Peak Oil - Club of Rome
I was watching the above video which I found very informative. It looks like it was made around 2008 and even then it spoke of being just before the Peak of Oil or just after. Likely now (4 years later we are past the peak of oil worldwide) If I take seriously the facts presented in the above presentation, if we are presently past peak oil worldwide, then the more middle class people that come into place worldwide the faster our world oil supplies will dwindle sort of like a roller coaster gaining speed after it reaches the highest point. If this is true it could be very dangerous for many or most countries on earth. Though I noticed the price of Gasoline dropped 6 cents since I last bought gas this likely is an anomaly, whereas a slow upward tick of the price of gasoline worldwide is likely to be the trend over the next 30 or so years at which point gasoline might be 10 dollars to 25 dollars a gallon or more even here in the U.S.
So, this might mean that we all have much less time to convert to other fuels than we thought before. Ethanol is a good idea but if we use corn this will cause many people to starve in the world because it raises the price of corn up exponentially to use corn ethanol since corn is a food staple in many countries both for humans and farm animals.
But, in Brazil they raise Sugar Cane that they turn into ethanol which doesn't cause people to starve like using corn does.
My cousin's idea of buying a 4 or 5 passenger Tesla sounds better every day. 300 miles on a charge with 7000 batteries on board.
One of the things that I found interesting is that the actual Era of Cheap Oil was between 1920 and around 1970 until the Arab Oil Embargo in I believe 1973. 1973 ended Cheap Oil and I can remember how this threw the U.S. into recession after recession throughout the 1970s and 1980s and even into the 1990s. During Cheap Oil we had a remarkably productive time from the end of World War II until about 1973. The price of oil went from around 17cents to 25cents a gallon to around 75 or 80 cents a gallon. That might not seem like much of a change today but if you go from 25 cents a gallon to even 75 cents a gallon that would be like going from the present $4.21 a gallon to $12.63 a gallon. This was a disaster for the U.S. and like I said threw us into recession after recession when you combined this with how much money we put into the Viet Nam War. The only reason the U.S. recovered is that other countries started to loan us money to get us out of the hole. Sound familiar?
If we are past the peak and it sounds more and more like we are worldwide, it is predicted that the actual oil produced will decline as much as 6.7% per year from now on. Likely this could raise the retail price of gasoline an equal amount or more per year. The way in which the price has gone up since January might be an early indicator of this trend already. People are trying to blame this on Iran but what if this is the new norm with or without the present Iran crisis? I'm beginning to believe that with or without Iran these price increases are the new norm because the cost of deep water or almost inaccessible oil wells is starting to bring the cost per barrel many places to 100 dollars or more per barrel just to get it out of the ground or from under the water thousands of feet below.
In order to meet the coming demand we will need 6 times the current capacity of Saudi Arabia. At present that is impossible to do.
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