> apocalyptic freak? doomsday scenario?
>
> I hope your right! Bless you! The sooner the
> better!
>
i'm not so sure, AQ. the issue as i see it our reliance on cheap oil. i'm not sure many people (who've had better things to do than spend two years reading about this depressing, obtuse subject) are aware of how major a disaster it would be if humanity runs into permanent severe oil shortages without an alternative in place.
how do the 8 million people in london survive when the costs of food production and distribution push the prices in the supermarkets into the stratosphere? indeed, where do we get all that food when we've run out of the raw materials to produce nitrate-rich fertilizer? and what do we package it in when the plastic is all gone? and where do the people who worked in plastics now find jobs?
these questions are the first off the top of my head... there are thousands more where they came from... oil is such a precious resource (truly... just because humanity has squandered it and used it to pollute half the planet isn't a comment on petrochemicals, just on our species stupidity). it is the abundance of cheap oil that has allowed our population to reach the heady heights of 6 billion.
the studies which have been done to assess the potential "carrying capacity" of mother earth when the security of cheap oil is removed from the equation do not make comfortable reading. of these studies, one in particular by a chap named Pimentel, i think - though i'll have to dig out the paper again to be sure it was him - made a lot of sense to me. he took the total surface area of the planet, worked out how much energy arrives here in the form of solar joules, and based his "carrying capacity" calculations on that number. this means that whether you talk solar panels, windmills, biomass or whatever, the law of conservation of energy tells us that we can never produce more energy from renewables than is "beamed down" by the sun.
he arrived at a top-end maximum figure of 2 billion people living at sustenance level if we make efficient use of all the energy falling from the sky. more comfortable numbers around half a billion would allow those people to live to a decent standard.
with an expected 8 billion people on the planet by the time the oil shortages begin, i'm not entirely sure the future is going to be a nice place to live to be frank (hence the accusations of pessimism).
the "solar carrying capacity" calculations leave out nuclear energy, which is like fossil fuels in that it stands a little outside the solar cycle (though even oil is originally a solar fuel... just millions of years worth of stored solar, rather than part of the constant solar cycle). however, uranium-mining is about as energy intensive an operation as you can get, and that's not even beginning to think about the waste issues. plus, you might be able to generate electricity using solar, but that still doesn't replace the thousands of other applications for oil.
if technology is to save us, then i believe we need to be looking at nuclear fusion technologies to generate electricty, and conserving the remainder of our oil for uses other than burning it in personal vehicles. but with every day that passes that the issue is ignored, it gets less and less likely that some wondrous solution will be made available in time to avert a catastrophe.
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