I merely said I am using less oil than I did before. Fact. You made all the value judgements and insinuations from that. If you are still driving a car that uses oil and gas then your words about using fossil fuels are without merit.
I've read reports that the rate of oil spilling into the ocean could be 25X worse than reported. That plus the fact that the rig that sank could be sitting on top of the borehole which the oil is coming from = nightmare! Jeremiah give us a viable alternative to the ICE.
The character of the speaker makes no difference to the legitimacy of the words. What I say stands or falls based on the words themselves and the facts of the case. If a murderer says murder is wrong, his words are legitimate even if he is a hypocrite for uttering them while still being a murderer. We are destroying the conditions that we require for our own survival as a species. The fact (which I have asserted, not denied) that I am part of the problem, does not change these facts. If you really do not claim to be making things better by driving a Prius, then I apologize to you if I suggested that you had made such a claim. But we all know that most Prius drivers are smug as hell about burning less gas than people who drive other cars. And the fact is that burning ANY gas is sending the world straight to hell in a hand basket. The spill in the Gulf is not an anomaly that could have been prevented if only BP had done something different. Oil spills like this are INEVITABLE as long as we keep demanding gasoline for our cars. BP didn't cause this oil spill. YOU AND I CAUSED IT by our lifestyle choices. You and I and every other consumer of fossil fuel in the world.
I accidentally ran into this video and think it reflects the American attitude about energy: fat, happy, and no desire to seriously do anything to fix it. Like the intro with the Mercedes diesel exhaust, then the keyboard guy going around in an electric wheelchair.
Uhhhh, No. BP had every thing in place and they even TESTED the equipment a few days prior to the incident. The BOP failed and we're not sure why. The media is pointing fingers as usual. BP has one hell of a saftey record. I find it really difficult to just stop using crude oil. It's what moves everything. I really don't see any other options to keep our economy sustainable other than to keep using what we have. Here is a article written by a guy in the industry. A Simple Explanation Of What Happened In The Gulf Oil Rig Disaster - WALL OF TEXT WARNING - AR15.COM And here is an interview with a guy that was on that same rig. Mark Levin Drilling in the water and deeper into the ground has it's dangers. This does not happen often and so, There is no reason to just stop using energy that we need.
Everything fails occasionally. When the consequences of failure involve this level of destruction, it is irresponsible to allow it. ("It" in this case being underwater drilling for oil.) There is a finite amount of fossil fuel. When it runs out we'll have to find other energy sources or abandon our industrial economy and revert to the stone age (and about a tenth of a percent of the present population). But if we wait until the oil runs out, we will lack the resources to develop alternatives. So, either we make the switch to non-fossil energy now, while we can, or we blithely go on burning it until there's none left, and condemn future generations to conditions so brutal that 99.9% of the population will die off, and those that survive will envy the dead.
You see here folks, Daniel is spewing pure anti-oil Rhetoric bull crap. The oil will NEVER run out. There is oil everywhere under the ground. The problem is finding enough oil to fiscally produce it. There is no sense drilling a $50 million dollar hole in the ground if you think you're only going to get $49 million back. "Peak Oil" theorists drive me nuts. The phrase by itself implies that there are only a certain number of gallons of usable oil in the world as it exists right now. If anything, the phrase "Peak Oil" should be changed to "Peak Fiscally Cheap Oil". What these people won't or don't tell you is that typically, a "common" North American oil well will only ALLOW you to produce 10-40% of the oil in the ground. The balance of the well is lost to pressure loss. Keep in mind that oil is not in massive pools underground, it is embeded in rocks and under a huge amount of pressure. If the world could figure out how to get the balance of the 60-90% of the oil out of the ground, we would be good for centuries.
I agree that we will never completely run out of oil, but we will get to a point where all of the economically feasible sites have been pumped dry. We are almost there now. Even if the supply is endless (and I don't believe it is, economically speaking especially if you throw in the environmental cost), there are other reasons not to burn it for fuel.
The effect is the same. If it costs a thousand dollars to produce a barrel of oil, there might as well be none there at all. And BTW they are already using sophisticated techniques to force that additional oil out of the ground, pumping steam and mud and what-not into the wells. The age of oil is coming to an end and if we don't start building alternative-energy infrastructure now, we're gonna be screwed.
