Running on Empty: NY Times Discovers Peak Oil

[chlamor]

Published March 13
Running on empty

by Natalie Canavor

If the cost of energy skyrockets, are the suburbs doomed? Would Long Island, already paying among the highest fuel and electricity rates in the country, become an unsustainably expensive place to live? A way of thinking that says "yes" is circulating, and has assumed tangible form in a video called "The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream." Made in Toronto by the independent producers Gregory Greene and Barry Silverthorn, it explores the idea that the world is running out of cheap petrofuels and predicts the utter ruin of North America's suburbs - and not in the distant future, but somewhere between 5 and 25 years from now.

<snip>

But "The End of Suburbia" is dismissive of alternative energy source development. "No combination of alternative energy systems will allow us to run what we are running," Mr. Kunstler said in a telephone interview. "If by some miracle we developed an energy system as potent as our fossil fuels, at the very least it would not come about before we went through a punishing and prolonged period of economic hardship, and personally I think the losses would be so great we might not even be able to gear up a system like this again."

<snip>

Matthew C. Cordaro, director of the C. W. Post/Long Island University Center for Management Analysis and a former Lilco executive, said that even projecting factors like the growth of China, there's still enough oil for 60 to 80 years, perhaps 100. We have almost unlimited amounts of energy around the earth, he said, when resources like coal (which can be converted to natural gas), hydrogen and uranium are taken into account. "It's very difficult for me to conceive of skyrocketing unaffordability given this trend," he said, "because you can produce electricity from a lot of sources of fuel and easily distribute it."

<snip>

Mr. Greene said he is an optimist, but reckoned that we have 10 years, and said that he's moving soon from Toronto to France because he's convinced that "the European dream will speak to how things play out in the 21st century, more than the American, which was a 20th-century dream." His collaborator, Mr. Silverthorn, is moving to rural Ontario to learn his ancestors' farming skills.


http://www.energybulletin.net/4698.html

[arcos]

1. kick!

[4dsc]

2. So much for buying an SUV..

and I guess I'll have to put off buying a boat too.

Too bad most Americans will go on with business as usual and when its too late, well it will be to late.. Let the fireworks begin then..