Of course, hope springs eternal. But I see no reason to accept hope replacing secondary school mathematics, or for that matter the kind of history and economics taught at Boston Public. Springtime for China and India means winter for an increasing number of persons in the US and EU unless...UNLESS the lies and misunderstandings about things like energy are exposed, and our political masters cut the posturing and get down to business..

Curiosity, perhaps unrelated but several analysts claim a close relationship between economic growth and oil production.... Assuming that's presently true and oil production cannot grow much more, what do you think are the odds that we could reorganize our societies to remain stable with significantly lower GDP per capita? For example, supplying a lot less throw-away kitchen utensiles, reduced processed levels of food, much longer-lived electronics products, etc. It seems logical to me that we should be able to maintain an approximately equal standard of life that way, with much lower energy consumption, but that the "laws of economics" which we presently believe to be necessary wouldn't allow that.

We have ethanol, biodiesel, natural gas and biomethane, as well as electric. Using a combination of all of the above, we can reduce the usage of petroleum dramatically easily within ten years. Since these systems can be used either in tandem or in combination with petroleum, we can easily reduce the need for petroleum to whatever level we want---we can even use no petroleum at all.

Let OPEC say or do anything they want---it won't make any difference to us.

There is another factor at play though and that is how much energy it takes to get a barrel of oil and I think that more than anything else dictates the price of oil. Let's say that the US is "awash with oil" as some contest. It is not awash in oil that can be easily extracted. In the Texas oil gushers at the turn of the last century (Circa 1901) the return on energy invested was about 100 to 1. That is it took 1 barrel of oil equivalent to extract 100 barrels of oil. Most of the new discoveries require 1 barrel of oil equivalent to get three barrels of oil. In 1901 you did not need to build a two billion dollar oil rig to get at the oil. Now you do. In 1901 you did not need to move half of Alberta by truck to an oil separation plan. Now you do. So it is the cost of getting at the oil that is a significant determining factor in whether the US is "self sufficient" or not. If it costs more to extract than you can make then companies will stop producing - their job is to make money not lose it.

It takes a lot less energy to get oil from the Middle East than it does to get oil from the Alberta Tar Sands.

But sooner or later oil extraction will become too expensive and that is the time when the move to other fuels will occur. Are we there yet - probably not - but certainly the time will come.

There is no technological reason why we cannot run vehicles on natural gas. The reason we do not is there is limited distribution of the gas via filling stations which - coincidentally - are all owned by the oil companies who have zero vested interest in having you transfer to using natural gas.

Remember also that you do not need oil refineries for natural gas so if you are an oil company shutting down a massive industrial facility that you have invested billions into does not seem like a sensible business decision. So the status quo is maintained as long as natural gas distribution is kept away from vehicle owners and as long as the price of oil and gasoline does not get too out of whack with incomes.

When oil at an affordable price does become scarce then the market will change. But don't expect anything in the next few decades.

Malcolm

One thing I learned to my chagrin is that US regulations are a huge hurdle. The cost of getting any modified vehicle onto the market is greatly increased by the crash-worthiness testing costs, repeated for every model / type / year to be offered. Any make / model / year to be offered with CNG fueling would need to have several samples tested to destruction for crash-worthiness, which cost places a very hard lower limit on the number of units which must be sold to break even. Any organization lacking immediate access to nationwide distribution is pretty much frozen out of the price-sensetive, which is where CNG should be appealing...

Very crudely I think this overstates US payments to OPEC by about >twice. A trillion dollars for OPEC in 2011 looks OK. (1x10^12/say $100/ b x365) = 27.4 x10^6 b/d. This comports fairly well with OPEC producing one third of 88 million b/d of conventional oil. 88/3=29.3 b/d.

While the US imports from OPEC countries (Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Angola to the tune of about 3 million b/d) Canada and Mexico are significant.

I submit that your 355 billion dollars more accurately represents US payments to all countries we buy from, not just OPEC countries.

Interestingly, the New York Times yesterday had a feature article on Iran's commitment to fueling vehicles with natural gas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/energy-environment/to-lower-pollution-iran-becomes-a-natural-gas-leader.html?emc=eta1

I think Malcolm has hit very close to home on his observation.

Germany is pushing vigorously convert petroleum use to CNG(methane--both fossil methane and biomethane)

They are building out biomethane production plants as fast as they can. And bi-fuel petroleum/methane cars are offered both by new car manufacturers and as after market conversions. Germany has installed over 5,000 CNG filling stations, roughly 10X as many as in the US---in a country about the size if Missouri and Iowa combined. And they have done it in less than ten years.

The difference between Germany and the US is, Germany has a well thought out, and workable plan---and they are serious about implementing that plan. Germany is now a world leader in advanced technology that is environmentally and human friendly.

