Star Tribune covers peak oil
The Star Tribune published a story about the reaction to peak oil today. One thing you get from this story is that peak oil is not a left/right issue. Neo-conservative hawks and environmentalists are both concerned about the impact of the end of cheap oil.
For more on Peak Oil, check out The Oil Drum.
posted by Luke Francl @ 10:31 AM |
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5 Comments:
I wonder if once upon a time there was teeth gnashing and hand ringing over the unsustainability in growth demand of transport horses, or so many words devoted to the coming darkness settling over the land as whale oil grew scarce?
The mistake that "peak oil" doomsday prophets make is that oil is not a unique commodity, rather it is another way of saying energy. Of which, there are abundant alternatives. Solar, wind, nuclear, bio-fuels etc. Many of these are far cheaper to produce than the current price of oil, but involve either infrastructure costs to adopt or have a price above the price oil would fall to if they were introduced that make them unprofitable or undesirable to pursue in the short run.
So what happens when we're not in the short run?
The peak oil stuff is good scare-journalism, but there isn't much of a story there.
There is a valid point in there though, that is that this is not a left/right issue. The contention of labor and capital was a 19th century conflict and despite our tradition of trying to view current problems thru that prism, its becoming more and more antiquated.
The far left socialist/union/protectionists have far more in common with the far right nationalist/intellectual property isolationists than they do with centrists (and the same is true of the far right.)
The interesting question here is how will this oil shortfall be addressed? Will it be a national solution that "protects" jobs and involves a handful of companies that "own" the solution, or will it be a global effort that involves a variety of business, government and NGO entities and broadly cross-licensed technologies?
It'd be more important to know where Alito stands on this than abortion or affirmative action.
While US law is ambivilent on intellectual property, the reality of precedent is squarely against cross-licensing arrangements. This an example of the courts legislating, in that something that was never intended to be obstructed by law makers has been by the courts.
-Censored
It blew my mind to see this on the front page of the Star Tribune.
What I would like to see is the decentralization of energy control. Solar technology has made great advances and it would be great to see the new solar technology in the hands of communities or individuals.
More freedom, please!
Oil is a finite resource. We will run out of it some day. Cheap oil is even more finite. Once oil output starts declining, the price will skyrocket.
Isn't it better to start preparing for that day now, rather than when it comes?
The value of the Peak Oil community is that they are the ones bringing the issue of alternative energy to the forefront.
If it weren't for them, there's no way we would be ready.
Agreed- the time to make changes is now. It's weird to actually see anything regarding Peak Oil beyond the usual message boards, blogs, and books.
The difficulty with having a discussion about the problem lies in the real sense of despair upon the realisation of the box we're in. Lots of people plain shut down and don't want to hear about it anymore.
What we need to do, of course, is use the energy we've got to create a a new energy infrastructure while we've still got it.
Another thing that is essential is to have some kind of an international conference about oil use- because what we absolutely need to avoid is a global war over remaining oil stocks. Our present troubles in Iraq would seem like a bump in the road to that kind of conflict.
Last of all we need to realise that energy=technology. All our ideas about solar, wind, nuclear, the so called "clean coal" tech, and biofuels are predicated on the concept that we will be able to use energy the way we use it now- which is the problem since at the heart of the matter is our dependence on oil. It's critical to everything we do.
We need to change the way we think about energy and the way we live because of it.
You oughta check out James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency:
Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century- pretty scary stuff- he talks about a worst case scenario and what it might look like.
I've been covering this locally for the last year and a half. The bloggers at The Oil Drum are pretty astute but tend to use traditional analyses.
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