I think an important distinction needs to be made here.Revi wrote:I don't know why you want to barbecue us greenies. We are the ones who live practically debt free and were the prudent ones in this past 5 year fiesta of fools.
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DantesPeak wrote:
The final product was impressively put together. It was mostly about Iraq war, and its effects on the US dollar and oil supplies.
I state there that the dollar was likely heading for an eventual collapse in the video.
Here's the link: link
idiom wrote:So in the event of a prolonged contraction how does the US avoid defaulting on its debt or entitlement or both?
Is there a tidy way to transition to a not-growth assuming economic system?
kdenninger wrote: There is nothing, once again, technically preventing flex-fuel CI engines; in fact, the military solved THAT problem in the 1960s and for some time had trucks that would run on any mixture of gasoline, jet, kerosene and #2.
kdenninger wrote:idiom wrote:So in the event of a prolonged contraction how does the US avoid defaulting on its debt or entitlement or both?
Is there a tidy way to transition to a not-growth assuming economic system?
Oh no, its going to be quite messy.
But there's a huge difference between "messy" and "Mad Max".
Most of the POers are in the "Mad Max" camp in one form or another. I strenuously disagree with that assessment.
As for entitlements, they're finished. Not all at once, but with certainty, yes. That which can't be done won't be done.
The 900lb Gorilla is Medicare; we simply have to have an honest debate in America on sustainable health care paradigms, and what we have now isn't it. What we had in the 50s and 60s was, but that devolves down into "ordinary care is cheap and you buy it with money, extraordinary care is expensive and if you can't pay you don't get it. Help comes in the form of private charity (e.g. The Shriners)."
Economic growth is not necessarily dead. Neither is energy supply growth. There's absolutely nothing preventing us from building a mixture of breeder and pebble-bed reactors which are self-sustaining in their fuel requirements, other than the will to do so (there are NO technical or operational impediments to constructing as many of those as we have the will to put online), and with lots of high-quality energy (electricity) virtually anything else can be accomplished in the energy environment. Get all of our current electrical generation off fossil fuels and on nuclear.
Turning coal into liquid fuel is a problem that was technically solved by Germany during the war. We have plenty of transition fuel while we get large-scale aquaculture online to produce short-cycle liquid hydrocarbon fuels (e.g. biodiesel from aquaculture.) The latter is a ~20 year problem to get both developed and into large-scale production, but we have the ability to get there with what we have now.
Yes, there is a cost issue to both the interim and ultimately, but is this necessarily bad? Why not a hybrid compression-ignition / battery vehicle that can serve commuting on a plug basis and charge overnight, but has a compression ignition flex-fuel engine (runs on anything from gasoline to diesel and all in between, including kerosene and Jet-A, along with biodiesel, in any blend) to prevent the problem of running out of power? The CI engine is comparatively expensive to operate but if sized small will be very efficient and provides cross-country capability, while remaining "off" for short-run and commuter driving.
One key is getting rid of spark-ignition engines in OTR vehicles, as that also paves the way for short-cycle sustainable fuel products. They are horribly inefficient at low and moderate power operation due to throttling losses; a diesel beats them on that basis by 20-30%, and that's an instantaneous reduction in consumption. Fuel oil also has more BTUs in it than does gasoline per gallon which contributes to even more efficiency per gallon, but not necessarily per unit of energy input. There is nothing, once again, technically preventing flex-fuel CI engines; in fact, the military solved THAT problem in the 1960s and for some time had trucks that would run on any mixture of gasoline, jet, kerosene and #2.
kdenninger wrote:Blah blah blah the world is coming to and end hide in the ground!
Ok dude. Do what you want.
But then... why are you here on a computer posting on the Internet? Shouldn't you be digging your bunker?
Oh, and if you're right, what good will gold do you? Can you eat it? Screw it? Heat with it? You think you can sell it? Uh, who needs it? Electronics and dental work are the only UTILITY values it has, and neither of those is going to be worth jack.
I don't buy the Mad Max scenario. Yeah, I know, its coming. That's what they said with Y2K too, and my power stayed on.
How about yours?
Revi wrote:Most people are too interested in blaming "greenies" or trying to win the powerball or buying a wave runner to pay any attention to the idea of saving this society.
Quote:
MOSCOW — The Russian oil boom, which has produced a gusher of cash, political power and an opulent elite — and has helped fuel the country's renewed assertiveness in Georgia and elsewhere — is on shakier ground than officials in Moscow would like to admit.
Most of the oil produced after the country's 1998 financial collapse has come from drilling and re-drilling old Soviet oil fields with more advanced equipment — squeezing more black gold out of the same ground — and efforts to develop new fields have been slow or non-existent.
That strategy is potentially disastrous, said Valery Kryukov, who researches oil companies in western Siberia for a government-funded think tank.
"If the situation which exists now stays the same, oil production will start to decline seriously in two years," Kryukov said in a phone interview from his offices in the city of Novosibirsk.
Roccland wrote:Is that you Dante around minute 36? the mystery man?
or did you write this book?
Most of the POers are in the "Mad Max" camp in one form or another. I strenuously disagree with that assessment.
shortonoil wrote:kdenninger wrote:Most of the POers are in the "Mad Max" camp in one form or another. I strenuously disagree with that assessment.
The Available Energy model is not a Mad Max scenario. It predicts that by 2025 the average American will be living a standard of living commensurable with his predecessor of 1915. He will be poor!
As far as building nukes, or tearing down the Rockies to fuel our future happy motoring ways, these have all been discussed ad infinitum on these forums. To take several books of information and compress it into one sentence, “yes we could.” We could - if we had started on the project 30 years ago.
roccman wrote:And BTW - I have two fully stocked bunkers in the ground and I am in the process of receiving title on a third ranch to bury a third bunker
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