The Oil Drum

So would I - that's the about as baseline as it gets. We'll find out real fast whether we have a physics problem or an engineering problem.

I was thinking of a remark posted some time in the last six or eight months stating that we are blowing through 400 years' worth of fossil hydrocarbon every year. Perhaps that source was talking about the natural sequestration rate in peat bogs and such.

I may have overstated the ratio, as the Wikipedia says the biosphere has "about 1900 gigatonnes of carbon". So if we throw every last polar bear, housecat, and blade of grass into the TDP retort, we may juuust be able to make our 85mbpd of artificial fuel for awhile... :)

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}

We don't inherently need to replace fossel fixed carbon at the rate we are consuming now. We just need enough energy to provide the humans on this planet with a viable lifestyle and economic system.

True.

I just sort of latched onto this subject, because for me it's like the ethanol hype only more so. There seems to be a 'techno-fix' mentality about these proposals with an implicit assumption that they will scale up to tens of millions of barrels / day.

In the end, I think recycling and reuse will prevail. It's a lot cheaper to simply separate the glass, plastic, steel, dog poop, carrion, spent batteries, etc (or to keep them separate) than to somehow try to cook them down into primordial soup and re-refine them. It's a symptom of our open-cycle culture, I think, to just throw everything together like that...

It seems that from a theoretical perspective we do have enough. Engineer Poet posted a piece a while ago showing how biomass could provide much of our energy needs. Solar could supplement it (http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/27/0432/3533).

Well I suppose, until the number of carbon atoms in the form of humans equals 1900 gigatonnes or so :^)

Finally, there is no real need for humans to use as much energy as we do. We are only so wasteful because energy is cheap. Once it is no longer cheap, we will use less to produce the same results.

Unfortunately as explained by Matt Savinar, Jay Hanson, and others: it isn't anything like human nature to even try to conserve. I think the re-education process is going to be extremely painful at best.

And then you have the likelihood of catabolic collapse: the good news is, almost everybody survives; the bad news is the same thing, as we now have six billion mouths to feed on a dwindling resource base. Last time humans lived in comfortable harmony with nature, there were not nearly this many of us.

| _{The problem will solve itself.}
|  _{But not in a nice way.}