On Dec 16, 2004, at 3:26 PM, Damon Agretto wrote:
Speaking of military, what do we imagine will happen when fossil fuels get low enough in reserve that there just aren't enough to go around any more?
I guess we'll just need to develop pocket fusion reactors to go along with our A-grav, rail guns, and directed energy weapons...
Dang, forgot about them.
Either the world's armed forces will eventually grind to a stop, or there'll be a commitment to retooling, I'd imagine; meanwhile civilians wouldn't get any. Given that humans tend to be shortsighted, and given that the money-grubbing bastards that run most companies don't see past the end of the fiscal year, I bet there's been no quiet development of alternative energies at all.
Oh I dunno. I don't think any company is going to let the situation go to the point where there is no more oil. To make a viable product during the Oil Embargo, and to meet customer demands, more fuel efficient cars were developed. When the wells run dry the automotive industry is going to be forced to develop new technologies, or be forced to close their doors or be replaced by a competitor. Capitalism might be callous, but they will respond to market demands if the demand is strong enough...
I agree, but the trouble is that those developments were all reactive. They came into existence after the crisis had been reached.
The US military doesn't accept *any* new weapons design overnight. It can take years for one proposed vehicle to be approved. And these are all air- and ground craft that run on conventional fossil fuels. For a non-fossil fuel alternative to work, we'd be looking at, first, a major powerplant refit, which would have to go through years of extensive failure-mode testing, and any engine change could well affect every other system on any given vehicle. I don't expect it would be as easy as, say, converting a Diesel engine to run on vegetable oil (which is itself not very easy).
One of the things we're constantly reminded of by the fossil fuel interests is how generally impractical, difficult, costly and, most of all, expensive any conversion will be. If this propaganda happens to be true, it could be decades before we have decent new military vehicles, and in the meantime the remaining fossil reserves would surely all be acquired by the governments of the world to keep their fighting forces in operation.
So the best we can hope for might be that the propaganda is a lie; alternatively, we might be fortunate enough that someone with some foresight has been pouring black project funds into alternative developments for the last couple of decades, and is now waiting for the time when there's no oil left to unveil a new class of equipment, catching all opposition flatfooted. (I'm just enough of a pessimist to fear neither is the case, a cynic to suspect the former, and a realist to suspect the latter.)
Slavish commitment to fossil fuels, opening up land reserves for oil and so on -- these really aren't very conservative strategies on balance. They're very short-sighted and long-term foolish, and their negative future effects will be felt by many people alive today.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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