green rants

Mouawad, J. (2008, April 20th). The Big Thirst. New York Times. Retrieved April 20th 2008 from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/weekinreview/20mouawad.html?ref=weekinreview

... Oil now accounts for just 19 percent of China’s energy needs. But China’s oil demand is expected to more than double by 2030 to over 16 million barrels a day, according to the International Energy Agency, as more people rise from poverty, move out of villages and buy more cars.

Just as in the United States, much of the increase in China’s oil demand has come from that country’s love affair with cars. The number of vehicles in China rose sevenfold between 1990 and 2006, to 37 million. China has now surpassed both Germany and Japan to become the second-largest car market in the world, and is set to overtake the United States by around 2015. China could have as many as 300 million vehicles by 2030.

William Chandler, an energy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, estimates that if the Chinese were using energy like Americans, global energy use would double overnight and five more Saudi Arabias would be needed just to meet oil demand. India isn’t far behind. By 2030, the two counties will import as much oil as the United States and Japan do today.

What about the United States? The country has shown little willingness to address its energy needs in a rational way. James Schlesinger, the nation’s first energy secretary in the 1970s, once said the United States was capable of only two approaches to its energy policy: “complacency or crisis.”

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to see its oil consumption surge since the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s. This can partly be explained by the fact that the United States has some of the lowest gasoline prices in the world, the least fuel-efficient cars on the roads, the lowest energy taxes, and the longest daily commutes of any industrialized nation. The result: about a quarter of the world’s oil goes to the United States every day, and of that, more than half goes to its cars and trucks.

Old prices are at $116 a barrel now but then again that's still based on speculative prices and the weak dollar and the futures. So when will this looming crisis ever.... actually loom?

I dont wish to think about it but guess what, when it actually looms, in the next 2 1/2 decades or so, imagine a world without sustainable energy. Imagine... energy rationing. (re: last week's south park episode on Internet rationing) Imagine, hours without electricity.

In fact, it's impossible to imagine this.

But remember playing Red Alert 2 and like 2 hours into the quest you run out of orefields to mine for cash and you basically start selling structures to salvage yourself? (I'm clearly a poor Red Alert player)

What will happen when the world runs out of energy.

P.S. I think wind, solar, hydro energy account for less than 1% of total global energy production now.

Solution?

There is no solution. The unprecedented prosperity and economic fertility the US enjoyed for the longest ever is now being looked upon as a prime model for everyone else in the world to catch up with. That's ... a couple billion people in China and India combined. They want what they had never been entitled to. and they want it now.

God save this land.