Letters to the Editor
cdunlea
Published Letters: 154 Editor's Choice: 35
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had_enough
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]"The industrial/technological/population growth of the human species has been fueled by oil, and nothing else. Take away oil, we're all back to the bronze age."
That statement is so obviously untrue it calls into question the rest of your analysis. Oil had nothing to do with the First Industrial Revolution (1800-1870), so without oil we'd at least be living at a mid-nineteenth century standard. Furthermore, the question of sustaining our population and living standards has almost as much to do with escaping the Malthusian trap by improved sanitation, medical knowledge and food supply as it does with oil. Yes, part of that last statement depends on the mobility of the food supply, but hydro, wind and solar power can generate the power required to keep transport and communications going.
While oil and petroderivatives do provide the best quantum package of energy by volume, as you say, the secret is in finding another package. The amount of energy being put on the earth, every day, remains relatively contant, because there are only three sources of energy: gravity (as in hydropower), geothermal, and the sun. All of these, for all practical concerns, are inexhaustible.
The real question is: when will the energy companies realize that? And that whoever develops the alternative combustion fuel, using energy stored by one of these methods, will utterly dominate the energy market for the next century as companies wedded to oil die off? Simply put, if you can a) create a combustion fuel this way, using one of these limitless energy sources, and b) patent it, you will be bigger than Bill Gates and Henry Ford combined. Now that's worth spending research dollars on.
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Why don't we get it?
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]A few nits.
No, it is gravity. That's what makes waterfalls work. Waterfalls, as in the massive amount of electricity the Northeast US buys from Quebec. See:
http://www.canren.gc.ca/tech_appl/index.asp?CaId=4&PgId=26
The original poster stated without oil we'd be in the Bronze Age, ie. technology ca. 1500 BC. I called BS on that overstatement. Yes, we'd be in trouble, but we got along just fine without oil in the Eighteenth Century, thank you.
Yet. Keep a little optimism, sunspot. Barely a hundred years ago we discovered radiation--until then the greatest scientific minds postulated a theory of anaerobic combustion to explain how the sun works. Radiation and all the discoveries we've made in nuclear physics created an entire paradigm shift within a generation. The same with combustion, radio broadcasting, flight. That's the speed of modern science. So why do you rule out the possibility that we will NEVER find an alternative? Yes, it does not exist yet, but that is the challenge before us--to create it.
Expensive? Sure it is--now. Do you know how much a PC cost in 1981? I can't recall how much my father's was, but he got his only because he worked for Digital--nobody else had one, and they didn't do much for you anyway. The point is, cost is a solvable problem, especially given time and innovation. The market always drives the cost down--that hasn't changed since the Romans figured out how to built amphitheatres faster for less money.
My point is not that there's a solution at hand, but that the form the solution should take is known. Again, if Exxon or Shell put real research dollars into finding the next energy package, they would control the energy market for at least a generation.
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had_enough
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Without getting into the snarky "you don't know what you're talking about" game, which tends to rebound on the giver, I will tell you this:
Your lengthy analysis of population, while no doubt probably accurate, is meaningless.
Why? Because you presuppose it has everything to do with the increased use of fossil fuels, presumably oil.
But we didn't use oil until the Second Industrial Revolution. And although the First, and the Late Iron Age, were powered to a good extent by coal, that was not exclusive and there is no reason to think it would have to be.
And, to state the obvious: people don't eat coal or oil.
But they do eat food. And people live longer with scientific medicine. And both DRAMATICALLY increased in terms of output and sophistication during the same period you describe.
In other words, you greatly underestimate the effects of tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, malaria, and a raft of other diseases in keeping mortality high. In 1700, infant mortality in England was about 30% overall. Today, it's 0.5%. Are you really saying that finding black gold in the hills solved that problem?
And by 1800 England had escaped the Malthusian trap. It hasn't had a famine since then, although the Early Modern period was rife with famines, plagues and other pandemic crises.
You cannot state that population growth = energy technology any more than you can state with certainty that without oil we will all die off. Your point is taken--yes, we're in for a world o' sh*t if we run the well dry. Bronze Age? Get real. We could go back to the steam engine first.
I didn't spent eight years reading about the fuel problem, but I did spend that time reading and writing about economic problems of the Early Modern and Modern periods. Go read Fernand Braudel to understand how humanity managed to develop iron technology without oil, he's far better at describing the process than I'll ever be. Heck, don't even go there; the Celts were smelting iron without it in 500 BC. There's your quantitative analysis.
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had_enough
[Read the article: Stocks plunge as investors flee risk]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]First of all, stop pimping your political website. Self-promotion is embarrassing.
Second, you draw an artificial line between the energy and the technology. The sun's energy has been with us always; not so the photoelectric cell. Mankind has always developed new technology, even during the darkest periods of history, and IF we are serious about this, we will find a way. Or reorganize, as you suppose. But we will endure.
Third, invoking laws of thermodymanics to say that we can never improve on the energy package is obtuse and demonstrates a lack of scientific method in that you believe no further discovery can be made. You rely on the authoritative "NO" without exploring the possibilities that maybe that isn't the final answer. Newtonian physics were supplanted by Einstein's; Lord Kelvin's theories replaced by Marie Curie's discoveries. Science is a work in progress. If you are not prepared to believe that, you have as much understanding of the concept as a Creationist.
Call me a dreamer, but I refuse to believe your doom and gloom. Is that what's bugging you, man? That I believe there is a solution out there to be found, instead of waiting for the end like the homeless guy on the corner with "THE END IS NEAR" hanging around my neck? Because that's what www.warsocialism.com reads like. No great mind ever solved anything with that mindset. I get the feeling you teased me about the little red star because you didn't get one. Maybe that's because you're not all you think you are.