US population - 300 million +
Earth's population - 6 billion +

Should one be readdressing one's defaults?

Just a thought.

Hey, here's something crazy that happened out here recently. A high pressure gas line ruptured in a neighborhood just south of SF, and there was a massive fire that basically burned down a few blocks. So far only one confirmed death, but there are some other people in critical condition. With the big oil spill and the beginning of the summer, and the gas line rupture out here at the end of it, the lesson I'm taking away is: fossil fuels are pretty damn dangerous!

Although I'm willing to concede the relative population difference, we aren't dealing with overall population. What we need to know is the percentage of SPCR readers that are in the US, North America, and other continents.

I'd be willing to bet the percentage of SPCR readers in America is considerably higher than the percentage of Americans in the World.

Anyway the intent there is related to purchasing computer equipment online. The majority of the threads discussing hardware default to newegg or other North American retailers for pricing in US dollars.

Some order from the US and have it shipped elsewhere. Others put their location in their profile info and I've done searches for prices in other currencies.

You may find it provincial of me to default to North America but it is where I live and all my google/pricegrabber searches default to US dollars.

I don't think anyone would question your motives or your willingness to help, and members stating their location in their profile is obviously a good idea for the reasons you've given.

Still, given that this *is* an international forum and we're all in a sense ambassadors here, perhaps the statement: "I'll assume you are in the US if you don't tell me otherwise" projects a certain negative (and in my personal experience mostly inaccurate) stereotype of America and Americans that some of your compatriots might find uncomfortable, and prefer to avoid?

Apologies for the OT, it's not particularly important in the overall scheme of things I suppose.

[quote="NeilBlanchard"]Open your mind.

The tropical region at the equator has expanded by more than 2 degrees latitude, both on the northern and the southern hemispheres, since 1980 -- adding a further 8.5 million square miles to the tropics.

The pH of the ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 and in short while shellfish will not be able to form their shells properly.

A “staggeringâ€

I think it simply reflects the common occurrence of Psychological projection/mirroring. Whether I say it or not I'm likely to assume you are like me. I happen to live in America.

There is nothing wrong with you being different than me. As they said back in the day "I'm OK, You're OK".

So if you have a suggestion as to how to more politely explain what my default behavior is I'll be happy to consider rewording the tagline but the intent is to make it clear to the reader what the consequences of not enough information could be.

It applies to our energy discussions as well. When I discuss Electricity or gasoline use I tend to think primarily in US units. I still get tripped up by metric conversions if a graph isn't there to show relative changes over time. If the graph is good enough I might not care what scale it's in.

I sure don't mean to offend anyone by thinking as an American but I think it's helpful in an international forum to provide context and make sure they have some clue how to weigh assumptions without making me spew disclaimers/footnotes/etcetera.

I'm sorry, I don't see a date in there, or a reference to any peer-reviewed studies. Go ahead and cite your sources so we can see how much it costs to convert from fossil fuels to sustainable energy over a 5 year, 10 year, 20 year, 50 year, 200 year, etc timeline. You simply cannot make a statement "it will be made worse" without any data to quantify how much worse, and over how much longer.

I know you must have some data and studies that you're refusing to tell anyone about, but it's time for you to come clean and tell the truth here. I'm sure everybody here can take the truth - you don't need to hide it any longer. Just tell us how much time we're looking at and what checkpoints are needed for conversion. 10% renewable in 5 years, 50% renewable in 10 years, etc. Just tell us the facts, we can take it.

given relative buying power of americans versus the rest of the world, (as well as population in proportion to buying power), it's more likely that any person you meet online is going to be an american as compared to any other single country.

so if you're gonna make a blanket assumption about unknown people online, if you're gonna pick a country for them, it's most likely gonna be USA.

Or alternatively, you could avoid making blanket assumptions in the first place.

If in doubt, assume a person is from the US.

Better still.

If in doubt, assume they are human, and currently living somewhere on Planet Earth.

Doubt is usually a problem if someone fails to disclose where they are.

Example: No location given, I assume they are somewhere on Earth.