We should learn from the German initiative.

It will take time but it is inevitable. While I certainly applaud the initiatives of Germany their natural gas supply is mostly from Russia and I doubt biologically produced methane is available in the quantities necessary. However it is certainly an example of what is possible.

In regards to Lens comment about vehicle safety tests - it seems odd to me that people consider heavy duty pressurised gas cylinders to be less safe than a thin walled plastic tank full of gasoline. At least the gas escapes rather than surrounds you in a pool of burning hydrocarbon.

But the oil industry lobbies well to ensure the status quo is maintained irrespective of the benefits to the planet.

Good grief I am sounding like an environmentalist. You guys are a bad influence on me.

Good discussion.

With a near unlimited supply of Alberta oil (unlike the German situation) I don't see much changing for North America for along time to come.

Malcolm

Only six years later in 1933 I witnessed the 24 Italian flying boats of General Balboa land on Lake Michigan for the (Chicago) Century of Progress Fair. About ten years later Germany had jets flying in WWII.

In a very remarkably brief period both horses and Model T Fords disappeared. I saw electric cars. They were expensive and only really suitable to boulevards. Yet their performance was very near present claims. Although only a decade before my memory of such things there were millions of horses in the US. As a child in the early '30s I saw some Model T's and draft horses I never once saw horses used for transportation. I never saw anyone use a hitching post outside a store. Our milk man and our ice man still used horses. But household refrigerators soon made that uneconomic.

When we showed nuclear emery at Nagasaki and Hiroshima the world changed, no, the concepts changed. We now had energy so cheap that households need not be metered!! and even better fusion electricity was just around the corner. And better batteries too were just around the corner.

About 1950 we6 we told fusion might be as much a 50 years in the future. After 60 years we were told it is likely more than 50 years in the future. We had had the lead acid battery about 130? years. It is still in nearly every vehicle built today.

Wind? As a child I saw that farms in Northern Illinois nearly always had wind mills to pump water for stock and vegetable garden irrigation. They had rainwater cisterns for washing (zero hardness, important in pre-detergent days) and manual wells for drinking and cooking. Many also had wind generators for their batteries which furnished limited lighting but also charged the batteries for their tube radios.

In the early 70's we knew there was an impending energy crisis. Particularly an oil crisis. Well no – actually it was the appearance of the ugly population crisis. In the ensuing 40 years or so what have we done? Use of fossil fuels use has skyrocketed. In 2012 it continues to skyrocket. If wind, solar or bio energy has been effective I have not seen it. If you are headed for the cliff, step on the gas. Whee.

While actual levels of oil reserves in North America is murky, there is no question that restricting access to the oil (the policy of the Obama regime) is economically unhelpful. Similarly, squandering massive amounts of taxpayer money on renewable energy is unhelpful.

While Professor Banks laments OPEC, the administration's actions also divert money that could otherwise be used by citizens for more general economic activity.

The government actions which immediately and effectively stifle the economy are those which a) reduce money supply (restricting private borrowing, increasing government borrowing) or b) reduce money velocity (creating economic uncertainty etc. causing people to stash as cash or reduce debt rather than re-invest or spend).

One would think that groups of people running around yelling that they have the only economic solutions would at least learn a bit of basic economics LOL.

We were told pre-Kyoto Protocol that we were 1) either past the point of no return on CO2, or 2) perhaps able, if we immediately reduced CO2 emissions to possibly save the planet. Seems Scientists agreed. Never heard a peep in rebuttal except by those popularly characterized as nuts..

CO2 emissions have skyrocketed since then and are still skyrocketing today. Reduce CO2 emissions? – hells bells we cannot even reduce the rate of increase. So is population. So has the number of people without electric service.

Now we find great elation about increased fossil fuel production largely due to fracking. Isn't this what we were told so recently would be the worst possible scenario? Yet we are celebrating?

Shouldn't we be lamenting?

I'm convinced that nothing much will help until everyone starts trying to help, though, and that'll never happen as long as there's money to be made by convincing people that their GW footprint doesn't matter.

Malcolm

I think the liberal mindset does not appreciate the costs and chaos and authoritarianism from mandating such radical changes.

The conservative mindset, however, is paranoid and assumes such pronouncements are just inaccurate or lies and won't face them. In that sense, the derided Al Gore was right in calling it "An Inconvenient Truth". On Peak Oil, I see little evidence to counter that; it's been predicted, in some form or another, since the '70s, and has mirrored these predictions pretty well. At present, the vast majority of nations are now in their own peak oil decline. Saying anything meaningfully can be done by more domestic drilling is just nonsense, just as saying a single country limiting CO2 output would be meaningful is also nonsense. But it's odd how conservatives support the former but deride the latter.

