The Demise of SocietyFollow

This has been posted on lots of message boards, but what do all you smart people think? Is this grim reality or the rantings of a madman?

Read for yourself...

lifeaftertheoilcrash.net

I would like to add that apart from plastic's, the majority of fuel useage and other 'crude oil' products could be taken up by bio-friendly power sources <wind farms, wave farms, solar etc.> and grown oil and alcohol fuels so i don't think we need to panic just yet unless your a oil company exec.

so are all the machines used to mine, machine and process Crude oil so whats your point?

I posted that website myself about a month ago.
It is a bit over-the-top (a bit? heh) but I've been doing a lot of reading on alternate energy sources. There are many alternatives out there that need more attention. My opinion is that, even if we don't "crash" in 10-15 years, we will still need many years to prepare for the eventual crash (say 100 years from now) by revamping all systems to non-fossil. There are plenty of technologes being developed, but I'd like to see more implementation. Thermal depolymerization sounds like it could be a very big deal to me.

That's more or less what I posted when this topic came up last time.

The big problem with this guys theory is that he (deliberately?) mixes "peak oil" and "out of oil" freely as he describes what will happen.

Peak oil is something that is "immediate". It certainly costs us a bit more each year to drill for the same amount of oil. Where the exact "peak" is no body can really say. He's right on that count.


However, when he talks about the problems he's usually quoting folks who are talking about "oil shortage", which is not the same thing at all, and is not nearly as immediate as peak oil.

As he goes down the list and dimisses each alternative fuel source, he uses two primary criteria:

1. They cost to much to produce, so they aren't efficient enough.

2. It would take too long to build the infrastructure changes needed to implement thm.


This doomsday theory works if you assume that peak oil and oil shortage are the same. However, his own definition simply states that peak oil is the point at which it steadily becomes more expensive to acquire oil. It specifically does not mean that there's not enough oil to satisfy global needs (that's scarcity of oil, or "oil shortage").

As we hit and pass peak oil, the cost per barrel of oil will increase. At some point, that increase in cost will make issue number 1 not an issue anymore. We don't use those alternatives simply becuase they currently cost more then oil. Once oil prices increase to a point that the alternatives are cheaper, we'll start using them.

Same issue with number 2. While peak oil is relatively immediate, oil shortage is a good while down the line. I'm pretty confident that as oil gets more expensive to aquire, the power producing companies will find alternatives and implement them. The infrastructure will slowly move from oil to other sources as that time passes.

It's just extremely unlikely to be a disaster. His other big problem is he assumes that oil companies are in the business just to sell oil. That's not true. They are in the business of providing fuel (power). Oil, currently is the most cost effective medium for moving power from one place to another. Once other sources become more efficient, you can bet that the "oil" companies will switch to whathever gives them the most profit. If they can make money building solar plants and selling the electricity generated by them, you can damn well bet that's exactly what companies like Exxon will do.

In this case, the desire to make money is what will push alternatives down the line. He assumes it'll happen the other way around. I just don't believe that oil executies are going to sit there and sell that last barrel of oil and then just close business because it's all gone and the worlds going to end. That's a ludicrous assumption IMO. Nope. They'll be branching out into other areas long before oil becomes scarce enough to affect profits.

[quote=trunksbrando]
Whatever that prediction is from some crazy fanatic, its all *****************

Blanket statements from morons are all we need.

Lol I feel like I shot Bambi now. Most people on this board have witty comebacks to everything.

I was more implying, that you likely didn't read one word on the site. You can't label it as ********* because as a fact it's not. It's truth, and judging from other posts that you are in High School, Oil Crises are something you're going to have to deal with in the future more so than the rest of us.

Oh, come on now, sstaurus, I read the whole thing, and at least a good portion of it was pretty much ********* Granted, some of the underlying basics were solid, but once he ventured in to conjecture and propogandizing, it was pretty much a crock.