Peak Oil, not all that bad.

Peak Oil is a reality, and I for one am relieved that the "dirty" era is almost behind us. Dirty in reference to the way it burns as well as some of the underhanded government's that we have to deal with to secure our energy.

Peak Oil will create a new industry in America, one that for the last 6 decades has been reserved for military and governmental use.

In fact, it has already begun. The president want's more Nuclear Power plants constructed before 2010. This will lower our dependency on oil. This will create new markets for energy companies to leap into. I see our dependency on oil dropping by 10's of millions of barrels per day. Entire industrial zones will be powered with nuclear plants.

This will drop our costs in production, as it will be powered by a cheaper energy source. Once the trend has poliferated enough, we may even be able to compete with China in low cost manufacturing.

This could possibly even lead to America being the dominate energey provider for the Western Hemisphere, selling off excess energy on the grid to Mexico and Canada. Further cutting the world economy's need for the black crude. In fact, would it be to far of a strech to presume that our government has plans in place to become a major player in the business of selling energy? I see this already.

As the world's most modernized countries wean themselves from oil, more of it becomes available to the rest of the world. With more available, supply increases, prices drop. This will allow underdevolped contries a great opprotunity to expand and industrialize. As their growth becomes expotential to ours, they will transition as well.

Oil has kept most of the world down, while the rich get richer. I heard that only 30% of the world's population has a need for modern energy. Perhaps its to expenive due to the fact that the larger, more powerful nations have been hoarding it.

I see a lot of potential for change here, it doesn't have to be bad, although it may be a little rocky at first. There are alternative's out there, we just have to look for them. Once we find them we have to retool our commerce and manfucturing processes to incorporate them.

It's the end of an era, not the end of the world.

Some good points crisko, Peak Oil doesn't have to be the end of the world. Hell the US could use a new industry with high paying high tech jobs and alternative energy could be a great thing for us, so long as it happens as you suggest in your post and we're not wasting the opportunities already. As for helping the third world nations, cheap energy is definately a component in building a modern economy. The only down side id that a few third world nations are dependent on the oil exports to feed their poor and if prices fall through the floor then their in real trouble. Venezuela and Nigeria come to mind, although they haven't done much for their poor anyway.

Very well put. While many are calling the 'Peak Oil' a doomsday, and in many respects I guess it is, but it could also be the beginning a new tomorrow with cleaner air, more efficient energy production etc. I just hope we get started now as many of the things we will need in the future to create new energy sources require materials that need oil based products for construction. Its better to build the plastic parts now for the new solar panels than wait until oil is really scarce and the cost of making the plastic parts becomes prohibitive.

In the USA, almost no electrical plants are now powered by oil. It is too expensive. It is the same way in the rest of the world.

Ignoring greenhouse gases, coal and natural gas are cheaper and certainly coal will stay cheaper than nuclear for a very long time.

The costs of producing things in the USA aren't because of electricity.

Oil is mostly used for chemicals and transportation fuels.

Nuclear offers nothing special here.

Nuclear power isn't really cheap, infact only 1/3 of the power generated by a nuclear powerplant goes out to the grid. On top of that dumping of nuclear waste is a big problem yet to be solved.

As mbkennel pointed out oil isn't used that much to power electrical powerplants (not in the most modern western countries at least), it's used mostly to manufacture almost everything and to transport almost everything. We have a growth economy, we have no other cheap energy source than oil for manufacturing and transportation of goods, if the economy continues to grow, so will the demand for oil. At some point we can't satisfy the economy with enough cheap oil and the economy will collapse, unless we have found some other cheap energy source for those purposes.

[edit on 2/8/2005 by SwearBear]

For some reason this whole situation reminds me of Y2K. Now I know allot of people on here think that was a hoax, but let me tell you from someone who was employed by a high-tech company at that time, It was a very serous problem that the suits ignored till literally the last minute. Now Peak Oil is here and allot of people are ignoring(including allot of the same suits who ignored Y2K until it became obvous that ignoring it could be catastrophic. I don't know wether this will be solved in the last minute like that crises, I don't really think we should bet the farm that we will succeed and start to make contingency plans like right now!

The Y2K problem might in some ways resemble the peak oil problem, but it cannot be solved by adding or changing some code in a program, it's much more complicated than that, the solution requires much more time, I'm talking about decades here.

If we want to keep the current world economy and our current lifestyles we must find a new and cheap energy source that is also portable, in order to apply it to vehicles aswell, we must do that fast (in a decade or a few decades) or then we must change our economy (no growth economy anymore) and our lifestyles so that we don't stress our current natural resources too much, basicly we consume less, this will however only buy us more time, maybe a few hundred years max. until we run out of cheap oil, but if we consume less and less over the years running out of cheap oil might not be as catastrophic as it will if we run out of it sooner (like in +- a decade), unprepared. In a few hundred years we could come up with a new cheap energy source, while it's more unlikely that we do it in a couple of decades.

However it is also unlikely that the people of today will give up their lifestyles, some of them would rather die. That's why there might be a ugly third world war where the biggest nations fight over the last barrels of oil, but eventually we will have to change our lifestyles.

There is no easy way out of this.

I realize that, I'm just saying that the mindset of the bean-counters and suits up until recently has followed the exact pattern that it did in the 90s. Nothing more or less. I never meant to infer that it would be as "easy" to fix as adding or subtracting a couple lines of code.

Both problems are unique problems, but damn why do we have to leave these things until that last possible minute....

[edit on 2-8-2005 by sardion2000]