grim news indeed

[stonehart]

Apocalypse Soon: Has Civilization Passed the Environmental Point of No Return?: Scientific American

 

[pixelsmith]

It's hard to tell if this is an article in a "science" magazine or something from The Onion.

 

[Bob Watson]

There stands a point where demand will outpace suppy...what then with food and oil shortages? St I belve will come rationing and brownouts. Next up would come blackouts socal relationships wth other countrys would detriorate in the face of limited resorces. As suupys dwindle and demand grows next upwould be food riots and then civilation woud collapse. If you think this is negitive thinking ask your selfhow much oil is left? Can we hervest it and refine it fast enough to meet incresing demand? And food.. how can we substain an ever growing population. I have 3 kids and I fear for the world I will leave for them...

 

[pixelsmith]

Someone please check the oil gauge on the planet.

We have been hearing this doom and gloom since the 60s when there was a looming ice age in the forecast. our current science czar to the president said we would all be dead from starvation by the year 2000.

You are concerned about the growing population, so am i right to assume you adopted your 3 kids?

 

[Voyager]

Someone please check the oil gauge on the planet.

We have been hearing this doom and gloom since the 60s when there was a looming ice age in the forecast. our current science czar to the president said we would all be dead from starvation by the year 2000.

You are concerned about the growing population, so am i right to assume you adopted your 3 kids?

The earth’s biosphere is an extremely complex symbiotic network of life. In both politics and science the important issues are often obscured by insignificant issues, such as, gay marriage, and global-warming. Destruction of the rain forests, destruction of natural habitat, the extinction of species, overfishing the oceans, pollution, both chemical and nuclear, are the issues we should be concerned about. As more and more parts of the earth’s biosphere is dismantled; at what point will the entire ecological system break down? Are we in the process of destroying our own life support system?

 

[Bob Watson]

Hey pixel:
My duaghters are 9 they are twins. Life gives you gifts sometimes you dont expect.
My son is 5 unlike my twins he was planed. Yes I am concerned. You can call me crazy. But my kids are my life...
Now as for oil. There is no gage but there must come a point where demand outstrips suppy..I am a simple man I don't have the answer when..it may be 10 50 100 years out. If you want more on my opionion ask. I will try to answer in a brief post. I will try to be clear and to the point. I am on my moble so I can't post links now but will do so when I get home.
Lastly I don't follow a doomsday lifestyle if and when it happens I will cross that bridge.
Bob

 

[Blabyboy]

this 4 mins answers some of your concerns nicely.

 

[pixelsmith]

The earth’s biosphere is an extremely complex symbiotic network of life. In both politics and science the important issues are often obscured by insignificant issues, such as, gay marriage, and global-warming. Destruction of the rain forests, destruction of natural habitat, the extinction of species, overfishing the oceans, pollution, both chemical and nuclear, are the issues we should be concerned about. As more and more parts of the earth’s biosphere is dismantled; at what point will the entire ecological system break down? Are we in the process of destroying our own life support system?

The entire ecosystem has "broke down" many times in earths history LONG before humans arrived, nearly every single time earth has done it to herself, other times via astroid impacts. Natural extinction of species is what promotes evolution and should not be that concerning in the big picture. It could be argued that since we are natural to the earth, whatever we do is natural, if Fukashima radiation kills us all then it isnt really much different than all of us dying from an astroid impact or ice age, volcanic blast, etc etc.

The destruction or taking of natural habitats for a personal habitat is something that has been going on since life forms first existed. When we start violating the basic rule of never shitting in your own bed then we deserve whatever we get and natural selection kicks in... as it has for millions of years. It is hard to fathom the millions of life forms that have come and gone and the multiple massive extinctions that have occurred on this planet. If we mess thing up and humans become extinct, the earth will recover as it always does and some other cool animal will come along. Someday an evolved Mudskipper may dig up my fossilized skull and be amazed at the size of my brain.

Spoiler Alert!.....when we all die, our christians friends* shall enter heaven. (*some restrictions may apply ie: Deuteronomy 23:1)

Remember to Reduce, ReUse, Recycle. Ride your bike when possible, pee outside when you can, reuse toilet paper at least 3 times, collect rainwater to dump in your toilet, donate to your community cow fart recovery program, and remember every litter bit hurts and only you can prevent forest fires.

