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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] The answer, my friend, may not be blowing in the wind.
  • Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:28:54 EDT

>> Nobody knows, anything is still possible but it sure looks like there
> are still those who want it to end.
>
> I never understood the people who want the big catastrophic changes <shrug>.
>

Rob, there's a vast difference between 'wanting' something to happen and
seeing it coming.

In the case of Y2K, I was in the IT game in the thick of it. I asked the
Y2K'ers "Please be specific, what do you think is going to happen. Almost
all IT
and control is handled by equipment many generations removed from the 8080
and 8088 based machines that "might" be subject to the problem. Where are
these
old systems operating under the old languages and OS? Point them out and I'm
sure we can fix them."

The answer was always "Nyaaa, ya never know! There MIGHT be some weak points
out there. Ya just never know!!"

The simple truth of the matter is that we indeed DID know. A lot of people
in IT industry didn't WANT to know that Y2K was a non issue because there
were
a lot of bucks to be made in analyzing and certifying systems.

In a way you are right. Peak Oil and Y2K are alike, but not in the way you
suppose. The shoe's on the other foot this time. This time those who deal
in
numbers rather than deja vu's say the world is now using just under 90
million
barrels of oil a day and it is coming from the following oil fields: Ghawar,
Cantarell, North Sea, North Slope, etc. etc. in the following proportions
.... Those fields have been declining at this given rate ....

Taking all that into consideration, where is the energy that oil now supplies
going to come from as the known sources continue their decline??

Said same number crunchers look at nuclear and understand that uranium
resources are finite and already stretched by current nuclear use. They look
at
solar, wind, biofuels etc, calculate the maximum potential for those and
realize
that it comes to a very, very tiny percentage of the world's current energy
consumption.

So they ask passionlessly, dealing with those numbers, where's the energy
going to come from???

And just like the Y2K'ers, the cornucopians say, "Nyaaa, ya never really
know!! They might invent something, or find something, everything will be
OK! Ya
just never know!"

Back when gas was $1.25 a gallon, I started following this. There were
geologists, people in the petroleum industry, etc. who said that were were
headed
for an energy crisis starting about 2006. They predicted the maximum
petroleum
output, it's price rise, and even the current lull in prices. It happened
just about exactly as they said it would.

I also heard people give the old "Nyaaa, ya never know" line back then and
many of them predicted a world oil glut to be going on right now with oil
below
$10 a barrel.

This alone would have been enough to make me take the numbers more seriously
than the "Ya never know" position.

So the situration is roughly this: The large oil fields, the likes of which
have not been doscovered since 1964, are in an average of 5% annual decline
(with some like Mexico's Cantarell in more than a 15% annual decline), the
deficit has been made up with numerous small discoveries and enhanced
recovery
techniques that simply deplete the large fields all the faster. World oil
production has been flat since 2005.

So you see, it's not a matter of ' you say toMAYto and I say toMAHto,
rather it's a matter of here are the numbers .... where do you think the oil
or the
energy is going to come from???? </HTML>




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