast, but I *am* a chemical engineer.

Studying the “peak oil” theory, I’ve found that the same curve shows up again and again whether it is from 1970 or today, and it is NEVER predictive of what supply will actually look like.  The same lines about a 30 or 35 or 40 year supply have been spouted for at least that long, but this statistic is a bit of a misnomer.  Peak oil theory only deals with the oil that is known to be present and accessable and profitable.  Gulf coast oil, for instance, was not considered in the peak oil calculation 40 years ago because engineers thought it would never be economical to pull it up.  Yet here we are.

New technologies for more efficient oil harvesting are being developed all the time, and that’s why the curve just slides along in time without changing very much.

There is no industry indication (and oil companies do know this topic very well) that we have reached peak oil production yet, or that we will actually be out of accessible oil in 40 years even taking into account increasing demand.

In my own defense, I detest Big Oil (I refuse to work for them) and would rather see renewable energy put in place.  Even most of us industry types realize that fossil fuels are unsustainable and are putting the human race on the fast track to Dead.

But the fact remains that hydrocarbons are the most efficient and easily-transportable energy source arond, and that is why it is so very hard to break away from them until the financial impact becomes unmanagable.  I promise you if people boycotted gas you’d see their attitudes change real fast.

Methods of making liquid fuels out of coal have been known since the 1920s (the Nazis produced enormous amounts of synthetic fuel during WWII when they lost access to oil), and on most projections we won’t run out of coal for a very, very long time.  Those methods expensive, but not so much that it would totally change our patterns of energy use (estimates I’ve seen are that fuels made from coal would involve costs comparable to $80 a barrel oil).  Of course, this would be environmentally devastating; considerably worse than using oil, because of the energy expended and waste generated in processing the coal.  So another way to put it is that pollution will destroy the planet long before we run out of fossil fuels.  So, for practical purposes (in a very perverse sense of practical), fossil fuels are unlimited.

You’re very welcome, jamie d!  That site and the TalkOrigins.org Index to Creationist Claims are two of the most coherent and articulate resources for combating stupid on the Internet.

I want to second what Caelan Aegana said.  I work in the Oil & Natural Gas Industry (in actual geophysical exploration), and part of the problem is we still don’t know the answer to the Peak Oil question because we are continually discovering new fields in the world’s seas and in remote locals.

Right now, the issue is accessibility.  In certain locales, it is just now becoming economically feasible to get the oil and gas out of the ground or from under the water, whereas it was financially impossible even 5 years ago.  But the demand is always going to outpace the dwindling supply.

There is one undeniable truth: fossil fuels will run out.  Anyone who tells you otherwise has no grasp of basic science.  It may not be 40 years off but closer to 100+ years off, but it is going to happen and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.

The stupid, it burns. Thankfully, it doesn’t release greenhouse gases while doing so.

yes it does: methane

as for the rest of this conversation… there’s really nothing you can do to convince someone who evidently thinks “feedback loop”, “tripping point” and “forcing” are just made up words by scary evil scienticists

The only oil-fired US powerstations I can find are:

Kahe:  Hawaii
Honolulu 8&9;:  Hawaii
W. H. Hill:  ???
Waiau:  Hawaii

No. 6 bunker oil is more than three times as expensive as natural gas.

Magis:  My housing development has its own power plant.  We have three turbines which generate electricity and steam heat for some 800 apartments and commercial building.  They were powered by oil; we recently had two turbines converted to use natural gas, with one still using oil.  There are way more power plants using oil than those in Hawaii.

I know this is the new secular religion

Boy, that one is always good for a laugh. Al Gore’s plan for The Great Global Warming Conspiracy, according to idiots like Magis, must go a little like this:

1. Get every reputable scientist and scientific institution on the planet to claim that CO2 is causing climate change in spite of allegedly obvious evidence that this is not true.
2. Use said scientists to convince the public that anthropogenic global climate change is really happening and that we must expend countless billions of dollars to fix the problem by switching to renewable energy sources.
3. ???
4. Profit!

Given the enormous success we’re having with Step 2, and the huge amount of personal, political and financial capital some people have put on the line to try and get citizens and governments to actually take action, I’m on the edge of my seat waiting to hear what brilliantly diabolical plan Al Gore has concocted to convince literally the entire scientific community to go along with the most perfect, most massive environmental, financial, scientific host hoax in history.

