http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUD4tvTImxU worth a listen.
[quote=plato1965]You’ve got blazing sun anway… why not use it.
[/quote]
Chevron is definitely aware of using solar for this type of thing. I believe the plant in the article below is operational, but I couldn’t find a more recent useful link.
Brightsource Snags Chevron Deal in Stealthy Move Into Solar Steam
Disclosure: I’m invested in Brightsource.
Are you from Canada? The reason I ask is because I am planning to migrate to British Columbia next year. With Canada’s supply of oil sand and BCs push for renewable energy, I figured that it will be a good place to live when peak oil occurs. Do you think Canada is making the same mistakes that the US is making?
Chris,
What is your outlook for oil stocks? Is this a good time to hold them, trade them through the oil price shocks, or to sell them because they will get dragged down with the other stocks?
How the major economies can continue proceeding with a business-as-usual mindset given the oil data is really quite a mystery to me, but that’s just how things happen to be at the moment.Here's how - The analyst speaking in this May 26, 2011 Blloomberg podcast on oil and gas prices when asked about Peak Oil simply dismissed it because the PO Theory assumes that technological will not develop new energy supplies
[quote=ewilkerson]
As for food:
I have gotten a pretty deep pantry. I’ve purchased eight of the six gallon containers of dried beans, etc. from the Ready Store.
I’ve stocked up on some canned meats and such from Sam’s Club.
Plenty of coffee…LOL
Anytime canned fruits, beans or something useful is on sale I buy a load.
I have a good supply of paper products.
I purchased a kerosene stove.
I am keeping a stash of updated seeds, starting pans for them, and a grow light system to start the seeds in.
I have started composting, planted some fruit trees, and trying my hand at sweet potatoes. I understand many people survived on them during the depression.[/quote]
Hoarding ANYTHING will do you no good at all, eventually. You WILL run out of food WTSHTF.
The best place to store food is in the ground…
If you can’t get used to that idea, well you will be a casualty.
Mike
[quote=phillipsd]Are you from Canada? The reason I ask is because I am planning to migrate to British Columbia next year. With Canada’s supply of oil sand and BCs push for renewable energy, I figured that it will be a good place to live when peak oil occurs. Do you think Canada is making the same mistakes that the US is making?
[/quote]
Two words: Dutch disease
Samuel
[quote=Damnthematrix]I have started composting, planted some fruit trees, and trying my hand at sweet potatoes. I understand many people survived on them during the depression.
[/quote]
Folks may already know that sweet potato leaves are edible and nutritious. They grow prolific and you can cook them and eat them. My mother has a patch of sweet potatoes from which she reglarly harvests leaves, and once in a while will harvest the sweet potatoes, too.
As for regular potato, the leaves are not edible and in fact can be poisonous. But then again, they are the most calorie-dense starch available to temperate climate, small-scale farmers.
Poet
either a price spike in oil causes an economic contraction which brings the price of oil down again, or an economic contraction comes from other causes and brings down the price of oil, either way you will end up with lower oil prices.
i just love all these articles from self appointed experts quoting themselves and predicting only doom and gloom.
did you know when they invented the steam engine they worried about running out of firewood ?
and later there were huge price spikes in coal and worries about coal running out, that was in about 1850, no sign of coal running out yet.
its all alot of nonsese, you are just acting as a mouth piece for exxon mobile, hype salesman, helping pump their profits before oil is superseeded with something else.
I don’t believe this is true. WTSHTF it will be chaos for a while, but eventually we will settle into a new normal. We will still trade for food - it just may be considerably more expensive, may be a much larger portion of everyone’s budget, and may not be buying it with the currency we currently use.
While growing your own food is certainly a good way to prep, just having enough to survive past the initial breakdown and reorganizing puts you far ahead of others. It gives you time to analyse the situation as it unfolds without sweating over how your going to eat which is a considerable advantage.
If you believe only those growing their own food are the only ones that will survive, I think you better be very very heavily armed since if it gets to that situation you will be fighting off hordes of starving people. I believe the only thing we can all hope for is to be prepared and be flexible. After all you may have a lovely garden, nice solar panels, and still have to flee due to many reasons (rioting, looting, lawlessness, political persecution, …).
Also, you did notice that ewilkerson said they were planting a garden, fruit trees, had seeds, etc?
Samuel,Thanks for your response. I was not familiar with that term. I can see the problem now.
