American Government health spending seen hitting $1.8 trillion

[Squilliam]

Kasz216 said:

Squilliam said:

The words are 'hopefully be viable'?

Renewable energy doesn't exist without the massive subsidy from fossil fuel energy, ditto for nuclear. The scale of present natural gas and coal extraction wouldn't be possible without the input of oil because you need to invest energy to get energy back. The reason why natural gas is cheaper than oil is simply because it isn't nearly as useful.

A) You can use Natural Gas for pretty much everything oil is used for energy related wise.

Now Plastics would get expensive as hell, but that's a different story.

B) Yeah, i'd like to think in 40 years or so renewable energy should be viable.  I mean, it is 30 years-40 after all. 

Aside from which, we're already building up our coal and natural gas resources.

Though really, lets pretend they don't... you think if an Oil Company wants to make more infrastructure for Oil or Natural Gas or Coal, that they're going to pay market prices for Oil?

Or am I just going to charge myself "at cost" for my own products?  It's not like these products are being produced at "Full power" either... meaning that as supply gets low, they would just pull out excess supply to build replacements... because companies aren't stupid.

I mean, how do you think new Oil riggs and natural gas mining gets set up constantly as it is?

Those don't require energy?

A.) How many planes, boats, rail cars, road vehicles, chainsaws, diggers etc can you power directly from either natural gas or coal?

B.) How do you build up finite resource that you're depleting? Answer: You don't. You can find more, you can expend ever increasing effort to extract more but you don't magically create the stuff. Anyway hopefully in 40 years time doesn't cut it because depletion is already cutting the supply of conventional oil. Why else do you think Shell is drilling in the Arctic? If they had any better prospects anywhere else in the world don't you think they'd try to drill those first? Why, pray tell do you think that the capital expenditure for companies like ExonMobil are increasing and yet the relative share of oil production remains flat? Why do you think that drilling activity in the U.S.A. recently fell from an all time high and yet production is only half of that in the 1970s?

http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_rate/historical_oil_prices_chart.asp

We simply cannot get oil out of the ground fast enough and cheaply enough to satisfy demand which is why the price is so high. Natural gas is no substitute, nor is coal. You can exchange coal for natural gas for most things and anywhere where the utility of the energy suplied is less valuable than sheer BTUs you already the substitution has already happened, the areas where it hasn't happened, haven't because they either can't or it is extremely impractical.