They are also basically ingenious enough to have invented the car that gave a shrew like you your freedom.

I'm sorry, Auntiegrav, but, what? What do "The ITER fusion reactor, ethanol, modern schools, and government checks and balances" have to do with one another? ITER is underfunded, ethanol is likely overfunded (the jury's still out), schools could use more funding, and how do you 'fund' an abstract concept like checks and balances? I couldn't make head nor tails of your post. If you are truly concerned about the environment, and about social justice, you should support alternative energy sources, especially fusion. Most people who oppose fusion research don't seem to understand that fusion reactors would be a) nonpoluting (either CO2 emissions or nuclear waste) b) incapable of meltdown and c) produce essentially limitless amounts of cheap power. Such a prolific source of energy would benefit all of humanity, not just wealthy, first-world nations. One of the major reasons those nations are wealthy is because of their control of energy resources, and one of the major reasons they exploit poorer nations is to obtain energy resources. With limitless cheap energy, that motivation disappears. Fusion may turn out to be just a pie-in-the-sky idea, but it holds so much potential that it's almost criminal for us to not persue it intently.

If I were a less charitable person, I would say some nasty things about Auntigrav's letter on page 12. However, I won't, because it really isn't appropriate nor does it help me make my point.

Indulge me, if you will: I like to make lists of things to clarify my thinking.

1. Peak oil seems to be an objectively real phenomenon. We are eventually going to reach the downslope of the Hubbard peak, like it or not, and will have to deal with the consequences. I am not sure whether that will be now or later; I am neither a petrochemical engineer nor a geologist, but it doesn't hurt to start thinking about some alternatives to oil now--like right now.

2. That said, some of the previous posters nailed it right on the head: the Peak Oil Movement is not doing anybody any good. What's the first thing they teach you in first aid? Stay calm, because it doesn't help anybody if you're running around like a chicken with its head cut off. That's what this group seems to be doing: inciting fear, but not offering a solution.

3. Checks and balances form the basic power structure of our government. Go back to your high school textbooks if this is new to you. It does not depend on "money" to keep it going. You should learn things like this before shooting your mouth off; it makes you look foolish when you do that. I'm looking at you, AuntieGrav.

4. We have the technological capacity to get away from oil. Or rather, the technology exists that could get us away from oil. However, it is variously underfunded, underutilized, and ignored. I hardly need to say that this will have to change, and sooner rather than later.

5. I don't see that as fundamentally a technological problem; previous posters have noted quite well that we humans are a resilient species. We get by when things get tough. However, the players in this drama are nations, and nations are subject to political considerations, which are difficult and ponderous.

6. You cannot change the nature of a nation's energy usage within a short period of time without things getting really uncomfortable. In the long run, I think, we will have to become accustomed to a little less comfort. Done right, though, that could take place over years and be less of a shock. Does the political will exist to break us away from oil? I fear it does not. That, I think, is the real danger: not that we will regress to the Middle Ages, not that people will be eating each other in the streets, not that our society will collapse. No, the danger is that our leaders at the local, state, and federal level do nothing until necessity demands that we take drastic action. At that point, things will get quite unpleasant. Can we do something about it? Sure we can. Is it easy? No.

if we want to get energy independent, let's tap the nation's most abudant resources: stupidity and hot air! Just plug a hose into the comments section of this blog and we can get off mideast oil forever. Now where's my nobel prize?

Nikola

Eilonwy writes:

"Contrary to Alec Johnson’s claims on nuclear's viability being a myth, France already provides nearly 80% of her electricity from roughly 55 nuclear-driven plants and would not require “thousands of them”"

By my calculation:

Current oil consumption worldwide is about thirty billion barrels a year. Gross heat in one barrel of oil is 6100 megajoules. So, oil consumption amounts to 183 trillion megajoules per year.

Here in New Brunswick, we have one reactor (Point Lepreau.) It's a CANDU-6 reactor with a peak output of 630 MW, or 630 MJ per second. (Admittedly not state-of-the-art, but I did these calculations for a Canadian conference.)

Quick calculation yields 9,200 Point Lepreaus running at peak capacity, year-round, to replace the gross energy we get from oil.

Granted, the CANDU-6 is not the state of the art. France makes reactors that are about 1,800 MW. So we're talking about maybe one-third of 9,200, or about 3000 such reactors running full-blast year-round.

Then again, it's not a good idea to run a reactor, even those spiffy French ones, full-blast year-round. Assume a capacity ratio of about 50% and you're talking about 6,000 state-of-the-art French reactors to replace global oil consumption.

Haven't even gotten into replacing natural gas, or the energy that must be reinvested in mining and refining uranium. Nor the inherent limits on the supply of uranium, which I'm not qualified to evaluate, but obviously it's not infinite.

A key point to consider is that when someone talks about replacing oil, and someone else says "Yeah, but X country gets Y% of its electricity from nuclear power," you have to consider that electricity generation is a very small part of our energy consumption. Most of what we use oil for is transportation, and that's something that electricity doesn't do very well. (I mean yeah, you can run electric trains, but those don't work when your cities are sprawling all over the map.)

If you want to use that nuclear electricity to make hydrogen to run the hypothetical hydrogen cars (not likely any time soon) you'll need an extra 25% of that total electricity to cover thermodynamic losses from electrolysis. 6000 x 1.25 = 7,500 reactors.