curveball21's Blog

Is anyone else in Cleveland as concerned about peak oil as I am?

In a nutshell, peak oil theory states that things don't start going to heck as soon as the last drop of oil is burned up in some engine, but rather things start going to heck as soon as the supply of oil is unable to keep up with demand.  At some point (and maybe it has already happened, maybe it will happen 10 years from now) there will be an annual amount of oil production that is not ever again exceeded in succeeding years.  This will coincide with an ever-increasing demand by customers old (US, Europe, Japan) and new (India, China) which will cause prices to skyrocket, and at the very least a global economic depression the likes of which we haven't seen for some time.  The downside is that unless oil is replaced by something else (hopefully more climate friendly, but maybe not) there will be no way for the depression to end (other than severe population decreases reducing demand). 

I think our cultural addiction to cheap, easily available energy will cause a lot of pain and upheaval.  I'm not convinced that the free market is capable of solving a problem which at the point of peak oil is insolvable.  After all, they ain't making any more oil.

In the Chigago Tribune last year, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Salopek did an excellent article tracing "the gas pumped at a single station to that fuel's shadowy sources around the globe.  The story begins at a glistening marathon outlet on Chigago's exurban edge and ranges from the fishless waters off the coast of Nigeria to the politically restless fields of Venezuela and beyond.  Salopek's journey, a travelogue of America's addiction to oil, reveals how American consumers are bound to some of the most violent, desperate corners of the planet and to a petroleum economy so fragile it may not last."

Read it here:  http://www.chicagotribune.com/chi-oil-email,1,3687917.
story

Tell me what you think

 

 

Baseball has a wonderful way of going on and on and on.

It goes on and on so much that weird things happen.  Things that would seem like they are "meant" to happen that way, if you believe in that sort of thing.

That's why my prediction for the remainder of the Tribe-Red Sox series is that this year Boston will further exorcise some old ghosts.  After all, the once-dreaded Yankees have gone from having the unbeatable "Yankee mystique" to an organization in utter disarray.  When did they jump the shark?  Right when the Red Sox reversed 86 years of agony and finally went over the top, not only winning the World Series in 2004, but handing the Yankees a humiliating defeat in an ALCS they were up 3-0.

I predict that the Indians will lose a tight game 6 in late innings.  One member of the Tribe will forevermore be haunted by the not-quite-dead ghost of Bill Buckner and be run out of town when he blows a play spectacularly, handing the Tribe another offseason of dreaming about the might-have beens.  Sunday's game 7 will not be remembered at all except for the mercy-killing coup de grace that it was. 

 

 

I am a Democrat, but it is just crazy to not plan for your own retirement. It is one area you should exercise some old-fashioned self reliance in. After all, it is the one thing in life you can't get a loan for.

Social Security only earning 3% on its investments is in a funny way good for America. You have to understand that our national debt has gone up from @3T (as in Trillion or $1,000,000,000,000.00) to almost 9T in the last seven years. Now, I don't mean to point fingers at any one person, but for the record, you can only put .5T on the till as the cost of the war in Iraq. The other 5.5T? It was pretty much a combination of tax giveaways to the well off (thanks George!), pay-offs to private contractors hired to do inherently government jobs (thereby *shrinking* the apparent size of government), and obscene pork barrel projects like the Farm and Highway bills.

The next prez, whoever he or she is needs to make reducing the deficit a priority and not just a lip service project or we are gonna be in a world of hurt for the next decade or two. Think of how much of your tax dollars go to service 9T in interest @ 4-5%...interest is costing us 5x what the Iraq War is costing us every year, and forget Social Security, the national debt is the new third rail of American politics.

Is anyone else in Cleveland as concerned about peak oil as I am?

In a nutshell, peak oil theory states that things don't start going to heck as soon as the last drop of oil is burned up in some engine, but rather things start going to heck as soon as the supply of oil is unable to keep up with demand.  At some point (and maybe it has already happened, maybe it will happen 10 years from now) there will be an annual amount of oil production that is not ever again exceeded in succeeding years.  This will coincide with an ever-increasing demand by customers old (US, Europe, Japan) and new (India, China) which will cause prices to skyrocket, and at the very least a global economic depression the likes of which we haven't seen for some time.  The downside is that unless oil is replaced by something else (hopefully more climate friendly, but maybe not) there will be no way for the depression to end (other than severe population decreases reducing demand). 

I think our cultural addiction to cheap, easily available energy will cause a lot of pain and upheaval.  I'm not convinced that the free market is capable of solving a problem which at the point of peak oil is insolvable.  After all, they ain't making any more oil.

I'm out of time now, but if there is further interest or thoughts on this subject, I will post more later.  You can Google "peak oil" to get a great start on learning more.   

I was very gratified to hear that all of those teenagers who were clearly railroaded in Louisiana with those outrageous attempted murder charges finally had the last of the charges dropped.

Congratulations to those of you who spent time and effort publicizing their cause. 

Thumbs up to Gorbash81 who first posted about it in these blogs. 

