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jrknothead
News Junkie
Joined: Aug 04, 2007
Age: 43
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Location: Tampa Bay, Florida USA
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 Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 12:25 am Post subject: Why the world will never run out of energy |
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Why the world will never run out of energy
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Oil, nuclear power remain abundantly available
Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert, the premium online newsletter published by the current No. 1 best-selling author, WND staff writer and columnist. This week, he is including a Chapter Three excerpt from his book, “America for Sale.” Red Alert subscriptions are $99 a year or $9.95 per month for credit card users. Annual subscribers will receive a free autographed copy of “The Late Great USA,” a book about the careful deceptions of a powerful elite who want to undermine our nation’s sovereignty.
Oil remains so abundant that it is unlikely the world will ever run out, Jerome Corsi’s Red Alert reports.
Economist Julian Simon, former professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was famous for taking a contrarian position on energy resources, arguing that our perception of scarcity was not validated by the current or historical factual record of energy abundance.
In an essay titled “When Will We Run Out of Oil? Never!” Simon argued against Malthusian fears that peak oil theorists were right and sooner or later the pumps would run dry, as environmental alarmist Paul Ehrlich frequently argued.
Simon traced fears of energy resource exhaustion back to an 1865 book published in London by W. Stanley Jevons, one of the 19th century’s greatest social scientists, titled “The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of our Coal-mines.” Jevons argued that Great Britain’s industrial progress would grind to a halt because industry would soon use all available coal. Jevons further concluded that there was no chance oil would be an alternative resource able to solve the problem.
“What happened?” Simon asked.
His answer: “Because of the perceived future need for coal and because of the potential profit in meeting that need, prospectors searched out new deposits of coal, investors discovered better ways to get coal out of the earth, and transportation engineers developed cheaper ways to move the coal.”
Similarly, Simon traced the fears in the United States back to an 1885 U.S. geological survey that declared there was “little or no chance” oil would ever be found in California. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior argued U.S. oil resources would be exhausted in 13 years. Then, when that prediction proved a false alarm, the Department of the Interior revised its estimate and declared that it was from 1951 that U.S. oil would be exhausted in 13 years.
Simon argued gloomy predictions about running out of oil, coal or any other energy resource including natural gas, were typically wrong for several reasons, including the following:
-Typically the energy resources exist on earth in quantities much larger than initially estimated;
-Advances in technology make exploration and recovery of previously difficult to develop energy resources more efficient and economically affordable;
-Improvements in productivity lead to more efficient use of energy resources over time;
-Alternative sources of energy are found, even while predominately used energy resources remain abundant.
Previously dominant energy resources, such as coal, become less dominant as more efficient energy resources, such as oil, become more understood and utilized – a process Simon believed would continue as liquefied natural gas replaces oil applications, culminating in nuclear energy replacing many current applications of oil and natural gas.
“Simon’s energy resource analysis essentially maintains that we will be running automobiles with nuclear batteries long before we run out of oil,” Corsi wrote. “Another point consistent with Simon’s analysis is that technologies have been developed permitting the clean burning of coal, while coal resources in the United States yet remain among the most abundant on the earth. In the final analysis, nuclear power is the final inexhaustible energy resource.
“Moreover, the development of nuclear power plants to provide electricity to U.S. cities on a scale developed in nations such as France would serve the dual purpose of providing infrastructure jobs that conceivably could match the jobs created by President Eisenhower’s decision to build the interstate highway system, while providing cheap, safe and efficient energy to satisfy our municipal needs indefinitely.”
Today, the U.S. Navy runs ships around the world predominately on nuclear power, without a history of life- or environmental-threatening accidents.
Simon wrote: “Of course nuclear power can replace coal and oil entirely, which constitutes an increase in efficiency so great that it is beyond my powers to portray the entire process on a single graph based on physical units.”
Corsi noted that the one energy resource that is truly renewable and sufficiently robust to produce the energy required in the 21st century is nuclear power.
He said the example environmentalists and radical global warming alarmists typically neglect is France, a country that since the 1980s has built a network of modern nuclear power plants needed to power France’s major cities for the foreseeable future. Today, approximately 80 percent of France’s electricity is generated by 59 nuclear plants across the country that are at least a generation more advanced that the nuclear power plants operating today in the United States.
“As with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the nightmare scenarios with nuclear power are now decades old,” Corsi wrote. “The Three Mile Island accident occurred in Pennsylvania in 1979, and the Chernobyl reactor meltdown occurred in the Soviet Union in 1986. The world has experienced no similar incidents with nuclear energy since then.”
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shadfly
Raven
Joined: Sep 24, 2009
Posts: 122
Location: Canada
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phil777
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Joined: May 21, 2008
Age: 23
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Location: Montreal, Québec
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:24 am Post subject: |
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Heh, even if it is an endless process, has it been measured yet?
And more importantly, would we really want to do this? |
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Vexcalibur
Phoenix
Joined: Jan 18, 2008
Posts: 864
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:25 am Post subject: |
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Because at this rate the we are not going to last more than a couple of decades.
DUH.
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ruveyn
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Age: 73
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:07 am Post subject: |
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| Vexcalibur wrote: | Because at this rate the we are not going to last more than a couple of decades.
DUH. |
That is what they said 2000 years ago. Repent! For the End is at hand! The earth has existed for over 4 billion years. It will last more than a bit longer.
ruveyn |
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visagrunt
Deinonychus
Joined: Oct 17, 2009
Age: 42
Posts: 353
Location: Vancouver, BC
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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Well, ask two economists the same question and you will get three opinions.
