Isn't Randi making this no more oil sound a bit too simple ?

[blues90]

I like Randi but she does seem to make it sound as if we can drop out of oil use overnight . I wish we could but this takes time , alot of time . We all know about alternate fuels and hemp .

Maybe she has the time and money to ride this out and see the benefit but many people are not in the position to do the same .

I believe fully in global warming but not in mankinds ability to change this for many years . I also don't share Randis faith in the politicians turning this around , meaning the war .

[Botany]

1. yes she is

problem with a lot of bio fuels is that if they come from
farm raised grain crops you put a lot of energy into the system
vs the energy value coming out. i.e. fertilizers and chemicals
(oil based), along with fuels to run the tractors and stuff.

[tsuki]

2. We can do anything. In 1942, we went to war with our fleet destroyed.

We built the pentagon and occupied it in nine months. We built one of the major engineering feats in the world, Hoover Dam with what would be considered primitive machinery now. We blasted through mountains to build superhighways. We put our mind and national will to it, we can do it.

[terip64]

3. I absolutely agree. This country is capable of great things. n/t

[tridim]

6. We are capable of great things IF..

and only if our leaders aren't actively fighting against it like they are now. Fortunately that power is on it's way out. The Apollo program would never have happened had JFK not taken the lead and rallied our collective will.

[terip64]

11. My fifteen year old son brought that up at supper the other day. There is hope. n/t

[daveskilt]

12. good point - what would $300billion buy if not burned in iraq?

[Frank Cannon]

13. You could buy FIVE Apollo projects (2004 dollars)...

for the money that we're spending on Iraq. It boggles my mind to think of the miracles we could be achieving.

[Kagemusha]

5. Er, the fleet wasn't quite that destroyed

as bad as it was, it could've been much worse, much sooner, in that instance...

National will's a wonderful thing, but it benefits from circumstance and it's not quite that universal. It's not nothing, though, granted.

[blues90]

10. different world now

You don;t have the same sort of blue collar workforce out there now to desire to do this . We have to depend on asia and other countries to build anything now even bombs and just about anything else .

So now that we have become a high tech / service job country who will do these jobs . I guess it would now be ok if you promote slave labor at min wage and a 80 hour work week .

Randi ignores the mechanics of this adventure . Where will the money come from ? Who will shunt the oil corps , they do own all the filling stations we have now so they would have to agree or we need new stations .

It is not just a simple thing . Not anymore , history is great but things have changed .

It all is a great idea but it sounds beeter in talk than it looks on paper .

I am not agaist ridding oil , not at all , but I am realistic .

[daveskilt]

4. yep - its not about the fuels or the technology its about infrastructure

How do you make the existing technology work with a new one? Just like CD's were around for a long time before they became standard - no one wants to buy a new player or find a new player for their car until the cost is low enough.

Now with oil - no one wants to get a new vehicle that runs on donuts or whatever until it makes financial sense to do so. With oil the picture is more complicated as no one wants to buy a donut powered car until their are as many krispy kremes as gas stations.

The switch to unleaded fuels took years and that was working with the same vehicle and same fuel and same stations. To switch to an alternate fuel will be a huge task unless it is something liquid, safely storable in underground tanks, easily transported to every gas station in america, and can be used in existing cars.

[rodeodance]

7. i think over time---technology efficiency will help----but we have to have

a large scale political will to do it!!

[Strelnikov_]

8. Yes, She Is. Twenty Years Minimum Is Required To Adequately Mitigate

our petroleum use, through a crash program.

And this is just to reduce, not eliminate, our petroleum use. And the time frame is probably overly optimistic.

This is assuming a path that only results in a long recession, of course. We can do it in much less time if we are willing to accept societal collapse and die-off.

Meanwhile, we currently import 13 M bbl of our 21 M bbl/dy fix (~60%), from an increasingly unstable world.

So, where do we cut in an emergency?

The 42% used for personal transportation. How do people get to work?

The 25% used for surface transportation. How do we keep people fed, commerce going?

The 11% used for farming (energy). How do we keep people fed?


That is why we need emergency measures, today.

No more direction by 'the market'.

[endarkenment]

9. 300-600B or R&D sure would help.

Which is about what we have spent so far on the oil war over in iraq.

