Offshore drilling bill passes house - CONTACT YOUR SENATORS!

[Cacia]

you know what worries me? that we've heard so many false cries of wolf that
when the real one comes along, we'll tune it out along with all the other white noise

yea, like NOW?

Remember Megatrends and the predictions about the information age and how the big issue would become processing and interpreting information? I see people every day that have been so domesticated, they can no longer perceive their environment accurately.

I remember living in the Inland Empire (SoCal) with my new baby for about three months (husband's job). Driving around in the morning, the smog was creeping along like sick green snakes between the cars in the traffic jams. I thought to myself "this could make my baby really sick and I can't live here, under any circumstances". It was one big science fiction movie. I left the next day. The air was too polluted. People said I was nuts. Every day, millions get up every morning and sit in that noxious gas....
and it just does not register that they should get out of the yellow cloud.

 

[Wayward Son]

Frankly - I love how everyone considers themselves experts nowadays - and refuses to believe the truth. I say go ahead, stick your head in the sand - be an ostritch. You'll just prove that Darwin theory of survival of the fittest was correct!

And you are the expert? You hold the one & only immutable truth? Interesting.

I am minded by the fact that so far through my life -I'm 45- the 'experts' have managed to be stunningly wrong in so many ways. According to paul Ehrlich we're supposed to be straving & out of food right now, & enjoying a mass die off of humanity for it. Other exeperts screamed in the 70's that we were facing an ice age & had to hurry up & warm up the planet & now those same ones are screaming that if we don't cool it off we're gonna die. We're supposed to be running out of oil right this minute, not sitting on another 100 years or so of it. The list goes on.

Just because someone is labelled and 'expert' does not mean that what they tell you is correct or even the truth.

 

[captain]

i hear what you're saying. it seems the press needs a "horror story" to sell
advertisement, and universities need something to get research grants over

you know what worries me? that we've heard so many false cries of wolf that
when the real one comes along, we'll tune it out along with all the other white noise

you know, it's not like there's ANYTHING i can do about it anyway, sad to say, at the global level ... what will happen will happen ... we're too far along on the ride to be able to stop now

when the prohibitive cost of oil destroys the US economy, i hope to be dead by then, seriously (no children, so no worries there). if it happens faster, i got my motorcyle and the AK-47

But the real question is how will we know if it is the real one. All of this is like life after death, some believe in it out of faith, some are agnostic and follow the middle of the road may there is and maybe there isn't and some reject it completely and no one will ever know until death take them.

 

[H2Andy]

But the real question is how will we know if it is the real one.

that is exactly the problem. i think many people simply refuse to belive that
there "can" be a real one, just like every year, tons of people stay behind when
hurricane evacuations go out .. because ... this can't be the real one

only it's coming ... and it's just a matter of time

i can see several ways out of our current oil predicament:

1. we find gizzillions more oil reserves we don't know about
2. we find feasible ways to reach and process "unusable" oil
3. somehow we develop an alternative to oil before oil runs out
4. we don't develop an alternative to oil before oil runs out

 

[Cacia]

Too many people not leading themselves, that is what happens. I am telling you.

 

[Wayward Son]

Andy, I think it quite probable that we won't run out of oil while anyone reading this site is still alive. So we have some time to work it out.

Look at how much technology has progressed in just the last 30 years or so. Things that are commonplace now were at best the dreams of science fiction writers then. There are a lot of people doing research now into alternatives. Over time, answers will be found.

But I don't see us making any huge leaps away from being an oil based economy in the short term. It's going to happen, but what form it will take & when it will be are as yet unknown.

 

[TheRedHead]

that is exactly the problem. i think many people simply refuse to belive that there "can" be a real one, just like every year, tons of people stay behind when hurricane evacuations go out .. because ... this can't be the real one

You can clearly see when a hurricane is coming. If you don't evacuate, you are merely betting on odds that it doesn't strike your path. We could do a lot to save oil right now if there was an economic incentive to do so. We can grow a lot of corn in the United States and produce ethanol. We could build new nuclear power plants for heating/cooling. We could build mass transit systems for transportation. Right now, none of these options are economically, or in the case of nuclear power, environmentally viable. That doesn't mean we are simply sitting on our hands waiting for the end.

When the tipping point arrives, there will be plenty of businesses rushing to supply the demand for alternative energy. There has to be a financial incentive and that incentive will appear when the profit center is established.

 

[Cacia]

Actually, I am looking forward to it.

I want to see some big changes, in my lifetime.

 

[Wayward Son]

I dunno how big they'll be. Some are happening. Ethanol & bio diesel. though with ethanol i've read that it takes 7 gallons of gas and/or diesel to end up with 8 gallons of ethanol at the pump, so that's not going to be very effective at reducing oil consumption unless that can be seriously improved on.

We need nuclear plants. Now, many of the same environemntalists who were instrumental in bringing that technology to a halt here have come around and concluded that it's a fairly environmentally friendly source, so possibly we'll start seeing plants built again. Hard to say, but maybe.

Solar has had a small piece of the pie for quite a while, but nothing we've done yet has been to provide a large enough amt of electricity for widespread use. There is room for improvement with it.

 

[bruehlt]

I dunno how big they'll be. Some are happening. Ethanol & bio diesel. though with ethanol i've read that it takes 7 gallons of gas and/or diesel to end up with 8 gallons of ethanol at the pump, so that's not going to be very effective at reducing oil consumption unless that can be seriously improved on.

We need nuclear plants. Now, many of the same environemntalists who were instrumental in bringing that technology to a halt here have come around and concluded that it's a fairly environmentally friendly source, so possibly we'll start seeing plants built again. Hard to say, but maybe.

Solar has had a small piece of the pie for quite a while, but nothing we've done yet has been to provide a large enough amt of electricity for widespread use. There is room for improvement with it.

Actually, just like Ethanol, Nuclear is a net energy loser since it requires numerous fossil fuels in the supply chain to produce it (mining, processing, etc). So no - nuclear won't help.