I'm looking forward to 2010-2015, though hopefully without so much warfare, because it's going to be the best thing that ever happens to our planet to be FORCED off oil dependency.

Do you guys think we'll drill in Alaska first or we'll finally "get it" that this is a futile effort and begin utilizing alternative energy sources instead? 

I'm not sure how we will get away with not having a war of some kind over the last remaining cheap oil.  Every other major civilization to date has had resource wars.  The question is how to war will be waged, I think, since there are so many avenues now beyond just bombing the heck out of somebody.  Currently the EU, the US, and China are the worlds three biggest competitors for the cream of the world's oil crop, and if any two of those come to blows we have huge problems.

If I recall correctly, we -are- drilling in Alaska for oil, just not in the wild life reserve that is so hotly contested.  Which is some what beyond the point seeing as we consume so much energy in a day that very few of the alternative energy sources will keep us satiated.

I'm not really sold on the alternative energy bandwagon.  At one point, I was, but in taking even a small closer look at the playing field it was plain that there would be a huge problem in even trying to make a deversified power base over the old Coal/Oil/Nuclear trinity.

I think the solution is to simply use less non-human energy, but that too is rife with problems because it basicaly asks that (well in the US at least) we reverse our market expectations.  How likely is that going to happen?  Well, it would probably take the equivalent of a national panic attack or skipping an energy heart beat, with the realization that more was on the way... and other fun things like the empowerment of local people to do things on a smaller scale, beyond the scope of national or regional policy issues.

Yeah, what I meant by Alaska was the wildlife reserve. The Republican party especially seems very keen on the idea of drilling there. I don't see how delaying peak oil a few more years by drilling up there will in any way solve the problem, but that's Republicans for you. "Make a buck while you still can" mentality. 

I agree that cutting down our usage would do wonders, but I have a very hard time convincing myself that people will actually do that - especially in the US, if nowhere else. Most of this country isn't even convinced that we are the cause of global warming. Several of my conservative friends have told me that they think it's just political hype from the Democratic party in the same way that the conservatives are hyping up Terrorism to support their agenda, nevermind the fact that the U.N. has stated that global warming is happening, that we are the cause, and that the US is only one of 3 countries trying to deny it (the other 2 being China and Turkey).

I was talking to some people over the Thanksgiving holidays and they seemed to think that nuclear power was the answer to the energy crisis. It has a bad wrap in the US, but France is nearly 100% nuclear at this point... I don't know. I'm still hoping for more of a cultural change than just switching to nuclear, but it does seem more likely an avenue the Republicans will embrace than less consumption would be. They'll try everything else before they'll accept a method where they're not making as much of a profit each year. 

Last I heard, and this was a while ago... say 4 years; that if the US wanted to go -completely nuclear- than in the world there is only enough of a supply of recoverable nuclear fuel to last us 50 years tops.  This would mean that after a while we would be mining coal to get the radioactive isotopes out for fission reactions, not for its hydrocarbons.

I heard a funny joke from a Lakota peer of mine:  When the US government was out looking for permanent sites to dump our spent nuclear fuel, they ran through a Lakota reservation and thought about using the mountain near by.  They ran into a problem trying to figure out how to make symbol that would be universally understood for all time that this was dangerous.  A Lakota elder happened by this conversation, and said to the men: "Do not worry, when you are gone, we will tell them where you put your trash." 

In terms of conservative vs liberal i'm not sure I like the disinction since i'm fairly conservative on some things and liberal on others.  Consider that the 'progressive' techno-uptopianists tend to be considered as 'liberals'.  Republican vs Democrat seems -better- but not the best since they seem to make weird breeds of both the parties in odd places.

I think its fair to say though that people don't like change.  Our brain and our body are structured to use as little energy as possible, and that means making use of patterns of behavior and making repetative tasks easier by building up the resources needed to do them.  Breaking out of those patterns requires more energy and is fairly uncomfortable on all levels.  Which is what most plans for alternative energy... or just about -anything- talked about on this site requires: a wide ranging change in how we live our lives on -some- level.  Too bad for them that reality seems to be against their arguments.

I think people will very willing make a change once it become too uncomfortable trying to maintain the old patterns.  For some of us that has come early, for others... well, not so much.  I think all of us who are trying to re-invent, pioneer, re-learn, or impliment strategies for dealing with a failing civilization infrasctructure are pretty essential, since most people when the more immediate problems surface will be in a state of shock.  Those people who have been doing it for a while should be able to seize the situation and make the best of it.

hmmm... I don't think that is true about nuclear energy, though maybe 50 years ago that was the case. We now have the technology to make a completely enclosed system that reuses, or recycles, what was once the waste product of nuclear energy back into the system to keep it running without having to put more in. That's the way the French do it, anyway. They recycle their waste instead of burying it like the Americans do.

Olivia,

I'm going to come off as a jerk here. I apologize for that, but this seems far too important to me to let slide.

The second law of thermodynamics still applies. A closed system only has so much energy, and if you want to take any energy out, say to convert to electricity, you have to put some energy in. From what I can glean from Wikipedia (here and here), they use the reactor to turn long lived radioactive materials into much shorter lived materials, so they don't sit around for thousands of years.

