WHY DONT THEY ADMIRE ME?
Lets see:
Appeasing islamists in Turkey… Check!
Bowing before the King of Saudi Arabia … Check!
Ask Pakistan for Joint Action, give them drones when they refuse… Check!
Tell Europe we are to blame for the problems and make them cheer and feel good about themselves because now its ok not to like the US, not just the President…
Still… let’s keep this guy out of the lower 48. He may suck abroad, but he’s doing MUCH MORE DAMAGE at home.
Terry, I’ve a question. I’m not being gratuitous by saying you’ve been one of the best sources of conservative perspectives I’ve read, backing your posts up with links to respectable newsletters. I appreciate the work, although I don’t share the same views. Here’s my question, prompted by an interview today (on npr) with Peter Diamandis, X-prize founder, about the current prize for a practical 100 mpg vehicle.
There’ve been a number of warnings about a looming energy disaster as oil fields run dry around the world (Huppert’s peak; Paul Roberts’ “The End of Oil”; David Goodstein’s “Out of Gas”). A few years ago I attended a summer program put on by the Western States Petroleum Association hosted by USC’s petroleum engineering school. The industry people said we wouldn’t “run out” of petroleum, but that the cost of production will begin to rise so that, depending on conservation and demand, by mid-century it will be too expensive to be burned as a fuel. So academics say “just around the corner”, oil people say “40-50 years”. What’s the American conservative perspective on the end of oil?
SAHS teacher, when did “conservative” become synonymous with idiotic?
I would answer you several ways:
One, is that there is no such thing as “Peak Oil”. For the last thirty years the total billions of barrel reserves have only increased.
We have enough oil shale to run this country for 1-2 hundred years, and the rest of the world is filled with this resource.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_reserves
Second, Oil is “abiotic”. Meaning, it is produced within the earths mantle. That’s right, that garbage about coming from dead dinosaurs… uh uh. Its in too many places and too deep to be produced from the cardon reactions of dead lifeforms.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/2423
That, and many fields, like the Gulf of Mexico, are refilling.
Third, if that does happen, then what will happen is what happens with everything else that we use on this planet. We will find another resource to “gradually” replace it.
This mythology of running out of a resource suddenly and looking around one day and saying oops! Doesnt happen. If I could get a job with Tesla Motors up in the Silicon Valley, I would! It makes sense!
What doesnt make sense is for SOME people to pretend like they’re smarter than EVERYONE ELSE and IMPOSE some so called solution.
THAT won’t work.
Thanks for the perspective, Terry. Except for the abiotic origen idea, it’s relatively consistent with what the oilmen at USC said. Proven oil reserves increase because of the way the term is defined, which is the total you can expect to produce from a given field. As production technologies advance allowing you to extract a higher percent from the field, the field’s “proven reserves” increase. They expect a smooth transition to alternative transportion fuels as oil production costs begins to increase. It will be economics that drives the research for new fuels, not government programs. Oil is still cheap. This was their primary complaint; closed down oil fields all across the U.S. still had 80-90% of oil in situ, but they couldn’t produce it at a cost competitive with other fields around the world. Can’t operate at a loss.