From this thread:
So, Mad Max-style apocalyptic fantasies aside, how do we cope, and what changes/sacrifices do we make when the price of oil starts ramping asymptotically to the moon?
Stranger
Have on hand prior to the announcement of peak oil
Solar Panels
Old Fashioned Gardening Supplies
Tons of water or a means to collect water
Firearms
Food Supplies
And then a optimistic outlook because WWIII wouldn’t describe the hell the world would see for those few years after oil is kaput.
Thankfully I am in the “people will realize its not a renewable resource and stop using it all on SUV’s and junk before its too late” camp myself.
If it gets that bad I’m just going to cash out. I don’t want to be a trigger happy survivalist agriculturalist.
I had no idea that oil production was a step function. :rolleyes:
Before we run out, the price will escalate due to shortages.
Thus other sources of energy will be competitive, and eventually cheaper, so I’m not worried.
gee, I just love threads discussing the end of the world. Everybody gets so excited…
But life ain’t like the movies. We arent going to just wake up one day with all the oil gone. It’ll be a very, very gradual process, as supplies get harder to find, and the price slowly increases. And then,in a gradual process, people will adapt. We’ll just stop driving SUV’s, and electric companies will stop burning oil. If by then nobody has invented cars that run on hydrogen fuel cells, we’ll just use electric cars. And if nobody has invented fusion power , we’ll build old-fashioned nuclear power plants.
Our great-grandkids will wonder what it was like to drive a smelly, noisy old piston engine car, and why we enjoyed it. And they won’t understand why we were so parallysed by worry about the environment that we didn’t build nuclear plants.Instead those silly ol’ folks back in the 21st century kept on burning oil, even though it was obvously so dangerous–causing global warming , and leading to economic chaos, war. Obvously, any child of the modern, enlightened generation XXXX (say ,the year 2215) can see that the world is better off not relying on oil, just like it is better off not relying on horse power.
(But it’s fun to watch people who like to worry about these things…)
The number of people with cars will decline sharply, perhaps 90% or more. The large number of people who build, service or repair them with have to move to another line of work, as will those involved in highway construction.
Our homes will be smaller, better insulated and mostly close enough to walk to work. We will not heat or AC our homes like now, maybe heat at 50 and AC at 90.
Hopefully, this will be a 30 year or so process, but I have my doubts. IMO, we won’t know we are close to running out of oil, until the pump rate declines sharply in the half dozen countries with large oil resources and at that point, the effective end of oil would be near.
It will be very unpleasant to return to a 1900 life, but everyone once did and many do so even today.
Perhaps the old style environmentalists will finally all die out or something and we’ll be able to actually start looking back at nuclear power without having to cringe? I seriously doubt the oil will ever run out myself…I think it will eventually be marginalized as a main fuel source by other, better technology…like hydrogen for instance, though there are several other possibilities. And in order to have hydrogen as an alternative fuel we need cheap, clean, nearly unlimited power…like, say, what you get with nuclear. Eventually the price of oil will rise to the level that people will start seriously looking into alternatives, or more accurately, that alternatives will become viable…at that point, no more oil economy. The stone age didn’t end because people ran out of stone…the oil age isn’t going to end because we run out of oil. Its going to end because a better alternative will emerge.
-XT
We can’t run out of oil, we haven’t had flying cars yet!
We still haven’t solved the basic problem of disposing with nuclear waste, so we should continue to cringe.
We haven’t solved it because the old style environmentalists have blocked or challenged every attempt to do so, due to their knee jerk reaction to anything nuclear…and have created hysteria about it to the point where the public in the US is wary of anything dealing with nuclear. One has but to look at the foot dragging and other efforts to block things like Yucca Mt. and any attempt to design, let alone build an new nuclear plant in the US to see why this ‘problem’ hasn’t been 'solved.