Agreed - oil will still be there, but look what the economic impact was the last time it went over $100 a barrel? [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulxe1ie-vEY]YouTube - Peak Oil - How Will You Ride the Slide?[/ame]
Rather than point out the errors in a rational manner, you just spout hyperbole. And you then make the same error of exaggeration by claiming oil will "NEVER" run out. What you say about economically feasibly recoverable oil is a good point. But it is also true that global demand continues to increase over the long run, and new sources are not coming on line as quickly as old ones are depleted. Increased oil prices will damage our economy. Just on that basis alone it is extremely important that we become self-sufficient. We must BOTH increase supply AND decrease demand (solely from the short term economic viewpoint, from the long term environmental one, we need to simply decrease demand). One of the ways to do this is to promote EVs and NG cars. Do you disagree?
'jeremiah", i disagree. i think many prius owners and others are very willing to give up our carbon lifestyles as soon as you offer us an alternative that you are currently using. if we are radiating smugness, what are you radiating? self righteousness?
Excellent video. Thanks! Zap Xebra SD 100% electric car. It requires some compromises. The problem is that most people (including Prius drivers) are unwilling to make compromises to their lifestyle. You are willing to switch from carbon to something else. You are willing to buy a car that burns less gas. But you (and I mean here all of us) are not willing to alter your lifestyle for one that involves LESS driving, or accept a car that only goes 35 mph. Smugness. The difference is that I know that what I'm doing is not nearly enough. My jeremiad is to try to convince other folks that what we are presently doing is not nearly enough. The first step to recovery is to realize that there's a problem, and right now, too many people, like Jimmy, think there's no problem: they think there's an infinite supply of oil, and that carbon has no impact on climate. Other people think that if we just cut our personal oil consumption by 50% things will get better. I'm standing here (figuratively, since I'm actually sitting) to say that it's not enough.
There's the crux of what's holding us back. Almost half the country has no interest in breaking the addiction. They like their guzzlers, they like their wars, and they like their drilling. If the half the country that does SOMETHING (like get a Prius)sacrifice even more to try to achieve an unacheivable environmental perfection, it won't help a bit. In fact it will just make the gas cheaper for the users and give them an economic advantage over the half that doesn't use it. You're preaching to the choir about the need to reduce our fossil use when you complain that driving a Prius isn't enough. It's the other side that is the holdup to REAL change. But you can't make a systemic change like that until a solid majority of the public is in favor of it. Currently there are too many people that either just don't care or who believe the lies that there's plenty of oils and using it is a good thing.
I liked your earlier post about not making an automatic scapegoat out of BP, but then you follow it up with this tripe. There are two things you are correct on: we are very dependent on petroleum, and the 'end of cheap oil' might be a more accurate (or understandable) description of the situation than 'peak oil'. There are no good answers for the dependency problem, but running our cars on natural gas and electricity (both of which can be produced here in the U.S., instead of sending our money to unfriendly and unstable countries, usually with terrorists; and are less polluting) needs to be a big part of it. But to your other points: most people who are aware of peak-oil do not say we will "run out" of oil on such-and-such a date. There is a peak to the bell-shaped production curve that follows the peak of the oil discovery curve. This happened in the U.S. much like Hubbert predicted it would, decades beforehand. This has happened in Mexico, the North Sea, etc. It's pretty easy to mathematically apply this same principle globally, except we don't really know what's under much of the middle east because OPEC is pretty secretive about such things. It's accepted that the 'spare production' was essentially non-existant during the summer of 2008, even by people claiming the price run-up was due to speculators. Even if people wanted to increase production then, they couldn't. The only economic possibility was a decline in demand, which happened in the form of a recession. Uh no, that's very common knowledge among all people following oil production, including Matthew Simmons, the most public person talking about peak oil. Many places will pump water or carbon dioxide underground to try to boost the pressure and bring up more oil. Saudi Arabia pumps sea water underground to do this, but then a percentage of the sea water will come up in neighboring wells. This is what they call the 'water cut' and it has been increasing from 30% to 70% in recent years. In other words, 70% of what comes up the oil well is water they pumped down neighboring wells. This obviously can't last forever. Once you educate yourself come back for a proper discussion of this critical issue.
