Quote:
Originally Posted by pEte fiSt iN Ur fAce
When people speak of innovation as it pertains to oil, my eyes roll back in my head.
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You mention a lot here. I don't want to hijack a thread about this development with a long conversation about energy, but you're not wrong that it is a conversation worth having. As far as technology goes, no one knows for sure what technology and technologies will be implemented in the future to mitigate our challenges, but there's no reason to say there won't be any. In Europe following the Middle Ages, charcoal was a massive source of energy. Deforestation became a very real problem, so much so that England had a serious lack of wood for constructing ships and buildings. This problem was not put to rest until new technologies for extraction of coal were developed. Coal itself had been "exhausted" centuries earlier. We were utterly convinced that it would be, because the very accessible coal was increasingly hard to find. So this is what people mean when they say "technology." It's nothing to do with Klingons or warp speed: it is a grindingly slow process of innovation, and it requires a lot of patience. A lot of it is invisible, which is why it can be easy to overlook.
What we're doing in Alberta is an example- these techniques didn't exist decades ago, and even where they did would not have been economical because of the price of oil. With oil prices where they are, we are enabled to use more expensive technologies to extract it. It's a choice to view that as desperation. Fracking is another example of a new and expensive technique that only makes economical sense above a certain price for oil. It is incorrect to say that the big oil consumers are producing less- this year, the U.S. will be a net exporter of oil.
I shouldn't have implied that it is a big deal that oil prices will increase- since its discovery, it has increased in price since the most accessible oil is consumed first. This is only logical. The ways in which we use oil have become more efficient- I'm no great fan of the personal automobile, either, and think that our dependence on it has more negative impacts than just environmental, but a car being sold today is more efficient (while still being safer and better-performing) than a car 20, ten, or even just five years ago. Likewise for industrial uses of oil.
In my opinion, corn ethanol is a senseless government scheme that amounts mostly to hidden subsidies to farmers. But that doesn't mean that the technologies being developed to create biofuels are non-starters: we may one day
produce ethanol from waste wood and other types of vegetation. Enough solar energy hits the Earth each day to power everything we've ever built many times over. Here in Ontario we have a very healthy electricity mix that relies on nuclear and hydro-electric energy. Our electricity consumption is currently so uneven that we sometimes pay other jurisdictions to accept our surplus hydro overnight- we could power many electric cars in this province without adding a single kilowatt of capacity.
I don't think this development is a good idea, but it's not because I think we're headed for peak energy and economic collapse because there are simply no more "easily" (this is subjective) accessible energy sources. There's too many reasons to be positive about things generally, so my reasoning is that we shouldn't put scarce local resources into more-of-the-same development when there are other types of developments that would add a lot more value to our economy and community.