I've got land. Do you?

[aloofman]

OR won't be allowed to develop the technology because the U.S. will squash them to prevent them from making bombs?

There's a major distinction here. There are countries that use nuclear power (Japan, for example) that have rejected building nuclear weapons. All nuclear powers are subject to inspections to show that they're using it for peaceful purposes. It is the defiance or avoidance of these inspections that yielded the current situations with Iran and North Korea.

Anybody who thinks it's a good idea for North Korea or Iran to have nuclear weapons, please raise their hand.

 

[tristan]

Didn't I read these articles in 1979 during the last oil crisis?

Pollution is a big deal. The sky, rivers, and sea aren't our sewers. But running out of resources isn't an issue. The reason that commodities are more expensive now has more to do with inflation than anything else. Whenever Greenspan gets nervous he adds some more greenbacks to the money supply. Then he's hailed as a genius.

 

[GFLPraxis]

One of the things not mentioned here, likely do to the mathematical nature, was discussed in my Calculus class. I don't really remember the figures, but I'll try to convey the general gist of it.

Basicly, our oil consumption ITSELF is constantly increasing. The rate at which we consume oil doubles every so often (I think it was a decade).


So you'll see a lot of articles claiming, "Oh, at present consumption rates we have enough oil to last us forty years!" Several were shown. The thing that these newswriters aren't accounting for is that the consumption rates are RAPIDLY increasing every year. We DON'T be at present consumption rates for the next forty years. The rate we consume oil will INCREASE. It'll likely be gone in 10-20 years, not forty.

The video was IIRC around 5-10 years old.

These articles are right. Once we past peak production worldwide, we're going to have a serious problem. When we hit the point that our consumption rates are increasing, but the amount of oil being produced is DECREASING...we'll have a massive shortage on hand.
Ouch.

 

[mpw]

...Basicly, our oil consumption ITSELF is constantly increasing. The rate at which we consume oil doubles every so often (I think it was a decade)...

Oil consumption will increase expotentially over the next decade as India and China embrace car ownership. It's also likely that they'll do so toward the cheaper end of the car market using out-dated engines designs that no longer meet the pollution requirements of many western countries.

We're pretty much screwed!