> From: Dan Mitchell <danmitchell@xxxxxxxx>
>
> Check out "Plan B 2.0" (Lester Brown; print edition or downloadable
> from earth-policy.org if you can stand reading from a screen) for a
> very
> lengthy excursion into how biodiesel affects food prices, but also
> a lot
> of discussion about water issues, birth rate issues, etc -- everything
> is much more inter-related than I thought.
He's an amazing person. I used to go hiking with him and Chris Flavin
in the Blue Ridge mountains. (Lester founded Worldwatch Institute,
which gathers statistics and does analysis on environmental topics.
He has since left to found another organization, leaving Chris at the
helm of Worldwatch.)
I do quibble with his initial faith in hydrogen, though he may have
tempered that recently.
> "Heat: How to stop the planet from Burning", George Monbiot...
Another amazing fellow!
> ... not so much from a
> run-out-of-fuel standpoint, because given enough money that's not
> going
> to happen for a while...
Don't be too sure. To paraphrase Kenneth Deffeyes, you can't put more
oil in the ground by showing up at God's cashier with a bunch of
printed money!
What classical, Adam Smithian economics misses completely, and neo-
classical, Friedmanian economics simply ignores out of greed, is that
you don't pay for oil with fiat currency -- you must pay for it in
energy.
This is most often expressed as "ERoEI", or "Energy Recovered over
Energy Invested" -- a basic efficiency equation. If you spend more to
get something that that something is worth, you're going to go broke.
So if ERoEI is less than unity, you're running out even faster than
before. If it is greater than unity, you're merely running out!
David Pimentel (et. al.) conclude that ethanol from corn has an ERoEI
of about 0.6. So for every unit of energy you put into ethanol
production, you get six-tenths as much back.
In the initial days of gushers, petroleum had an ERoEI of over 100.
Currently, it's about 5-6. The tar sands in Canada yield synthetic
crude at an ERoEI estimated to be about 1.3 for the current, most
accessible deposits.
What happens when it costs you as much or more to get at oil as you
get out of it? That's the entropy point, and printing paper dollars
may continue to produce some oil at that point, but not for long! In
fact, it is just barely worth it at an ERoEI of 1.3, when you account
for the overhead of running the modern energy-intense economy that
supports the basic operations of mining and conversion.
So I can agree with your "not going to happen for a while," depending
on how you define "a while." 50 years? No way! 20 years? Improbable.
Many folks think oil will quickly go out of reach of all but the
richest in ten years or less.
Here's another way of looking at it: you're in a space-suit stuffed
with $100 bills, and ten minutes of air left. How much will an
additional ten minutes of air cost you?
:::: The amount of ethanol needed to fill a big four-wheel-drive SUV
just once uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. --
Gwynne Dyer ::::
:::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality http://
www.EcoReality.org ::::
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