 

[stonehart]

interesting but personally I see us running into serious economic problems long before oil finally depletes.
It is a finite resource so it will run out at some point, but I agree that no one can really give you a fixed date.

As far as the item I posted it was to provoke discussion

Where I stand on the subject is this: It matters not when oil is going to run out or even if the climate change natural or man made rains hell on us, nor is it simply the levels of pollution we pump into our rivers, ground water, farm land, acidification of ocean etc.. the list is long. Now all of these factors alone could be dealt with, if they are a problem at all as some would debate we make no impact at all on the environment.

Personally I am not so sure but I am no climatologist etc I am an engineer ..... however let us look at it from the oil angle........

We live in a closed system ... Think of the planet as an island that has all that you need to survive and it is extremely difficult to leave.
Logic prevails that in a closed system all things have either a finite short term use or a final fixed rate of extraction (this would cover such things as coal and oil as they take a long time via geological process to become the carbon fuels we need for our modern civilization).

Now given that this is produced at a slow rate the renewable aspect of this type of resource is dictated by geological time, so it dose not take much intelligence to work out that if you extract and use an energy source of this type there must be a point at which the renewable point is out stripped by the usage. As to just where that point is I do not know I am not a geologist. But it is a closed system so you can only keep taking out of the system to a point where it either runs our or more likely it becomes just far to difficult and expensive to keep extracting creating an economic situation.... the problem is what point do we hit first?

There is a feedback loop of sorts going on here.. our world is run by oil as it is not only a fuel it is the basis of a huge proportion of our modern synthetics, the oil in an of itself is probably not the problem it is the economic feedback that surely is as you do not even need to run out of it to have an economic collapse happen because of it.

Now we could argue that we get more efficient at extracting and using it, and yes to a point this should slow down the short term consumption of it right?
Well not really for what we have not taken into account is the increasing demand for it, and this is the crucial matter at hand as far as understanding the availability of oil in the coming decades.

The world population is still growing and at an exponential rate and no one will argue with this, the third world nations are trying to emulate the first world ones and as they move up the demand for base resources such as oil increase. At the same time we become more efficient at obtaining the oil we are also using it faster ..... so ...

As I stated before we live in a closed system that offers certain resources at finite short term levels, so having said that how do we maintain infinite global economic growth with a finite resource?

The blunt answer is you don't! and you can't!

You can only cut the cloth so many ways until you end up with a rag so to speak.... Let us look at a bit more but from a base production point of view.

In the case of food production, the amount available is largely defined by available area for production coupled with the efficiency of production , supply and demand dictate as to what commodity's are most likely to take up this area such as cattle and the number of production steps dictates efficiency.

Modern farming requires an absolutely astonishing amount of petrochemical products to keep it running as it is in the fertilizers the fuel for the machines, transport of the goods to market and then on to the consumer (who tends to live in cities) and most people have no idea the amount of steps required to get a simple Cobb of corn to the table, every price increase of the base extraction cost of oil effects every step in this chain and as such the consumer cost at the very end.

Now let us add price speculation into the mix at the stock market and you begin to see the problem as far as hitting the economic wall well before we ever run out of oil, for
at what point dose it become un-economic to buy or even plant this corn? or to be blunt how much of an increase is needed before the consumer can not afford to buy the goods.

We are in fact seeing this problem now with the increase of fuel at the pump you see food prices go up as well, take into account most peoples wages are not keeping up and a general economic melt down across the globe the general population is coming under increasing pressure to survive day to day. The price increase as far as base extraction of oil is not all that much, it s the speculation that is killing us right now.

So do we need to run out of oil to experience a collapse? No not at all as far as I can see the global civilization as we see it now is on a fast track to a sudden stop in the way we do things. The global economic system will over heat and disintegrate long before we run out of oil for you can only patch the system up so many times before you either get implosion or explosion.
I do not see us dying out or going back to the dark ages for that is pure fiction, but I do see us needing to change the way we do things radically in the next few years.

Frankly there are alternatives to total oil dependency such as Thorium etc and humanity has a way of enduring that these dooms day news items seem to over look all to often.

As for the Item I posted I agree with Pixel it reads like an Onion News Item

Well that was a rant in a half but you get the idea... yes we will run out of oil the question is will we stop using it because we use some thing better? or did we collapse economically first?

as for the ecosystem.. it has broken down and changed many times in earths history and we are not really all that relevant in the long term scale of planetary time.

