Registered: Sep 2000
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http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/RRiraqWar.html
- Macroeconomic thoughts about what could be a major cause of the war

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Registered: Mar 2003
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Hmm..interesting. Just one or two points:

1 - can anyone convincingly tell me at what point of efficency/dispertion, renewable energy (solar, tidal, wind being main 3) will be able to replace oil.

2 - why countries such as US/UK are not investing massively to hasten that day and so stop the whole mucking around with oil producing countries.

3 - what happened, and when did it, when dollar replaced UKP as worlds reserve currency?

4 - the dislocation threat is viable, but it seems a prospect manageable in other ways. not sure how but still...

however one issue remains - its a war in americas interest, they are the big boys on the block. If the world turns to Euro, US takes a nose dive, the rest of us do too. Even Euro countries. Its in everyones interest...Iraqi peope, US, UK, Euro, world economy. Just would be nice to do it without killing 100,000.

so, yes, it does seem a convincing argument for the war and afghanistan. But I never really thought this was an altruistic effort. Even kosovo intervention happened cos it was on our doorstep. In Rwanda, sierra leone and elsewhere we tried a bit but our hearts were not in it - not to the extenet of iraq.

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http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/23463

a more balanced view of the article - with some interesting points:

Surely this, as much as any, is a over riding arguement for the regulation of global capital flows (whilst freeing global trade) - a central tenet of most liberal economists these days.

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Registered: Sep 2000
Location: Helsinki. Finland
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interesting that metafilter article, I should study more economics I guess

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Registered: Mar 2003
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We all should :-)

I still am struggling with this though - the petro dollar argument is convincing, but not as a conspiracy theory. I may be being naive, but could Bush et al, just beleive that this is right AND doable AND happens to serve our interests.

Does it matter the right thing is done for the wrong reasons?

At what point do the right reasons, become wrong because we ran out of patience? How many weeks should we wait until it is no longer morally bad?

help. liberal angst turmoil striking:-)

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Registered: Nov 2001
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quote:

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"...for the regulation of global capital flows"

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oxsan


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Even if the cost of producing one megawatt of electricity from solar/wind/tidal/etc. becomes cheaper than producing one megawatt of electricity from oil/coal, we will still continue to use fossil fuels for a long time, due to existing infrasrtucture. It will not be until building a new solar/wind plant is actually cheaper than maintaining an existing oil/coal plant that we will start to shift production.

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Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:

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Originally posted by oxsan
There really is not an acute shortage of oil and there is a large part of the earth's surface which has not been
explored for oil yet.

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Registered: Nov 2001
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You are right, Smug. The US is not nearly as worried about what the price of oil is as it worries about maintaining a stable pool of oil from which all buy at the same price. The spectre of depleting the world's oil reserves is a frequent cry of the liberal left in the US. We did buy about 20% of our oil overseas but that has been reduced lately and I'm not sure but I believe it is down to about 12% at the moment. This is a matter of convenience not necessity. We could exist for a while on 100% US oil---we just don't want to do so because we need the commerce in oil and petroleum byproducts to exist. We have recently reactivated a large number of wells in the US that flow a very high specific gravity oil which probably accounts for the 20 to 12 reduction above---or maybe it is because of disruption in our normal Venezuelan supply due to riots (near civil war) down there.

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Lifeisgood, I don't think that solar, tide or wind will ever replace combustible fuel in our civilization. They are not nearly as efficient. Hydrogen as a source of power and energy plus nuclear power are the best probable future sources of evergy---but we have years and years and years of research and then years and years and years if tchnolkogy development to do before youi will notice any significant shift in the basic energy source paradigm.

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Yeah, Venezuala is on strike as far as oil is concerned. That would push up the price of gas in the US, I guess (regular supplier goes dry). The US government was buying in a fair amount of foreign oil recently for stockpiling as I recall, although it probably isn't accounted for in domestic consumption figures.

A nice hot Summer may see demand for oil (and, therefore, imports) increase, of course.

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quote:

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Originally posted by oxsan
Lifeisgood, I don't think that solar, tide or wind will ever replace combustible fuel in our civilization. They are not nearly as efficient. Hydrogen as a source of power and energy plus nuclear power are the best probable future sources of evergy---but we have years and years and years of research and then years and years and years if tchnolkogy development to do before youi will notice any significant shift in the basic energy source paradigm.

