| Kytiara said: If you are interested in the subject of peak oil, I'd suggest you read a book by James Kunstler titled "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century". In fact, I'd suggest everyone read it even if they aren't interested. It deals with more than just peak oil, but thats part of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency An excerp is available here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/7203633/the_long_emergency Also, @Dogs Rule, there's no way we're going to prevent demand from exceeding supply. China and India alone are likely to drastically increase their oil usage so even if the US suddenly drops its demand, they'll just pick up the slack. Also, you're assumption that supply will dry up at a steady rate isn't likely. If you read up on Hubberts peak theory, you'll see that its a bell curve. The peak is at the top of the bell and the slippery slope on the other side is extremely steap. It's likely to be like a tap being turned off. One year we're pumping out oil like normal, the next year its gone. For a historic example, do some reading on US peak oil in the 1970's. Keep in mind that the reason we keep pushing peak oil further back is because as the price of oil goes up, more of the hard to get oil becomes profitable to extract. 15 years ago when oil was sitting at 25$ a barrel, the oil sands in Alberta, Canada were considered way to expensive to exploit so they weren't included in oil reserve calculations. Now that oil is sitting at 120$ a barrel, it's worth it to develop these sites and therefore they get included which makes it seem like oil reserves are climbing when in reality nothing new has been discovered. Essentially what people really need to be paying attention to is how fast we're using up our easily extracted and processed oil, not the oil sands or hard to reach oil reserves. They won't matter much when the world runs out of the good stuff. Anyway, it's nice to see this issue getting some attention since it is a far more pressing and dangerous issue than the theory of anthropogenic global warming. When the oil runs out, it'll sure cut human produced CO2 and we can all hail the kyoto accord for finally triumphing! =) |
Here is the bell curve. Forget the peak oil date of 2000. Call that year 0, 1950 will be -50, 2050 will be +50.
I guess I did not expressed myself properly when I said "at a steady rate." I did not mean that it would be a straight line decline. I knew that it would have a bell curve. But I also wanted to point out we would not run out of oil from one day to the next.
As long as we control WORLD demand so that it matches demand its -x(year) demand, then the world economy will be fine and the environment will benefit as a side effect. Example that by year +50, we have dropped WORLD demand to that of the year -50.
As you pointed out, emerging markets are the ones putting strains on current world demand, that is their unquestionable right. It is conceivable though that mobile and renewable energy (which is what cars need) will be the norm by the year "Peak oil +50". As Zim pointed out in the post above this one: "necessity is the mother of invention." So as soon as Peak oil is seen as an imminent crisis by the masses, then investment in renewable and mobile energy will be made which will begin to alleviate the pressures caused by peak demand.
