Kowabunga

This is in part a follow-up to the recent townhall meetup that took place last week. We were all intrduced to a graph on peak oil production, produced by PeakOil.org. Tracy has also written about this site on his blog, Anti-Strib, and is well worht a read.

Edmund Contoski, in his book Makers and Takers, sites that current oil reserves are estimated to last 250-300 years, natural gas, at current consumption rates, will last another 600 years, coal, 2,500 years, and there is enough shale oil to last 40,000 years. This doesn't even take into account the amount of uranium and how longthat will last with current breeder reactor technologies.

If we want oil and natural gas reserves to be stretched out over longer periods of time, then we need to expand the use of nuclear energy. Doing so will have two net effects: 1) natural gas, which many electric generation plants are now using instead of coal, will have a reduced rate of consumption; 2) since nearly every home relies on natural gas for winter heating, the cost will be dramatically lower as hoome owneres won't be directly competing with pwoer companies for the supply of natural gas. Less usage, less demand, more supply, equals lower prices. This will benefit the poor the most as they are typically the ones who are hit hardest as prices shyrocket wiht winter demand.

Back to the peak oil concept. This has been going on since the 1920s, when predictions were made "that only seven billion barrels of oil remained in the United States. By 1943 four times that amount had been consumed..." The trend continues to this day, with proven oil reserves increasing every few years as oil exploration uncovers new deposits, and technology advances enabling extraction from deeper oil fields.

InfoPlease has a chart listing the Proven Oil Reserves For 2003 for the top 10 known reserves. It does not include sites like ANWR. A second chart lists Top Rank Producers for the same period. The CIA World Fact Book also lists a chart on Proven Oil Reserves for 2002, with worldwide estimates of about 1 trillion barrels of oil.

After perusing the peak oil site, one has to ask: what do they propose to do? It is heavily slanted towards doom-and-gloom, as are many of the sites and articles it references, without providing any solutions, or acknolwedging that technological advances keeps changing the date of when peak oil production will hit.

Actually, it is entertaining exploring some of the linked sites. One site, peakoil.com, which kind of ounds like a sister site, is running a poll "would you serve if drafted?" The majority of respondents said no, or, one choice quote: "I would definitely serve if I was drafted to do something useful, like reforesting denuded hillsides or teaching rural Nigerians about birth control. I would be unlikely to agree to serve in Bush's corporate war machine." The comments are riddled with idiotic statements like that one, and profanity.

And still no solutions to the "oncoming energy crisis."