Shamgar
Location: Where I Am

Example: Location given to a County that covers an area of 1,417 square miles, north east of London, England.

andyb
Essex, England


Andy

I have proof that Global Climate Change is real:

Russia and Canada and the USA and others are moving to claim mineral rights in the Arctic, and things could get nasty. The ice is melting and ironically this has exposed more oil and gas, and we want to burn it!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14092469
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103119177

Ships can now travel through both the Northwest and Northeast passages, which will save days/weeks/months on shipping times.

isn't that a "good" thing?

Sure, that individual thing is good, on it's own. But all of the other effects of global climate change will be devastating; on so many fronts.

Just wanted to share another graph or two



The one above is an old standby from TheOilDrum.com that combines most government/industry predictions on oil production into one graph.

Note however that the baseline for that graph is not 0 (not zero). The point isn't that we will run out of oil. The point is supply of Oil is very likely to drop in the foreseeable future and Oil will get more and more expensive as supply drops.

If you would like to see more graphs like that one (and underlying numbers + a solid explanation) this post from 2009 is worth looking at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5521


Below we have another look at oil.







oh and I saw a new term biflation that I found interesting.

Interesting graphs. Do the deposits also consider tar sand/shale oil deposits?

If you go to http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5521 they discuss

All Liquids
Crude Oil + NGL
Other Liquids
NGPL
Crude Oil + Condensate
Canadian Tar Sands

The other graph titled "the growing gap" is pure conventional oil and does not include tar sands.

I don't know where shale oil fits in these but I'm going to assume it is not covered in either one because it isn't currently produced in sufficient quantities. But that is a guess because dammit Jim, I'm a computer guy not a oil expert.

Check out http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3839 which includes this



Dunno why the drop off in shale oil production but it's dropping like a rock in that graph.

New graph

This one is confusing because of the color scheme used and the placement order of the legend.

Darker colors on bottom are countries with healthier exports, lighter colors on top are countries that either export less now than they used to or no longer export even though they used to be significant exporters.



Peak export is a tougher nut to crack than peak supply as there is consumption, import, export data in addition to production but if you like scratching your head about numbers like this the rest is at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/7007

Yeah, I dunno, I'm not really that worried about the world running out of oil, I'm more worried about the atmosphere filling up with CO2. I went to a talk years ago by a guy named Dean Kammen, he's a professor up at Berkely working on alternative energy stuff, I think he advises Steve Chu occasionally. The talk happened right around when gas prices started shooting up, and there was a lot of peak oil paranoia at the time. The beginning of his talk emphasized how things like shale oil and coal gassification could keep us in fossil fuels for a very long time. Although prices would go up. And that's probably a good thing for fossil fuel alternatives, until alternatives become common enough that fossil fuel supply prices come back down via supply and demand. That's why we really need some price on carbon, so we don't just slide back into fossil fuels when prices drop again.

You apparently don't realize what you just said.

Shale oil and coal gasification release more CO2 than any process you want to see happen if you care about CO2.

I'll not bother grabbing exact numbers for shale oil I'll just point you to the highlight snippit since shale oil is a minor player compared to coal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmen ... _emissions


On top of that you are confusing "coal to gas" and "coal to liquids" which are two different things. Coal to gas is done for electricity and since 99% of the cars in America run on liquids and not electricity coal to electricity doesn't help much when you run out of cheap oil (remember we don't burn oil for electricity much now).



So which half of this statement did you mean? Is it

or is it


because if we start using coal to power our cars it's just going to get worse if you actually care about CO2.

and either way you go on the CO2 issue, there is another case for confusion as most talks about energy use the term "gas" to mean that colorless odorless stuff we burn for heat or electricity not that liquid stuff you and I put in our cars.

So when you see a table like



You have to assume they mean Natural Gas not gasoline.

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/Feg/co2.shtml tells us that gasoline emits 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon but translating that to Tonnes per GWh or translating coal to any per mile rating for a car is lots of math and deals with many inefficiencies that some will ignore when converting.

Finally whatever happens, even if we ignore CO2, running low on oil will have severe economic impacts.

