Re: More Reasons "Peak Oil" is a Crock

In article <4I6dnSST19Nh_9rbnZ2dnUVZ_jmdnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Bob Cain <arcane@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Mitchell Jones wrote:

Result: the world is rapidly approaching a disaster--runaway oil
prices--that is entirely man-made, and need not happen at all.

Thus the Iraq "war." Iraq is a giant reserve field the U.S. has
effectively seized to sustain its military after that runaway
disaster. We will see no substantial flow of Iraq's oil into the
world market. Ever.

The current and future chaos in Iraq was carefully crafted to disable
or minimize that oil flow. The U.S. is _not_ losing. Everything is
going as planned.

That's the only basis for the U.S. invasion and continued presence
there that actually makes any sense. This administration understands
better than any prior one the magnitude and inevitability of the peak
oil problem and the haste that is necessary in making preparation for
it.

***{"Peak oil" is the theory that mankind has already extracted and used
up half or more of all the hydrocarbon deposits that were "out there,"
and, thus, that future discoveries will inevitably decline over time,
approaching zero as a limit. Result: runaway oil prices caused not by
government bungling, but by an inexorable decline in the available
supplies.

Unfortunately for the "Peak Oil" proponents, it is a simple matter to
calculate a lower bound for the size of the available hydrocarbon
deposits. All of the oxygen in our atmosphere was placed there by
photosynthesis, a process that uses sunlight to remove the carbon from
CO2, so that the carbon can be incorporated into biomass. Hence for
every O2 in the atmosphere, there is a carbon sequestered as part of a
carbon-based life form, or in the remains of such a life form buried
somewhere in the Earth--i.e., in a hydrocarbon deposit. If you compute
the total amount of carbon involved and subtract the part currently in
living biomass, you will find that the amount remaining in the Earth is
sufficient to allow a minimum of 100,000 years of oil production at
current rates of consumption.

Or, at any rate, that's what Hanson concluded in a post to this group
several years ago. I checked his numbers at the time, and found nothing
wrong with them. If you are truly interested in this topic, I invite you
to do those calculations yourself.

Or maybe you can persuade Hanson to pontificate on this subject again.
:-)

--Mitchell Jones}***

A day may come when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al are
rehabilitated and seen as self sacrificial heroes.

Well, maybe not Wolfowitz. :-)


Bob

*****************************************************************
If I seem to be ignoring you, consider the possibility
that you are in my killfile. --MJ
.

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