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Musings on the Price of Gas | 65 comments (65 topical)

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It is good in the long-run (5.00 / 2) (#62)
by facta non verba on Sat Apr 19, 2008 at 07:35:28 PM EST
not the short-term. It will be extremely painful. It already is. We had have food riots in Egypt, Haiti, India, Burma this year. This is all related.

The long-term is a twenty year or more horizon and frankly apart from Iceland, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland and Cuba, the road off oil has not been broached.

To broach this subject in the US requires a political leadership that is wholly missing apart from a few on the margin. To not tackle the complex energy issues that confront is to sign our death warrants.

The fact is that we eat petroleum, it permeates every aspect of modern civilization. Without it, I could not send this message to you. We have peaked petroleum and while we can replace parts of it, for some uses there is no substitute. Our grandfathers produced 40 bushels of corn per acre. We can produce 200 bushels per acre because of petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides. When that's gone we will be able to feed maybe 3 billion people, other estimates are in the range of a billion to two. How we get there will matter thus I say those who come after us will curse us.

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Musings on the Price of Gas | 65 comments (65 topical)

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