Malcolm is perpetuating another myth: New Ice Age Prediction Myth

In general, I find the conservatives advancing beliefs that are quite easy to dismiss, which bothers me (a lot). On the other hand, I think the more liberal viewpoint is impractical about how to plausibly advance on this problem. The best think developed countries like the U.S. can do is be ready to perform CO2 reductions IF everyone else is willing to do so as well. And forget about our historical context of running up CO2 levels for the last hundred years; that brought us (meaning: the world) vaccines, antibiotics, flight, nuclear power, and a bunch of other stuff responsible for raising the standards and populations of the developing world in the first place. So deal with it.

At the risk of pointing out the painfully obvious, the government is too big and chews up too much of the economy. The answer is to shrink the government, not raise taxes.

As for catastrophic global warming caused by man, there is simply no compelling proof as the process is simply too chaotic, with too many unknowns, to draw a conclusion. At best, you have conjecture. That is hardly a valid basis for spending trillions of dollars, especially on poor solutions like renewable energy. Try using and creating energy more efficiently and wisely, which is a vastly superior solution to the perceived threat.

"Try using and creating energy more efficiently and wisely, which is a vastly superior solution to the perceived threat."

You say this over and over, but neglecting CO2 emissions (and probably some aspects of coal and oil depletion as well) the cheapest thing to do is just burn more coal. We know how to do it. The infrastructure is in place. No scary nuclear stuff. The Chinese are doing it (so it MUST be wise!).

Efficiency is sometimes not the cheapest thing to do. So there is no economic incentive to be efficient, or wise, for that matter.

Macro Climate science is at the stage of determining whether the sun or the entire universe circles the earth. They've not yet begun to perceive the earth is not flat.

The problem is of course that both sets of predictions (both backed by learned papers by equally learned professors) are just theories that cannot be proven.

What concerns me most regarding the various pronouncements about climate is that they follow a very similar format to pronouncement about other sure things. Such as the earth is flat - a widely held scientific belief of its time proven now to be spectacularly incorrect. Or the Sun revolves around the earth - a whole generation or two of the brightest scientific minds of the day once again proven to be spectacularly wrong. Or the decades of medical pronouncements from learned professors of medicine that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and worry - now shown to be caused by a bacteria. Or that blood letting cured disease in humans. Or the belief that the recent flooding in New York has anything whatsoever to do with climate. The list of such scientific follies goes on and on. The real point is of course is that given enough publicity people can be brainwashed to believe anything at all. And that is very sad.

Malcolm

And you're actually proclaiming and untested theory yourself, to wit that the flooding in New York was NOT due in any part to global warming. Where's your backing?

Hopefully you're not as solid as you think you are about brainwashing the public, and we will be able to actually take some mitigating steps despite the brainwashing attempts of your ilk constantly trying to discredit solid science.

And before you come back at me again about the flooding in New York, consider that GHG's in the atmosphere, by simple application of known physics, should have (IMHO unarguably) contributed to the recent increases in ocean temperature noted by satellite measurements, resulting in a) increased ocean levels due to thermal expansion (If temperatures are allowed to rise by 3 degrees, the expected sea-level rise could range between 2 and 5 metres, with the best estimate being at 3.5 metres.)

You are misunderstanding me. The myth is that scientists said that there would be a new ice age in the 70's. This didn't happen. Follow the link.

I would propose some possible causes for the high water levels. You can call it a theory if you want to but it is some basic observations of the situation.

1. There was a large hurricane. Not the worst hurricane and as wind speeds go rather tame in the scheme of things. Quite large in diameter therefore the sea swell effect was significant. 2. It was a full moon. High tides are a known and predictable effect and always cause high tides. Ask any sailor.

The combination of these two events is a much more likely explanation of the high water levels.

The water expansion data you supplied is hogwash and you know it. Yes that IS what happens if you expand the entire body of water on the earth but you surely are not going to tell me that the water 3 miles down in the Pacific is at all affected by increases in surface temperature.

I made reference deliberately to those people of yesteryear as scientists because that is how they were viewed buy the population of the day. Just as the scientists of the day are viewed by the general population of today. Yes todays scientists have better technology but if you are unable to prove your results then you are no better than the flat earthists. I note that you did not comment on the failure of eminent medical scientists to fully understand stomach ulcers which is very recent. Finding the true cause of the problem was a complete accident. So if you think modern scientists with all their computer technology cannot make gigantic mistakes you need to give your head a shake. They can and they do.

There is an old saying in the computing world - GIGO - Garbage in - Garbage out. If you put unreliable data into the climate modeling computers you get similar unreliable results out.

And as I said there is not a single element of the GHG theory that can be proven. Therefore it is guess work aided by big computers. Just as the ice age prediction was.

Malcolm

Lol