I’ve been spending too much time in long discussions about other people’s blogs.
Besides, I’m getting tired of the same old subject matter.
So you won’t see my name popping up much in commentaries on physics arcana, and I am not about to go round and round on discussions of global warming.
Instead, I want to introduce a topic to which the blogosphere has not been paying sufficient attention. Peak Oil has been sneaking up on us, and it interconnects with many other topics, such as energy policy, global warming, and international affairs.
The link above leads to an old (2005) but not outdated review of two books on the topic. I am hoping that this and future posts will bring knowledgeable people with varying perspectives to contribute to an intelligent discussion.
To get things rolling, here are the opening paragraphs of that review:
After a summer of rising gasoline prices, two books that appeared in 2004 are worthy of renewed attention, especially when one of them, The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New Future by energy and economics writer Paul Roberts, has come out in paperback with a new afterword.
In the other, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, Caltech Distinguished Service Professor David Goodstein provides a more scientific view but reaches the same urgent conclusion: The Age of Oil is coming to an end, and the future is precarious. Demand for oil will soon exceed the production capacity of even the largest suppliers. The world’s economy is heading for a painful transition.
I’m sure there are readers out there with more knowledge than I have on the topic. I invite them to respond here or to start their own blogs to keep this on the radar screen.
Oil is just recent in Human History. We had wondurful civilazations with out a drop of oil. It will be great when oil vanishes, and countries who just sit idle, will have to work.
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production enters terminal decline. The concept is based on the observed production rates of individual oil wells, and the combined production rate of a field of related oil wells. The aggregate production rate from an oil field over time appears to grow exponentially until the rate peaks and then declines, sometimes rapidly, until the field is depleted. It is important to note that peak oil is not about running out of oil, but the peaking and subsequent decline of the production rate of oil.
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there’s actually a LOT more to this story… jump over to http://www.stuffididlastnight.com
cheers!
Since this posting continues to get attention in the blogosphere, I want to call attention to my latest blog note on OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) as an alternative to OPEC.
Fred Bortz — Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)