Liquid Fuel...made from Sunlight and CO2

[brian eiland]

My problem with ANWR...just imagine an accident like we experienced in the Gulf...and then a LOT of that crude oil being trapped under an ice cap. What would that do to the mircro-biological life in that polar water And then how that might effect the other sea life that depends on that life. That could be the worst of all oil spills

BTW crude oil did not solely come from plant life. I suggest you have a look at the video reference I made, CRUDE

[kerosene]

Drill or no drill -
I personally think that taxing fuel and encouraging shift to less oil intensive lifestyle is important not for saving atmosphere but to avoid utter drop off.

We have burned roughly trillion barrels of oil and there is argued to be about the same left. New discoveries are tiny compared to the hay day of oil finds (despite the vast superior technologies). But we can speculate that maybe there is 1.5 trillion barrels left.

In my opinion we will burn it all. Sucks to be atmosphere but we will burn all easily recoverable oil. Clearly $100+ barrel is still tolerable for the market - its just so compact and handy that we will end up burning all/most of it.

The question is how quickly. And here steering markets with targeted taxation is very useful. Rising energy prices is much less of a disaster for a "efficient" society than for wasteful.

Also in my opinion boomers had it best, contraception was invented, aids came in only in the 80s, money printing and manufactured boom lasted pretty long to provide a fun ride. It is the 20 somes who will have to live through a long term change to a life where next generation will have less than the previous one. And this is a huge change. Nobody likes that change so we hear blame being distributed to every direction when largely its just a big long term shift that nobody really single handedly created.

The problem with downsizing or going backwards is that nobody will want it. Social security could be funded if we reducing the payments out NOW with quite moderate amounts. That's never going to pass so we will give what was promised until there is nothing. Same with oil. We (as people) will keep demanding cheap oil as long as we can until one day we hit harder inelastic limits and the shock will be much more harsh.

It will be interesting but not fun. And people will get so angry so easily (watch this thread) that more wars will be easy distractions.

marc faber is one of my favorite talking heads and his not so happy world views seem pretty reasonable.

[Frosty]

The whole world does not comprise of just USA and Europe. The far East that is so often refered to and cruely as the third world is building shopping centres no smaller than those I have seen in Europe if not bigger, yet more economical because they are new, and since they did'nt have any thing to replace they can jump a giant leap over all the old uneconomical material and design as if they never existed.

And because of lower wages more economical appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners come under extreme competition and generally dominates advertisement.

I don't think an American would care or even look at the back of a fridge or Air con to see its consumption and care even less about 10 watts difference.

Old type light bulbs are no longer available and the new 1000 hours are affordable and are now ubiquitous in all application.

Things happen very fast here.

[Dave Gudeman]

Originally Posted by Frosty

150 dollar a barrel will see to that prob,--- next few years sometime,-- or once you start paying what the Europeans pay for it.

You said it. That's why I'm really trying to find a way to make a sail boat work for me, so I don't suffer as much if/when the crunch comes. But I just don't see much point in having a boat if it takes me four hours to get anywhere. If it doesn't do at least 12 or 13 knots it's pretty much useless for travel around the SF Bay. And that's a bare minimum.

You know, I have no basic problem with talk about the dangers of US over-reliance on fossil fuels when it is about real policy problems. We really don't need to be building huge homes with wall-size glass windows pointed directly at the summer sun in Phoenix where it commonly gets to 118 freaking degrees in the summer. What bugs me is not the observation that the US is heading for trouble, it is the moralizing tone, as though Americans are just such mean selfish people because we respond to economic incentives just like everyone else in the world does.

Of course it _is_ true that Americans could stand to live with a bit more moderation, but so could a lot of people. The people of the UK could stand to drink quite a bit less for example. The Italians could do with a bit less vacation time and longer hours at work. The Japanese could find something else to do on vacations besides taking pictures of everything. The Australians are rather compulsively obsessed with cricket. The Spanish should really stop torturing those poor bulls. The French should stop being so ... well ... French. But it's really not very nice for me as an American to tell all of the rest of you how to live your lives, now, is it? In fact it was rather rude, now that I think of it.

Given the basic truth of human nature that most people do not live with moderation in all things, the real issue isn't morality; it's economics. Energy is cheap in the US and so people use a lot of it. Many civilizations have had a problem with management of resources that were so cheap to exploit that they were not sustainable at the rate of exploitation. Do you have any idea how many animals were driven to extinction because either the habitat or the animal itself was a cheap exploitable resource? Some ancient civilizations fell because they farmed all of their soil away because or they used up all of the copper that they needed to make bronze. So it bugs me when people are always singling out the US as if we were some special evil mutant species who have discovered this brand new vice of unbalanced economic incentives.

[Jeremy Harris]

You're spot on, energy is dirt cheap in the US, even now, which is one reason consumption is high - there's no economic reason not to use production and transportation systems that are relatively oil-hungry.

When I filled my car up last week it cost me just over £60 (about $99) for about 45 litres (just under 12 US gallons) of petrol (gasoline), so the cost is about $8.25 per US gallon here at the moment. The cost has risen by around 20% in the past 12 months and looks set to keep on rising - my guess is that we may be paying the equivalent of around $9 to $10 per US gallon by the end of the year. Prices across Europe are broadly similar.

If fuel here was half the price (say around the current dirt-cheap US fuel prices) then I wouldn't bother to drive a car that does around 60mpg - heck, I'd probably go back to driving a 4x4.

[yipster]

have not read from the start of this tread thinking it was about real estate with microbes?
but do agree a boat, any boat should do over 10knts yet fuel is to much to talk about
dont really know how to melt salt to plutonium so wait with this, besides, it aint a boat