On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 12:13:02PM +0100, Ashish Gulhati wrote: > Peak oil is the purest rubbish. Propaganda created, as usual, to > promote an > atmosphere of fear and put more power in the hands of tyrants.
No, it's classic economics. No one will commit massive funds for infrastructure if the price is volatile. It's one of the cases where the invisible hand is flipping us the bird. > "Humanity uses 345 Quads per year of fossil fuel. Oil shale deposits > hold 10 million Quads." - Huber & Mills [1] If you look at how oil is made from oil shale: you need a large scale industrial plant for hot stream injection (steam, made, of course, by partly burning the oil) and the resulting oil is heavy, and needs reforming/platforming (you guessed it, a big and expensive plant again). When you want to build such plants, you start planning 10-15 years in advance, and commit huge funds. Only if the oil price was stable and slowly rising would this be a safe bet. > Known coal reserves: 200,000 Quads. Same thing: Fischer-Tropsch plants. Same reason. > There is no energy crisis, and never will be, so long as human > inventiveness > isn't completely stifled by authoritarian morons. I agree -- just expect the free market to deliver the goods. You need to artificially (by regulations, taxes) fix the price to fit above curve (constantly and slowly rising prices) so that the free market can initiate the switch away from oil. Another place where state comes handy (free market doesn't do long-short R&D at all well) is sinking funds into new sources, like synmethanol, biomass synfuels, fuel cells, water electrolysis, electric vehicles, liquid hydrogen jets, and similiar. Of course, instead you've got porkbarrel, random wars, etc. > See: http://www.lewrockwell.com/walker/walker15.html -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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