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32 comments on Drilling on Wall Street

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davebygolly on June 26, 2006 - 11:31pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
"Six Billion People! Its the real root of peak oil."

This is true. Very few are willing to face up to it. Everything else, every conservation step is a wasted unless we also address this issue. It's completely obvious.

We either bring world population under control at our own inititiative or nature does it for us. But it would take an uprecedented degree of mutual cooperation between countries, a world-wide education campaign, a change in our world culture.

It won't happen yet. Disaster of some scale will befall us. But I am not a long term pessimist. At some point, realism will prevail. There have been many world-wide bodies functioning in the second half of the 20th century addressing global problems, maybe not with great success always, or even mostly. But their existence shows what's possible. It's just a matter of how much suffering it will take to get our full attention.

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Prodigal Son on June 27, 2006 - 12:30am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In a way, the world faced a similar situation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- isolation had ended and we were confronting, for the first time, the prospect of living together on a steadily shrinking globe. That first experiment ended with world war followed by depression and another world war. We've climbed out of that hole to even greater heights..only now we face the same old problems in a world of declining resources.
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Nagorak on June 27, 2006 - 1:47am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
It's not the root of the problem though.  There are only approaching 300 million in the U.S. and we use 25% of the world's energy.  World population is not the problem, because much of the world doesn't use oil and gas, and the rest while using some, use much, much less than we in the first world do.  

Most countries that are developing into industrialized economies see the need to address population growth.  Not all of them do, and not all of them will, but if they don't, they are the ones that are going to suffer.  The amount of oil a country can afford is based off of its relative wealth, not its population.  If India has 2 billion people, each person will get half as much energy.  

In the end the whole situation will be self regulating.  We can increase efficiency and use better technology to get by with less energy.  Beyond that, if the energy is not available we'll end up going without.  The burden will not be equally felt, but countries like India and China will feel great incentive to solve their population issues (as China already is doing).  If the first world is any guide, basic economics will do the rest, as population is beginning to decline in the first world, sans the United States.  

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ThatsItImout on June 27, 2006 - 2:34am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Nagorak,

Thank you for pointing out what should be to most people self obvious, but somehow never is.

I would go even further than your excellent sentence, "The amount of oil a country can afford is based off of its relative wealth, not its population.", and add a corallory:
"The amount of oil a country must afford to have compared to it's relative  wealth is based on it's relative waste."

Let's deal with those two facts, and keep our eyes on that prize first, before we attempt to socially reengineer the world, which has always had dubious chances of success anyway.

Roger Conner  known to you as ThatsItImout

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BrianT on June 27, 2006 - 9:16am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You make a good point. Continually we hear that peak oil is co-related strongly with peak economic output. As you state, most of the world's population is using little to no oil. Look, post-peak, the % of the world's population that will be using little to no oil will steadily increase. Under the oil usage/economic growth argument, these persons are contributing little to economic growth currently, so why would steadily adding to their numbers crash the global economy? The persons on the planet that are creating wealth are going to have access to oil for a very long time as the % of the world's population that has no access to oil steadily increases. This will not faze Wall Street in the least (in fact they will love it as downward pressure will be put on wages globally).
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