For even if we do change the climate to the point it kills us the planet will carry on and new life will evolve.

Just because you think you are important dose not mean that you are.. the planet dose not give a flying fuck if we go extinct and take 90% of the rest of the species here with us... like I said new life will evolve.

 

[Voyager]

The entire ecosystem has "broke down" many times in earths history LONG before humans arrived, nearly every single time earth has done it to herself, other times via astroid impacts. Natural extinction of species is what promotes evolution and should not be that concerning in the big picture. It could be argued that since we are natural to the earth, whatever we do is natural, if Fukashima radiation kills us all then it isnt really much different than all of us dying from an astroid impact or ice age, volcanic blast, etc etc.

The destruction or taking of natural habitats for a personal habitat is something that has been going on since life forms first existed. When we start violating the basic rule of never shitting in your own bed then we deserve whatever we get and natural selection kicks in... as it has for millions of years. It is hard to fathom the millions of life forms that have come and gone and the multiple massive extinctions that have occurred on this planet. If we mess thing up and humans become extinct, the earth will recover as it always does and some other cool animal will come along. Someday an evolved Mudskipper may dig up my fossilized skull and be amazed at the size of my brain.

Spoiler Alert!.....when we all die, our christians friends* shall enter heaven. (*some restrictions may apply ie: Deuteronomy 23:1)

Remember to Reduce, ReUse, Recycle. Ride your bike when possible, pee outside when you can, reuse toilet paper at least 3 times, collect rainwater to dump in your toilet, donate to your community cow fart recovery program, and remember every litter bit hurts and only you can prevent forest fires.

I can't argue with that. This civilization is unique (in recorded history), in that our technology is having a greater impact on the natural environment than previous civilizations. You are right the earth would recover. It would be nice to have a balance between technology and the natural environment. I don't see that happening anytime soon. There is no need to take action: Jesus will save us!

 

[stonehart]

The entire ecosystem has "broke down" many times in earths history LONG before humans arrived, nearly every single time earth has done it to herself, other times via astroid impacts. Natural extinction of species is what promotes evolution and should not be that concerning in the big picture. It could be argued that since we are natural to the earth, whatever we do is natural, if Fukashima radiation kills us all then it isnt really much different than all of us dying from an astroid impact or ice age, volcanic blast, etc etc.

The destruction or taking of natural habitats for a personal habitat is something that has been going on since life forms first existed. When we start violating the basic rule of never shitting in your own bed then we deserve whatever we get and natural selection kicks in... as it has for millions of years. It is hard to fathom the millions of life forms that have come and gone and the multiple massive extinctions that have occurred on this planet. If we mess thing up and humans become extinct, the earth will recover as it always does and some other cool animal will come along. Someday an evolved Mudskipper may dig up my fossilized skull and be amazed at the size of my brain.

Spoiler Alert!.....when we all die, our christians friends* shall enter heaven. (*some restrictions may apply ie: Deuteronomy 23:1)

Remember to Reduce, ReUse, Recycle. Ride your bike when possible, pee outside when you can, reuse toilet paper at least 3 times, collect rainwater to dump in your toilet, donate to your community cow fart recovery program, and remember every litter bit hurts and only you can prevent forest fires.

Nice you said just what I did at the end of my last post

 

[mike]

Easter Island is often used as an example of overexploitation

Overexploitation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The tragedy of the commons refers to a dilemma described in an article by that name written by Garrett Hardin and first published in the journal Science in 1968.[13]
Central to Hardin's essay is an example which is a useful parable for understanding how overexploitation can occur. This example was first sketched in an 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd, as a hypothetical and simplified situation based on medieval land tenure in Europe, of herders sharing a common on which they are each entitled to let their cows graze. In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put each succeeding cow he acquires onto the land, even if the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded and it is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group. If all herders make this individually rational economic decision, the common will be overexploited or even destroyed to the detriment of all. However, since all herders reach the same rational conclusion, overexploitation in the form of overgrazing occurs, with immediate losses, and the pasture may be degraded to the point where it gives very little return.

"Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons." (Hardin, 1968)[13]​

In the course of his essay, Hardin develops the theme, drawing in many examples of latter day commons, such as national parks, the atmosphere, oceans, rivers and fish stocks. The example of fish stocks had led some to call this the "tragedy of the fishers".[14] A major theme running through the essay is the growth of human populations, with the Earth's finite resources being the general common.
The tragedy of the commons has intellectual roots tracing back to Aristotle, who noted that "what is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it",[15] as well as to Hobbes and his leviathan.[16] The opposite situation to a tragedy of the commons is sometimes referred to as a tragedy of the anticommons: a situation in which rational individuals, acting separately, collectively waste a given resource by underutilizing it.
The tragedy of the commons can be avoided if it is appropriately regulated. Hardin's use of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, leading Hardin to later remark that he should have titled his work "The tragedy of the unregulated commons".[17

 

[mike]

interesting but personally I see us running into serious economic problems long before oil finally depletes.
It is a finite resource so it will run out at some point, but I agree that no one can really give you a fixed date.

As far as the item I posted it was to provoke discussion

Where I stand on the subject is this: It matters not when oil is going to run out or even if the climate change natural or man made rains hell on us, nor is it simply the levels of pollution we pump into our rivers, ground water, farm land, acidification of ocean etc.. the list is long. Now all of these factors alone could be dealt with, if they are a problem at all as some would debate we make no impact at all on the environment.

Personally I am not so sure but I am no climatologist etc I am an engineer ..... however let us look at it from the oil angle........

We live in a closed system ... Think of the planet as an island that has all that you need to survive and it is extremely difficult to leave.
Logic prevails that in a closed system all things have either a finite short term use or a final fixed rate of extraction (this would cover such things as coal and oil as they take a long time via geological process to become the carbon fuels we need for our modern civilization).

Now given that this is produced at a slow rate the renewable aspect of this type of resource is dictated by geological time, so it dose not take much intelligence to work out that if you extract and use an energy source of this type there must be a point at which the renewable point is out stripped by the usage. As to just where that point is I do not know I am not a geologist. But it is a closed system so you can only keep taking out of the system to a point where it either runs our or more likely it becomes just far to difficult and expensive to keep extracting creating an economic situation.... the problem is what point do we hit first?

There is a feedback loop of sorts going on here.. our world is run by oil as it is not only a fuel it is the basis of a huge proportion of our modern synthetics, the oil in an of itself is probably not the problem it is the economic feedback that surely is as you do not even need to run out of it to have an economic collapse happen because of it.

Now we could argue that we get more efficient at extracting and using it, and yes to a point this should slow down the short term consumption of it right?
Well not really for what we have not taken into account is the increasing demand for it, and this is the crucial matter at hand as far as understanding the availability of oil in the coming decades.

The world population is still growing and at an exponential rate and no one will argue with this, the third world nations are trying to emulate the first world ones and as they move up the demand for base resources such as oil increase. At the same time we become more efficient at obtaining the oil we are also using it faster ..... so ...

As I stated before we live in a closed system that offers certain resources at finite short term levels, so having said that how do we maintain infinite global economic growth with a finite resource?

The blunt answer is you don't! and you can't!

You can only cut the cloth so many ways until you end up with a rag so to speak.... Let us look at a bit more but from a base production point of view.

In the case of food production, the amount available is largely defined by available area for production coupled with the efficiency of production , supply and demand dictate as to what commodity's are most likely to take up this area such as cattle and the number of production steps dictates efficiency.

Modern farming requires an absolutely astonishing amount of petrochemical products to keep it running as it is in the fertilizers the fuel for the machines, transport of the goods to market and then on to the consumer (who tends to live in cities) and most people have no idea the amount of steps required to get a simple Cobb of corn to the table, every price increase of the base extraction cost of oil effects every step in this chain and as such the consumer cost at the very end.

Now let us add price speculation into the mix at the stock market and you begin to see the problem as far as hitting the economic wall well before we ever run out of oil, for
at what point dose it become un-economic to buy or even plant this corn? or to be blunt how much of an increase is needed before the consumer can not afford to buy the goods.

We are in fact seeing this problem now with the increase of fuel at the pump you see food prices go up as well, take into account most peoples wages are not keeping up and a general economic melt down across the globe the general population is coming under increasing pressure to survive day to day. The price increase as far as base extraction of oil is not all that much, it s the speculation that is killing us right now.

