by MD » Thu 19 Sep 2013, 03:37:49
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pops', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'M')ight be I'm reading the wrong sites but there is a bit of noise that O would love to have a national emergency and stall the next presidential elections- become a dictator.
Gypsy you are on a tear lately, LOL
There are .94 guns per capita in the US.
Now I'm no gun nut and I certainly hope they all stay tucked away quietly under the mattress but you gotta admit, that is a lot of guns. Like lots of our dubious titles we have more per capita than our leading rivals (Serbia and Yemen) by 50%.
therefore I see a vanishingly small chance of elections being postponed anytime in the foreseeable future, by anyone. Don't you remember "hanging chads"? We had a pretty touchy situation there and the process worked just fine - to the extent that the constitution was followed and no one hit the streets with pitchforks or tanks that is. That's all you can hope for.
In fact, I predict there is no need for O doing [whatever] because the dems will win the POTUS walking away in '16. The House Republicans are in the process of abdicating the White House (and Senate) in favor of retaining their seats in Mississippi and whatever other backwater protected district. The fact is there plenty of legal ways for usurpation of power here, no need for a constitutional crisis, heck, we're so democratic we believe in civil rights, for corporations! But that's way off topic.
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But on topic, PO is only irrelevant until it isn't. I had no trouble considering peak back when oil was $20 and yearly supply growth was 2-3%. Why would I have trouble considering the possibility of peak when the price of oil is 5 times higher and supply has barely budged in 8 years?
Fact is, I didn't even think supply would begin to get tight and prices start to rise until about now.
The FF industry finally took the PO "meme" seriously enough to devote a few million to a PR campaign that has capitalized on the drilling frenzy in the shales. Their plan seems to have switched focus to convincing the US that we are the new KSA and should become an exporter (even while we're still an importer). If they can pull that off and export as much nat gas and oil at world prices as possible they'll win big and of course then the US will be worse off than before.
True, the public has adapted to $3.50 unleaded, perhaps wondering from time to time why the massive Glut touted everywhere hasn't lowered the price but motoring on more or less regardless. Search hits here at PO.com are way down. That tells me that folks have bought the bill of goods and think this ($100 oil/$3.50 unleaded) is a passing phase and that certainly there is no upside, how can there be, we're KSAmerica?. That just like the '80's we're headed for tall cotton, that the shales are just like the North Slope and the North Sea and the GOM. Unfortunately they are anything but.
So, what is the future of "peak oil"? Exactly the same as it was 10 years ago:
A finite resources will have a beginning and end of extraction, first growth, then a peak and finally decline.
Shale is a detail, if every ounce the USGS says is there could be extracted starting today, it would delay the peak 5 years. But for a lot of reasons, it can't be extracted overnight. Not the least of those reasons are mineral rights the world over will never make shale anywhere else look like here, It may be extracted eventually but not overnight. Same with the trillions of "barrels" of under- and over- cooked oil typically lumped in with crude, they will indeed last hundreds if not thousands of years... but that's because it will take to mine them. So since peak oil is about peak flow and peak flow is about the 20% of 50+ year-old wells that produce 60% of the oil, nothing has changed
The only thing I see different now than 10 years ago is some folks placed large amounts of personal capital on overly precise estimates of future events when they should have been trying to be more encompassing in their outlook and think about society as a whole. I feel like peak oil is moving along about as predicted but I see many others saying the predictions were exactly wrong - and they are correct, I saw some chart with a pile of some math scribbles on it showing exactly how wrong or right, out 3 or 4 decimals. LOL! Tell me how useful that is... LOLOL Like someone said, rather than being generally correct they've turned out exactly wrong.
A holistic approach to depletion is the future. Sorta what we've been practicing here for almost 10 years, no?
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