io9 
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San Francisco, 7:35 AM
Mon Dec 7
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/28/09
Ahem... Blood Car. #dystopia
10/28/09
The upside: to paraphrase one scientist on the project, "I don't believe in peak oil, only peak technology."
The downside: it's not cheap, and no, you can't make it viable for $1.50 a gallon.
The other upside: the fact that you can't do it cheap will (hopefully) make other forms of energy seem more attractive.
This idea that we'll wake up one morning to find the oil tap has run dry is an easy myth to scare ourselves into action, but reality will be much more complicated than Mad Max. (Though probably not as bad-ass.) #dystopia
10/28/09
If peak oil was imminent, they'd be hoarding and price-gouging. You can really, really, count on it. The only reason not to hoard and price-gouge is if you think there's still too much lead-time before the prime hoard/gouge era, and you don't want to make alternatives economically feasible too soon.
Besides, Peak Oil being a "crisis" is pretty much 100% myth. It'll hurt the economy some, and that's about it. There's still plenty of coal around (no, really, centuries worth). Coal can not only be used for many of the fuel/energy purposes of petroleum, it can also be made into petroleum. The process become economically viable around $4-$5 per gallon. We already know that gasoline prices like that don't cause the end of civilization, since Europe pays a lot more, and all it means is that only rich people can have cars that aren't crappy little shitboxes.
So, no end of civilization, no end of plastics feedstocks, no need to worry, really.
If you're really desperate to worry about Peak Oil, about the only rational way is to worry about environmental impact. Regular oil is way cleaner than coal and synthetic oil.
-Kle. #dystopia
10/27/09
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10/28/09
Tens of millions of suburbanites in this country are in the same situation. #dystopia
10/27/09
I is confus-ed. #dystopia
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10/27/09
[www.technologyreview.com] (There's much more to be discovered offshore in the Gulf, BTW)
You may remember Boone Picken's proposal to switch to a natural gas economy last year. The US could be self-sufficient with a combination of natural gas, nuclear and renewable resources in fairly short order. Then, if you're willing to clean up coal...
Remind me of this energy provoked social break down again in 100 years or so.
(PS, oil prices are ticking up due to the dollar is taking it in the shorts -- those staggering deficits remember? -- rather than any sudden change in availability.) #dystopia
10/27/09
Again you have made me unleash my dogs of war.
Look at what remains of your gallant scouts. Why? Because you're selfish! You hoard your gasoline.
Now, my prisoners say you plan to take your gasoline out of the Wasteland. You sent them out this morning to find a vehicle. A rig big enough to haul that fat tank of gas.
What a puny plan! #dystopia
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10/27/09
And it's not enough for there to be oil in the ground. It has to be economically extractable: it has to take less energy than is in a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. Otherwise, its a net loss energy-wise.
It's astounding the stuff we make from oil: not just fuel (and hence: virtually all transportation and heating), not just plastics (and hence: virtually all consumer goods and packaging), not just lubrication (and hence: virtually the entire manufacturing base), but commercial fertilizer and all other sorts of petrochemicals on which we've come to depend.
I sometimes wonder of running out of oil is one of the factors that explain the Fermi Paradox. #dystopia
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10/27/09
Remember the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe following WWII? I recall reading that the Plan was being formulated in the U.S. State Department long before we were involved directly in the war. That's the kind of long term thinking I'd like to see more of.
I was recently at a conference in Santa Fe New Mexico at which a representative from DARPA remarked that "we lost control of the hardware a long time ago, and now we're losing control of the software". By which he meant all the supercomputer manufacturers had gone out of business because all the money is in the commercial space. So now we have to figure out how to build supercomputers from commodity multicore whiteboxes. (Hint: unless your application is embarrassingly parallel -- like Google's MapReduce architecture -- and doesn't move a lot of data around, it doesn't map well to the Brave New Computational World.) This is another great example of how we've lost a possibly critical long term ability while succeeding marvelously in the short term.
(SOAPBOX MODE OFF) #dystopia
10/27/09
10/27/09
But to be fair to those that may disagree with me (feel free, that's how I learn) it is _very_ hard to optimize for the long term, or to even know what the long term is. I see this in software product development all the time: how do you justify expending resources (e.g. developer time) to achieve a long term goal when you don't even know what the future holds? Better to do just enough to make the current iteration work, and worry about the future in the future, when presumably we'll have a better view of it.
Yeah, I'm perfectly capable of arguing both sides of that issue (and routinely do). #dystopia
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#@! #dystopia
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