So do we need to run out of oil to experience a collapse? No not at all as far as I can see the global civilization as we see it now is on a fast track to a sudden stop in the way we do things. The global economic system will over heat and disintegrate long before we run out of oil for you can only patch the system up so many times before you either get implosion or explosion.
I do not see us dying out or going back to the dark ages for that is pure fiction, but I do see us needing to change the way we do things radically in the next few years.

Frankly there are alternatives to total oil dependency such as Thorium etc and humanity has a way of enduring that these dooms day news items seem to over look all to often.

As for the Item I posted I agree with Pixel it reads like an Onion News Item

Well that was a rant in a half but you get the idea... yes we will run out of oil the question is will we stop using it because we use some thing better? or did we collapse economically first?

as for the ecosystem.. it has broken down and changed many times in earths history and we are not really all that relevant in the long term scale of planetary time.

For even if we do change the climate to the point it kills us the planet will carry on and new life will evolve.

Just because you think you are important dose not mean that you are.. the planet dose not give a flying fuck if we go extinct and take 90% of the rest of the species here with us... like I said new life will evolve.

And the price hikes cascade as well, My local vet has stated she's doing it tough as prices increase and people stop bringing their pets in, in our last two visits she has over serviced us, dispensing combos of medication that she didnt in years gone by, charging us twice the usual fee's. I understand why shes doing it, she has to survive.
The local car mechanic does it too, and so everyone else has to charge extra to cover their own costs, its a nasty cycle.

The system relies on growth, but growth leads to overexploitation of resources, again a cycle that cannot be sustained.

I heard a commentator on the greek fiscal crisis call it "kicking the can down the road"
We can see the problem, but prefer to kick it down the road than fixing it.

Thats the problem with "growth" its the both the problem and the fix, and that contradiction only works in the moment of now , eventually something has to snap.

So we kick the can down the road and hope for the best

 

[stonehart]

And the price hikes cascade as well, My local vet has stated she's doing it tough as prices increase and people stop bringing their pets in, in our last two visits she has over serviced us, dispensing combos of medication that she didnt in years gone by, charging us twice the usual fee's. I understand why shes doing it, she has to survive.
The local car mechanic does it too, and so everyone else has to charge extra to cover their own costs, its a nasty cycle.

The system relies on growth, but growth leads to overexploitation of resources, again a cycle that cannot be sustained.

I heard a commentator on the greek fiscal crisis call it "kicking the can down the road"
We can see the problem, but prefer to kick it down the road than fixing it.

Thats the problem with "growth" its the both the problem and the fix, and that contradiction only works in the moment of now , eventually something has to snap.

So we kick the can down the road and hope for the best

I could not agree more...
when I am not off working on tour I run audio equipment imports.. the consumer is not buying much right now and it is the dead season here for me so yeah it is getting hard.

Got rid of the other car and we now have one as the cost of two was getting to much, but we are only saving on mechanical costs not fuel as the vehicle now has to go the extra miles.

I earn ok (not rich just comfortable) but hell I could not earn any less now days as the economy is just getting worse not better no matter what the political clowns say.

On a side note keep your eyes on China as the boom over there has well ended and their economy has started to contract. This bodes ill for the US and for Europe.

 

[Blabyboy]

interesting but personally I see us running into serious economic problems long before oil finally depletes.
It is a finite resource so it will run out at some point, but I agree that no one can really give you a fixed date.

As far as the item I posted it was to provoke discussion

Where I stand on the subject is this: It matters not when oil is going to run out or even if the climate change natural or man made rains hell on us, nor is it simply the levels of pollution we pump into our rivers, ground water, farm land, acidification of ocean etc.. the list is long. Now all of these factors alone could be dealt with, if they are a problem at all as some would debate we make no impact at all on the environment.

Personally I am not so sure but I am no climatologist etc I am an engineer ..... however let us look at it from the oil angle........

We live in a closed system ... Think of the planet as an island that has all that you need to survive and it is extremely difficult to leave.
Logic prevails that in a closed system all things have either a finite short term use or a final fixed rate of extraction (this would cover such things as coal and oil as they take a long time via geological process to become the carbon fuels we need for our modern civilization).