Because that’s what deniers like Magis are suggesting that this is. Suggesting that anthropogenic global climate change is either an error or a hoax is in fact far less credible than suggesting that the moon landings were faked. It’s several orders of magnitude more ridiculous, yet people like Magis buy into it. The mind boggles that people are so incapable of actual critical thinking.

Nuclear should be explored but only as a BRIDGE to other energy sources. Why? Because it looks like were going to hit peak oil before we’ve fully developed things like wind and solar. Were going to have to charge our future electric cars with nuclear power at least partially for a time.

Nuclear has risks, and its not a very good option, but the two other options are: continue to warm the earth, or cut back drastically on our standard of living. The former is unthinkable, the latter a political non-starter.

Amanda,
I’m delighted you have mentioned the problem of peak oil in this post, but it’s far more alarming than even you suggest. Indeed, there is a strong possibility our industrial civilization is doomed. And what does that mean for our politics, our personal lives and every single hope of a ‘better’ future?

It well may be that our present order is a hothouse flower in the long span of human history and that we are headed for a collapse, and a lot sooner than most people think.

The International Energy Agency released its annual report recently and an article in the UK Guardian jumped all over it as ‘baloney.’ Evidently, according to two IEA insiders, the numbers about future production have been cooked at the behest of our government, because the fear is that if the truth got out, the financial markets would utterly collapse (goodbye pensions/401-Klife insurance/the banking system).

Meanwhile over at the oildrum.com oil industry analysts are saying that we are at peak now (which explains why oil is going for $80/barrel in the midst of this global recession), that the breakdown of the credit markets last year have led to a plunge in oil exploration/development projects, and that coupled with production declines in existing fields on the order of 6%/year, means world crude oil production will start falling off a cliff by 2013.

If that’s the case, then goodbye airlines and the travel industry, goodbye fruits and vegetables shipped from California, goodbye malls, goodbye restaurants, goodbye home building, goodbye modern medical care, goodbye automobile industry, goodbye industrial parks, goodbye service industries. Instead, say hello to farming, sewing your own clothes, shivering in the winter, sweltering in the summer, the return of infectious diseases, and, if we’re lucky, life as it was in the 1820’s.

Some studies of the energy resources available to us via fossile fuels suggest it is the equivalent of each of us having 600 serfs at our beckon call.

I am the ‘official’ religious person to show up at this site, and let me tell you that I do not believe in the oil fairy or the technology fairy or any other magical resource that will allow us to preserve our vaunted way of life. The Scientific American might publish an article saying we could convert our economy to renewables by 2030, but they left off the inconvenient truths of the $200 trillion (not a typo) price tag and that the rare earth metals that are essential ingredients are themselves in serious depletion.

The future looks grim, indeed.

but the two other options are: continue to warm the earth, or cut back drastically on our standard of living.

Or 3) stop buying the corporate line that even the corporations don’t buy any more and realize that we can preserve our quality of life by being a hell of a lot smarter about how we design our products and our communities.  In other words, waste less, think more.

I was trapped on a plane for many hours sitting next to well-dressed middle aged gentleman. He seemed little conservative. A some point starting insisting that oil was being continually manufactured in the earth’s crust. There’s a kind of rabbit-duck perception shift that happens when you realize that a person you assumed to be sane is actually completely off the deep end. Within minutes he was screening home videos of a UFO on his laptop.

By 1978 it had started to warm again, to everybody’s relief. But two decades later, after the temperature peaked in 1998 under the influence of El Nino, climate stopped warming for eight years; and in 2007 entered a cooling phase marked by lower solar radiation and a reversal of the cycles of warm ocean temperature in the Atlantic and the Pacific.”

so for 20 years it got warmer, but we had a cold winter in 2007 and 08 so we are in a cooling phase????

Look, I’m an old guy, but I’m not ancient, lots of people remember what I remember – a solid blanket of snow on the ground from late Nov/early Dec until spring (sometimes late spring, I remember being a kid looking for the Easter Bunny’s tracks in the snow)

Even if you’re too young to remember it you have photos, classic Christmas movies, Currier & Ives prints, Norman Rockwell paintings, etc that show shoppers bundled up in heavy coats

The last Christmas I had with my wife 3 years ago it was 75 degrees out side, when I buried her a month later I stood in the cemetery in a summer weight suit and no coat

But no, I should believe you, Sean Hannity and the Moonie Times that we are in a global cooling period instead of my own lying eyes

I’m sorry about your wife, Jeff. That’s a really poignant image.

