

Why transition away from fossil fuels will take decades—if it happens at all - cwan
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/november-december-magazine/moore2019s-curse-and-the-great-energy-delusion

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Mz
This article seems to overlook the whole Peak Oil issue: That the age of cheap
oil is basically dead and the culture it spawned is in its death-throes.
People will have no choice but to make changes.

I suspect some of those changes will involve simply using less commercial
energy: Living closer to work, shopping closer to home, walking more,
carpooling more, using more public transit, bicycling more. There is also a
lot that can be done for buildings in terms of passive solar design, some of
which can be retrofitted even though passive solar is something which works
best when incorporated into the design of a building from the get go. When
there simply isn't enough money in the household budget for the long commutes
so many Americans make, changes will take place, one way or another. And it
_will_ happen. The only way out of it is to find some new huge oil field. As I
understand it, geologists have ruled that out as a possibility.

You simply can't burn what you don't have. Kicking and screaming or not,
change is on its way.

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hga
Problem is, we just don't know when Peak Oil will hit. It's been predicted for
decades and decades (long before the '70s) ... yeah, someday it'll become
true, but will we perhaps have enough cheap power then to simply make
hydrocarbons out of cheap feedstocks (in the short term, tar sands and oil
shale, then coal, and eventually pull CO2 out of the air?).

Huge new oil fields _are_ being discovered, or did you miss the deep one off
of Brazil? Or how in most countries the government owns mineral rights, so
property owners do everything they can to discourage oil exploration and
extraction? Or the ban on oil extraction off of most of the US coast?

There's also the potential for new extraction methods, look at natural gas in
the contential US in the last few years.

A review of the whole '70s "Limits to Growth" obsession and its total failure
to pan out might be in order.

