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So quoth Karnaj:
Fun fact: Parcelan is has never met a Jew in his life, and he has no intentions of doing so. If he succeeds, he will be only one of six confirmed Catholics to never encounter a Jew during his life. This entitles his family to an endowment of one million dollars, at the cost of having his corpse raped seventeen thousand times by an army of men with Down Syndrome. He feels it's worth the trade.

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I'm glad you found someone to make you happy.

P.S. According to our suicide pact, you're the only one entitled to rape the corpse. Wait, I should say obliged, according to the terms.

The problem is that quite a bit of promise isn't worth a fart in a windstorm, every one of them could be five years off or fifty years off or five thousand years off. We're battling the law of conservation of energy, and it's no small obstacle.

Alternative energy is a long-term goal, it solves long-term problems.

We have short-term problems, and those can only be solved by more fucking oil. Period.

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Aw, geez, I have Maradon! all over myself!
We have short-term problems, and those can only be solved by more fucking oil. Period.

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Which we're not going to get. We'll be losing Mexico's oil by as early as 2014, perhaps even sooner. KSA has been stable, but we have no idea when Ghawar will be exhausted. Russia's peaking right now, so we can expect imports from them to drop off in the next few years. What does this mean? Even if we drill in ANWR, even if we drill off the coast of Florida, and even if we develop oil shale, we're not getting anywhere. All we're doing is replacing failing reserves--and probably inadequately. The problem can't be solved, even in the short term, because every day, production is falling or remaining flat at largest oil fields of the world, and China and India are gobbling up any gains made in other fields. All we can do, really, is slow the decline by exploiting what we can until such time that long-term solutions can be implemented.

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Verily, Karnaj doth proclaim:
Which we're not going to get. We'll be losing Mexico's oil by as early as 2014, perhaps even sooner. KSA has been stable, but we have no idea when Ghawar will be exhausted. Russia's peaking right now, so we can expect imports from them to drop off in the next few years. What does this mean? Even if we drill in ANWR, even if we drill off the coast of Florida, and even if we develop oil shale, we're not getting anywhere. All we're doing is replacing failing reserves--and probably inadequately. The problem can't be solved, even in the short term, because every day, production is falling or remaining flat at largest oil fields of the world, and China and India are gobbling up any gains made in other fields. All we can do, really, is slow the decline by exploiting what we can until such time that long-term solutions can be implemented.

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Production is falling because we have reserves that we are forbidding ourselves to touch for no good reason.

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x--KarnajO-('-'Q) :
...All we're doing is replacing failing reserves...

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I don't understand why you consider stopgap measures unacceptable.

Nobody is suggesting entirely foregoing alternative energy, that would be as stupid as entirely foregoing oil development. We have to make oil last as long as it possibly can, and that means tapping every last resource we have. Of course they aren't going to last forever. The SUN isn't going to last forever. It will last LONGER.

We don't have to choose between oil and alternative. Oil is not a government program. Neither are alternative fuels really. More leases for oil does not mean fewer grants for alternative. On the contrary, more leases for oil means more money for energy companies who are the ones doing the goddamn alternative energy research in the first place. (GM and Shell Oil are the ones responsible for the hydrogen fuel cell powered car, as an example off the top of my head)

If we're very, very lucky, and we search and drill for every last drop we have on this planet, it might just last until we have a viable alternative liquid fuel solution.

And you need to stop assuming that mass transit is a viable solution, because for the vast majority of the people out there, it's not and it never will be. Even with an ideal infrastructure most people are looking at an enormous loss of quality of life, and I'm not talking weekend visits to grandma, I'm talking working 12 hours and getting paid for 8, and loss of job mobility and employment competition.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 06-09-2008 at 08:02 PM.

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Naimah put down Tada! magazine long enough to type:
Production is falling because we have reserves that we are forbidding ourselves to touch for no good reason.

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You honestly think that we can match the rate of decline we're seeing elsewhere in the world with domestic reserves? Alright, I'll bite. Show me where we can make up 1.5 to 2 million barrels per day in domestic production. That'll cover the exhaustion of Cantarell, Mexico's largest oil field.

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And coming in at #1 is Maradon! with "Reply." I'm Casey Casem.
I don't understand why you consider stopgap measures unacceptable.