This may already have been covered, I’ve jumped comments to get to input, because I want to point out natural gas has usually been obtained from fossil fuels, but there’s loads of other sources, and America is finally beginning to tap them.

Methane comes when bacteria break down organic sources, as best I understand it. Ever pass a sewage treatment plant and noticed a big flame at the top? It’s burning off methane. For some reason, until recently, no one seemed to think of putting water and turbines over the flame. It’s coming. They’ve turned dairies into energy producing sites. Methane leaks out of landfills might be converted by creating a planned vent which could be turned into an energy source. Humans create a lot of methane indirectly (and directly, but no one wants to try to turn farts into a power supply). Natural gas is a much more extensible energy source than other fossil fuels, because it comes from processes currently in action, that we already concentrate into sites.

My own hope is for fusion. If done with hydrogen, it’s only output will be heat and helium. And it would be done on such small scale with such huge energy returns, that the heat output would be the main issue rather than the hydrogen-to-helium conversion. But we don’t know how long development will take, so it’s a good idea to use alternate energy sources to draw out oil for as long as possible.

I’m very worried about peak oil, but I’m not as big a doomsday-advocate in the long term as I probably should be.  I predict some hard times as we transition from a cheap oil economy to one in which we use sane and economical means to save energy.  Simple things like bundling up in the winter and wearing less in the summer can help out tremendously, provided we stop doing idiotic things like making summer weather indoors in the winter and blasting us with AC in the summers.  Architecture must change to adapt to real standards of passive energy use: South-facing windows, large overhanging roofs, insulated walls, good materials, windows that actually open, and so forth.  Energy from nuclear, solar, wind, and other sources will be much more common, provided we can get sane about nuclear power, upgrade our grid, and figure out how to not need so much power in the first place (which should be item number one on all our agendas.)  Solar water heaters are a good idea, and should be mandatory in most places where the roofs don’t freeze for months at a time (those places should have tankless heaters.)  Geothermal power seems so simple, but it probably isn’t as easy as it should be.

In regards to peak oil being disproven because new fields are being discovered, I have to disagree strongly because the new fields aren’t as big as the depletion in the known fields.  More fields aren’t by themselves better than the ones we have now unless they’ll produce as much or more oil.  And that’s not what’s happening.  When Mexico is leading toward being an oil importer in the next few years, it’s time to notice what’s really going on and realize that the next few years are going to be chaotic in regards to oil production, oil prices, oil panics, and oil predictions.  What’s not chaotic is the obvious fact that we’re running out a lot faster than we want to, since that’s as sure a thing as the sun rising in the East.

) stop buying the corporate line that even the corporations don’t buy any more and realize that we can preserve our quality of life by being a hell of a lot smarter about how we design our products and our communities.  In other words, waste less, think more.

Well yes, I agree, that’s the long-term goal. But I’m afraid that can’t be met in time to stop the warming of our earth. Why? Because look around. People are idiots.

A stipulation to using nuclear as a bridge, though, is that before we start building new nuclear plants in this country we should make sure nuclear power will be WELL REGULATED. I.e., as well-regulated as France, Japan, Sweden, and other nations that get their electricity from nuclear. Get rid of any Reagan-era bullshit in that industry, it’s too damn risky.

One of the things that’s sort of interesting about renewables like methane (which, btw, is a very potent greenhouse gas if not recaptured) is that they were being captured and used for energy through the middle of the 20th century, and then we got tired of the idea. Staten Island lights used to run on Fresh Kills methane.

(And nuclear plants might indeed be economic if the companies that built them were more focused on building a product than on financial engineering. But that’s what you get when the best and brightest go into the money industry instead of actually building stuff.)

. But that’s what you get when the best and brightest go into the money industry instead of actually building stuff.

Paul—

That, in a nutshell, is what’s killing this country. Building paper instead of building products. There are even some people that get more outraged over the bailout of General Motors than they do by the bailout of the big bankers—even though General Motors actually, you know, produces a product, and the banks really don’t. A Chevy Malibu is a lot more valuable in the real world than some made up financial bullshit derivative.

