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 Originally Posted by Illfavor
Does anyone in here know of any good literature on modern energy over-consumption? The more I read about fossil fuel consumption and non-renewable energy sources, the more it seems like the world is steaming towards some sort of catastrophic energy shortage...Am I wrong here? I don't want to be one of those people who doesn't think and doesn't care and is then shocked when gas is $10/gallon in two years, and we simply have none in 25.
I don't read published material, just stick to blogs, lectures, and discussions. So I don't have any recommendations
But to put it in a nutshell: it's not about quantity, but about rate and pricing. There's loads of oil out there, we won't run out of it in our lifetimes, but rate of production can only get so high (we only have a few percentage points of potential production increases beyond current), and increased pricing is mainly about increase in demand of emerging economies i.e. India wants more oil so the prices of all oil go up.
US is extremely energy inefficient. All we need to do is pressure our society to push towards urbanization, cheaper transit, computerization, and increasing efficiency, and we'll be fine. Peak oil is a problem of pricing that is somewhat self-regulating. The real bad boy is global warming. It won't be killer for us, but will be for our great grandkids.
I guess what I'm saying is that US assumes that wasting energy is what should be normal, but really we're just having to return to a time before the US flushed energy down the toilet. It's not going to run out, but it will never again be cheap either.
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