Among all of my blogs, the one I posted to Cliffhanger on 2006 July 26, entitled "The Five Biggest Problems in the World Today" has received more comments than any other blog I have made. Apparently people are interested in world problems, and I think it is good, because that means that there is some hope for the world after all. The problems I listed were:
1. Peak Oil
2. Global Warming
3. Retirement of Baby Boomers
4. Prevalence of Mainline Religions
5. Discrimination
The most recent call, from AndimsoNice, accused me of watching too much CNN. I certainly did not get Peak Oil from CNN. You still get little about this major problem in the news media, even though oil prices are $4 a gallon, the airlines are having major problems, and there are food and fuel shortages throughout the globe. However, the three problems AndimsoNice mentioned are indeed serious ones, so let's consider them. Here they are:
1. Clean drinking water
2. Genocide
3. Food shortages (not foot shortages!)
1. Clean drinking water. Indeed many places in the world are experiencing fresh water shortages. Georgia, a state in the US, is one of these. Some of the lakes have almost gone dry recently from the shortage of water there. Water is a renewable resource, but only so far. After the population grows above a certain point, it consumes more water than can be made available by Nature, so then it becomes non-renewable. Also, water is non-renewable in places where it is scarce; in other words, the deserts. Cities such as Almaty, Phoenix, Timbuktu, and Urumqi are going to have serious problems in the future because hardly any water falls from the sky at these places. They have to rely on rivers or aquifers, which will dry up if population grows rapidly, as it is doing in Phoenix, and perhaps in Urumqi. Global warming caused by fossil fuel consumption is creating more desert and exacerbating the problem. I call this problem the Water Limit, rather than Peak Water, because we don't produce water; there can be no peak production. Another problem lies behind both Peak Oil and the Water Limit, and that is population growth. Ultimately, the human population will have to stop growing.
This problem is a serious one, and I really did not list it, but it does relate to Peak Oil and Global Warming.
2. Genocide. Why do certain people or tyrannical rulers want to kill entire populations or ethnic groups? I think it is because of this "we vs they" mentality. If people are dissatisfied with life, a tyrant can seize on this dissatisfaction and whip up hatred against another people, as Tutsis against Hutus or Germans against Jews. Religion makes the problem worse, as if people were houses, God would be an unoccupied property, and sooner or later, this tyrant will occupy that house and become God. Belief in one self and in those around you may be the best way to help combat genocide. Certainly if genocide exists, it needs to be wiped out, either by the victimized people or by others; for example, our troops should not be in Iraq and Afghanistan but in Myanmar and Sudan.
In any case, Peak Oil will make this problem worse, as people will say that we are running out of oil, so make sure we get it and not those barbarians over there. This problem is related to both Peak Oil and Discrimination, since committing genocide against a people is an extreme case of discriminating against them.
3. Food shortages. Population growth is strongly behind this one. If there are more mouths to feed, more land is needed to grow the food for them. Peak Oil is also strongly related to this problem. In fact, this may be one of the worst effects of Peak Oil. Food is grown for the world today in such bountiful places as Iowa and Brazil, but to grow this food requires oil to transport the food to where it is needed, to operate the farm machinery to grow the food, to make the fertilizer for the crop and so forth. About 90% of the cost of food nowadays is oil. And so food shortages will appear and get worse as oil production declines.
This problem is so related to Peak Oil that I include it as part of this problem.
So now I rank the problems of the world as follows:
1. Peak oil and Food Limits.
2. Global Climate Change and Water Problems
3. Retirement of Baby Boomers
4. Prevalence of mainline religions
5. Discrimination and genocide
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Sunday, July 06, 2008
She's Real Fine, My $4.09
It's been a while since I blogged here, so I will do it now. What I see right now is a price of crude oil that keeps going up and up with seemingly no stop. The last time I saw it, on the Fourth of July, 2008, it was $145/barrel, or $3.45 a gallon. That is about the price of wholesale gasoline, and retail gasoline just recently hit $4.00 a gallon here in Virginia. That's right, $4 a gallon is here.
