extinction rate is already 10,000 times the average background rate;
Chris, this is an artificial rate, as useless, except to Greens, as events cause extinctions, not averages. It's akin to saying of we added all the average dick lengths on Earth, it'd reach 2/3rds to the Moon. An interesting topic, but unhelpful. Estimates of resources magically increase when money is involved. The shale gas that was paltry in the US 10 years ago is now something the Greens scream about, and Obama fears, (that's ideology for you). Its just that the Atlantic plays that Petrobas was counting on, were nuked by US shale gas and oil development. If money drives everything, and technology follows, the world becomes more cognitive. As Matt Ridley noted, once you have a bit of goodies in the world, human perception of pollution changes. All of a sudden, tigers and orangutans, clean air and water, star to matter. Maslow's hierarchy of needs becomes apparent. Am I saying that pereception controls physical reality? No. But it effects the way we choose things. Also, the road not taken, in energy, in space, has been effected by ROI. The ROI that I speak of, is not what is decided by you and I, who are spacekateers, but the worlds' rich, who access power and influence it. Feel like weeping now? Last, don't switch off the dirty, environmentally devastating, until we've got clean at hand, producing Terawatts of electricity on a 7 x 24 basis. But this is not for you and I too decide, Chris, but the super rich ;-) -----Original Message----- From: Chris de Morsella <cdemorse...@yahoo.com> To: everything-list <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Thu, Mar 6, 2014 8:34 pm Subject: Re: The situation at Fukushima appears to be deteriorating From: "spudboy...@aol.com" <spudboy...@aol.com> >>Chris, at some point we must ask basic questions, such as, do the toilets >>flush, and do the lights come on? We are not, I believe, speaking here about >>Bruno's UDA, versus Tegmark's MUH, but how well our civilizations flourish or >>fail? If we have the clean tech to replace the dirty tech, and can afford it, >>and it can produce the megawatts, then there is no argument here. My only >>question to the Greens is: Does it do all of the above, and can you provide >>evidence? To the earth and the real world we inhabit, it actually matters not at all, how much we debate whether or not the toilets will flush or the lights will come on. The physical limits of our planet have been reached, or will soon be reached. Some things to consider: the extinction rate is already 10,000 times the average background rate; ocean food webs are collapsing all over the world in a drastic manner; the rates of desertification, deforestation, loss of top soil, loss of soil fertility, loss of aquifers are all proceeding at rates that should alarm anyone who actually looks at these trends. Vital resources -- such as oil for example -- have already peaked (the world will never produce as much oil as it did in the 2005-2010 period... those days are over and super giant mega fields are all in decline (including the biggest of them all: Ghawar, according to Simmons (with whom I corresponded over the years with until he died a few years ago) -- the Saudis jealously guard their production/reserve stats on the level of a state secret, but it is telling that in spite of the various price spikes that have happened and will continue to occur they have been unable to up their output in order to promote their stated goal of price stability. -- instead we must live under the distorting effect of wild price swings, because there is no swing supplier anymore.... i.e. oil has peaked ) All fossil energy supplies are at or are nearing peak production and because of tertiary and other advanced techniques employed to squeeze as much out as possible as fast as possible, once fields go into decline their rates of decline are very rapid. Take for example the Cantarell super giant field off the coast of the Yucatan and one of the worlds biggest fields ever discovered. Production peaked at 2.1 million barrels per day in 2003; falling to 408,000 barrels per day by 2012, which is less than 20% of what it had been producing at peak in under ten years after decline set in. There are no more super giant fields remaining to be discovered (except perhaps in the Arctic Ocean basin or in Antarctica and in extreme deep water deposits (such as the one discovered in Brazil) but in such cases there exist extreme challenges in getting the oil out -- just ask Shell Oil (Deep Water Horizon disaster). Brazil in fact has not been able to develop its super giant at nearly the level it had hoped to as another example. In all cases the EROI (or energy returned on energy invested) of extracting this hard to get oil -- or for mining tar sands, or fracking shale deposits as well is rapidly falling leaving ever smaller margins of surplus energy -- for all other needs. The EROI of oil extraction has fallen into the single digits from 100:1 in the early days of the Texas and Saudi mega fields; if it falls much further it will not be able to generate enough surplus energy to maintain technological industrial civilization. Does it matter what you desire? Or what John Clark thinks? Not really, not to the earth and to the hard facts of Limits to Growth. Do yeast in a barrel wonder when they have reached peak sugar whether they should perhaps slow down -- only to be shouted down by the various John Clark yeast analogues that there is plenty of sugar and to keep on consuming sugar as fast as they can. Does believing there is plenty of sugar change the outcome for those yeast in that barrel when the supply of sugar begins to run out? We are like yeast and the earth is our barrel. You can argue with me till you run out of breath, but the facts remain the facts. Oil has peaked and many other energy and other resources are close on its heels. The cornucopean world view is a form of self delusion. If we want to have a hope in hell of avoiding the worst collapse our species has ever experienced since the time of the Toba super volcano that erupted some 70,000 years ago and is thought to be linked to the genetic bottleneck event written into our mtDNA, then we had better get our collective shit together pronto. We won't, of course because loud voices will keep shouting that there is nothing to worry about and that all of this is just the ranting of "greens" -- yeah drill baby drill and what has that got us? P.S. If you want to argue the stats of the shale gas and oil (kerogen) plays I have the facts that prove that this is all a huge bubble that cannot be sustained -- and that in fact is beginning to go bust as capital expenditures are finally reaching the upper limit of what is possible. If you want to argue future reserve availability then please do so presenting actual verifiable statistics, as I will. I am not interested in books about supply written a hundred and fifty years ago or that Malthus got it wrong... many of the facts and figures are in the public domain. All one has to do is look. Chris -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
