:P

As I've pointed out before, ethanol could do it if the production was ramped up.

However, not from corn as the lobbyists for the farm industry are so fond of.  Ragweed and celluse waste is the way to go.  Funny to hear Bush mention it in this State of the Union speach.  A professor in Georgia puts the potential yield of ragweed to ethanol at about $1200 an acre if ethanol is priced at $1.20 a gallon to the grower.  There isn't a (legal) crop in the US that can match that kind of return.

hmm, interesting. i hope you're right. i guess the question is whether ethanol can yield the same kind of energy input-to-output ratio that oil provides right now. and whether you can do things like run tractors and farm equipment on it, which would be necessary in the long run to harvest ethanol in the kinds of quantities needed.

Also, can jet planes run on ethanol? Can plastics and other petroleum-based derivatives be made from ethanol? It will be interesting to see how life changes in the next few decades.

Some scientists argue that it takes more fossil fuels to produce ethanol, all energy input considered, than the amount of fossil fuels ethanol is purported to save.  More energy in than energy out is a losing proposition.  However, this is debatable...

Provided we don't go bonkers with greed and start apocalyptic wars over the remaining "ancient sunlight," human ingenuity will figure out a way to evolve beyond reliance on fossil fuels.  The transference will not be painless.  It will take a few generations to understand the social good of more mass transit and fewer personal passenger cars.  I think in the year 2106 our descendents will call the suburban tract at the personal passenger car an embarrassing wast of resources.  "Can you believe our ancestors just burned all that oil driving those huge automobiles?," they shall say.

Nuclear energy may have an inevitable role despite its terrible dangers.  Nukes are good for producing electricity.  However, nukes won't solve our transportation problems....or do you want to be the first to test drive the "atomic car"?  I dunno, might have to bring Edward Teller back from the grave for that one!  Perhaps they might run electrical light rail systems off of nukes. 

Hydro might do the trick if we could make it more efficient and less volatile...

As for "peak oil," yes, I think we've hit the peak, and extracting the remaining half will be much harder, much costlier, and much messier than extracting the first half was. 

Suppose we DID discover another gargantuan reserve?  Maybe double the amount we thought we had worldwide discovered in the Antarctic.  Could we afford ecologically to carry on the way we have for another 100 years?  Eventually we would burn through it all and be faced as a species with the same resource problem.  So its time to deal now.

A good start would be to vote out all politicians who have worked in the oil industry.

I hope so.

I don't believe we'll ever run out of oil; I think we'll run out of affordable oil.

Some scientists argue that it takes more fossil fuels to produce ethanol, all energy input considered, than the amount of fossil fuels ethanol is purported to save.  More energy in than energy out is a losing proposition.  However, this is debatable...


The most prominent of the "more energy than it's worth" scientists, is someone whose work is not peer reviewed and generally not considered accurate.  If it were true, Brazil wouldn't power 40% of their cars on ethanol from sugar cane.


Hydro might do the trick if we could make it more efficient and less volatile...


good for some applications, but creating new dams generally destroys a lot of land, and isn't the great solution it appears to be.


As for "peak oil," yes, I think we've hit the peak, and extracting the remaining half will be much harder, much costlier, and much messier than extracting the first half was. 


The US hit it's peak oil in 1970, around the time it was predicted.  There's a lot of naysayers who claim the whole "peak oil" thing never happened when it was first predicted, but they ignore the fact that "peak oil" didn't refer to the world's production, it referred to the US production.  I believe it was off a year or two, but it did happen.

The world is getting close to peak oil production, but not quite there yet.  It's hard for anyone to know because several countries won't reveal their deposit sizes.


Suppose we DID discover another gargantuan reserve?  Maybe double the amount we thought we had worldwide discovered in the Antarctic.  Could we afford ecologically to carry on the way we have for another 100 years?  Eventually we would burn through it all and be faced as a species with the same resource problem.  So its time to deal now.

A good start would be to vote out all politicians who have worked in the oil industry.


More oil would just encourage consumption, which increases the polution in the air. New sources of really cheap energy would cause a lot of problems.

Well, I guess the point about sugar cane that the guy who wrote the book I'm reading would make, is that if the sugar cane is being harvested using conventional industrial farming techniques then those processes are very fossil-fuel intensive, in a way that doesn't necessarily show up in the energy-in-to-out calculations.

And it's interesting, I hear reaching peak oil won't be evident until we look back a couple of years in retrospect, because of the complexity of the data involved. The fact that oil prices are so persistently high and that so many producers have been at max capacity for months makes me think we might be in that period now, between peak oil occurring and its becoming known to us.

Anyway, I hope you're right about ethanol. This "long emergency" book has pretty much got me crying into my depleted beer every night. dag!

The most prominent of the "more energy than it's worth" scientists, is someone whose work is not peer reviewed and generally not considered accurate.  If it were true, Brazil wouldn't power 40% of their cars on ethanol from sugar cane.


I can't remember the scientist's name...he's a Polish fellow.  He did work for the petroleum industry a long time ago.  
There's also the question of emissions from ethanol.  What effect would a worldwide fleet of automobiles run on ethanol have on smog and the greenhouse effect?
I misused "hydro" to refer to "hydrogen."  Dubya was talking about getting more cars to run on hydrogen cells.  I didn't believe him anymore than I believed Dan Quayle when he declared in 1990 we would put a man on Mars by 1999!  Dubya would only support hydrogen-oriented fuels to the extent the technologies could make him and his oil buddies richer.  Now, if we could only get cold fusion going, we could make all our cars run on atomic energy, totally safe with the only biproduct being fresh water!
:D


Well, I guess the point about sugar cane that the guy who wrote the book I'm reading would make, is that if the sugar cane is being harvested using conventional industrial farming techniques then those processes are very fossil-fuel intensive, in a way that doesn't necessarily show up in the energy-in-to-out calculations.

