Will we have to return to animal and manual labour when the oil runs out?
Before cheap energy, gangs of men used to take years to build anything...bridges, roads, canals etc..and labourers worked the fields etc... when energy costs rise and the oil runs out, will these conditions return?
Answer:
Nah, nuclear and renewable will reduce our dependance on oil. Governemt (including US) is desperate to sever reliance on Middle East and Russia
I sincerely hope so. All pride in work seems to have disappeared from our society since mechanisation took over. We allegedly have become more civillised, personally i think we have gone backwards. No morals, no respect and no self respect and a throw away society. I drive my horses and look forward to the day when there are no more cars. I'm happy to read by candle light or make my own entertainment.
Umm, no. Actually there are many excellent sources of power that can be used. Oil companies have alot of control and that momentum is slowing the introduction of alternative power. You can't change the world economy overnight! Depleted oil supplies will force great change though.
By the way, a large % of the world still 'work the fields' and use 'gangs of men'.
No, I think the old machines will be partially converted to utilise biodiesel, but will eventually get phased out. New machines will be electric, charged from hydropowered, nuclear, geothermal or solar plants. Bicycle sales will go up. :-)
Oil is not going to run out in the next thousand years or more. However it is likely to get a lot more expensive as it may have to be extracted from tar sands, oil shale and whatever. Eventually it will be effectively reserved for use by public transport, emergency vehicles and farming either by price or by legislation.
The main problem for a shortage of oil based fuels is farming. There seems no practical way of powering tractors, tillers and harvesters with mains electricity. Highly expensive fuels mean highly expensive farming and more expensive foods.
Most freight transport is not really a problem. Much of the rail network still exists, is going order and can be extended and electrified. Trucking will return to short haul stuff since it is and always was monstrously energy inefficient over long distances.
The private vehicle will wither away as fuel become too expensive for the average family. Buses and trains will take over just as they did in the period before the boom in personal car sales.
Airlines may cease to exist, or become so fantastically expensive that they will be like they were in the 1930s, only the wealthy could afford to fly.
Biodiesels and ethanol are not a solution. To keep it's vehicle fleet on the road with locally produced ethanol, the USA would have to devote almost all its farmland to ethanol crops and the population would starve. However these can spin out supplies to some extent and reduce some forms of pollution, which is another question.
Ironically, when the car was first built, it was heralded as a sollution to pollution; the pollution being the streets filled with horse dung. Little did they know.
Nope. That will just force the world to change to other sources, IE: Nuclear.
However, that will cause complete economic and social breakdown in the Middle East and other regions that depending on supplying Oil. Can the world survive that?
I grow a large part of my food by manual labor; its more healthfull and costs less other than time lost in front of the tv. My bike and its trailer are in top shape and ready to go. "New" sources of energy are already around, they just are looked at as "fringe" and not accepted by the masses yet.
I doubt it. Humans are smart enough to find an alternitive fuel- such as biofuel, which can be made of most anything, including corn and garbage.f there is an effective biofuel in 50 or so years, these conditions are probably not to return. Though, it would take a little longer to build these things because the biofuel is not as strong as oil, coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
There's no reason to if we simply use the technology we have. The sun is the real energy source for this planet. It was dumb for us to bother with oil in the first place. Did you know that the original diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil?
I doubt that their will be any alternative to oil and coal which will provide such an abundance of cheap energy that we can continue with our egregious waste of resources. The world population will have to fall drastically and a simpler, more local lifestyle will be adopted.
it is probably not a case of returning to musle power, the Human population is now to big to be sustained by such methods; but of reassesing our requirements or facing colapse of civilisation.
the problem is that alternatives to oil all depend on the energy from the sun. (except for nuclear, and the US will not allow most of the world access to that technology) Oil & fossil fuel is just that energy stored from past years.
So what humans have been doing is "spending" our savings to fuel unpresedented growth in the last 200 years.
