[MonteQuest]

Some years ago, I wrote thread about energy illiteracy.

Americans, it seems, have an insidious disease that is pandemic across the country—energy illiteracy: most of us have no idea whatsoever how our energy economy works, much less are we able to discern with any degree of certitude when it is beginning to unravel. Beyond the price of gasoline and maybe heating oil, most consumers understand very little about the energy that they use. It is taken for granted. Few can say how much energy they consume in the course of a day or a year, or where it comes from. In fact, most people feel that most of their electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, when, in actuality, it is produced primarily by coal-fired and nuclear power plants with natural gas increasingly replacing coal.

Whereas residents of poor nations are acutely aware of every aspect of their energy use; every stick of wood, (sometimes carried for miles) and every gallon of cooking fuel is closely watched. Oil, in our affluent culture has become an invisible commodity, something we vaguely understand as to be important on a national and international level, but something that doesn’t really affect our personal daily lives, except in the price of gasoline.

This ignorance of the general population has even gotten worse with the false claims of energy independence by MSM.

Euan Mearns had a great piece on this. The myth of US self-sufficiency in crude oil.
Link

About half the population thinks the US is becoming energy independent. Men in blue. Women in red.



And we can see the disparity between DEMS and the GOP with regard to our energy future.



Nuclear= bad disaster.



And this chart is an eye-opener. Over half from Saudi Arabia? This is the result of politicians and mostly right-wing media falsely claiming we are dependent upon Middle East oil.



Here's where we actually get our imported oil. Euan Mearns has a great chart in the link I posted that breaks it all down. Basically, most people have Canada and Saudi Arabia's contribution reversed.



AS Euan Means opined: You think there is a danger that wrong geo-strategic views are being formed with this level of ignorance about oil imports, especially in the context of evolving and worsening conflicts in the Middle East?

I do. Coupled this with the complacency that cheap gas is fostering...

[onlooker]

I think this energy illiteracy is within the larger phenomenon of illiteracy to the nature of the current situation humanity finds itself in. Overpopulation, global warming and other threats do not register with most people or they think someone will do something about it. It is the nature of the societies we live in that people have little power to change things. So I think people shrug their shoulders and carry on. Specifically, people here in the US are spoiled as to the manner in which they live and consume. We know no other way and nobody advocates a return to a primitive lifestyle which is not even feasible for such huge a population. Ignorance borne from not needing to know or understand these things to survive. Thus we are complacent about just about everything that does not relate to our immediate life and prospects and the top tier power holders do not seem inclined to inform the populace much less change radically anything.

[GHung]

In short, most people bracket their beliefs within their comfort zones. When reality infringes on that, they just make shit up or grab whatever straws keep them there.

[MonteQuest]

Thus we are complacent about just about everything that does not relate to our immediate life and prospects and the top tier power holders do not seem inclined to inform the populace much less change radically anything.

Yes. The Tragedy of the Commons. Speaks volumes about why we never elect leaders that will vote to preserve or conserve the "commons" except from those districts with an enclave of enlightened voters.

[shortonoil]

We deal with this continuously. The average person is so illiterate about energy that they don't even know that they don't know anything! Once you leave the engineering sector, it is almost impossible to explain it to them. The average man on the street has been so conditioned by MSM relayed propaganda that their mind has been frozen into a stasis of perpetual ignorance. This will undoubtedly result in the coming energy crisis evolving into a disaster of unmitigated proportions.

http://www.thehillsgroup.org/

[MonteQuest]

This will undoubtedly result in the coming energy crisis evolving into a disaster of unmitigated proportions.

My thoughts exactly.

Oh, they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue.
For they thought it was a ship that water would never go through.

[Rod_Cloutier]

I read an interesting essay on this matter this morning:

Apparently, sixty-three percent of Americans cannot afford a five-hundred dollar car repair. This is not a scenario which will be allowed to proceed. The problem with having a handful of people be vastly rich while the majority are poor is multi-fold, but what is often not discussed is the general dysfunction that is generated by so greatly valuing people’s labor and time on such drastically different scales. Even without talking about the do-nothing billionaire class, the gap in pay between the massive portion of the population that works service sector jobs and those who engage in more “skilled labor,” generates an inability of the lower classes to access the services of the middle. Despite having moved to a rural location to build my own off-grid home on land where I can attempt grow a significant quantity of my family’s food, I still work a full forty hours a week between two part time service sector jobs. One of those jobs pays ten dollars an hour. A mechanic commands anywhere from seventy to one-hundred dollars per hour in this region. Such a disparity makes acquiring the services of a mechanic on the edge of impossible

