Kyros said: Sometimes the market just isn't able to serve a function needed by society. Yes free after Winston Churchill: The market economy is the worst of all systems except for all the other ones. I am not sure if the market is the best system for copying with global warming (here politicians would need to integrate carbon usage into the market with a carbon tax or whatever) but the market is PERFECT for copying with problems like rising oil prices. Attempts by politicians to solve this problem will with absolute certainty make the problem worse. I mean you see what happens at the moment. When oil gets more scarce prices rise and companies will scramble to make alternative energy sources. No need for a doomsday scenario.

Well obviously since it's a market situation the market will adjust eventually, but the question, I think, is whether natural market adjustments are good enough as far as mitigating the impact of peak oil on the global economy and population. You have not answered this question at all. (Perhaps I'm asking too much -- none of us are experts. But in that case you should acknowledge that the question remains unanswered.)

I think we're a far way away from real energy problems, right now we're just facing problems due to short sighted governments and temporary supply/demand issues ...

As oil becomes more expensive it becomes profitable to extract (synthetic) oil from more expensive energy deposits. Right now it is profitable to produce synthetic oil from coal and oil sands (like those readily found in Athabasca), and soon enough shale oil (as is found in the green river formation) will also become profitable.

On top of that, much of our electricity generation is currently from coal, oil and natural gas but (as the price of oil remains high) this will likely switch towards alternative energy sources like Nuclear, wind, and hydroelectric which will free up coal, oil and natural gas for uses which can not easily switch to alternative energy sources (like Plains and automobiles).

@happysqurriel
most of the rivers that are able to be damned for hydro power have been, and even though it is a "clean" energy source, it does wreck fish populations because it makes it harder for them to migrate up and down the river to spawn. Also, solar power only works in the daytime unless you use some of the power to generate steam to create power that way, I believe a solar plant in France does this to supply power at night, and wind only works when the wind is blowing, and that isn't all the time and to get more energy to need bigger windmills. Nuclear is good, but the lobbyists won't let them build more without a big fight and then of course you have to store the waste. If we can make a fusion plant (like the sun) instead of fission plants like we have that would solve a lot of problems. At least under my understanding (which is very very very limited) of fusion power.

OT

In US waters, there is enough natural gas to power the US for 3000 years at the rate of consumption right now. Even though I don't know about other countries, especially since the US has so much coastline and all, if other countries have similar amounts, but that is more than enough to power the US whoever the corporations decide to sell it to for a long time. have you ever heard of the Bermuda Triangle? The reason so many ships and planes disappear there is because natural gas escapes from the ocean floor in big plumes of gas, if a ship is above it, the ship will lose buoyancy and sink and if a plane is over head, the engines will fail.

No I haven't. This wouldn't be very respectable anyway. But I am pretty sure that market adjustments are the best possible solution for this problem.
If it is good enough is another question, but I am pretty sure that no other approach would be better.

@cwbys21

Every alternative energy has its problems and we will most likely need a mix. Dams are ok but limited. Geothermal and tide energy could help. Solar would be an option etc. etc. pp Carbon sequestration has great potential. Offshore wind is nice. Perhaps even something exotic like fusion power or the revival of fast breeders. People can change their attitude to nuclear power when energy starts to get really expensive.
Even biofuels have great potential. It is true that biofuels from maize are idiotic, but they are effective when created from sugar cane or switch grass. And companies are working on biofuel from cellulose so you could use almost everything green lying around which would normally be thrown away.

The stock market is taking a beating today, partly due to a new record in oil prices (there's practically a new record every day recently). The US dollar is also going down.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/21/news/economy/oil_hearing/?postversion=2008052112

"We cannot change the world market," said Robert Malone, chairman and president of BP America Inc. "Today's high prices are linked to the failure both here and abroad to increase supplies, renewables and conservation."

Malone's remarks were echoed by John Hofmeister, president of Shell.