Alright, it sounds like you're parsing me a little close to the edge there. I know that alternative fossil fuel derived liquid fuels are bad. I really get that. Sorry if my terminology wasn't clear there. It would be a lot better if we transitioned away from fossil fuels to anything else, bottom line. We definitely agree on that. (I think.)

What I'm really saying is, I'm worried that if the world is bound and determined to keep on using fossil fuels, they can. Sure, prices will go up and the environmental destruction would get much, much worse. I'd really love for rising oil prices to finally get people to switch to electricity or some carbon neutral fuel to power vehicles. But I'm worried that scarcity and rising prices alone won't do it. I'd love for some leadership to start the move to more sustainable energy for transportation, so we'd have an alternative for fossil fuels when easy oil starts running out. There could be some fossil fuel scarcity apocalypse on the horizon, but I think it might be farther off. And the longer we go along with business as usual, that worse it gets for the environment. Something like a 70s era oil scare would probably be a good wake up call, but that oil scare didn't push us off oil, and neither did $4 a gallon. I'm sure there's probably some price that will force people to demand action, but there's that 'frog in boiling milk' effect to worry about. I'm worried that politicians will keep postponing short term pain and creating a larger long term crisis.

So what I meant when I said "I'm not worried about running out of oil", what I meant was, "I'm not worried that oil companies are going to stop providing some horrifically environmentally destructive fossil fuel based product", and what I meant when I said "I'm more worried about the atmosphere filling up with CO2", I meant, "I'm more worried that the oil companies will be able to keep us provided with horrifically destructive fossil fuel based products for a long time, and we'll keep buying it, thus filling up the atmosphere with CO2, accelerating global climate change, and destroying the world as we know it."

So am I being clear here? I'm pretty sure we're forcefully agreeing with each other, I'm hoping we don't have to get snippy about it.

Yeah, maybe it was my mistake but I got the impression that you thought shale oil and coal conversion would make up for oil with no drawback.

Just as much as I wanted to be clear with you I wanted to be sure any lurkers that might read this knew as well.

Since you have clarified it and I've beaten the dead horse I suppose we can look ahead...

Do you believe that Global Climate Change is real, and that it is caused by humans?

If you do not believe in the Theory of Gravity, will you float away?

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Clarification about where visitors to SPCR come from:

A visit to Alexa will give you one very unusual fact about SPCR "popularity" in the world -- unlike the vast majority of N. Am. sites, SPCR is more popular in the world than in the US: 40,000 rank in the world vs 52,000 in US.

More details from Google Analytics -- re % of visitors from continents.

Europe -- 50% (including UK = 8.6% of total site traffic)
Americas -- 33% (US = 25% of total site traffic)
Asia -- 8.5%
Oceania - 6.8%

US is the single largest majority. Canada 7.1%, Australia 6.9%, Sweden 4%.... a whole lot of EU countries at ~3%. So SPCR has ~50% of visitors coming from countries where English is not the official language.

Solar PV still doesn't even register on the US graph (it's less than 1%).

So lets look at World consumption



For some reason they don't include the legend in this graph so I'll put it here:

Gray = Coal
Blue = Hydro
Orange = Nuclear
Red = Natural Gas
Green = Oil

again no solar to speak of.

statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_2010.pdf is worth looking at, here are some excerpts

"OPEC oil production –7.3% The largest decline since 1983"
"Natural gas production –2.1% The first decline on record"
"Coal’s share of world energy consumption 29.4% The highest since 1970"

far more detail in the PDF, charts, maps, raw data, etcetera.

Interesting book, I'm reading it now. Oh and for those that didn't click on the link the title of the book is "Sustainable Energy — without the hot air" not just without hot air.

I love the dedication "to those who will not have the benefit of two billion years’ accumulated energy reserves"

another line I saw later was

"If all the ineffective ideas for solving the energy crisis were laid end to end, they would reach to the moon and back"

and here is one that surprised me

Xbox 160W
Sony Playstation 3 190W
Nintendo Wii 18W

So playing a Wii takes 1/10th the energy of playing an xbox or playstation. Now I know why there was a red ring of death. Hot components in a tight space. (high energy in small space = hot).

I'm having trouble finding the video mentioned as being a safety video at www.valence.com. Looks like they took it down since the book was written.