Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Air Power 1914-2019 - How to rule the Sky" video.
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@qk-tb2df "as the worlds oil reserves go down (if they actually do)"
First you discover oil. Then you start building oil rigs, and 12-15 years later will the oil field be ready to be used. And then you pump oil. The oil field usally never run out of oil. The problem is rather that when you have pumped out half of the oil of the field, then it will become harder and harder to get oil out from the ground. The oil will be mixed with sand and will be thick and sticky and hard to get out from the ground, and you will need more and more energy to pump the oil from the ground.
And then you need more and more energy to clean your impure oil from sand and other stuff before you can turn your oil into petrol, plastics, asphalt, and other petroleum products.
So the oil will become too expensive and too energy consuming to pump up from the ground at some point. And then the oil field gets closed down even if there are oil left in the ground.
I mean why use 100 barrels of oil to drive a diesel pump if you only pump up 50 barrels of oil from the ground? That would only be idiotic and unsubstainable.
The problem is that we do not discover much new oil fields nowadays. And the few oil fields we find are tiny in size. And the quality of the oil we find is also crappy (ie Canadian tar sands) or it is oil which is not easy and cheap to get - like drilling for oil thousands of meters underneath the water outside the Brazilian coast.
"the supply/demand of electric and other sources will become more and more appealing to markets"
That might be true. But the laws of physics crush the laws of economics.
Unless you of course believe in magic.
"also keep in mind that the world population will eventually start to flatten out as more education is involved"
I guess that is too little too late. We have already depleted much of the freshwater reserves. We have depleted fishstocks. We are using up oil reserves and phosphor mines that provides our agriculture with inputs that allows a highly productive agriculture.
And the population are declining in places with smart people (ie Iran), while the population is increasing in places with dumbass retards (ie Pakistan).
We are seeing a world with more religious fundamentalists and dumbass analphabets in Africa, while civilized westerners and east asians are getting fewer.
The global population is already too large to be substained. And having a few billion more people in the near time will only overstretch the planet even more. Land will turn into deserts as we use up water and cut down trees and use up the top soil with our unsubstainable agriculture. Extinct animals are not coming back. Rainforrests will not come back even if we wait another 1000 years for it to heal. The fresh water reserves under arabia took a thousand years to fill and now most of it has been used up. The aral sea and dead sea will soon be nothing but desert.
Global population will stabilize as you say. But it doesn't seem like it will be through the rational way of stupid people abstaining from having kids they cannot take care of.
Rather the job has to be done by mass starvation.
At this point are countries like India so fucking overpopulated that the next monstous disease, like the bubonic plague 2.0 would not be able to fix the problem even if it manage to kill an astonishing number like 500 million people.
Even if that would happen there would still be a billion people left just in India alone.
I wish that you were right however. I wish that everyone - even the idiots - would have a great standard of living. But that is never going to happen with a planet with 7 billion people. There are simply not enough resources on this planet to go around for everyone, so that we all can live the life of middle class Americans and have
a family with 2 cars, one house, multiple computers, a tv, a fridge, a mixer, a lawn mover, a stereo, a washing machine and so on. And then afford to take a vacation to Spain, Florida, Hawaii or Thailand.
"stop listening to retarded doomsayers and use your brain"
Many doomsayers are wrong. But some of them make good arguments for not believing in a bright future. All I do is to simply just look at the facts. And if someone presents a convincing argument - then I am prepared to change my opinion.
In this case do I really wish that I was wrong, because I don't like the idea that the world is running out of oil, that we are depleting resources and that millions of people will die because of it. And that human civilization has reached its peak, and that every future generation will become poorer than us when energy becomes scarce.
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@qk-tb2df "the REAL thing to worry about would be the economic collapse if there isn't a good enough of a transition period for oil"
First we humans used timber as source of energy, then we switched over whale oil, then we used coal, and today we oil and fossile fuels.
During all those steps we went from one energy source over to another energy source that was more powerful. But with oil its different. We have nothing more powerful to replace it with.
It costs energy to produce energy. When drive a drill into the ground you use up energy. When you pump up oil from the ground you use up energy.
And likewise does it also cost energy to produce ethanol fuel for cars. You waste energy when you pump water to grow wheat. You waste energy when make fertilizer. You waste energy when you drive a tractor. You waste energy when you fly a plane to spray pesticides. You waste energy when you use radiators to dry your harvest and so on.
And the most interesting thing about energy is the ratio we get - Energy produced vs. energy consumed. If you can pump 30 barrels of oil up from the ground for every barrel of oil you spend to get that oil, then you get an EROEI value of 30 (EROEI = Energy returned on energy invested).
A good energy source should give you a high EROEI. Oil in the 1800s could give you an EROEI of 100, since oil was everyware and you didn't even have to go down deep to get it. You only had to stick a hole into the ground and a black fontain came up.
But today have the average EROEI value of oil began to sink worldwide, because we have used up all the oil that was easy to get, and now we have to pump up dirty oil from the ground with much sand in it that costs more energy to extract and turn pure.