Now given that this is produced at a slow rate the renewable aspect of this type of resource is dictated by geological time, so it dose not take much intelligence to work out that if you extract and use an energy source of this type there must be a point at which the renewable point is out stripped by the usage. As to just where that point is I do not know I am not a geologist. But it is a closed system so you can only keep taking out of the system to a point where it either runs our or more likely it becomes just far to difficult and expensive to keep extracting creating an economic situation.... the problem is what point do we hit first?

There is a feedback loop of sorts going on here.. our world is run by oil as it is not only a fuel it is the basis of a huge proportion of our modern synthetics, the oil in an of itself is probably not the problem it is the economic feedback that surely is as you do not even need to run out of it to have an economic collapse happen because of it.

Now we could argue that we get more efficient at extracting and using it, and yes to a point this should slow down the short term consumption of it right?
Well not really for what we have not taken into account is the increasing demand for it, and this is the crucial matter at hand as far as understanding the availability of oil in the coming decades.

The world population is still growing and at an exponential rate and no one will argue with this, the third world nations are trying to emulate the first world ones and as they move up the demand for base resources such as oil increase. At the same time we become more efficient at obtaining the oil we are also using it faster ..... so ...

As I stated before we live in a closed system that offers certain resources at finite short term levels, so having said that how do we maintain infinite global economic growth with a finite resource?

The blunt answer is you don't! and you can't!

You can only cut the cloth so many ways until you end up with a rag so to speak.... Let us look at a bit more but from a base production point of view.

In the case of food production, the amount available is largely defined by available area for production coupled with the efficiency of production , supply and demand dictate as to what commodity's are most likely to take up this area such as cattle and the number of production steps dictates efficiency.

Modern farming requires an absolutely astonishing amount of petrochemical products to keep it running as it is in the fertilizers the fuel for the machines, transport of the goods to market and then on to the consumer (who tends to live in cities) and most people have no idea the amount of steps required to get a simple Cobb of corn to the table, every price increase of the base extraction cost of oil effects every step in this chain and as such the consumer cost at the very end.

Now let us add price speculation into the mix at the stock market and you begin to see the problem as far as hitting the economic wall well before we ever run out of oil, for
at what point dose it become un-economic to buy or even plant this corn? or to be blunt how much of an increase is needed before the consumer can not afford to buy the goods.

We are in fact seeing this problem now with the increase of fuel at the pump you see food prices go up as well, take into account most peoples wages are not keeping up and a general economic melt down across the globe the general population is coming under increasing pressure to survive day to day. The price increase as far as base extraction of oil is not all that much, it s the speculation that is killing us right now.

So do we need to run out of oil to experience a collapse? No not at all as far as I can see the global civilization as we see it now is on a fast track to a sudden stop in the way we do things. The global economic system will over heat and disintegrate long before we run out of oil for you can only patch the system up so many times before you either get implosion or explosion.
I do not see us dying out or going back to the dark ages for that is pure fiction, but I do see us needing to change the way we do things radically in the next few years.

Frankly there are alternatives to total oil dependency such as Thorium etc and humanity has a way of enduring that these dooms day news items seem to over look all to often.

As for the Item I posted I agree with Pixel it reads like an Onion News Item

Well that was a rant in a half but you get the idea... yes we will run out of oil the question is will we stop using it because we use some thing better? or did we collapse economically first?

as for the ecosystem.. it has broken down and changed many times in earths history and we are not really all that relevant in the long term scale of planetary time.

For even if we do change the climate to the point it kills us the planet will carry on and new life will evolve.

Just because you think you are important dose not mean that you are.. the planet dose not give a flying fuck if we go extinct and take 90% of the rest of the species here with us... like I said new life will evolve.

Nice try, but it's not a closed system. It's an island right? so you have the Sea to bring to ,and take things from, the island - fish maybe to eat or seaweed, driftwood to burn. You urinate/defecate in the Sea (so long as no one's looking ) and rely on the tides to take things away from you. You also have the weather that can provide energy in various forms.

The point is, as illustrated in the video above, there are other substitutes for resources currently employed. Further, the market assists us in telling us when to start looking for other substitutes as well as more of the same resource. Other substitutes are still in their infancy WRT to oil, hence they need subsidies to be as competitive to establish a market rate that competes with oil based products, but they will get there - maybe not the ones currently on the table now, but substitutes will come when it is economically viable to do so. Let's suppose that speculators do drive up the price of oil (as they have done in the past), it will naturally come down because as people buy less, more will need to be stockpiled until it can be shifted. There is only so much storage capacity and so companies will need to reduce the cost to shift the oil to reduce their held capacity, thus the speculators will need to guess the right time to off-load their shares before they start to go down. The only brake on a proper free market is politics and the governments that peddle them, hence wars for resources.

