by frog
I just came across this photoshopped picture by Flickr’s azrainman on peak oil:
These two are good peak oil photoshop satires too.
Meanwhile, this cartoon is also good from boodoo:
This is a political cartoon from an 1861 issue of Vanity Fair. Boodoo quotes American Theocracy:
Mid-nineteenth-century Americans were a literate and reading people. Demand for nighttime illumination far exceeded the four million barrels of whale oil produced each year by refineries in New England and New York. It was for this reason that ["Colonel" Edwin] Drake’s Connecticut backers sent him to the Oil Creek valley. Journalists and entrepeneurs recognized the continuity. The first oil gushers in Venango County prompted hurrahs akin to seamen’s “thar she blows” for the spout of a large sperm whale. In 1861 Vanity Fair published a cartoon showing formally attired whales attending a ball honoring Drake’s well, pausing to toast the new technology that had spared them.
It’s a healthy reminder that peak oil can happen and has fairly tragic effects if you are the thing that contains the oil that is running out (be you a whale or a planet)
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
my pictures are better fwwog, go to
http://paulscottfilms.blogspot.com/
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“Royal Dutch Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer said Tuesday he expected easy-to-produce oil and gas would likely peak in the next 10 years.”
I don’t get it does the May 2005 record not still stand?
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Peak oil is BS.
Look at this:
http://www.nextenergynews.com/news1/next-energy-news2.13s.html
Will put one up the Arabs etc.
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PC is havinhg a vicious swipe at environmentalists
“Seventeen years after he told a stunned audience they were part of a “so-called intellectual mainstream of the Western world [that] has been fouled with a whole array of intellectual toxins resulting from the undermining of reason and the status of man” — intellectual toxins that “can be seen bobbing up and down in the ‘intellectual mainstream,’ just as raw sewage can be seen floating in a dirty river”"
http://pc.blogspot.com/2008/04/toxicity-of-environmentalism.html
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GW Denier – do you have an alias of PO Denier as well? Seems so!
Even if the “200 billion barrel Oil Field” proves correct, doesn’t address the impact the CO2 emissions burnig that oil will have on the greenhouse effect.
And however many million barrels are i nthe groung, we can’t escape the fact that oil is a finite resource. If commonly accepted peak oil predictions are wrong, the same scenario will still eventually exist for my and your grandchildren or great-grand-children. Eventually it will happen, because there is only so much oil, and oil isn’t made anywhere near as fast as we are using it.
So isn’t it better to address that issue now, rather than when it has actually run out?
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“there is only so much oil, and oil isn’t made anywhere near as fast as we are using it.
So isn’t it better to address that issue now, rather than when it has actually run out?”
So by that reckoning, should we also be addressing peak platinum, peak iron ore, peak gold, peak everything else that’s mined or taken from the earth, all of which will eventually run out so their continual use cannot in any way be considered sustainable in the long term.
There really is a lot of tosh talked about peak oil, but if you mention it enough then it gives people something else to worry about. What with all the overblown hype about AGW, it’s a wonder some people manage to sleep at night.
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Skeptic, there is a fundamental difference in peak oil and scarcity of metal minerals. This is because mining oil is mining energy, so at a certain point of complexity and inferiority of mineral accumulation, extracting oil becomes pointless because of the amount of energy needed to do so. Whereas mining ore will still be useful at increasingly inferior candidate mine sites – because, market forces willing, the mineral will be extracted at whatever energy cost for the value of its unique chemical and physical properties – oil will become irrelevant as its economics as a source of energy are eroded by competition from other sources with different cost curves. None of which is to say that the issues arising from the scarcity of metallic ores aren’t significant, but they are different to the issues facing reliance on oil. Seeing you probably don’t know anything about petroleum geology, petroleum engineering, petroleum extraction technology or the oil industry in general it is pretty rich to call peak oil tosh. But then, some people can’t help themselves but be contrarians, though they will nonetheless arrogantly refuse to look in to any detail about something, instead basing their views upon their need to counter a phantom agenda which they see as needing fighting.
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The earth’s core is iron, so I don’t think we have to worry about peak iron.
Platinum, gold, silver, copper, etc are elements. We have to try very hard indeed to destroy them, so anything we dig up and use, we can recycle and use again – unless we really dilute it.
We can’t manufacture oil without putting in more energy than we’d get out, and peak oil may well have happened nearly 3 years ago. If it hasn’t already happened, then it will, and before we are ready for it.
Trevor.
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GW Denier, 200 MMbo is BS.
Look at this:
http://www.ndoil.org/content/view/62/2/
“- Reserve studies estimate 250 billion barrels of oil in the North Dakota Bakken. However, current technology allows that we could only produce about 1% of those reserves.”