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They're not unnacceptable. In fact, they're necessary to mitigate a lot of nasty shit. You named them to be a short-term solution, which is what I take issue with. You're not solving anything by extracting all this oil. You're treading water. Well, not really treading water, but rather drowning less slowly.

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Nobody is suggesting entirely foregoing alternative energy, that would be as stupid as entirely foregoing oil development. We have to make oil last as long as it possibly can, and that means tapping every last resource we have.

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Neglecting the environmental damage for the time being, conservation is the easiest, most cost-effective way to make oil last as long as we can. And yes, that means that all but the rich may have to forego gas-guzzling vehicles, and yes, that may mean that the poor can no longer afford driving as much as they once could, but it's a cruel fucking world. Further, building domestic capacity is going to take time. Conservation can be begun immediately, and voluntarily.

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Of course they aren't going to last forever. The SUN isn't going to last forever. It will last LONGER.

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Nice strawman. No human being will ever have to worry about the sun burning up. You and I however, will definitely live to see the end of oil (barring untimely accidents, of course).

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We don't have to choose between oil and alternative. Oil is not a government program. Neither are alternative fuels really. More leases for oil does not mean fewer grants for alternative. On the contrary, more leases for oil means more money for energy companies who are the ones doing the goddamn alternative energy research in the first place. (GM and Shell Oil are the ones responsible for the hydrogen fuel cell powered car, as an example off the top of my head)

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Not necessarily. Unless you put a gun to their heads or threaten to nationalize them, there's not a goddamn thing you can do to force them to invest to alternatives. And why would they, anyway? They have a good thing going. They have stockholders to keep happy.

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If we're very, very lucky, and we search and drill for every last drop we have on this planet, it might just last until we have a viable alternative liquid fuel solution.

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Wow, what a plan. "Let's hope really really hard that one of the pipe dreams like cellulose has a favorable EROEI!" It sounds like that insane Christian group out west that's praying for lower gas costs. OK, so what happens if we're not very, very lucky?

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And you need to stop assuming that mass transit is a viable solution, because for the vast majority of the people out there, it's not and it never will be. Even with an ideal infrastructure most people are looking at an enormous loss of quality of life, and I'm not talking weekend visits to grandma, I'm talking working 12 hours and getting paid for 8, and loss of job mobility and employment competition.

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Waaah, I have to give up my 12 mpg SUV and live in a slightly smaller house near a commuter rail line, waaah! I might actually have to get to know my neighbors, waaah! As I've said before, it is a cruel fucking world.

You ever take a train or bus into an urban downtown core? You know all those huge office buildings they usually have there? It's downright idiotic to assume that you lose the ability to change jobs because now you have to ride the commuter train to work. Don't assume that because you, personally, loathe evil, socialist mass transit that everyone else does. Finally, where is it enshrined that you have the right to live fifty miles from your job and not incur hugely expensive commuter costs, or long commute times, whatever the mode of transit? Why should the best jobs be outside of the city core?

Besides, this is just the market in action. Mass transit is proving to be a viable alternative, even in its current shoddy state. If private vehicles can't compete with the benefits of mass transit, then their use should diminish, as well as subsidies supporting those private vehicles.

Public transportation needs gas too, I think. Also, supply and demand.

Then again, I could just be talking out of my ass.

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They're not unnacceptable. In fact, they're necessary to mitigate a lot of nasty shit. You named them to be a short-term solution, which is what I take issue with. You're not solving anything by extracting all this oil. You're treading water. Well, not really treading water, but rather drowning less slowly.

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That's exactly what I meant by a short term solution - a solution that's only good for the short term.

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Neglecting the environmental damage for the time being, conservation is the easiest, most cost-effective way to make oil last as long as we can. And yes, that means that all but the rich may have to forego gas-guzzling vehicles, and yes, that may mean that the poor can no longer afford driving as much as they once could, but it's a cruel fucking world. Further, building domestic capacity is going to take time. Conservation can be begun immediately, and voluntarily.

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This whole paragraph is based on a series of essentially correct, but flawed assumptions, some of them entirely tangential, so I'm going to use a bulleted list:

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Conservation and expanding oil development are not mutually exclusive. Which one will stretch oil farther is still up in the air. Oil companies are betting millions that it's development, and I see no reason to prevent that gamble.

