Katrina, Global Warming and Peak Oil

Katrina has upped the dialogue on the role of the federal government, global warming and peak oil. I'm not going to talk about the first and the second to are intertwined. While we have a lot of people telling us we must reduce the use of oil, one because the emissions are causing global warming and two because we are running out of it. I believe that carbon emissions are only a part of the global warming issue but they are still not a good thing. All but a very few now believe that we are approaching the end of oil. So what does that mean to you and I? No body is telling us. There are no substitutes for oil that will allow us to maintain out current life styles. Let's take a quick look at some of the alternatives that are mentioned.

Hydrogen: We should have known that if George W. Bush is talking about it it's not a good idea. The reality is hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy transfer medium. It does not occur naturally and has to be produced by by splitting water. It requires more energy to split the water than you get back when you burn it to create energy.

Solar: Electricity can be produced from sunlight with a photovoltaic cell. A photovoltaic cell is a semi-conductor device which means it made from a pure slice of a crystal of a semi-conductor like silicon. Like hydrogen silicon does not occur naturally and must be produced by splitting silica (quartz). This to requires a lot of energy. Even if a photovoltaic cell over it's lifetime produces more energy than it took to make it we are still dealing with a problem of scale. It would require square miles of land for a solar farm that would equal the output of a small thermal generating plant.

Ethanol: Like the photovoltaic cell ethanol requires energy to produce and requires square miles of land to grow the raw material, grain. In Brazil they are already clearing rain forests to grow grain for ethanol production.

Wind: Wind is certainly renewable but at the same time it takes up a lot of space and it's can't be counted on all the time. Can wind contribute? Yes. It is a substitute for thermal electricity generation?, No. The same can be said for geothermal, tide and wave generation.

The bottom line is our lifestyle is dependent on plentiful cheap oil. Without it we will have to give up our love affair and dependence on the automobile. Without it we will have to rethink our 3, 4 and 5 thousand square foot houses that have become common here on the west coast. With the price of natural gas and electricity due to skyrocket many are going to find out how expensive it is to heat them this winter. Forget 10 dollar toasters from China and apples from New Zealand; shipping costs will make those a thing of the past in the near future. Peak oil will solve one problem, the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.

The politicians of neither party have told us this because we don't want to hear it. Politicians that tell us what we don't want to hear don't get elected even when it's true.

So what are we really going to be giving up? I couple of weeks ago I had a post over at Running Scared on The end of affluence as we know it where I wrote;

Kunstler describes the future as "the end of affluence". The old 70's hippy in me wonders if that's true. What has our "affluent" life style given us? More mental health problems, drug and alcohol addictions, broken families, living next to someone for years and not knowing them, mindless hours in front of a television set, the list goes on.

We can view the upcoming changes as an opportunity for a better life or we can view it as the end of the world. I vote for better life.