What They Don't Want You To Know About The Coming Oil Crisis

[4dsc]

http://www.countercurrents.org/po-leggett210106.htm

Could there be a brighter future with less oil??

We have allowed oil to become vital to virtually everything we do. Ninety per cent of all our transportation, whether by land, air or sea, is fuelled by oil. Ninety-five per cent of all goods in shops involve the use of oil. Ninety-five per cent of all our food products require oil use. Just to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires six barrels of oil, enough to drive a car from New York to Los Angeles. The world consumes more than 80 million barrels of oil a day, 29 billion barrels a year, at the time of writing. This figure is rising fast, as it has done for decades. The almost universal expectation is that it will keep doing so for years to come. The US government assumes that global demand will grow to around 120 million barrels a day, 43 billion barrels a year, by 2025. Few question the feasibility of this requirement, or the oil industry's ability to meet it.

They should, because the oil industry won't come close to producing 120 million barrels a day; nor, for reasons that I will discuss later, is there any prospect of the shortfall being taken up by gas. In other words, the most basic of the foundations of our assumptions of future economic wellbeing is rotten. Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.

[BlueEyedSon]

1. Yes, cheap energy has been the engine of growth for many years.

BTW, the US uses 20 million per day (out of the 80 million per day worldwide). We only have 5% of the world population and hardly any manufacturing sector, so where is it all going?????

[4dsc]

2. Transportation

I believe we waste over 60% of our oil on transportation.. I now take more oil to put your meal on the table than ever before.. That's why its going to get interesting when fuel shortages appear in our society..

[BlueEyedSon]

3. If you are really keen on the petroleum/food thing, check this out:

The Oil We Eat
Following the food chain back to Iraq
Posted on Friday, July 23, 2004.
Originally from Harper's Magazine, February 2004.
By Richard Manning.

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Much more: http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html

Richard Manning is the author of
Against the Grain : How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0865476225/qid=1143381818/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7434393-4171208?n=507846&s=books&v=glance

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0865476225.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

[4dsc]

6. Thanks

I'll add this book to my list of necessary reading..

[opihimoimoi]

4. Basics will be hard to get....Plastics, Fuel for trucks/tractors/cars/etc

Food, clothing, etc/

The answers lie in front of us but we refuse to see them...we are spoiled and jaded...it is called PEACE...we waste so much on Defense...its pathetic...

[kayice]

5. America itself doesn't react like it did years ago......

Carter may have had his flaws, but (I was in high school) I never forgot his lessons nor would I be arrogant enough to say the problems do not exist.

Tell Americans they are addicted to oil all the while flying here and there for fundies $$$$ and to cover your butt; yep---jet fuel doesn't count, President, Jr..... :thumbsdown: