The end of fossel fuels?
Okay, I was so shocked by how closed minded people were on another website that I had to come here to see what you all think.
I had mentioned something about WHEN the fossel fuels run out just thinking that this was a fact that everybody knew and nobody thought otherwise. I got people argueing with me saying that fossel fuels will never run out because we will always find more reserves and mother nature is always creating more because things keep dying. ???
I am like, WTF? :o How can anybody think that way? I mean, isn't it common knowledge that we are using fossel fuels WAY fasther then mother nature can create it? And that eventually there won't be anymore reservors?
Do you agree? I mean, nothing lasts forever!
I was just wanting to start a topic as to what poeple believe is the next age once the "age of fossel fuels" draws to a close as it is predicted to do so in the next 50 to 100 years.
I figure that you guys probably think more like me and have to see it the way I do. I am just shocked at the ignorance of poeple. How can they be so blind??? Do they just not want to face the inevitable thinking that it won't happen as long as they ignore it?
By the way, I believe that when the sun sets on the age of fossel fuels, it will rise with the dawn of the nuclear age. I think that will happen in our children's generation, 50 to 100 years from now.
SnowQueen, I just read a great book that it sounds like you'd appreciate! It's called Idiot America (http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-America-Stupidity-Became-Virtue/dp/0767926145), and it's about how certain aspects of the media and other forces are encouraging people to be hostile to science. Yes, it has a liberal bias - Rush Limbaugh would not be a fan. But it attempts to explain why ignorance has become kind of a fad.
SnowQueen, I looked at your profile and I am a few years older than you. Part of why people aren't concerned can be illustrated by Chicken Little and The Boy who Cried Wolf. I have lived through "fosil fuels will be depleted by (fill in the date)" dates twice and a few "the world can only support (fill in a population number) people" limits surpassed. When I was an older elementary student, the coming ice age was used to ban cloroflorocarbons. We must have over done to get global warming. Opps, now they just call it climate change.
Now I do believe we need to find alternatives for a variety of reasons but the doom and gloom people have been wrong before so they must we wrong this time. Right? Not nesisarily, but to many people that is how they think.
I certainly hope the nuclear age never dawns, given little events like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, unless they can come up with something that doesn't leave dangerous residue with a half-life of basically forever.
It drives me insane that I live in Spain which could sell solar power to the rest of Europe if the politicians would just stop lining their pockets at everyone else's expense.But since you can't tax or embargo the sun, they're not interested.
I would hope that the next "energy age" would be solar/Aeolian.
I certainly hope the nuclear age never dawns, given little events like Three Mile Island
Q. How many letters are in the alphabet?
A. 20, because TMI blew up and wiped the USA off the map.
That was March 28, 1979. I was in 9th grade. It was my school friend Debbie's b-day. It was a Wednesday and I came home from school sick with a stomach virus. Mom was working in Harrisburg so my oldest sister picked me up and took me home. As we drove along the Susquahana river, there were cars parked on the side of the 2 lane country highway, state rt 441. My sister commented that "someone must be protesting something again" as we drove by. I went straight to bed and did not hear the news of what was going on until the next day after Mom had gone to work. They were discussing possible evacuations. I had just turned 14, my mom was 30 miles away on the other side of "The Island" as we called TMI. Were the National Guard going to take me one direction and send my Mom in her car another? How would we get in contact with each other again? This was before cell phones.
On Friday, I was well enough to go back to school. It was on lock down, no out going phone calls allowed. The rumors were flying the the reactor had exploded. Parents were coming to the school and pulling kids from classes to leave the area. Finally, my mom came. We went home, packed a few things to take with us and went to my oldest sister's for the night. The next day, we drove to Beaver Falls, NW of Pittsburg, to stay with my other sister until things settled.
Things calmed down after a bit and we went home. My oldest sister had taken her 2 preschool kids with us to Beaver Falls as part of the voluntary evacuation of preschoolers and pregnant women within 5 miles of TMI. They wanted her to take them to Hershey Arena as an evac station. Now that was really going to do good if things went critical (NOT!). It was, maybe, 15 miles away "as the crow flies". She was reembursed some of her evac expenses afterward but had to put up a major fight to prove she was on that 5 mile radius line and not outside it. Mom and I did not count because I was her youngest.
TMI was a series of things that all were very unlikely by themselves and should not have statisticly happened at the same time, any one of which not happening would have prevented the situation. In spite of this, I am neutral on neuclear energy. Every power source has it's issues.
In Europe we are still reaping the effects of Chernobyl.
I am not neutral on nukes.
I don't think that we will "run out" of fossil fuels. To understandwhy, you must understand the underlying economics involved. As the oil companies deplete their sources, the price will adjust accordingly. For example, if the oil companies assessed their supply and predicted that at the current usage, we would be out of oil in 10 years time, then the oil prices would jump, thus decreasing total oil consumption. As the supply slowly approaches depletion, the price would continue to rise until it was no longer practical to use in the current amounts. This would create a hole in the marketplace where there was a huge demand for vehicles that use other means of fuel. This hole would be filled, thus leaving the oil in less and less demand. So I don't think it's really an issue of "running out" so much as an issue of the cost becoming increasingly unreasonable enough to cause us to use alternatives. There are already alternative vehicles, and as oil price increase, you will see a correlation with the supply of alternative vehicles.
We are running out of oil, there's no doubt of that. I cannot give you an exact date, but its complete depletion is inevitable. Unfortunately, now we've found all these reserves of natural gas, so our reliance on fuels that cause global warming will continue.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, yes, we'd run out of oil and gas eventually, but before we do, the climate will have changed so much that it will be ever more difficult to grow food. Read the book Tropic of Chaos, that will help you see how quickly we're making our earth uninhabitable.