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NeedToUseYou -> RE: Is Oil our ultimate undoing ? (7/3/2011 2:40:59 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aneirin
Petroleum, in one form or another, has been used since ancient times, and is now important across society, including in economy, politics and technology. The rise in importance was mostly due to the invention of the internal combustion engine, the rise in commercial aviation and the increasing use of plastic.
Although various forms of internal combustion engines were developed before the 19th century, application was hindered until the commercial drilling and production of petroleum began in the mid-1850s. By the late 19th century, engineering advances led to widespread adoption in a variety of applications.
So what, our dependence on oil has been with us some hundred odd years and many advances have come been derived from those first commercial uses in the western world, but as we all know as oil and it's distillates have become more available, more and more people want the stuff, and in greater and greater quantities to drive what ?
What is our addiction for oil driving, what will be the ultimatum of this addiction, is there an ultimation ?
But aside from the small scale use of naturally occuring surface oil or in the case of the Chinese, the first drilled oil well circa 347 CE, oil in the form of petroleum was a small scale affair, it's use and development attributed to what is now known as the Arabs, the Mongols and the Chinese, life went on, history plodded along, but come the western world in the nineteenth century, this small scale use has exploded into what we have today, and with that, the acceleration of human tool development.
My overiding question is, are we better off now with oil, or as before, without ?
And in addition to that, can we with our memories of oil go back to a simpler existence without petroleum products at our daily beck and call.
We'd be better off without it, but only if we find a replacement for it.
If you stopped using oil right now, you'd have death on the scale you could not even imagine. The farms are dependent upon it, transportation is dependent upon it, cheap consumer goods are dependent upon it. This entire world is dependent upon it.
That's bad, as we are a world at present with essentially a single point of failure, which could result in death tolls in the billions. A large fraction of the world population is already on the brink of starvation, remove the oil, which facilitates industrial farming, and food prices would skyrocket.
Anyway, calls to yesteryear are romantic, but there are over 6 billion of us now. The world has not gotten any bigger since it was a billion people. The only difference is machines, fertilizers, some genetic engineering, pesticides, and transportation enhancements, now looking at that list, it is clear that almost all of this "progress" is derived from oil, or other fossil fuel. And simply switching to 100% natural gas, is no real solution either.
So, you want a better world, not hinged around a single point of failure, or a couple points, you have to, start creating energy in a non-destructive way, and the only method that has any prayer,IMO, in the next 20 years, is advances in solar, greater utilization of wind, and dramatic advances in energy storage mechanisms. Until then the world will rest on the edge of a knife that will determine the fate of billions of lives.
So, no I don't want to magically poof oil away, it is the only thing keeping a huge number of the population alive, however, I do want to work away from oil, natural gas, nuclear, coal, as those are suicide paths on a 100+ year time line, which now that I'm almost 35, does not seem like such a big number anymore, my grandma is almost a 100 years old, that is like one life time.
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