[DeSwiss]

14. I don't think so...

When OPEC imposed its 2nd set of price hikes in 1976 I had a freshly minted college diploma in my pocket and a car that got around 10 miles to the gallon. Gas prices wnet from a 100% increase to a 200% increase in a matter of weeks. The minimum wage then was $1.35 per hour. I concluded right then and there that as a country, we ought not allow ourselves to be put into a situation where others controlled our sources of energy -- and our future. Yet only weak-as-tea efforts were made since that time and little has been done toward gaining back that control. The result is our foreign policy is held hostage and we have propped up dictators -- one against the other -- in order to continue the flow of oil. Our lifeblood.

While there may be all kinds of difficulties and explanations for the reasons why we can't move to alternative energy sources, and about how hard it'll be, as long as these are the only dynamics of discourse on the issue, we'll never do a damned thing. Most of the major changes we've seen in our lives have come about not because everyone was in agreement about how to go about it, but because someone said, "I'm not waiting for a consensus, something needs to change now!"

So the first step is to DO something. Changing tax laws to heavily favor the development and use alternative fuels is one of those things. Heavily investing our tax dollars in new technologies and energy sources is another. Reducing lost energy through conservation and improvements in insulation, fuel economy, etc, is another thing. The government imposition upon vehicle fuel providers like Exxon, et al. of a requirement to begin modifying and providing facilities for the use of alternative fuels, solves the problem of distribution. If not, then government low-interest loans for new businesses that will. If such businesses need to be subsidized initially, fine. Its not going to happen for free and it won't be cheap. The one thing we CAN be assured of, is that the cost of foreign oil is going to increase. And in that cost we must factor the amount of our resources that go toward protecting those sources. Like the war in Iraq, for example.

The alternative is to wait and argue what is the best way and the best plan and nothing happens. That's what we seem to be best at as a country these days. There won't be a "single magic bullet solution," for this. Life is messy and so is the solution to this problem. It seems as if everyone is looking for a liquid replacement fuel to take the place of gasoline when there isn't one. At least not one that doesn't require more energy to produce than it provides. So it will take a number of different alternatives. And when there is money to be made, you can bet the market will finds a way to do it simpler.

So for anyone who supports waiting until we get it just right, all I can say is that this is a recipe for disaster. We waited for the government to impose controls on the stock market and throughout the late 1800s crashes were devastating and frequent. Until the big one came in 1929 and brought the country to its knees. We waited to find fuel-efficient cars until the Japanese and Europeans took our lunch in the 70s by building VWs and Toyotas, resulting in the permanent layoff of American auto workers. An industry we once dominated and now hold maybe 40%. And when the Soviet Union had satellites beeping over American soil in the late 1950s, we finally elected a president that wouldn't wait:

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. And therefore I believe that before this decade is out, we will have landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to earth." ~ John F. Kennedy May 23, 1961

This is the leadership we need. Not consensus building on how we should begin, but someone with a vision and the fortitude to help us move forward. And then DO something.

IMHO

~DeSwiss

[blues90]

15. I agree with you

I just feel Randi makes it sound like this can happen next week . Certainly all efforts need to be made and one is you have to convince the public it is in their best interest . This seems to be one of the long term factors that holds this back .

[DeSwiss]

16. And blues90, I agree with you that the issue isn't simple...

....but for most of America that's the way it seems we prefer for our problems to be cast -- in the simplest of terms. If we bog the issue down in the minutae of all the details everyone will simply turn it off mentally.

Repukes are always appealing to people's emotions on issues like the so-called sanctity of marriage and patriotic themes of nationalism -- as well as the use of "the poor little children" ploy, that seems to portray the idea that the government can raise and protect kids better than parents. Mainly by controlling what we can read, see, hear and by monitoring everyone or if all else fails, putting us in jail.

And yet our policies and actions do more to jeopardize their future than anything else. We are leaving them a legacy of a polluted earth that will be they're responsibility to clean up. And we're also leaving them tons of spent nuclear waste that they'll have to find a place for. So maybe this is the political approach that should be used: "If we don't change this now, we're killing our kids."

As for the leadership question, the problem there is that the very interests who finance elections, are the same ones whose only interest is in maintaining the status quo. So obviously appealing to people in the strongest terms emotionally is the only way to convince them to ignore the pat answers, the nervous nellies and the doomsayers and their moaning and complaints about "why we can't," and start listening to politicians whose message is about "how we can."

IMHO

~DeSwiss