The issue of energy policy is so tangled up with vested interests, that it is very difficult to discern who is being paid by whom to produce what piece of thinking.
Every energy industry needs government support (either through regulatory reform, infrastructure or commercial support) and in the United States, particularly, that means expending a great deal of money on lobbying and think tank work.
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Vexcalibur
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Posts: 864
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 9:09 pm Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: | | Vexcalibur wrote: | Because at this rate the we are not going to last more than a couple of decades.
DUH. |
That is what they said 2000 years ago. Repent! For the End is at hand! The earth has existed for over 4 billion years. It will last more than a bit longer.
ruveyn |
So is your reductio ad absurdum any relevant here? The earth will last billions of years... humans? not so much.
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Ahaseurus2000
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Joined: Sep 22, 2007
Posts: 765
Location: Tauranga, New Zealand
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| Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2009 11:17 pm Post subject: |
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Has Growth of population and energy demand been factored into this perspective? Even with falling costs, improving supply, and other factors creating what seems to be a limitless availability of energy, can this availability stay above the exponential growth of population and resulting demand of energy? In food production, Population Growth usually eventually eats up any surplus' that exist and overpopulation occurs, and I cannot see how Energy can be any different.
Besides, the original perspective seems to ignore politics.
And I heard there was a Natural Gas shortage in the US? |
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ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo
water
Joined: Jun 19, 2008
Posts: 3519
Location: Somewhere between Canada and Mexico
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 12:14 am Post subject: |
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Scientists want to obtain the oils of algae and soak up the iron in asteroids. That will be the future of mankind. Outer space and algae oils. Antimatter combustion and particle acceleration.
Sophisticated robots with tweezers and laser beams for fingers will take over the operating room.
Just like in Star Wars episodes, missing arms and legs will be replaced with bionic limbs. It will become a part of the Olympic games, people using these bionic limbs to do what was once thought of as impossible.
Welcome to the age of droids. |
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shadfly
Raven
Joined: Sep 24, 2009
Posts: 122
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 1:57 am Post subject: |
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| and computer chips implanted in the brain to carry out our more routine and rudimentary thought processes and execute decisions, supply suggestions and ideas, store memories, and facilitate distance communication |
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Inventor
Phoenix
Joined: Feb 16, 2007
Posts: 3541
Location: New Orleans
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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| phil777 wrote: | Heh, even if it is an endless process, has it been measured yet?
And more importantly, would we really want to do this? |
Everything that dies sinks to the bottom, decays, gives off Methane, which bonds with water forming Hydrates. There are pools in all the deep places, very large pools. The cold and high pressure keeps it there, and drives it into the mud, which is warmer. Now it migrates upward through the mud strata, and reforms in natural traps as oil and gas.
The goal of the oil companies is to lay claim to all the natural traps, and not mention the huge pools of Hydrates.
The hydrates act a a solvent, extracting the oils as they move, and oil is what they are after. The Hydrates are clean burning natural gas, oils lubricate, fuel, make plastics, and feed many industries.
Having to drill a hole they can claim ownership, but the pools of Hydrates would be public domain.
As the Constitution says, All rights not granted to the government or the states, are hereby reserved to the people. We own enough Hydrates to power the electric grid for thousands of years.
This would make some rich people unhappy, so they made a secret deal with Dick Cheany, and as a nation, we do not know what our energy policy is. He is gone, but the same Congress are still getting their pockets stuffed.
In some ways it is better than killing whales, which was the oil supply, and whale oil was used in automatic transmissions until recently. A hundred or so years ago it was the main lamp oil, lubricant, and many other uses. Two hundred years of whaling exterminated species, all of the Sea Cows, and greatly reduced all the others.
Populations are recovering, In the Gulf there are several hundred Killer Whales now, and many other species repopulating places they were hunted out.
So some good, some bad, and feeding Congress to the Killer Whales might help.
Freedom cannot exist without an educated public, who makes full claim to their government. |
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Ambivalence
Phoenix
Joined: Nov 09, 2008
Posts: 618
Location: PEEuhLEE
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 8:57 pm Post subject: |
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The world will never run out of energy because there's an enormous friggin' lightbulb a hundred million miles away that should be good for another few billion years, and when it eventually goes out, it'll take the Earth with it. 
Good luck with all the rest.
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Eggman
das Freak'n Techno Viking!
Joined: Jul 18, 2008
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| Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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What about entropy?
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ruveyn
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Age: 73
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Location: New Jersey
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| Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 12:43 pm Post subject: |
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| Eggman wrote: | | What about entropy? |
The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed thermodynamic systems. The Earth is wide open, receiving energy from the Sun at every instant. The Sun is good for another five billion years. That is why evolution (which is anti-entropic) is possible. It is energized by sunlight.
ruveyn |
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Eggman
das Freak'n Techno Viking!
Joined: Jul 18, 2008
Posts: 3572
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| Posted: Sat Oct 31, 2009 3:43 pm Post subject: |
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| ruveyn wrote: | | Eggman wrote: | | What about entropy? |
The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed thermodynamic systems. The Earth is wide open, receiving energy from the Sun at every instant. The Sun is good for another five billion years. That is why evolution (which is anti-entropic) is possible. It is energized by sunlight.
ruveyn |
Sun...limited life span...besides open can juist be a really big closed..It said limitless. Allways be technically correct, the best type of correct.
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