As the price of the commodity rises we will also get more efficient at using it (in addition to extracting it) and an example here would be gold. You can buy many things that contain gold, but pure gold is very expensive and so producers have identified the fact that they can still create product with gold but use it either in very minimal amounts where high purity is required, or it can be diluted/ synthesised for other products where a lower level of purity can still achieve the desired effect.

cheers,
bb

 

[stonehart]

Nice try, but it's not a closed system. It's an island right? so you have the Sea to bring to ,and take things from, the island - fish maybe to eat or seaweed, driftwood to burn. You urinate/defecate in the Sea (so long as no one's looking ) and rely on the tides to take things away from you. You also have the weather that can provide energy in various forms.

its a very old analogy of the earth as a closed system ... NOTE DIFFICULT TO LEAVE.

It should say imagine an Island you can not leave..

Also try pissing into space from down here ... good luck.

Now as far as efficiency goes.. do not get me started for the economic system is anything but!

The economic system by definition it is not efficient and not meant to be so
don't fool yourself if it was efficient the price of goods would be lower not higher.
A higher price index on goods means many things but it always means the level of efficiency in production and transport.

As I said I import goods and I have a very good grasp of it.

 

[Blabyboy]

The trouble with the 'growth' in the western economies was that it was a beard for increasing debt. Once the growth stopped, the illusion of being able to service the debt went AWOL.

The Greek's and the EU will continue to kick the can down the road so long as politico's make the decisions, it is much easier for them to promise jam today and not mention the stale bread for tomorrow. Politics destroys any and all chance of a proper free economy being able to work. However, we hopefully realise that eventually even politicians will 'get' it (some already do) and things will change and they will do the least work they have to, to fix the problem for a few years more.

When (and where) the next energy revolution occurs will be when things really change for the better/worse.

cheers,
bb

 

[mike]

its an analogy and the earth is a closed system

Exactly the earth is an island.

 

[Blabyboy]

its an analogy and the earth is a closed system

No it is not. How can you (an engineer) be so foolish to say that - I thought engineers were supposed to be analytical and obsessed with detail?.... so the Sun has no part to play in this - fine switch it off mate and see what happens in 8 minutes.

Meteors and asteroids have no part to play in this? Bringing elements and large scale changes to this planet.

The Moon (the bringer of tides) has no part to play in this? Tidal power is being tested right now for energy generation. It helps animals migrate around the globe bringing food to different locations.

You really should look up once in a while.

 

[mike]

The trouble with the 'growth' in the western economies was that it was a beard for increasing debt. Once the growth stopped, the illusion of being able to service the debt went AWOL.

The Greek's and the EU will continue to kick the can down the road so long as politico's make the decisions, it is much easier for them to promise jam today and not mention the stale bread for tomorrow. Politics destroys any and all chance of a proper free economy being able to work. However, we hopefully realise that eventually even politicians will 'get' it (some already do) and things will change and they will do the least work they have to, to fix the problem for a few years more.

When (and where) the next energy revolution occurs will be when things really change for the better/worse.

cheers,
bb

My take on the greek situation is there was an attempt at an austerity govt, the people rejected the idea.
Its the tragedy of the commons played out in the real world

In Hardin's example, it is in each herder's interest to put each succeeding cow he acquires onto the land, even if the carrying capacity of the common is exceeded and it is temporarily or permanently damaged for all as a result. The herder receives all of the benefits from an additional cow, while the damage to the common is shared by the entire group.

Just as the individual voter (quite naturally) is putting his and his familys interests ahead of the common good.

Thats a part of the problem, in a democratic system the voter always puts their self interest first, thats only natural. But it must also be recognised for the shortsighted mechanism it is.
People wont vote for austerity, they prefer to kick the can down the road, but eventually the bills must be paid.
But self interest will always take precedence over the collective debt, which is at the very heart of the problem

Chinas one child policy is another example, you would not be able to impose such a policy in a democracy. No one would vote for it.