CONNECTING THE DOTS
Frosty Wooldridge
More About: EnergyWho is to blame for $4.00 a gallon gas? How about $10.00 a gallon?
“At this point, it’s almost
certainly too late to manage a transition to sustainability on a global or
national scale, even if the political will to attempt it existed, which it
clearly does not. Our civilization is in the early stages of the same curve of
decline and fall as so many others have followed before it. What likely
lies in wait for us is a long, uneven decline into a new Dark Age from
which, centuries from now, the civilizations of the future will gradually
emerge.”
Who
can we blame for $4.00 a gallon? Answer:
every last one of us cotton pickin’ American gas guzzling 8-cylinder SUV
drivers, trucks, trains, boats and planes!
We burn 20 million barrels a day in the United States. The world’s humans burn 84 million barrels
daily. That’s 29.9 billion barrels of oil annually
worldwide! Whopping carbon footprint!
Hey! Did
you think a finite resource like ‘endless oil’ could go on forever? That’s like sucking on an ‘endless milkshake’
straw at the local diner! It eventually
runs dry and you suck on air.
Are
you upset? You gotta’ be kiddin’ me! The
“Hubbert Curve” told us that “Peak Oil” would hit the United States in 1970
when geologist M.King Hubbert predicted a drop from nine million barrels to three
million barrels daily. It came to pass!
Peak Everything: Facing a Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg
tells us we face rapidly declining supplies of metals, water, oil, coal,
minerals and most other resources we rape the Earth to acquire for our
rapacious human activities. Are we
preparing with such simple plans like 10 cent deposit/return laws on all
metals, plastics and glass. Not a
chance!
If
you think $4.00 a gallon today hits your wallet, think again. Chris Steiner
wrote $20 Per Gallon, which predicts with deadly accuracy a steady
rise of prices from $5.00 to $10.00 to ultimately $20.00 per gallon before
mid-century. Why? Answer: we may have only burned 50 percent of
the Earth’s oil supplies, but it’s farther down, harder to get at and more
expensive to extract. Thus, costs rise!
Experts
knew it would happen, but since 1970, we just kept burning oil like there was
no tomorrow. Tomorrow happens to be
today! How’s that big Ram truck with
eight powerful cylinders doing for you at $4.00 a gallon. Peak Oil will prove a game-changer!
We
failed to incorporate conservation in any form.
We failed to plan.
We failed
ourselves and future generations.
“As we go from this happy hydrocarbon
bubble we have reached now to a renewable energy resource economy, which we do
this century, will the “civil” part of civilization survive? As we both
know there is no way that alternative energy sources can supply the amount of
per capita energy we enjoy now, much less for the 9 billion expected by 2050.
And energy is what keeps this game going. We are involved in a Faustian
bargain—selling our economic souls for the luxurious life of the moment, but
sooner or later the price has to be paid.” Walter Youngquist, energy
“An
immutable fact of expensive gasoline: Americans will find someone to blame,”
said Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal. “We can expect in the coming months to hear
many sober analysts attempt to explain the complex reasons for rising oil
prices: inflation, Middle East tremors, growing demand. Expect, too, for all
those reasons to vanish behind what most Americans will see as the far more
obvious cause: President Obama's regulatory assault on domestic oil and gas
production.”
Obama,
Congress and the American people dance around the fact that we failed to plan. We face an unsustainable “Peak Oil”
consumption conundrum. We created a “Faustian
Bargain” with the inevitable “Hobson’s Choice” for the final answer. That ‘answer’ forces us to take only two
choices left to us: pick door number 1 and you get to walk over a cliff with no
parachute; pick door number 2 and you fall into quicksand with no lifeguard.
In
January 2008, candidate Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle that under his
cap-and-trade plan, "electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
Steven Chu, now Secretary of Energy, told this newspaper in the same year:
"Somehow, we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the
levels in Europe." Currently, $8.00
a gallon in UK!
In his book The Long Emergency by James Howard
Kunstler, he predicted that China would burn 98 million barrels of oil daily by
2030. They stick six million new cars on
their highways every year—so they will reach that burn rate in 19 years.
However, the planet will be coughing up only empty ‘stuff’
like you do at the end of your ‘endless milkshake’ when you suck on ‘nothing
left’.
What can we do?
·
Massive change-over to two and four cylinder
cars
·
Massive push for electric and solar cars
·
Massive push for wind and solar energy
·
Massive push conservation on all fronts
·
Massive push for walking centric cities
* Massive change-over to mass transit
* Massive change-over to bicycles
As the USA adds 3.1 million people annually, net gain, to
rise from 312 million to 400 million by 2035—more demand, less oil—higher prices
and lucky to have any oil at all! Finally,
we need a massive push for population stability by the United States to lead
the rest of the countries of the world.
We cannot keep adding human numbers if we expect to survive the 21st
century.
##
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3 Comments in Response to Who is to blame for $4.00 a gallon gas? How about $10.00 a gallon?
Again I remind Rusty that 'peak oil', that the world is running out of it, has the same credibility as Reefer Madness. Look up 'peak oil is a myth'. You will see what has made the Soviets a major oil player as well. SamFoxVery well said. We in America, are ready to point fingers to anyone instantly without self evalutating oursleves.
When you point a finger, one points to your desired direction, three point back at yourself (haha go figure) and the forgotton thumb looks up (may be to warn you, the Big guy knows the whole truth - Thats if you believed in Him)
Thanks for the lovely reminder, we Americans forget things little too fast! Must be the fluoridated water, Vaccines and similar after affects, if you can phatom what i mean.
In the original version of Mike Browns book "Brown's Alcohol Motor Fuel Cookbook," Mike talks about the the acetylene enzyme. I don't know if it is in the current version, and I don't remember the big word that the enzyme is called, but here's how it works.
You throw some starch into a clean container, add some watter and the enzyme, keep the "mash" at about body temperature, and acetyl alcohol floats to the top.
It has a much larger molecule than ethanol - many hydrogen and carbon atoms to 1 oxygen atom - and therefore, more power... almost the power of gasoline.
Of course, it is a little different to handle than gasoline or ethanol. But, with the technology we have, any problems could be overcome extremely easily.
So whose fault is it that we don't use it? Think of the money the farmers could make growing corn, etc., for the starch in it... instead of sitting idle and living off Government subsidies.