The End of the World.. as we know it

Well.. 2012 as most know it. December 21. Buricsh seems to have handle as to why. After reading his interviews the date kind of concerns me too as for my kid.

Dallas

Even if solar cells were 90% eff. the area needed to charge batteries in an electric car would be way too bulky given a small battery, the battery will still need to be huge and weigh alot more then gas would.

Ultra capacitors are the way to go, but only when they get beter energy/lb densities then lead acid batteries. Alot of batteries don't store all the energy you put in them.

Originally posted by cybertroy
Vehicles are made to fail and continue a profit stream.

This is a high dollar car starting to fail after 10 years, a Cadillac folks!

I got lucky. Back in '95 I got a used Mazda truck (1987 model). I've been driving it ever since. It's still going after all these years. I've driven that truck from Charleston, SC to Tucson, AZ up to Seattle and back across to the Carolinas. Take care of a vehicle like that and it'll run forever.

Whenever I talk about selling it and getting a sports car people always say, "Don't sell it!" So many people have said that that I probly will just buy a new car and keep it. Its great to haul stuff and work out of, too. Can't do stuff like that with a rice burner.

As for American cars.. I truly hate to say this, but cars made in the USA can't compete with their Japanese and European counterparts. The only American made car I've ever owned was a '65 Chevelle back in high school. Of course, that car rocked. Other than that, I wouldn't waste my money.

The thing that sucks now is a handful of years ago I could fill the truck's tank on ten bucks; now it costs $20 and up with these rising fuel costs.

Originally posted by shadow_games
www.rollingstone.com...

Thanks for the link shadow. Rolling Stone always has great political articles.

I somehow missed that one.

shadow_games, that was an excellent article. I've written on this very thing myself. It gets into the myriad difficulties of the days ahead(like food shortages & displacement) that concern me the most. Everyone should read this article - we have got to prepare ourselves NOW for what is most certainly about to befall our nation!

Originally posted by picklejuice
there are no backups, solar panels only have a 20% efficiency rate, and transporting electricity is less efficiënt in heat, as for hydrogen technology, to make enough cells, we would need ALL the platinum in the world, and that's not counting the fact that the cells will break down eventually, biodiesel needs too much space, TD is like eating your own feces, you might not be hungry anymore, but you didn't gain much energy (sorry for that disgusting anology), hemp, wind, none of it is practically feasible, or if it is, the EPR isn't big enough.

Really? I work for an Auto Manufacturer R&D proving ground(cannot go into details, sorry). I can only tell you that there are many advances in alternate fuel technology, you would be amazed, trust me, there will be no need for gasoline within the next few years to come.

Originally posted by Kamikazi
Really? I work for an Auto Manufacturer R&D proving ground(cannot go into details, sorry). I can only tell you that there are many advances in alternate fuel technology, you would be amazed, trust me, there will be no need for gasoline within the next few years to come.

Can you tell us what country the manufacturer is from?

Zip

Click on my profile!

[edit on 19-5-2005 by Kamikazi]

Originally posted by EastCoastKid
I got lucky. Back in '95 I got a used Mazda truck (1987 model). I've been driving it ever since. It's still going after all these years. I've driven that truck from Charleston, SC to Tucson, AZ up to Seattle and back across to the Carolinas. Take care of a vehicle like that and it'll run forever.

That brings back memories. I blew up a mazda in nebraska one year. Me and a buddy were pissed driving down the road at night (heading to vegas) and BAM! sparks flew everywhere. We pulled over and passed out. In the morning I got under there and checked and there was a fist size hole in the block. We had thrown a rod. I said screw it and started the thing. It actual ran smoother than before! The only problem was we were smoking so bad you couldn't see nothing behind us. I drove that bastard 40 miles to a small town! Pulled in to some place that looked exactly like "back to the future" and thats where we decided to live for awhile.

Originally posted by vincere7
That brings back memories. I blew up a mazda in nebraska one year. Me and a buddy were pissed driving down the road at night (heading to vegas) and BAM! sparks flew everywhere. We pulled over and passed out. In the morning I got under there and checked and there was a fist size hole in the block. We had thrown a rod. I said screw it and started the thing. It actual ran smoother than before! The only problem was we were smoking so bad you couldn't see nothing behind us. I drove that bastard 40 miles to a small town! Pulled in to some place that looked exactly like "back to the future" and thats where we decided to live for awhile.

Man, does that bring back some memories - for me, too. When I was driving out to Phoenix, AZ, back in '93 from South Carolina, I was driving my Nissan Sentra (packed to the gills). I had driven that "utility vehicle" through the Army, hell and halfa Georgia. But it was still kickin'. We were somewhere in Mississippi heading down a backroad late one night and all of a sudden my muffler went crazy. Balls of molten metal started flying out bouncing down the road behind us. (God help anyone walkin behind us!!) As the sun came up the next morning, I was dying of a stomach ache. We got a hotel room, I passed out for a day and we got the car fixed.

