Tom Barber wrote:
> Tom, I have a great interest in this sort of thing. Do you have any leads as
> to where you heard or read about it?
Not off-hand. I read a lot of magazines and books and it seems to seep
out and get lost.
What worries me in the near future is that we seem to be ramping up to
a new facist/socialist society, at least in the US, maybe Europe too,
and no top down society can have the flexibility to respond to severe
new stresses. There are a lot of societies that are moving to greater
openness and freedom though, at the same time. The answers will
probably come from these places, I expect. I remain hopeful.
To Hillary McClure, who said:. Check out
<http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm>, and other articles on
the same website about the world energy supply. There really doesn't
seem to be a lot to argue about there. World oil production is peaking
around now or in the next several years...
Actually there are several possible arguments, not the least that
these same experts have made these same predictions over and over
again in the past 100 years, to be made fools of by the passage of
time. If we take them as true this time, there are still other avenues
to explore.
I teach at a large car manufacturer, Nissan, and most of my students
are engineers. They are hard at work on cars that don't burn oil. The
main drawback now is cost of fuel. Hydrogen and other proposed
replacement fuels are still far more expensive than oil based fuels,
and will be until the peak of oil production is passed in a decade or
so. After that oil prices will creep up and probably other fuels will
become competitive. Unfortunately that probably means mass industrial
sized hydrogen production, using electricity generated by nuclear
power. Like I said, I am hopeful, but there are certainly a lot of
unsolved problems that need careful thought.
I am less hopeful about the future of solar and wind power. Both
require very special environments to function well, and both are
likely to cause a lot of environmental problems if used extensively.
Time will tell.
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