Trust me, you cager baboon, and pay no heed to Rove's smoldering eyes peeking out from inside my gaping mouth.
Here are some resources related to this subject:
It's time we, the ordinary people, experience what it's like to get by without the huge amount of
very cheap energy that oil provides. US citizens
must take a hard look at the energy requirements needed to keep all those frustrated commuters
on the road rolling along slowly in the trap of miserable inhuman traffic every day.
One gallon of gasoline contains energy equal to hundreds of hours of hard physical labor. If you don't accept that figure, using your body, push your car the same ten, twenty or thirty miles that single gallons of gasoline easily do for you every day. After that exercise you'll be convinced, assuming you're not dead. Gasoline is powerful stuff with an inexpensive price tag. It's no wonder we've become addicted.
I regularly ride my bicycle to job sites in Chicago. I'm the engine that powers my vehicle along the road. I personally experience every additional kilogram added to my bike, be it extra gear for work, spare clothes, or that extra bit of fat picked up over the holidays. It's a joy to ride unencumbered when I just go out for a recreational spin.
When I see people driving their autos down the road I wonder if they understand just how much effort is required to propel the huge weight of their vehicle. For them personally it's no more effort than lightly pressing a pedal with their foot. It's a magic carpet ride. Under the hood it's another story. Gasoline flowing through the engine releases 30,000 kilo-calories of energy for every gallon consumed.
The US consumes 386 million gallons of gasoline daily to propel all those autos down our roads. That's 11 trillion kilo-calories of energy every day. In electrical terms that's equal to 13 billion kilowatt hours daily, more than the total electrical generating capacity in the US. Add an additional 140 million gallons of diesel consumed every day, and total energy consumption gets significantly larger.
Picture this: to replace all of the energy consumed by autos, trucks, trains, ships and tractors every day with nuclear power, the US would have to manufacture over one thousand new nuclear power plants to meet the demand. One thousand new nuclear power plants... it's hard to imagine; we only have a hundred or so in the US now.
The world supplies of oil and other fossil fuels used to produce gasoline won't last forever. I'm not saying that they will suddenly disappear, they won't. Oil is going to become more expensive than it is now, much more expensive. Large rapidly growing economies, such as those in China and India, are making ever increasing demands on the world's finite oil supply. Greater demand must result in higher prices given that daily output of conventional oil supplies cannot increase indefinitely, may have already reached their maximum, and will inevitably go into irreversible decline.
A time is coming soon when the cheap energy from oil must be replaced. What then? How will we know how much energy we must replace, how long it will take to replace, and what will replace it, if we the ordinary people of the United States don't understand how much we use now? Our country will suffer great and lasting economic and social damage if we get caught with our pants down when cheap oil becomes a thing of the past. The rich have little to fear since they will have plenty of cash to pay for all the fuel they desire, expensive or otherwise. They have not now, nor will they have, any sense of urgency to replace oil. It's obvious that the energy provided by oil is immense, and replacing it will be neither trivial nor quick.
The numbers are important because our country's success or failure in the 21st century will be reduced to a single overriding issue: how we respond to replacing oil. If we act now, are sure footed and swift, we should be able to avoid a catastrophe. If we ignore the problem or play political and military games with it: we are in for a very rough ride which will end in a sudden, unprecedented, and possibly fatal national disaster.
Time is our enemy. We have the technologies to replace oil. We've had them for many years. We have nuclear, solar, wind, biofuels, bicycles, etc., with newer technologies on the way. What we lack is sufficient time to build them to the scale required to replace oil.
The numbers don't lie. Oil provides a staggering amount of energy. The alternatives we have built so far amount to a hill of beans in comparison. If we are to survive the decline of oil, we must build replacement systems at a scale comparable to oil, and that process could take decades. If we start too late we will be like the scuba diver who failed to ascend completely to the surface before his oxygen tank ran out. Even if he is on his way, he will suffocate and die if he can't break the surface before he passes out from lack of oxygen.
Our civilization, our children, and ourselves, are that scuba diver. Our black oxygen, oil, is on the decline, and we are in very deep water. The longer we wait to begin our ascent, the more likely it is that the life we know now will be irreversibly damaged, or destroyed.
Without the cheap energy from oil, the world would never have reached its present state. Oil is used to make the fertilizers that make the plants grow to feed the world. Without oil to make fertilizers, the amount of food produced by the world would plummet. Oil provides the means to move all of that food around the globe. Oil makes possible the agricultural system that we rely on.
The world's population during the 20th century rose from just over 1.5 billion to more than 6 billion people. That growth is a direct result of the power of cheap oil. Cheap oil has made possible an otherwise impossibly large world population. With cheap oil on the decline in the 21st century, the population growth of the 20th century will be reversed. The 21st century worldwide population reversal will be cruel, merciless and unstoppable. It will make the Jewish holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's cultural revolution, and the many ethnic cleansings of the 20th century look like an afternoon at the park.
Most of the world lacks the means to replace oil. It is very probable that a large fraction of the population around the world will die from starvation when oil becomes too expensive. Many of the people that live today will die as a result of the decline of oil. America is capable of avoiding the grim fate that awaits most of the world, but only if we act now.
Don't believe it. Ignore the numbers. Pretend the problem is unreal, unscientific, far off
or someone else's problem.
This is all baloney. It's just another crazy radical political agenda.
Believe what you want. You will anyway. But know this: you
were warned, and you intentionally chose to ignore the warning. When the time comes for recrimination,
put the gun to your own head and pull the trigger, because
Liberty
is not for these slaves; I do not advocate
inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary,
I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel
all they please before whatever
fraud or combination of
frauds they choose to venerate... Our whole practical
government is grounded in mob psychology and... the
Boobus Americanus will follow
any command that promises
to make him safer.
— — H. L. Mencken