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Sure, they will go hand in hand. But you have to get past the notion that we're discovering more oil that we're depleting, because it's simply not happening.

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Holding a gun to everyone's head and forcing them to drive a prius wouldn't even put a small dent in global oil consumption. The consumption of China and India is, as you indicate, parabolic. Fuel efficiency must increase, but as much for economic reasons as anything. It's certainly too small a concern to justify fascism.

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Global oil consumption isn't much of a concern to our way of life, in the context of conservation efforts. After all, we still produce around a quarter of our oil domestically, and we do have non-trivial reserves, both conventional and unconventional. Conservation, then, allows us to buy less oil from foreign sources. The oil we don't buy, then, will be gobbled up by China and India, but that's their problem. The greater reliance we have on domestic reserves through conservation (because, let's face it, we're never going to produce our current consumption domestically), the less jarring dwindling global reserves are to our way of life. Couple that with an increase in domestic production, and we might actually get somewhere.

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The rich are generally the early adopters of fuel efficient technology, not the other way around.

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Only if it's new and expensive, like hybrids or fuel-cell vehicles. There are tried-and-true methods for increasing efficiency that have been around for decades elsewhere in the world that are, through economies of scale, by no means expensive. In this context, I assert that it will be the middle class who will adopt these technologies, out of pure need. They'll simply be priced out of SUV ownership, while it will take much longer for the wealthy to feel the pinch.

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This is not speculation, many oil companies are doing alternative energy research as a matter of public record; BP and Shell spring to mind. And why wouldn't they? They actually don't have a good thing going; they're more qualified than anyone in the world to know that their golden goose is dying, and where will they be when it's gone? Where will their shareholders be?

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The golden goose may be dying, but it's going to die slowly over the next three decades. That's an incredibly long time, and while corporations may cease to exist, it doesn't mean people can't become incredibly rich in the short term, then end their association with that entity. No one is forced to look out for the long-term health of a corporate entity. But no matter. Like you said, they're investing in alternatives, and probably will continue to do so.

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That's not my plan, that's what plans that don't involve oil development amount to. Even if we have blackshirts take away everybody's SUV's, the degree to which we can actually affect global conservation is minuscule to the point of irrelevancy. Plans that involve both oil development are prolonging measures meant to stretch oil long enough to replace it.

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As I said above, we shouldn't concern ourselves with global consumption, and we can't really do anything about it, anyway. What happens beyond oil, however, can't depend upon something that might happen. And please, have no delusions about it: something like cellulose is far from guaranteed. We might not figure out how to get a favorable EROEI until 2045. Or we might find out that it's simply impossible. We might also work out the final problems in a couple of weeks. We need to be thinking of practical solutions to our long-term problems now.

In the mean time, our best bet is to reduce our dependence on foreign sources, because they're vanishing, as was predicted by the Land Export model. This is best accomplished through conservation, which, as we have discussed, is a multi-pronged approached of increased fuel efficiency, increased alternative transit options, and development of domestic resources. We can't replace our imports with domestic production, but we definitely can make the amount we import much, much smaller, thus ensuring that when the bottom finally does fall out and all imports cease, the shock to our economy and way of life is not as pronounced.

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95% of the nation's businesses are small businesses and LLC's. They are outside city cores for a myriad of reasons, but primarily taxes and land values, neither of which will change with oil prices. I never implied that there was a right to live far away from your job and incur no expenses, only that it was vital to the job economy, and it is. You can't just pack the suburbs into skyscrapers and not lose anything in the process. Space will always be vastly more limited, land values will always be vastly higher, choice and job mobility will always fall because there simply won't be room for more businesses.

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And you need not pack the suburbs into skyscrapers, but the model of having everything separated by distances so vast that automobile ownership is mandatory is just silly. It just doesn't make sense anymore. Urban suburbs, with population densities approaching 4,000 to 5,000 people per square mile, make much more sense. They can be economically served by mass transit, have walkable downtown cores for the small businessman, and be linked to larger urban centers via rapid transit for the rest of us working schlubs. This is nothing outlandish; either. It's the model for every older city in the United States, and it seems to be working reasonably well. It would be silly to say that we can keep the country exactly as it is, because that's frankly impossible.

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Not only is mass transit not a viable alternative, it usually isn't even a direct competitor. Not everybody can live like you. You could pave the continent in light rail and the nearest station would still be hours away from most people. You can waaaah all you like, but a two hour commute every day means an enormous loss of quality of life, tantamount to a quarter loss in wages. Coupled with the loss of a job market and it's an unbelievably bad scenario that should be avoided at all costs.

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If the alternative is nothing, people will take mass transit. Cold, hard economic factors or actual physical fuel shortages are going to force people to abandon the exurbs and their cars, plain and simple. You're not suggesting that urban populations some how prop up exurbs with some sort of tax, right? So how do you propose we keep suburbia alive in the face of the demise of oil? We can mitigate things with conservation and development of domestic oil, but there's still going to be a gap. And in that gap, the least efficient will be the first to go.

And sure, that means that a lot of people will lose the big backyard and the wind in their hair as they drive your SUV down the interstate to work every day. Shit happens, and you still need to eat, so you put up with the smaller loss of quality of life, rather than stubbornly forcing a much larger one on yourself by refusing to adapt to reality.

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Maradon! got served! Maradon! got served!
This is exactly right, except, I've never heard of a government subsidy for cars.

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Perhaps I misspoke. Rather than saying that the subsidy supports private vehicles directly, I should've said that it the subsidy supports their proliferation. What do you think gas taxes are? Road tolls? There's a reason the government flips a shit when someone is discovered making their own biodiesel in large enough quantities to entirely forgo filling up at a station; it means that they've used the roads without subsidizing their continued existence through fuel taxes. Every time you fill up, you ensure that the roads you use are well-maintained, and that there are funds available to build new roads.

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The propaganda machine of Gadani's junta released this statement:
If everyone uses mass transit like you're suggesting, won't the price of said mass transit skyrocket along with fuel prices?

Public transportation needs gas too, I think. Also, supply and demand.

Then again, I could just be talking out of my ass.

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Not all mass transit needs fuel. Any high-density urban light rail or subway as almost always electrified. The better regional rail services are electrified, too. They draw their power from coal-fired plants(and we don't have to worry about coal for at least seventy-five years), usually, sometimes nuclear or hydro. As for the diesel operations, they scale better economically than cars, so while costs will rise with rising fueld costs, increased ridership, wear and tear, and fuel consumption, they do so at a much, much reduced rate when compared to cars. It will always win on efficiency. Now that efficiency is starting to become important, people are giving mass transit a serious look.

Here's how the vote broke down:

FOR
Todd Tiahrt (R-KS)
John E. Peterson (R-PA)
Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)
Virgil H. Goode, Jr. (R-VA)
Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Jerry Lewis (R-CA)

AGAINST
Norman D. Dicks (D-WA)
James P. Moran (D-VA)
Maurice D. Hinchey (D-NY)
John W. Olver (D-MA)
Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV)
Tom Udall (D-NM)
Ben Chandler (D-KY)
Ed Pastor (D-AZ)
Dave Obey (D-WI)

But go ahead and tell me that it's "not the democrats" cockblocking oil development.

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(and we don't have to worry about coal for at least seventy-five years)

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Coal power will be illegal by 2025 as a result of the energy bill passed by the democrat majority. The same one that will outlaw incandescent light bulbs in 2012

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 06-14-2008 at 06:32 PM.

Also, your link to the Appropriations Committee isn't very useful. I tried to find information about them hampering oil development, but all I found was that they are making oil companies renegotiate leases that they were improperly issued.

In fact, much of the majority concerns seemed to be related to underfunding Indian and environmental obligations.

Here

The ban on coal power was buried in the energy bill passed in december of 2007, which, in addition to making it illegal to sell standard lightbulbs, set a sloping decrease on allowable carbon emissions for energy production which would eventually make it impossible to produce energy with coal. That one would take a lot longer to find from a source that wasn't a political commentator, unless you want to find the text of the bill.

Maradon! fucked around with this message on 06-14-2008 at 07:16 PM.

Also, I still don't see anything about banning coal. Apparently the Energy Department forecasts that 57% of electricity will be generated by coal power in 2030, so we can't possibly be banning coal.

Just like the CAFE standards - they didn't ban SUV's outright, they just set fuel efficiency standards that would be impossible for a standard SUV to meet.