> Peak oil theory is based on the possibly flawed theory that world oil > reserves are "fixed" when there are some recent ideas in geology that > talk of crude oil as being a kind of natural exudate of the earth. In > other words the planet naturally produces these substances slowly > over time.
The key here is SLOWLY which makes it rather academic. We have used up reserves that took millions or billions of years to produce in just 100+ years. We will probably use of the rest in considerably less time. > > Bottom line however is unchanged: burning and consumption of these > products is harmful to the atmosphere. Therefore we need to find less > impacting sources of energy. Yes. Unfortunately as oil disappears we will be tempted to use more coal, which is more plentiful. Coal can be turned into an automotive fuel. The Germans did it durning WWII. But it is costly and inefficient. Oddly enough more coal use could actually slow global warming. There is a new therory, that has be substanciated to a degree, that the effects of global warming have actually been postponed by particulate polution in the atmosphere, which reflects much of the sun's energy. > The down side of this is that the style > of energy we are likely to adopt in transition is nuclear energy. There is likely to be a renaisance of nuclear. However, construction, maintainance, mining and refining of uranium, and decommissioning of nuclear plants require massive amounts of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, many of the cleaner altenatives such as wind and solar cells also require large fossil inputs to manufacture and sustain. Many manufacturing processes depend on very high temperatures which are hard to produce without fossil fuels. We tend not to realize what a integral part of technological civilization they are. History might actually refer to the 19th, 20th, and 21st centurys as the fossil fuel civilization. That is if there is still such a thing as history. It may be critical to get the alternative in place before the oil to create them is gone. Otherwise it will be impossible to bootstrap new technologies into large scale production. > To subscribe, send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ and click 'Join This Group!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