And even if oil today only have an EROEI of say 30, it is still a superior form of energy compared EROEI from solar, wind, nuclear, and biofuels.
Brazilian ethanol fuel only have an EROEI of 15. Swedish timber have an EROEI of 5. Ethanol from maize and grain even have an EROEI of 0.5 - which means that you even lose energy by using oil to produce ethanol!
So as you see. There is nothing we can replace oil with. The EROEI of other forms of energy is too low to replace oil. And would it even be possible to maintain an industrial society if EROEI falls down to such a low number as 5?
And that is just the beginning of all the problems. Where should you grow all biofuels to produce the large amounts you will need? I mean we humans also needs somewhere to live and we also need something to eat ourselves and not just our cars. And same goes for solar and windfarms. Nuclear power also have a shitty EROEI of about 5 (if I remember correctly what Nicole Foss said). And if we would to replace all oil, coal and natural gas with nuclear then we would need to build enormous amounts of new nuclear plants. And we would get a new problem - How would we be able to find enough fuel for so many new nuclear plants? There is only a limited amount of uranium on this planet. And if we would use it all to replace oil, then the global uranium reserves would be used up in only a few years.
So no, replacing oil cannot be done. Even the nazi scientists couldn't solve Germany's oil dependency problem. Nor could the Brazilian military dictatorship which during the 1970s oil shocks started to run so huge trade deficits when oil became expensive that they felt forced to get off their oil dependency by fueling cars with ethanol from sugarcane. But even 40 yers later are Brazil still consuming enormous amounts of oil.
So many American presidents have promised to get off oil dependency that this statement have just become a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNfZeh6oK-c
Our world have been dependent on fossile fuels for 200 years now since the start of the industrial revolution. And it would take decades if not even a century to transform society away from that.
Even if we would tomorrow get the space aliens to hand us over a blueprint of the perfect engine for renewable energy it would still take time to change society. We must produce lots of things before we can replace our old machines that relies on a combustion engine - cars, trucks, ships, aircrafts, chain saws, lawn movers, motorcycles, snowmobiles, leafblowers, diesel locomotives, jetskies, helicopters, air compressors and what have you?
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@qk-tb2df Sure you can power all kinds of tools with electric power. But do you have the resources?
As I said there are many types of machines. And there are millions of them. And there is not even enough Litium and other rare materials on the planet to make enough electric car batteries to replace 1% of the cars used worldwide.
And the next problem down the line is how you should expand the energy grid. And then you need to somehow get enough power to all those machines. Building 10.000 nuclear plants would take decades before they are finished, and would only work until you run out of uranium after some years.
Nuclear power does also do nothing to help us solve the problems we have here and now.
How would it help us get the oil the resources we need to build all the electric machines you talk about?
Today we need enormous amounts of oil for everything we make. Your computer probably consumed oil about 10x its own weight during its manufacturing process.
A car consume tonnes of oil to make, since half of all a car consumes during its life time happens during the production process. Only making a single tire takes 26 litres of oil.
And then we need to find ways of replacing oil for all kinds of things: plastics, toothpaste, medicines, colours, pesticides, asphalt, food coloring and food flavourings, cosmetics, synthetic fabrics, rubber and the list is endless.
Only such a thing as kerosene would be hopeless to find a replacement for, because it is a kind of fuel with unique and extreme requirements:
Energy content per unit volume, energy content per unit weight, freezing point, boiling point, flash point, etc. And not the least must the fuel be possible to produce in sufficient quantities.
Todays aviation fuel is ideal since it works even when it is 55 degrees cold at 11.000 metres.
Todays biofuels for airliners would have to expand unrealisticly much to replace aviation fuel from fossile fuels. Ross Walker, who works as a developer of alternative fuels for Airbus says you would need to grow sunflowers on an area the size of France to provide the French airline industry with all the biofuel it needs. And growing algae on a plot of land of the size of Belgium would be able to provide enough fuel for the entire worlds aviation industry.
This sounds like an unreasonable solution to me. Especially considering that we also need land for other uses. We would need 2 million square kilometers of forrest only to provide fuel for all cars and trucks on EUs roads. We would timber fuel to heat our homes. We would need land to grow food and feed cattle. We need land for roads, shopping malls and mining.
My own country Sweden is blessed with having lots of forrests and not lots of people which needs to be supported unlike more densly populated countries. But Sweden would still not be able to replace all its oil imports with biomass. We import 118 barrels of oil each year, while 96 million square metres of forrest grows each year - which is rougly equal to the energy of 81 million barrels of oil. So even if we burn down all our forrest growth for an entire year would we be able to replace our oil imports.
But of course cannot even countries like Russia, Canada or Sweden burn down all their trees. We need forrests to provide us with paper, and timber for furniture and buildings and things to export.
And trees needs 20-30 years to grow so you cannot just cut down all trees at once. So cutting down 3-5% of the trees each year would be a more realistic goal. And that means that not much biomass can be used to replace fossile fuels can be replaced by fossile fuels.
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