In addition, because of this ridiculous fear, advances in new technology which would make the plants both safer and mroe efficient are being done in other countries…like China and South Africa…than in the US. Again, because of the resistance and knee jerk reactions by the old crowd. Wired ran an article on this point in its latest addition, and they make a good point that the old style environmentalist movement with its aversion to everything nuclear is destroying the environment, and unless we change not only are we going to have a shitty environment but we are going to be hopelessly behind the rest of the world and playing catchup when the price of oil starts to REALLY rise. THATS something to cringe about.
-XT
From the World Nuclear Assoc. the energy density of Uranium is 500,000 MJ /kg. Oil comes in around 50. That’s a factor of 10,000 in uranium’s favour. Now 1 kg of crude oil seems to come in at 85%/wt carbon. So if you burn 1 kg you’ll get 3.4 kg of CO[sub]2[/sub]. Burn 10,000 kg and you’ll release 34 thousand tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. With uranium, you’ll need to store 1 kg of spent fuel. Volume? A cube about 4 (<2”) cm per side.
I know which problem I’d rather have.
For those who are interested, there’s lots of discussion on this subject over on the Peak Oil Forums. It’s a diverse lot, and opinions run the gamit from Julian Simonesque skeptics to those of people who’ve already bought land and weapons in undisclosed, remote locations.
Hmph, I always wondered what happened to the Y2K nutters went. Now I know.
Other sources may be “relatively” cheaper. That doesn’t mean a 6.5billion human population is sustainable.
Any organism in any ecosystem can increase in population until limted by some necessary factor. Energy is a factor for us now- if the availability and accesability is diminished by the depletion of oil, even though alternatives may be relatively cheaper, they may not support the population level.
What made the Y2K screamers crazy was their assumption that nothing would be done to fix the problem- not that there was not a coding problem.
The difference now is that what must be done is not as straightforward and obvious as correcting a few billion lines of code.
Using current technology how much oil is required to build a nuclear power plant? To mine the necessary uranium?
I get that we could have better and more electric vehicles (though current technology requires a lot of oil to build vehicles, too) but that just replaces the tractors and vehicles. How does all the electricity a nuke plant generates replace the use of petrochemicals in agriculture?
Well that’s OK because it doesn’t need to be. The population is currently plateuaing and will decline within the next 100 years.
That makes no real sense. Humans are currently profligate energy users yet our food production outstrips demand by so much that we dump tonnes of the stuff in the sea, burn it and pay people not to grow it. And at the same time the amount of land needed to produce this food per capita is declining. Even if oil usage were cut in half we could easily support the population because oil plays no real role inpopulation support. If we had to cut energy output we might have a problem, but most oil is used in vehicles while coal is the primary energy soucre and coal is not in short supply.
None, not a drop, zero, zilch, SFA. Using current technology we could easily build a nuclear power plant and mine the uranium using exclusively coal power, of which there is absolutely no shortage. Most major mining equipment and rail transport exists in electric form right now. It’s only the actual mine trucks that require diesel fuel and conversion of coal to gas or even diesel fuel is a piece of cake with modern technology.
This idea that it’s going to take a lot of oil to build anuclear power plant just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. We don’t even currently use a lot of oil to build coal-fired power plants, it’s primarily coal energy.
Petrochemicals are just a convenient and cheap source of hydrocarbon. They can be readily produced from coal, of which there is no shortage, or plant biomass. If it comes down to that we can produce it directly from the air using CO2 as the source. The electricity of the nuke plants plays a role in this by powering the transformation process from the carbohydrate of plants or long-chain carbon of coal into the required from for petrochemical feedstock. There’s no serious problem here. Prices will rise a little but so long as we have energy we will always have hydrocarbons.
How will planes fly?
Hydrogen? Liquid hydrocarbon derived from coal or plant biomass? Hydrocarbon derived from carbon fixed directly form the air if necessary! That’s the point that everyone misses in these scenarios, there is no fundamental difference in carbon and hydrogen atoms no matter what their source, and they are not rare. After that it’s all just chemistry. We can always obtain liquid hyrdrocarbon if needed. We may decide that it’s not needed enough to justify the expense, indeed in many cases we doubtless will, but if we need planes enough to pay for them then planes we shall have.