When those savings run out we will have to survive on the "current" account.
this is best explained in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
http://www.amazon.com/last-hours-ancient...
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Answer:
Nah, nuclear and renewable will reduce our dependance on oil. Governemt (including US) is desperate to sever reliance on Middle East and Russia
I sincerely hope so. All pride in work seems to have disappeared from our society since mechanisation took over. We allegedly have become more civillised, personally i think we have gone backwards. No morals, no respect and no self respect and a throw away society. I drive my horses and look forward to the day when there are no more cars. I'm happy to read by candle light or make my own entertainment.
Umm, no. Actually there are many excellent sources of power that can be used. Oil companies have alot of control and that momentum is slowing the introduction of alternative power. You can't change the world economy overnight! Depleted oil supplies will force great change though.
By the way, a large % of the world still 'work the fields' and use 'gangs of men'.
No, I think the old machines will be partially converted to utilise biodiesel, but will eventually get phased out. New machines will be electric, charged from hydropowered, nuclear, geothermal or solar plants. Bicycle sales will go up. :-)
Oil is not going to run out in the next thousand years or more. However it is likely to get a lot more expensive as it may have to be extracted from tar sands, oil shale and whatever. Eventually it will be effectively reserved for use by public transport, emergency vehicles and farming either by price or by legislation.
The main problem for a shortage of oil based fuels is farming. There seems no practical way of powering tractors, tillers and harvesters with mains electricity. Highly expensive fuels mean highly expensive farming and more expensive foods.
Most freight transport is not really a problem. Much of the rail network still exists, is going order and can be extended and electrified. Trucking will return to short haul stuff since it is and always was monstrously energy inefficient over long distances.
The private vehicle will wither away as fuel become too expensive for the average family. Buses and trains will take over just as they did in the period before the boom in personal car sales.
Airlines may cease to exist, or become so fantastically expensive that they will be like they were in the 1930s, only the wealthy could afford to fly.
Biodiesels and ethanol are not a solution. To keep it's vehicle fleet on the road with locally produced ethanol, the USA would have to devote almost all its farmland to ethanol crops and the population would starve. However these can spin out supplies to some extent and reduce some forms of pollution, which is another question.
Ironically, when the car was first built, it was heralded as a sollution to pollution; the pollution being the streets filled with horse dung. Little did they know.
Nope. That will just force the world to change to other sources, IE: Nuclear.
However, that will cause complete economic and social breakdown in the Middle East and other regions that depending on supplying Oil. Can the world survive that?
I grow a large part of my food by manual labor; its more healthfull and costs less other than time lost in front of the tv. My bike and its trailer are in top shape and ready to go. "New" sources of energy are already around, they just are looked at as "fringe" and not accepted by the masses yet.
I doubt it. Humans are smart enough to find an alternitive fuel- such as biofuel, which can be made of most anything, including corn and garbage.f there is an effective biofuel in 50 or so years, these conditions are probably not to return. Though, it would take a little longer to build these things because the biofuel is not as strong as oil, coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
There's no reason to if we simply use the technology we have. The sun is the real energy source for this planet. It was dumb for us to bother with oil in the first place. Did you know that the original diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil?
I doubt that their will be any alternative to oil and coal which will provide such an abundance of cheap energy that we can continue with our egregious waste of resources. The world population will have to fall drastically and a simpler, more local lifestyle will be adopted.
it is probably not a case of returning to musle power, the Human population is now to big to be sustained by such methods; but of reassesing our requirements or facing colapse of civilisation.
the problem is that alternatives to oil all depend on the energy from the sun. (except for nuclear, and the US will not allow most of the world access to that technology) Oil & fossil fuel is just that energy stored from past years.
So what humans have been doing is "spending" our savings to fuel unpresedented growth in the last 200 years.
When those savings run out we will have to survive on the "current" account.
this is best explained in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
http://www.amazon.com/last-hours-ancient...
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