[LINK] [SPAM?] Re: The man who's tutoring Bill Gates

[Richard Archer]

At 1:26 PM +1000 21/6/10, Karl Auer wrote:

>On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 11:00 +1000, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> > [the U.S. energy industry] constitutes the world's most massive, most
>> > indispensable, most expensive and most inertial infrastructure. Its
>> > principal features change on a time scale measured in decades, not
>> > years. That's why "we're going to be a fossil-fuel society for
>> > decades to come."
>
>Yeah? Hard to be a fossil-fuel society when there is no fossil fuel to
>be had. If his point is that we have enough to last us through all those
>decades, then fair enough.

If oil production peaks in 2010 then according to Hubbert's
bell curve, production in 2050 will be at 2/3 of the peak.

That level of decline could easily be compensated for by
efficiency measures, and with a concurrent roll-out of
solar/wind/nuclear/geothermal etc, I don't see that oil
production declining by one-third over 4 decades would
necessarily cause a significant decline in Western living
standards.

I did read some other writings by Smil this morning and it
seems that his views of climate change are firmly in the
climate sceptics camp.

He has made some other interesting predictions though,
such as the likelihood of a major war and an influenza
pandemic being almost a certainty within the next 50 years.
He predicts 50,000,000 deaths from each.

 ...Richard.