Abstinence is the worst possible contraception.  Why?  Because you can’t get a large number of humans to not have sex.  Period.  They will kiss and fool around and eventually, it’ll happen.

To the point that populations that use abstinence have a higher birth rate than populations that don’t!

Jeff, I do hope that the beautiful warm weather meant that she could enjoy some time outside in her last days. 

But you are right that a short-term change is not a long-term trend, unless you make graphics for investment infomercials.  Just because I’ve dropped a clothing size since I realized that the best way to avoid exposure to H1N1 is to bike to and from work doesn’t mean I should go out and get a wardrobe in the clothing size I wore in high school.

Funny that OPEC policy has spared us a few years of peak oil issues - remember when they realized that they could make more money over a longer time by pumping less?

It says oil SLASH gas.  They’re using natural gas.

Oil and natural gas are produced by similar processes and found in the same locations.  Running out of plentiful cheap oil means running out of plentiful cheap natural gas too.  There isn’t enough biogas to go around and no one has yet demonstrated a feasible technology for extracting gas from hydrates.

As far as national energy planning goes oil and natural gas may as well be the same.

Brian, if nuclear is so economical, how come it has failed economically?

Because you’re comparing it to the wrong thing. About 50% of my electricity comes from nuclear, while about one part in two million comes from solar.  The reason for this is that nuclear is far cheaper than solar.  Other sources of electricity are irrelevant, because they’ll either run down too much in the next 50-100 years (coal, oil, natural gas) to be widespreadly viable; or they simply can’t produce sufficient energy to meet a significant part of the world’s demand (wind, hydro, geothermal).  Today, coal is popular because it’s cheap, but the cost of coal goes up as coal gets harder to find; the cost of nuclear doesn’t go up, because we’re so much farther from depleting Uranium/Thorium/Whatever.  (Plus, burning coal is bad if you’re under the age of 50 or so, or give two shits about those of us who are.)  Similar natural gas, oil.

There’s no magic bullet, but it’s true that nuclear power would be a hell of a lot more viable if the industry had had some efficacious regulation back in its American glory days. Unfortunately, nuclear power has always been a lot more about a way to make money than anything else, and the industry (well, like most of the power industry) has a history of breathtaking sleaze and brutality. Add the incredibly dangerous and frightening nature of nuclear accidents, which are what inevitably happen in an industry with the problems of the nuclear industry, and you get one scary brew.

And of course, nuclear material doesn’t appear out of thin air. Plenty of elements involved in nuclear power are incredibly environmentally damaging. So it’s appealing, as has been mentioned, as a low-carbon “bridge” to cleaner energy. But it’s not carbon-free, and once we’re ON nuclear power, who’s going to want to switch it off as we switch to the smaller bang-for-buck of solar, wind and other truly sustainable energy sources? And of course, a nuclear-powered future will run on a largely traditional grid where consumers buy all of their energy from the distributor. A sustainable grid running on renewable, low-carbon resources would be a grid with a lot more power generation by the consumers themselves, not to mention reduced use through energy saving devices and habits. That doesn’t maximize profit for traditional energy companies, so they’re not exactly on board with it (though if working with that strategy is made the only way for them to survive, they’ll change tack so quickly your head will spin)

As for anyone getting excited about fusion power - don’t hold your breath. It’s a long time coming, if it ever comes at all.

Finally, ANY low-carbon future is a future with a LOT of batteries in it. It’s true that carbon is our most-pressing issue by far, but we definitely have a disposal issue to deal with in solving it. Yes, supercapacitors will help if they can achieve similar or higher levels of energy density, but this isn’t something that will just go away.

You do know that Titan is basically covered with oil, right?

Oil is just a hydrocarbon. Hydrocarbons CAN come from dead dinosaurs, but they don’t have to.

Oil - convenient dinosaur hydrocarbon sitting in great big pools underneath our feet - is a limited resource. Hydrocarbon, as a general resource, is not. The universe is full of it.

We might not want to burn carbon because of environmental concerns, but we won’t ever run out.

Sorry, Titan isn’t covered with oil per se, but rather with burnable hydrocarbon compounds.