---

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Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:

---

Originally posted by oxsan
Lifeisgood, I don't think that solar, tide or wind will ever replace combustible fuel in our civilization. They are not nearly as efficient. Hydrogen as a source of power and energy plus nuclear power are the best probable future sources of evergy---but we have years and years and years of research and then years and years and years if tchnolkogy development to do before youi will notice any significant shift in the basic energy source paradigm.

---

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Registered: Nov 2001
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Actually oil is selling in my home town for $1.63 per US gallon which I don't consider too devastating. Two weeks ago we had a rice of $1.48 per US Gallon.

It isn't really joe Citizen who gets bitten so hard by the oil prices.; There are a lot of ways he can beat it like car pooling, staying home, getting a more gas efficient car, mass trans etc. The ones who feel the huge bite are truckers (who are almost all
paid by the mile and have to furnish their own fuel) and airlines
which use enormous quantities of fuel and have no recourse.

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quote:

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Originally posted by oxsan
We did buy about 20% of our oil overseas but that has been reduced lately and I'm not sure but I believe it is down to about 12% at the moment.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by oxsan
Actually oil is selling in my home town for $1.63 per US gallon which I don't consider too devastating. Two weeks ago we had a rice of $1.48 per US Gallon.

It isn't really joe Citizen who gets bitten so hard by the oil prices.; There are a lot of ways he can beat it like car pooling, staying home, getting a more gas efficient car, mass trans etc. The ones who feel the huge bite are truckers (who are almost all
paid by the mile and have to furnish their own fuel) and airlines
which use enormous quantities of fuel and have no recourse.

---

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Registered: Nov 2001
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Smug, Solar cells and their installation was one of ny projects back in the sixties and seventies. We built a city supply for a small town in West Texas on a grant from the new Department of Energy and dotted the landscape for miles around this little town with Fresnel lens tunnels and voltaic cells. It worked of course but could not stand up to the huge variation in power demand even for a very small town and I understand that they have gone back to their old hydroelectric source because it was very much cheaper and had unlimited demand potential. We also provided a system to the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport that has since been abandoned. As I said--years and years and years of research followed by years and years and years of technological development followed by available capital and expert salesmanship.

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Yes, the other thing that is needed is storage, for dealing with changes in demand; that might have been improved already since the 70s, I think. Hey, you could use it to generate hydrogen for storage for that matter. If there was a lake nearby, you could pump water to another higher lake (if that sounds bizarre, there is a power station in Wales that does exactly that to deal with variations in power supply, although it obviously runs off national grid electricity, which is mostly generated from the burning of fossil fuels). There are other challenges (as the positively minded would say) ahead, but the p-v cells themselves and the storage of the energy are two big ones.

Photovoltaic cells nowadays aren't the same thing that they were even a few years ago, I gather (it isn't my field, but the woman that I was taking the seminars with is much more knowledgable than I as she is a 'solid state' physicist and she is impressed).

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Registered: Nov 2001
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quote:

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"Given time those things get fed downj to the consumer"

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posted this link in another thread but ill give it again since the subject came up and the article is well thought out.

Wired 10 year hydrogen power plan

we may already be to the stage of affordable solar power. Wish i could remember which article it was, i think about net-0 houses (overall $0.00 energy bill) in which a university in the US has created a relatively small test solar plant and are getting around a 30% per year return on in investment by selling the electricity. Plus as production ramps up, all projections point to the prices from cell dropping dramatically, much like semiconductors.

Plus if we were to adopt buckminster fuller's plan of a world energy grid (i know, fat chance) in which you link up electricity grids across borders, those spikes in demand that dont necessarily line up with when you get the most output from your cells can be mitigated. Furthermore it would allow countries with plenty of clean energy to sell it easily to other countries and encourage them to invest in it.

/end derail

Anyway, i would love to hear some clearly qualified and respected economist address the arguments in the article. Unfortunately i find it enlikely to be found anywhere other than a scholarly journal as most editors/producers of news would think it way over the head of the public (probably rightly so.)

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Registered: Nov 2001
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Gulik, I think that it is not an economist of world renown that you need to review that article but a scientist and an engineer and a manufacturer of world renown that need to review it. Some things take time as well as money. You also will find, I predict, that you cannot marshall the will of the people to back such an effort. I have been listening to predictions of gloom and doom with regard to oil depletion for more than fifty years and have seen no major changes or even efforts with strong direction in that time---I do not really expect it to start now.

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