--William

Hi, I'm Patrick. I'm just going to jump into this conversation, because I'm interested in alternatives to fossil fuels.

From what I have learned of them, breeder reactors take stray neutrons from the reactor's core, capturing them using a blanket of uranium-238 and producing an abundance of plutonium-239, the primary fuel source of nuclear power. While there is not an indefinite supply (meaning that nuclear power isn't self-sustaining), naturally occurring uranium is about as common as tin or zinc; supplies are not likely to be exhausted in the near future.

While nuclear energy may not be the entire answer to the problem of fossil fuels, I believe it to be a much more effective energy source than coal (which releases more radiation into the environment than nuclear power) or oil.

Hey William,

You don't sound like a jerk at all. I'm sorry my post was not well-written. I should have said that the WASTE part of French nuclear plants are closed systems. Patrick mentioned breeder reactors, which is the kind of reactor I'm referring to. We don't use them in the US because there is no demand for nuclear energy research or improvement in this country. Existing US plants take the waste that has only been used once and bury it in the ground. In France, however, they recycle the waste back into the system (an average of about 12 times, I think) before having to add any fresh uranium. US nuclear plants create nuclear waste, but they don't have to if we were to only adopt the much more highly advanced French system. They could be a zero-emissions energy source for clean energy if we wanted them to be. When you compare our nuclear plants to the recycling French ones, ours seem archaic and ludicrous. Why release radioactive waste into the environment when you can recycle it AND make your energy plant 12 times more effecient at the same time? The answer is because no one in this country is interested in doing that. There's no demand to change it.

That said, I don't think nuclear energy is the whole answer, but it does create a lot more energy than solar, wind, or wave can, which can give us more time to adjust to a more conservative energy using lifestyle without suffering total collapse. Conservation is definitely a good idea. Diversity of energy sources is another good idea.

If the system is sustained or perpetuated, nobody will care about easing back on their energy consumption unless its trendy, and trends pass.  While I agree that Nuclear is a better choice at this stage of technical know-how concerning it, it will take a reduction in total energy capacity to make the majority of people reign in their energy consumption.

edit: "...more in the ground."

(Sorry for my lack of typing skills. My brain thinks faster than my fingers and I sometimes forget to complete sentences).

Nuclear power doesn't solve (or even address) the myriad transportation uses of energy - planes, autos, trucks, ships, trains (with the exception of light, electrified rail) all use liquid petroleum of one distillation or another. France is in the very same, uh, boat.

2/3 of the US oil consumed goes directly for transportation - and it's used in the manner of "burned once, then it's gone".

-Jim

Hey Jim,

I think we need to use energy methods where they are appropriate, and use as many different kinds of energy methods as possible if we really want to make it sustainable. Just as we all agree that cultural diversity is the key to sustainable culture ("10,000 ways"), and that biological diversity is the key to life, so too is energy diversity. In other words, electric cars are cheap, non-polluting, and solve the oil problem. Steam engines for freight trains? Solar houses for lighting and heating homes, etc. etc. The reason we went through oil so quickly is because we relied on it for EVERYTHING.

That said, the US military has been using nuclear turbines for nearly all their aircraft carriers for many years now. These things are designed to take missile blows head on without breeching the reactors. So, nuclear energy can be used for transportation, I just think it would be rather expensive when electric cars are also an available technology.

-Olivia

In the US we -do- have a sort of energy diversity.  For the most part our electrical generation is done for a large part with coal, and coal is something that the US still has a very good deal of, baring some problems like high sulpher content, we also use nuclear for a decent chunk of our energy reserves.  Oil power plants, while not being the minority, are still not the majority, and we certainly do not use oil for everything.

Even in heating you have three or so major modes of heating: Natural Gas, Electric, and Fuel Oil. While some of the electric might come from oil itself, its also just as likely to come from coal, nukes, or wind power (which is the combination we have here in northern Illinois).

The reason we have gone through oil so quickly is the same reason that populations grow to the limit of their food supplies: if a resource is easily and readily availible, we will use it in preference to others.  The same is true for any other culture.  Oil is currently 'cheap' and is energy rich so it can be put into a variety of applications, so we do so.

Trying to convert the US's transportation infrastructure to electric would be a huge nightmare for many many reasons.  First off, we are already using the oil in frastructure that has been in place for decades, and oil is still cheap so a move would seem to be counter intuitive.  Secondly, a change in infrastructure would require the expansion of the electrical systems in order to serve the need demanded by the electrical cars.  In this case you would both need to construct new energy path ways, which requires energy itself, and new electricity sources which might very well be oil fueled themselves if we have to start dipping even further into our coal reserves.  Third, it would require lots of people to get new vehicals in transition, some people just don't have the economic means to do that.  If the situation was governent or corperately sponsored it might help, but the state of the federal government is one that is not condusive to that kind of program.

In the end, Coal, Oil, Natural Gas, and Nuclear are not sustainable energy sources.  They have a limited span of use and do not regenerate within human siginifigant time periods.  Any system that relies on them is, itself, not sustainable.