As if that weren't enuff, by the time we got to the first sign for Tucumcari, New Mexico my car flat died on the interstate. Lost the transmission. It almost came to a stop as we were cresting the hill. I literally got out and pushed the damn car and we somehow coasted down the first exit and to a gas station. It was surreal. Dead car at sunset in a town straight outta Twin Peaks. We called a towtruck and you wouldn't believe it. A PINK lowboy drove up to haul my car to a shop owned by a crazy redneck woman. Her whole fleet of trucks were pink.

They had to keep the car for too long, so we had to hop a greyhound bus to Flagstaff, where my buddy met us. I wound up having to go back to Tucumcari to get my car. I blew over a thousand bucks on that trip in all. That was my start-up cash. Life. Whatcha gonna do? I actually drove that car back to South Carolina and until about '95. Great car. Not a hot car. But a mucho dependable one. I got my pick-up when the car finally died for good.

that's not in the "funny" sense, but in the "crazy" sense.

For instance:

Half the homes in America are heated with gas. To further complicate matters, gas isn't easy to import. Here in North America, it is distributed through a vast pipeline network. Gas imported from overseas would have to be compressed at minus-260 degrees Fahrenheit in pressurized tanker ships and unloaded (re-gasified) at special terminals, of which few exist in America. Moreover, the first attempts to site new terminals have met furious opposition because they are such ripe targets for terrorism.

That's nothing that $4.00 a gallon gasoline won't cure. LNG will have to be a major import. This won't be so bad or difficult. It's now a proven technology and is expanding rapidly. Japan, which unlike the USA/Canada/Mexico, has no natural hydrocarbon resources, already imports lots of LNG. The terminals will be built offshore, and the LNG ships will not come closer than a few kilometers of land. There will be regasification facilities offshore and the gas comes in on a pipeline, exactly like normal gas pipelines in the industrial world.


Coal is far less versatile than oil and gas, extant in less abundant supplies than many people assume and fraught with huge ecological drawbacks -- as a contributor to greenhouse "global warming" gases and many health and toxicity issues ranging from widespread mercury poisoning to acid rain.

yeah, but that's not stopping people now, so why will it stop people in the future?

You can make synthetic oil from coal, but the only time this was tried on a large scale was by the Nazis under wartime conditions, using impressive amounts of slave labor.

The comparison to Nazi slave labor is ridiculous. Chemical engineering does not take large amounts of slave labor---it's not like building the pyramids! The Nazis used slaves because they could and because they were evil bastards.

Consider also other facts: liquid hydrocarbons have a certain ratio of carbons to hydrogen. Natural gas (mostly CH4) has too many hydrogens. Coal (plain C) doesn't have enough.

With sufficient motivation (price of oil high) it's pretty clear that chemistry can be developed
to combine the two.

It's true that once Peak Coal and Peak Gas have hit, then we'll be in for a real world of hurt. That's about 30-50 years away.


Food production is going to be an enormous problem in the Long Emergency. As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale.


It will be more difficult but not an "enormous" problem. Sure, price of chemical fertilizer and pesticides will increase with the oil price, but how much? What fraction of the price of fertilizer is really tied directly to oil? I'd guess no more than 20%, and probably less. That's a whole lot less than the 60% of retail gasoline in the USA.

OK, people will grow food closer to where they live. OK. Right now we can get fruits and meats from Chile and New Zealand in average supermarkets! Even with a significantly higher price of oil I think we can get food from Nebraska to Illinois OK. We waste huge amounts of food making vast soybean farms for who knows what and corn to stick our coca cola. Things get tougher, we can drink water and eat normal food. (We should do it anyway for health!)

Remember that people HAVE to eat, and therefore food production is the one thing that you
can count on will somehow adapt, one way or another---in the absence of major political interference or violence.

The idea that somehow there will be a huge increase in agricultural labor is also somewhat silly. If food gets more difficult there will be even more pressure to increase efficiency.
Huge gangs of people who have to be fed are not more cost effective even if it takes more expensive fuel to run the tractors.


Regarding suburbia. We could nearly halve fuel consumption per commuter if we really needed to, and we could do it nearly instantly if there were will to do so. Consider cars like in Europe (existing technology) and those radical devices known as "motorcycles" and "scooters". Many healthy people could commute by scooter at 80-100 mpg, and scooters have hardly been made for significant fuel efficiency (as if there were a need). Smog release of modern motorcycles and scooters are much better than before.

Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable.

Like food, pharmaceuticals will certainly be available. The cost of oil in the price of pharmaceuticals is negligible. The costs for pharmaceuticals are regulatory, in the required testing and documentation for government approval, large scale clinical trials paying doctors who make $300k a year.

For many chemical processes there are "GTL" ---gas to liquids---synthesizing many hydrocarbon products from natural gas which is still more available than oil. Since less of the price of the product is oil dependent, they can stand the increased price of GTL based feedstocks even better. GTL is like the basic inputs for mobil-1 synthetic oil. There are advantages that they are very "clean" and precise molecularly over crude-based inputs.

New York and Chicago face extraordinary difficulties, being oversupplied with gigantic buildings out of scale with the reality of declining energy supplies.

Holy diversionary red herring, Batman! Buildings aren't the problem! We can pipe in plenty of energy using this technology known as "wires".

If we build nukes like we should, we aren't going to be facing Peak Electricity!!

No Peak Electricity means that industrial civilization is NOT going to collapse.

Transportation in some forms will become significantly more expensive.


I predict that Sunbelt states like Arizona and Nevada will become significantly depopulated, since the region will be short of water as well as gasoline and natural gas.


water is a separate issue. Phoenix can do without golf courses.
Natural gas will fix itself with LNG terminals.


Imagine Phoenix without cheap air conditioning.


PEAK OIL IS NOT PEAK ENERGY

When's the last time you filled up your air conditioner at Shell?

Imagine Phoenix with the Palo Verde nuclear plants.

If alternatives are continued to be suppressed then we could end up with an Amish type of civilization. Amish type lifestyle is not a bad way, it's natural, less poluting, and has that cozy kind of feel.

I'm spoiled on machines though. I could care less about an overly loud sports car, or loud truck though. So an electric vehicle would be just fine. But I do like a kickin' stereo, so I will put my decibles there instead of in the engine. For the loud engine folks, you can just put playing cards in the wheel spokes.

In all honesty, oil might not be so bad if we weren't chopping down the rainforests at the same time. Trees can take care of pollution. But mankind just does some stupidly irresponsible things. People do things like chop down the big shade tree and put a lawn ornament on top of the stump. The way we pollute earth and destroy it, it's like taking a dump in a swimming pool and continuing to swim in it.

If we used our resources responsibly, recycled everything, composted all the organic material, and didn't overpopulate the planet then I think we have a lot better chances of surviving here.

Troy

Originally posted by mbkennel
That's nothing that $4.00 a gallon gasoline won't cure.

There are many people who cannot afford to spend that kind of money on gas for their vehicles. This economy is killing the little guys. (And I know you folks in Europe are probly laughing at us b/c you pay even more than that. All my life, we spoiled folks in the USA have enjoyed low, low fuel prices. When incomes aren't keeping up with soaring costs, it can be very difficult to adjust.)

ON COAL USE:

yeah, but that's not stopping people now, so why will it stop people in the future?

In the future, at and after peak oil, the environment will be damned. The powers that be won't even give that a second thought. Basic survival will trump all.

FOOD: A BIG PROBLEM?

It will be more difficult but not an "enormous" problem.

You might wanna take a closer look at this problem. It's much bigger a problem than we can even imagine. We have the government and the corporations to thank for that. It's past time for communities to start planning for local food production now. There isn't any time to waste.

Remember that people HAVE to eat

Just because people have to eat doesn't mean they'll be able to. Go to any war-torn country or area that's been hit by a natural disaster. Ask those people if they eat because they have to. Many will tell you they just go hungry. Those who do have food often get looted if folks find out and its unprotected. That's the law of the jungle.

water is a separate issue. Phoenix can do without golf courses.

Have you ever lived in Phoenix? I have. And I would never want to be stuck in that suffocating hell hole of a valley if something catastrophic happened. The only good thing about it is you can live outside and not freeze to death. That is, if you have a solid source of water.

A friend and co-worker of mine sent me this link. Check it out.

www.kunstler.com...

Here's another great read from Kunstler. It's a speech he gave in Hudson, NY. It was on the website my friend linked me to.

Remarks in Hudson, NY
January 8, 2005
James Howard Kunstler

My last three books were concerned with the physical arrangement of life in our nation, in particular suburban sprawl, the most destructive development pattern the world has ever seen, and perhaps the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.
The world - and of course the US - now faces an epochal predicament: the global oil production peak and the arc of depletion that follows. We are unprepared for this crisis of industrial civilization. We are sleepwalking into the future.

The global peak oil production event will change everything about how we live. It will challenge all of our assumptions. It will compel us to do things differently - whether we like it or not.
www.kunstler.com...