But is it worse than what we have in the US considering how well Canada weathered the financial crisis. They had a balanced budget for many years before the crisis, they have been paying down their relatively low national debt, and they have emerged from the crisis with the world’s most stable banking system.
phillipsd
[quote=technet]did you know when they invented the steam engine they worried about running out of firewood ?[/quote]Yes… and they would have had there not been huge amounts of undiscovered AND superior quality fuels, namely coal gas and oil…
Well you’d be wrong… have you even done the Crash Course yet? Not all coal is created equal. Some, like Anthracite has very high energy content, while brown coal has much lower energy content. ALL the best stuff is already mined out leaving us… the dregs. So we have to mine more and more just to tread water. The USA has already reached “Peak Coal Energy Content”. And the world’s coal reserves have been found to be waaaaay overstated, some like the German reserves being OFFICIALLY downgraded 99%!
Before you go spouting your own nonsense about, I’d suggest you educate yourself by first doing the CRASH COURSE…
Google “Peak Coal”
And THEN get back to us with what you now think…
Mike
[quote=rhare]
I don’t believe this is true. WTSHTF it will be chaos for a while, but eventually we will settle into a new normal. We will still trade for food - it just may be considerably more expensive, may be a much larger portion of everyone’s budget, and may not be buying it with the currency we currently use. [/quote]
With all due respect… you still don’t get it.
90% (that’s right, NINETY!) of all the calories in your food comes from fossil fuels. It would only take some oil crisis, like a revolution in Saudi Arabia, or “the big one” hitting California, and you would have a massive oil shortage causing the shelves in supermarkets to be rapidly emptied, with no resupplies… At any one time, supermarkets only have three days worth of food on the shelves. EVERYTHING is delivered by truck… EVERYTHING.
Good luck…
Mike
Sorry mike, but I believe you are being overly dramatic, and that takes a lot. So tell me, even if Saudi Arabia was taken out (12% of world oil production) how does that translate into no food? People will certainly adapt to a new lower normal and as long as people need to eat, food will be traded.
Indeed, I believe we will have a SHTF event. Markets will fail, currencies will fail, and within a few weeks (perhaps months) a new normal will arise with trade for those with food and oil. You just won’t be buying your next generation ipad over a latte at Starbucks while discussing American Idol.
I believe your “IF YOU DON’T GROW YOUR OWN FOOD YOU WILL DIE!!!” message is not accurate and not particularly productive. Many people can not grow their own food, in fact very very few can grow all they need to survive on their own. So I believe it is much more prudent to have a good stockpile to survive supply chain disruptions (maybe months) and be able to adapt to a new normal which I doubt any of us knows exactly what that will look like.
Mike,I must not have been unclear and incomplete. I have started planting a garden. I just started this year with only fruit trees and sweet potatoes. I am keeping a store of seeds, bought a tiller, seed starter equipment, etc. My “city” is not all that big so I have relatives I can work with as well on their farms. I, also, anticipate that I am going to be the only one in my neighborhood prepared, so I am going to work on co-oping gardening. We have pretty good size lots here.
The way I look at all this is that mankind is either going to learn to work together and not be so selfish or perish.
Ernest
When oil hits $180 a barrel will you come back and share more wisdom with us?
Just like the Man-made Global Warming, this peak oil stuff is concocted to force a change in our lives and society. It’s really laughable when you dig only a little… So many other supposedly scientific “truths” are the same way - modern nutritional “scinece” and modern medicine. We have a saying at work (not gonna say which science focused agency)… “Science is welfare for smart people.” I had lunch with a really sharp young engineer and he was telling me about his study and report on the viability of wind and solar as combined replacements for oil, natuarl gas, coal (combined or individually) … Even when he stacked the assumptions to near ridiculous odds in favor of “green” energy, it was still in the single digits in terms of percent of energy provided by these sources - not to mention the incredible costs of wind and solar to acheive that level. If it were a sound solution, we would be doing it. Don’t be sheep! Study the subject yourself.Start at first principles. Don’t take my word for it.
...this peak oil stuff is concocted to force a change in our lives and society.And what would that change be and who wants us to change?
Johnny, You can’t reason with people like that. They can be the ones left off the Ark. All I know is that having a background in business, Economics, and science the first time I heard Matt Simmons speak about it convinced me. I probably spend an hour or two an evening searching the net to educate myself further.
I’m just curious.
I always wonder what the motivations are to post things like that. No real facts. He just alludes to things someone said.
I also wonder if he thinks there is an infinite supply of oil or if he has even thought that far ahead.