The national average is $4.09 a gallon. She's real fine, my $4.09, my $4.09. No, that wasn't what the Beach Boys meant when they sang their song about a hot rod car called a 409. That was back in the 1960s, when oil was plentiful, summers were endless, and were spent surfing at the beach and chasing all the girls, especially California girls. I looked up in Wikipedia to see just what a 409 was. I was not interested in beach music back in the early 1960s, and I could have cared less, and only know of the song because my brother played it all the time. I couldn't imagine it was a horse, despite the lyrics ("Giddy-ap, Giddy-ap, 409"). There was a brand of Chevrolet back then (i.e, not a hot rod but a schlock rod, like Mickey Mouse - that came from another song during those days) with a 409-cubic inch engine. That's 6.7 liters! Wow! My gas-guzzler Plymouth Voyager has at most a 3.0-liter. There was a Beach Boy mentality back then that said this would go forever.
We now know differently. There is only a finite amount of oil on this planet. Apparently there were 2 trillion barrels of oil in this planet, and 1 trillion has been pumped out. So therefore, a peak in production can be expected, and many analysts think it was somewhere between 2005-2008. The high price of oil and gasoline is causing Americans to cut back, but Indians and Chinese are still continuing to increase their use of oil. Now people are wondering when shortages will occur. I think they will not occur for some time. The shortages of the 1970s were caused by regulations on gasoline prices. There are none now, so instead prices will skyrocket. Those who have the last buck, instead of the last place in the gasoline line, will do without.
So what do we do? A mixture of developing new sources of energy, such as solar, wind, and batteries for cars, as well as conservation, is what will work in the long run. It is pointless to dig the ANWR, drill off-shore, or tear up Montana and Wyoming in search of oil for shale, since these are still non-renewable resources. We are already doing that. If it doesn't work we need to do something else.
And something else we need to do. I fear for what will happen if shortages develop and people have to do without. The Beach Boys sang about the 409; they have another song about a Thunderbird, which symbolizes our oil culture: "And with the radio blasting
Goes cruising just as fast as she can now, And she'll have fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the t-bird away" When will Big Daddy Peak Oil take our fun away?
The national average is $4.09 a gallon. She's real fine, my $4.09, my $4.09. No, that wasn't what the Beach Boys meant when they sang their song about a hot rod car called a 409. That was back in the 1960s, when oil was plentiful, summers were endless, and were spent surfing at the beach and chasing all the girls, especially California girls. I looked up in Wikipedia to see just what a 409 was. I was not interested in beach music back in the early 1960s, and I could have cared less, and only know of the song because my brother played it all the time. I couldn't imagine it was a horse, despite the lyrics ("Giddy-ap, Giddy-ap, 409"). There was a brand of Chevrolet back then (i.e, not a hot rod but a schlock rod, like Mickey Mouse - that came from another song during those days) with a 409-cubic inch engine. That's 6.7 liters! Wow! My gas-guzzler Plymouth Voyager has at most a 3.0-liter. There was a Beach Boy mentality back then that said this would go forever.
We now know differently. There is only a finite amount of oil on this planet. Apparently there were 2 trillion barrels of oil in this planet, and 1 trillion has been pumped out. So therefore, a peak in production can be expected, and many analysts think it was somewhere between 2005-2008. The high price of oil and gasoline is causing Americans to cut back, but Indians and Chinese are still continuing to increase their use of oil. Now people are wondering when shortages will occur. I think they will not occur for some time. The shortages of the 1970s were caused by regulations on gasoline prices. There are none now, so instead prices will skyrocket. Those who have the last buck, instead of the last place in the gasoline line, will do without.
So what do we do? A mixture of developing new sources of energy, such as solar, wind, and batteries for cars, as well as conservation, is what will work in the long run. It is pointless to dig the ANWR, drill off-shore, or tear up Montana and Wyoming in search of oil for shale, since these are still non-renewable resources. We are already doing that. If it doesn't work we need to do something else.
And something else we need to do. I fear for what will happen if shortages develop and people have to do without. The Beach Boys sang about the 409; they have another song about a Thunderbird, which symbolizes our oil culture: "And with the radio blasting
Goes cruising just as fast as she can now, And she'll have fun fun fun 'til her daddy takes the t-bird away" When will Big Daddy Peak Oil take our fun away?
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