During the summer our gardens are teeming with zucchini, tomatoes, okra, and other vegetables. Sweet potato vines crawl far beyond their primary roots and lavender flowers appear along their lengths. Welsummer chickens hunt grasshoppers in a field and we collect easily a dozen eggs a day from their nesting boxes. The food that we do not preserve or immediately eat we will sometimes sell. I can fetch twenty dollars for a load of produce, eggs, and wild harvested mushrooms. A truckload of gravel laid on our driveway allowing our property to even be accessible by car costs three-hundred dollars. Our own driveway requires about two of these truckloads every spring, and that does not include the road up to our land, which we must also contribute to maintaining. The simple life is expensive, and the honey, eggs, strawberries and other fresh foods we can produce are essentially valueless to the outside world thanks to petroleum. But we have to keep pace

It is ridiculous that essentials like fresh fruit and vegetables are valueless, where the cost of having a lawyer, or seeing a doctor can bankrupt someone. There is something seriously wrong with how our society values work. Work represents energy flows, so by misvaluing energy flows our society misallocates resources.

http://collapseofindustrialcivilization ... like-12404

[ennui2]

It might be better for people like that to stop focusing so much on growing food and learn to become a mechanic! If you can't beat em, join em, basically.

I get so much BS from people for not having clocked out of white collar IT work and building the permaculture doomstead which is mostly about being held up to an abstract ideal when it doesn't actually make good money-management sense. Regardless of how people may feel about one kind of work earning more than another kind of work, it is what it is. Until money no longer has value, or food prices skyrocket, this is the world we're living in. You can rant and blog about it until you're blue in the face, but it won't change the day-to-day world.

So I would agree that there's something wrong with how our society works, but unless you want to be permanently disgruntled, learn to deal with it. I mean come on, just look at the image in the header of that blog. And the guy who wrote it has a left sidebar with this juice tidbit:

A day will come when all the imaginary lines will be blown away, and in the scattering dust of all the maps made meaningless, all things will be left equal once again.

This is a guy who is "praying for calamity". He refuses to do as the Romans and therefore he's the architect of his own misery. He might as well be an Amish guy living in the middle of a wealthy suburb and shaking his fist at the neighbors for not living as he does. At some point you have to accept that not everyone's gonna subscribe to your worldview and stop spending all your time pissing into the wind.

[ennui2]

ennui, do you stand by your assurance (made just yesterday) that "if oil gets expensive enough, ultra-deep-water, methane hydrates, CTL, it will ALL be brought into action. It's only a matter of time." (Link) ?

I am tired of repeating myself. I'm sorry you have to tolerate the fact my analysis doesn't match yours. Deal with it.

[MonteQuest]

Here we see as gas prices dropped, so did people's priority for developing renewable energy, while developing more FF sources increased.

And rising nationalism.

[ennui2]

Your analysis? I don't recollect you explaining what methane hydrate production looks like? How does it function? Please be so kind as to reference an actual prototype system? Tnx in advance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxCohrWshvM

http://tinyurl.com/hmh8usr

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/busi ... 505577.cms

Technology for producing gas from hydrates is still in pilot stage - though considerable success in Japan, US and Canada gives hope. Indeed, Japan has declared it would start commercial gas production from its offshore hydrates from 2020 after proving commerciality of the technology by 2018. ONGC intends to benefit from Japan's experience and technology by starting pilot production from its discovery from 2017.
The sources put the initial reserves potential of the hydrates at 134 tcf (trillion cubic feet). Even if ONGC manages to pump out a tenth of the reserves, the discovery could yield nearly 13 tcf of gas against RIL's 9 tcf.

Will you now STFU about me being so illiterate? Of course you won't.

[ennui2]

But but but but, ennui. Like gold in seawater, methane clathrate exists in such low concentration and in such inaccessible places that the energy to collect said material would exceed the energy potential recovered. That is a negative net-energy return. ennui. We know this. It's a bad thing. bad thing ennui

That's your prediction, which will either be proven right or wrong. I've learned not to stick my neck out the way other Chicken Little doomers have, only to look like idiots later.

[ennui2]

No ennui. It is science. Your neck is exposed. And you look like an idiot at this moment.

No it isn't. It's acknowledging unknowns. Sufficiently advanced technology is equivalent to magic. There have been no shortage of so-called experts who said humans would never fly, never get to the moon, or that computers would never shrink to a certain size. They felt this way because they could not break themselves out of viewing the world of the present to understand that a series of innovations stacked one on top of the next allows us to get from point A to B. That kind of fatalistic attitude has been proven wrong time and again. While I agree that technology always reaches a point of diminishing returns, I am not going to knee-jerk assume that this or that unconventional FF will not be recoverable. I'm not predicting it will be either, only that industry will give it the full college try when oil prices go high enough.

[MonteQuest]

We are becoming ever more polarized.