Well, not all of them, anyway

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You’re saying we shouldn’t be exporting our 9 and a half barrels a day of oil?

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From the Telegraph:

A new report by UBS says the scramble for scarce raw materials is turning ever more political, with ominous implications for ill-endowed societies that rely on imports.

Nationalist policies are making the crisis worse. Governments are blocking foreign investments in sensitive sectors, imposing arbitary taxes, or meddling in details.

So we have some limited oil resources, and what are we doing? Continuing to export all we can.

Perhaps we should be thinking the unthinkable, and look a bit further than the next election…

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Kelpie I wouldn’t be suprised if Antartica does end up getting drilled for oil in the near future.

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Has anyone taken into consideration that the Oil cartels may be getting the world into a softened up state where they will be ready to let them get into the oil in Antartica?

The world’s money keeps being sucked in by fewer & fewer big companies.

Stopping userous profits might be more to the point but don’t ask me how.

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Economists Rethink Free Trade
It’s no wholesale repudiation, to be sure, but something momentous is happening as doubts begin to creep in

by Jane Sasseen

But something momentous is happening inside the church of free trade: Doubts are creeping in. We’re not talking wholesale, dramatic repudiation of the theory. Economists are, however, noting that their ideas can’t explain the disturbing stagnation in income that much of the middle class is experiencing.
/ /
Yet concern is rising that the gains from free trade may increasingly be going to a small group at the top. For the vast majority of Americans, Dartmouth’s Slaughter points out, income growth has all but disappeared in recent years. And it’s not just the low-skilled who are getting slammed. Inflation-adjusted earnings have fallen in every educational category other than the 4% who hold doctorates or professional degrees. Such numbers, Slaughter argues, suggest the share of Americans who aren’t included in the gains from trade may be very big. “[That's] a very important change from earlier generations, and it should give pause to people who say they know what’s going on,” he says.
/ /
In an interview with the Financial Times late last year, Hillary Clinton agreed with economist Paul A. Samuelson’s argument that traditional notions of comparative advantage may no longer apply.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_06/b4070032762393.htm?campaign_id=rss_null
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and when we have a trade deficit or the housing market slumps we encourage immigration from anywhere and everywhere: property developers make the money; we pay for light rail etc,etc.

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“New Zealanders should export food that it can grow, transport, process, and distribute more efficiently overall than our export markets can- before taking subsidies into account on either end, and counting externalities like pollution, ecosystem disruption, soil degradation, and public health consequences. Food miles are part of the equation of food’s overall carbon footprint.”

AND how the hell are the average exporters meant to know anything about this once it is outside their control? Ah I bet it is governments, and there is no incentive at all for a protectionist US or EU administration to use this as a ruse to shut us out – no never.

Food miles is a ruse for protectionism, it is spreading like wildfire through environmentalists worldwide, and you’re just promoting it more here. As with a lot of the armageddon laden environmental movement, all that matters to most is people understand a message – the message is anti-trade and I know, as the Green Party wrote to its UK counterpart on this, that the Greens know this is potentially devastating to the NZ economy.

Make no bones about it, if most food consumers in the world adopt this fad the NZ economy will be devastated.

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I meant

…most commonly a certain proportion of income or if price increases begin to exceed rises in incomes, before they change their behaviour…

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As an addendum

Research has found that people are willing to absorb extra costs as long it doesn’t reach a certain threshold, most commonly a certain proportion or if price increases begin to exceed rises in incomes, before they change their failure, so a mere 8 cent tax on petrol will be fail to make any meaningful difference to carbon emissions and will just prove very unpopular with the voting public across the board, because it will just make them poorer for no benefit at all.

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frog,

Oil consumption will HAVE to fall if prices continues to rise and it WILL if the global credit cruch continues and consumers are not able to afford their current energy consumption.

The only way it will continue to rise is if Western governments subsidise energy consumption as nations do in the Gulf States, Asia, and Latin America and if the financial markets can convince U.S. consumers to go back into debt to utilise the recycled money from the Gulf States and China thats flowing through the world’s financial system.

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Yah….

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kahikatea,

What BluePeter is saying is that you don’t need to completely replace oil usage in order for the price to fall, but merely to supplement it. If demand falls as energy use diversifies, with current production levels then the price per barrel will drop.

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The price of the alternative appears to be lower now? For example, teslamotors.com uses 2 cents per mile, running on electricity.

I guess we’d need to compare total cost of electricity infrastructure and delivery mechanisms vs fuel, but if it does hold true that electricity is a as cheap or cheaper source overall, and if vehicle transport and energy were taken out of the loop, then we may not have an oil scarcity issue, as significant demand would fall away….

This is why I’m asking what percentage of oil stocks do cars and energy use now.

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BluePeter Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 9:17 am

> Because Moores point is that we’ll solve the transport and energy needs with alternatives.

> If that happens, then that reduces demand for oil, driving down the price, and extending the lifetime of the reserves, assuming these reserves are actually limited according to Peak Oil thory.

Only if the price of the alternatives is low enough. It can only drive it down to parity with the price of the alternatives, or to the actual cost of oil extraction, whichever is higher. And bear in mind that the actual cost of extraction is rising all the time, due to the exhausting of the more accessible reserves.

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Frogger,

Peak Oil *is* a theory. However, if you read my argument, I’m assuming Peak Oil to be true.

Would you care to address my actual point? i.e. what percentage of oil is currently consumed by passenger vehicle transport and energy?

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BP – I see that you’re up to the same old red herrings. Peak Oil is not a theory, it is a geological fact. What is theory is when it may happen on a global scale, not if. We will never run out of oil. Ever. It is the energy return on energy invested that is about to peak or may be peaking now, and it is this EROI that will decline until the point is reached that we can’t be bothered trying to pump any more of the stuff. This will still leave significant quantities in the ground. Peak Oil is not the end of oil. It’s the end of cheap oil.

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Fair enough, BB – I have read Dude, Where’s My Country and Stupid White Men and I do accept that MM’s not always accurate – whether he is deliberately inaccurate is a matter of opinion. I don’t know enough to say one way or another.

Unlike one Richard B Cheney, I might add, who there is no doubt deliberately told porkies to Congress to get support for the Iraq war.

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Because Moores point is that we’ll solve the transport and energy needs with alternatives.

If that happens, then that reduces demand for oil, driving down the price, and extending the lifetime of the reserves, assuming these reserves are actually limited according to Peak Oil thory.

So, with transport and energy taken out of the loop, the lifetime of reserves would be significantly extended, ergo we’d still be able to fly planes and make eye glasses?

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This is something of a distraction, but didn’t he write his own rebuttals too? Who cares, all that matters here is whether, as he suggested, the ‘real danger from peak oil is not its impact on energy but its impact on food production.’

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toad

Yep…I really should provide some evidence, have a gander at this then…mind you I imagine it will be written off as the ranting of a “neo con”

http://www.slate.com/id/2102723/#
http://www.mooreexposed.com/
http://www.moorewatch.com/

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