 

You can read about it at this link: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/14/jena.six/index.
html

Here is what I believe:

This life is the most important.  God, if there is one, clearly intends for this life to be a learning experience.  If there is a meaning to life we are not meant to know it, but we are meant to try.  Anyone that tells you they have the correct answer is delusional.  There is no way God, with perfect knowledge, could possibly believe that human beings would culturally evolve to the level we have today and still find a connection to the religious customs and world beliefs of ancient nomads.  The longer it takes for God to come around with a Jesus 2.0 update, the harder it is for reasonable people to believe.  I mean why is it right for St. Thomas to get to touch the risen Lord to believe and I get my instruction from a line of 200 generations from St. Thomas that tell me to believe because it is just so.  I should get the same consideration St. Thomas got or it is all just an unfair b.s. game (like pro wrestling) where God has already decided the winners and losers in advance.  That's why I don't believe in stuff like the Rapture or the Second Coming.  Playing the Devil's Advocate though....if something like the Rapture did happen, it would be evident to all, and people who were not taken would still be given a chance to re-evaluate their position and have an opportunity to be saved.

No one knows what happens to us when we die.  I personally believe that where we go when we die is exactly where we were before we were born.  It is probably nowhere (oblivion).  Wherever it is, I really doubt it is going to be a place where we adore the face of God or a place where we burn in eternal torment.  Even if you are a Christian fundamentalist, there are too many examples of descriptions of both heaven and hell in the Bible that describe them as very different types of places to be really sure either.  Some passages describe hell as a lake of fire, others as a dark place where God is simply absent.  It can't really be both.  The same with heaven. 

The afterlife is either very complicated (multiple levels of heaven and hell and places in between and you fall into one of those based on what you did and believed in your life) or very simple (oblivion).  Personally, as much as I love life and living, I hope its oblivion.  If the Christian fundamentalists happen to be right against all odds, *and* God is merciful and lets me in to paradise despite my doubts, they would frankly be impossible to live with for all eternity.  I'd rather take my chances at the pitchfork palace, with all the other enlightened people who foolishly believed in reason and compassion.

I am sure the law of diminishing returns is still going to be in effect in the afterlife.  Being skinned alive by demons and having your flesh burned to a crisp and consumed right before your eyes while the people in heaven watch on closed circuit t.v. and laugh at you isn't going to be as painful the 666,666,666th time as it is the first time, right?

Well welcome to another one of my ponderables.  Unfortunately, this one has no real evidence to back up any opinion you may have.  If they are out there we certainly haven't seen any sign of them.  If they aren't out there, we never will.

In a nutshell, my opinion is that there are alien lifeforms and probably alien civilizations out there.  The universe is just incomprehensively huge, and if life started here, then I am not willing to bet that the mechanisms and conditions that caused it to be so on Earth are not present elsewhere.  Also, scientists are not even certain this is the only universe there is.  Probably many more civilizations have come and gone than are present in the universe right now.  I mean it is about 14 billion years old and our sun is only slightly over 1/3 that age.

I think it is not at all likely that they have ever visited Earth though.  We are getting pretty darn close to discovering the basics of how quantum mechanics and general relativity work and we still have no idea how it might be possible to travel faster than light and still stay in the familiar dimensions we are currently aware of.  If alien beings could even travel half the speed of light, they should be close enough for some evidence of their existence to have been detected.

Another problem is we have no sample size to detect how many civilizations or other planets with living creatures might be there.  To even begin to calculate that you have to find at least one other to begin a scientific extrapolation.  I know Drake tried, but even he admits the sample size problem.

I would also be interested in hearing from people who are deeply religious.  Putting aside your opinion on whether or not other sentient creatures exist in the universe, suppose they really did.  How would you feel when that discovery was announced?  Would it shake your faith in God to know for sure that not every sentient being in the Universe was created in God's image?  Would you view intelligent extraterrestrials as children of God or not?

First, thank you to all who participated in my immigration blog. 

Here is another one of the things that bothers me when I think about it:

Does the Earth have a numerical limit to the amount of people it can support, and what is going to happen to it when we hit that limit?

Should we consider limiting civil liberties to ensure that it never happens (e.g. China's one-child policy).

If we refuse to limit civil liberties, what are the alternatives?  Are they responsible alternatives?  (e.g. will forcing the Earth into a population equilibrium cause more human suffering by disease, war and famine than the human suffering that would be entailed from the limitation of human liberty?

When Benjamin Franklin said "A people who would trade liberty for security deserve neither" the world had limitless horizons.  Not any more. 

 

 

Now I am generally of a liberal bent, and can very often be cajoled into "going along to get along".  Having said that, I think illegal immigration is beginning to have a profound and not positive effect on American culture.

I am genuinely torn about this, becasue I know that immigration in its historical sense (and not always legal either) is one of the things that has made this country so strong and vibrant.  The main difference to me, between then and now is that in the past immigrants were coming from many different cultural backgrounds and even though they formed communities were eventually forced to effectively assimilate to get by and advance in America.

In the present day the vast majority of immigrants come from Spanish speaking cultures, fleeing corruption and political and economic suppression in their homelands.  Having visited areas of the US close to the Southern border I can say that it seems to me that capitalism and our traditional American culture is being forced to adjust to the new arrivals rather than the other way around.

I'm not certain this is a totally bad thing, but I'm really pressed to find the positives and hope to start a discussion here about it.

Here are what I see as the main negatives other than cultural invasion:

1.  People fleeing the economic situation in their homelands are likely the people whose personality tends to be risk-taking.  If these people are leaving in droves to find a better life elsewhere, who is left to agitate for change at home?

2.  Some say that illegal immigrants take jobs Americans won't take.  To me this is completely disingenuous.  THERE IS NO JOB AN AMERICAN WON'T TAKE IF HE IS PAID ENOUGH TO DO IT.  American companies are outsourcing American jobs illegally right here at home and the U.S. Government is doing nothing about it.

3.  Reconquista.  It's ours!  We stole it fair and square!