"The fundamental laws of supply and demand are at work," said Hofmeister. The market is squeezed by exporting nations managing demand for their own interest and other nations subsidizing prices to encourage economic growth, he said.

switch grass produces the most biofuel per acre, so if the government was smart, they would stop paying farmers to not grow food (this was implemented because food was so cheap that farmers were making no money so they pay farmers not to grow food to raise the price) and instead have farmers use that land for switch grass which also renews the land for better crops. i still think natural gas in the best, like I said the US has enough of it to last us 3000 years. that is enough time to work on fusion nuclear power which is nearly limitless, clean, and safe (no atomic bombs if something happens).

cwbys21 said: switch grass produces the most biofuel per acre, so if the government was smart, they would stop paying farmers to not grow food (this was implemented because food was so cheap that farmers were making no money so they pay farmers not to grow food to raise the price) and instead have farmers use that land for switch grass which also renews the land for better crops. i still think natural gas in the best, like I said the US has enough of it to last us 3000 years. that is enough time to work on fusion nuclear power which is nearly limitless, clean, and safe (no atomic bombs if something happens).

Do you have a link for the 3000 years of natural gas thing?

 

Some of the official agencies are coming out with worrying reports on the supply situation... Peak oil seems to be drawing near indeed.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121139527250011387.html?mod=hpp_us_whats_news

The world's premier energy monitor is preparing a sharp downward revision of its oil-supply forecast, a shift that reflects deepening pessimism over whether oil companies can keep abreast of booming demand.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency is in the middle of a large study of the condition of world's top oil fields. Its findings won't be released until November, but the bottom line is already clear: Future crude-oil supplies could be far tighter than previously thought.

The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day now. But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.
...
The IEA is now trying to shed light on some of the industry's best-kept secrets through a study of the world's top 400 oil fields. With behind-the-scenes assistance from major oil companies, oil-field-service companies, energy ministries and consultants, the agency hopes to assess the overall health of major fields scattered from Venezuela and Mexico to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. The fields supply more than two-thirds of daily world production.

The study, employing the efforts of a team of 25 analysts, marks a sea change in the IEA's efforts to peer into the future. In the past, the agency focused mainly on assessing future demand and then looked at how much non-OPEC countries were likely to produce to meet that demand. Any gap, it was assumed, would then be met by big OPEC producers such as Saudi Arabia, Iran or Kuwait.

 

Even though I can't find anything, it was on a History Channel show called Mega Disasters where one guy thought that a big plume of methane gas came up from the ocean during a storm and lightning caught it on fire and it was a big fire ball that might have killed off the dinosaurs. In the show they said that there is 3000 years worth of methane in the oceans in US waters. The show won't be re-aired in the next week and I don't want to buy it for $25. The guy got the idea from some thing that happened in the early 1900s in Africa where methane gas came up out of a lake and created a fire ball.

NJ5 said: The IEA has predicted for several years that crude-oil supplies will arc gently upward to keep pace with rising demand, topping 116 million barrels a day by 2030, up from around 87 million barrels a day now. But the agency is now worried that aging oil fields and diminished investment mean that companies could struggle to break beyond 100 million barrels a day over the next two decades.

Now in this case I'll agree with Kyros that the market will adjust fast enough to counteract the problem.  If the problem is merely that people aren't trying hard enough to get the oil out, then the market will certainly have more than enough companies/governments scrambling for the privilege of picking up the slack well before the global economy self-destructs. 

Creating entirely new energy resource pools, on the other hand, is another matter.  The natural instinct of capitalism is to keep taking from the well until it runs dry and by then it's FAR too late to avoid consequences on a scale yet unseen by man.  Oh, I'll bet that by the time that oil was just getting to the really bad downslope on the bell curve there'd be a few great new energy sources, but they'd take many years if not decades to scale up to anywhere NEAR the levels that the world is used to getting -- no, anywhere near the levels the world NEEDS with its current setup.  (Well, unless we get fusion, but we've been "10 years away" from that since the 1960s if I recall correctly, so don't bet on it.) 

The market REACTS, and this time reacting just fucking isn't good enough.  What is needed is to ACT.