And it's interesting, I hear reaching peak oil won't be evident until we look back a couple of years in retrospect, because of the complexity of the data involved. The fact that oil prices are so persistently high and that so many producers have been at max capacity for months makes me think we might be in that period now, between peak oil occurring and its becoming known to us.

Anyway, I hope you're right about ethanol. This "long emergency" book has pretty much got me crying into my depleted beer every night. dag!


I too read the book "The Long Emergency."  I said it was a worthwhile read, but avoid it if you are subject to suicidal tendancies or survivalist paranoia!  I think Kunstler may paint too bleak a picture, but I think we also need to "hope for the best but prepare for the worst," as the saying goes.  Ever since I can remember guys like Kunstler have been brushed off by the mainstream media as "Chicken Littles crying 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling!'"  The problem is, the sky IS falling, it's just falling gradually.  This makes a mass state of denial quite easy to sell.

I wonder if it would make any difference if the Brazilians were able to wean the tractors and the production plants off of petroleum and make them run on sugarcane ehanol themselves?

I think some of kunstler's observations about the hidden uses of petroleum are really interesting. take the whole Bauhaus architecture thing: everything in sprawl America is made with a flat roof which makes it vulnerable to leaks of rain water, and the vents in these buildings have been sealed with petroleum-based sealants and synthetic rubbers. Without those sealants the buildings are likely to become unusable within a generation from weather damage. Now who'da seen that coming? Although to be fair I think kunstler's being a little slippery here because the amount of petroleum needed to seal vents is nothing like the amount needed to, say, ship a ton of grain from one coast to the other.

I think some of kunstler's observations about the hidden uses of petroleum are really interesting. take the whole Bauhaus architecture thing: everything in sprawl America is made with a flat roof which makes it vulnerable to leaks of rain water, and the vents in these buildings have been sealed with petroleum-based sealants and synthetic rubbers. Without those sealants the buildings are likely to become unusable within a generation from weather damage. Now who'da seen that coming? Although to be fair I think kunstler's being a little slippery here because the amount of petroleum needed to seal vents is nothing like the amount needed to, say, ship a ton of grain from one coast to the other.

Well, we shall have to figure out something!  I don't agree with the techno-phobes because we can't really go back to the 18th century.  We can't unring the bell, we can't put the genie back in the bottle, we can't return the apple back to the tree of knowledge.  Like I said earlier, the hardest part of the problem may not be finding technical solutions, but chainging human psychology to enable us to find such solutions.  We cannot afford the greedy super-rich individualist lionized in our capitalist folklore.

There's a lot about the prospective post-oil culture I like. The need to return to local systems, the need for community, the emphasis on foot travel and mass transit, temperance of unfettered capitalism, the need to stop worshipping avarice as the one and only greatest virtue, the likely end of industrial-scale warfare, a cleaner environment. Yeah, I just hope that psychologically folks are prepared to make the change. one of the things kunstler is dead on about is the strength of the American investment in the suburban lifestyle. It's so engrained in the national identity here and I fear there might be a lot of throwing good money after bad before we admit suburbia was largely a pointless boondoggle.

There's a lot about the prospective post-oil culture I like. The need to return to local systems, the need for community, the emphasis on foot travel and mass transit, temperance of unfettered capitalism, the need to stop worshipping avarice as the one and only greatest virtue, the likely end of industrial-scale warfare, a cleaner environment. Yeah, I just hope that psychologically folks are prepared to make the change. one of the things kunstler is dead on about is the strength of the American investment in the suburban lifestyle. It's so engrained in the national identity here and I fear there might be a lot of throwing good money after bad before we admit suburbia was largely a pointless boondoggle.

Yea verily, I agree!

I can't remember the scientist's name...he's a Polish fellow.  He did work for the petroleum industry a long time ago. 


and probably still does work for them too no doubt.  Most of his caluclations were "worst case" scenarios, and used corn which doesn't have a high cellulose content, and requires a lot fertalizer.  All those assumptions go away with prarie grass or other woody types of fast growing weeds. 


There's also the question of emissions from ethanol.  What effect would a worldwide fleet of automobiles run on ethanol have on smog and the greenhouse effect?


Opposed to gasoline, it shouldn't be worse.  Opposed to hydrogen, it's definitely worse, if the hydrogen is created from a pure source, not coal or nuclear, etc.


I misused "hydro" to refer to "hydrogen."  Dubya was talking about getting more cars to run on hydrogen cells.  I didn't believe him anymore than I believed Dan Quayle when he declared in 1990 we would put a man on Mars by 1999!  Dubya would only support hydrogen-oriented fuels to the extent the technologies could make him and his oil buddies richer.  Now, if we could only get cold fusion going, we could make all our cars run on atomic energy, totally safe with the only biproduct being fresh water!

I wonder if it would make any difference if the Brazilians were able to wean the tractors and the production plants off of petroleum and make them run on sugarcane ehanol themselves?



I can't see what difference it makes.  If they're still using oil, they have to pay for it, the costs therefore would be reflected in the price of the final product.  It takes oil to get oil out of the ground, and ship it hallfway around the world.  I have a feeling if the same "analysis" was performed of oil, the guy would come up with the same answer for oil!

The process for creating ethanol isn't that different from producing most other forms of alchohol.  Denatured alcohol for instance, can be purchased for a couple dollars and it's in a can at a retail store.  Even with all the costs involved in producing it and trucking it across the country, they still can make it cheaper than gasoline at the pump.