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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>Do we know of any economic interest groups that do not have paid 
cheerleaders? 

No.  There aren’t any.  All the more reason to not use any of them as a 
source of information.  The two I mentioned, NAR and CERA, for example, I am 
astounded at the number of times their predictions have been just dead 180 
degrees 
wrong and it’s not because they were blind sided.  Other individuals and 
organizations have made consistently much more accurate predictions in those 
areas.

>Long before the oil runs out there will be a plethora of 
>alternate energies. They exist now but the prices are too high to be 
>economically viable. As alternate fuels' prices decline and oil 
>prices rise, when the prices meet in the middle, the oil game is over.

Spoken like a true economist.  The purist economist sees the "invisible hand" 
in the market as correcting and equalizing everything, but the ivy grows 
thick about their heads and too often reality is left out of the economic 
equation.

My posit is this:  Oil provides so much of the world’s energy, and especially 
the energy used in the US, and oil is so convenient, energy dense, portable, 
storable, flexible, and right now, abundant, that there IS no alternate nor 
combination of alternates that bid fair to replace any but a small fraction 
of 
the energy from oil.



In a lot of ways, saying that we will find an alternative for oil is like 
saying we will find an alternative for water or soil.  Oil is unique.  We pat 
ourselves on the back with the likes of "but we sent a man to the moon!"   
Yes.  
But only because we were in the oil age.  Feats like that are more a function 
of our floating on a sea of oil than our cleverness.  

Here is where the economists trip up.  Suppose you have a farm vehicle that, 
for the sake of easy arithmetic, has a ten gallon tank and gets ten miles to 
the gallon.  The filling station is just a little ways down the road and you 
have for years driven the vehicle to the pump (for the sake of my 
illustration, 
the only way to fill it up) and the fuel expense of getting it from the farm 
to the pump and back is negligible.  

But one day that filling station closes (forever) and the next closest one is 
five miles away.  Now it takes half a gallon of gas to get to the filling 
station and half a gallon to get back.  Your overall fuel costs are a bit 
more.  
You arrive back at the farm with nine and a half gallons but must make sure 
that half a gallon remains in the tank to get back to the filling station.  
You 
have a useable capacity now of nine gallons although you must purchase ten.

Then that filling station closes (forever) and the next closest station is 
thirty miles away.  Once you have filled up at this station, it takes three 
of 
your ten gallons to get back to the farm and even with the seven gallons 
remaining, you can only use four to do farm work.  You have to leave three 
gallons 
in the tank to get back to the filling station.

Your fuel cost is now much higher.  You have to pay for ten gallons of gas 
but you get the use out of only four of them.

Then that service station closes (forever) and the next nearest station is 
sixty miles away.  At this point the economics don’t matter any more.  There 
is 
no way for you to get to the service station and arrive back at the farm.  
You’d be out of gas before you got there.  At this point you lose the use of 
your 
vehicle.

This is what peak oil is about.  It isn’t about "running out" of oil.  That 
isn’t possible.  In the 1930’s it took the energy of one barrel of oil to get 
100 barrels of oil out of the ground and refine it.  Now of days that’s close 
to the energy equivalent of 30 barrels of oil to obtain and refine 100 
barrels 
and that ratio worsens each year.  The filling station is 15 miles away and 
is on the verge of closing (forever).  Economists look on oil as if it can be 
had forever if we are just willing to pay enough money for it, but just like 
the example of the farm vehicle, once it takes a barrel of oil to get a 
barrel 
of oil, it doesn’t matter how much money you are willing to pay, you get no 
oil 
to use.



To the economist it’s just a matter of oil getting so expensive that solar or 
wind will be "cheaper" and everything will equal out.  But they are looking 
only in the amount of money involved which in energy terms is irrelevant.  
Oil 
is used to produce wind turbines, solar cells, batteries, transmission lines, 
vehicles, and every other device that uses and delivers energy.  When we rely 
on, for example, the energy of a wind turbine to make another wind turbine, 
the returns are scant.



What is requires, which we don’t have now, is an entirely new way of viewing 
what our culture is all about.  Looking about for something else to stuff in 
the gas tank when the oil is gone is not going to get us anywhere.  

Or as Al Einstein put it: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of 
thinking we used when we created them."


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