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Kev, you can get as much oil as you like, technology will see to that.
CO2 induced GW is BS, so I don’t give a fat rats backside about putting more food into the atmosphere.
The world is not warming at all and we are going into a peroid of cooling as sun activity is decreasing.
So big fat Al can travel as much airmiles as he likes without needing to buy off sets.
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Sounds logical
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Actually GW Denier the world is getting hotter, as the Sun ages it grows bigger and hotter. Our demise is inevitable which, funnily enough, makes a complete mockery of conservation. It will be the ultimate form of recycling though, as the earth gets vaporized out into space.
I wonder if we should put a big recycling symbol and number on the side?
I wonder if Coronation street will still be screening then! AAARGH.
In the interim I’m with working sustainably what we have.
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try going down there to get some of that iron from the earth’s core before giving reign to your wild optimism.
industrial precious metals can’t just be used over & over because they’re not all used in consumption goods which are used once & discarded, they are tied up in long-term usage. demand increases but supply does not. some are used in such tiny quantities in any given item that the cost of recovering them would be prohibitive.
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GW Denier, technology will not see to the extraction of all the oil: refer to my previous comment – petroleum mining is the extraction of energy, not the extraction of a precious mineral. There are certain fundamental increases in inefficiency that put limits on the improvement of petroleum engineering – yes, I know that technology is improving, but you should base any argument on fact, and there is no reason to have blind faith that petroleum engineering can become infinitely more efficient. Your arguments about global warming don’t merit debate- you blindly and emotionally push the barrow of unexpert agenda-monkeys for no rational reason, whereas global warming understanding is an established, unemotional science that is constantly being refined and reassessed by thousands of true experts -but what you should realise is that economically speaking, our reliance on oil is potentially horrendously destructive anyway. Its not going to run out for a long while, as market forces will constantly provide for new (but more complex and more energy-intensive) sources, but the ability to use petroleum for things such as fertiliser, a phenomenon which massively expands the worlds ability to feed itself.
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Ahuahu,
“it is pretty rich to call peak oil tosh”
If you actually read what I said, I said ” lot of tosh talked about peak oil”, I didn’t say that peak oil itself is tosh. And yes I admit to knowing very little about the petroleum processes you mention, then again neither do the vast majority of the people who make comments on peak oil and other petroleum matters, so I guess that means all those comments are invalid too.
And even with all your fancy words, I still don’t understand how use of oil is regarded as being “unsustainable” whilst the use of other finite earth resources is not. Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us with your understanding of what “sustainable” actually means to you?
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WorldChanging.Com covers the issue of Peak Guano:
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I didn’t say “the use of other finite earth resources is not” unsustainable, I just said it was a different, pehaps less serious type of unsustainable. Part of this is due to the obbvious reasons: the fact we can recyle these metals – though not always, part of the fact is that new technologies are being developed using carbon- and that carbon-composites etc or new plastics which can be substituted for these materials (of course, ironically, plastics are going to become more expensive as the price of oil increases) are increasingly better. Ultimately, we will run into similar situations, but the economic force with which they hit will be different. I don’t really think much human activity can be truly sustainable by definition. I suppose I am pretty skeptical about much human activity, but oil reliance is probably the one thats going to hit hardest first: not because its going to stop flowing, but because its going to escalate in price even more unpredicatably than anything we have ever seen in the commodity markets
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The day the sun expands to gobble the earth, there will still be oil in the ground.
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Ahuahu,
Well at least we agree on one thing then, that we don’t think much human activity can be truly sustainable by definition. It’s just a matter of degree.
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at least there are other sources of energy. metals are not on the whole replaceable. maybe palladium for platinum & vv but they’re both going to run out, so whatever
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matter of degree celcius of course!
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& some people say global warming is no problem!
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GW Denier, somehow I get the impression you fell asleep before you finished reading the USGS geotechnical investigation of the Bakken field. 99% of the Bakken field oil is 2 miles down under oil shales. Just about the worst place it could be. It makes seismic mapping a very fuzzy affair so it’s back to wildcat well drilling, just doing it sideways instead straight down. At $6mil a pop. Even marathon considers committing more than 8 rigs to the Bakken field to be extravagant. The rush is more of an amble really.
In fact the USA has twice the oil reserves that Saudi Arabia has even without including the Bakke field. Unfortunately all those reserves are bituminous oil deposits. That’d be like drilling for chilled treacle.
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It looks like DBuckley has solved the conundrum of how to get the USAs bituminous oil out of the ground. Wait for the day the sun expands to gobble the earth, that’ll melt the stuff. Bit of a long time to wait though.
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