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In history, have we ever faced this situation before?

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In history, have we ever faced this situation before?

Unread postby Ayoob » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 12:50:15

Was there a time in the past here in the US when we began to run out of a natural resource? Have we had water shortages or power shortages in the past? We had a blip on the radar in the 70's and never really got our butts in gear as far as finding some other energy source. Before that, did we ever have a time like we're facing today?

North Korea got cut off from their energy supply, and I hear the situation is desparate there today. Are there any other post-industrial societies out there that we can study?
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Unread postby chris-h » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 12:54:09

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Unread postby jesus_of_suburbia_old » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 13:02:44

I think we'd be wasting time using all our resources and knowledge on developing a new source of energy. Even hydrogen proponents will admit that we'd see any mainstream use of the technology in decades at the very least. One can only hope that we look to adapt to the problem as opposed to pursuing some unfeasible soltion.
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Unread postby rerere » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 13:11:33

jrob8503 wrote:I think we'd be wasting time using all our resources and knowledge on developing a new source of energy


Please identify a 'new' source.

(BTW Hydrogen power as fuel cell isn't a new source of energy....it is an energy carrier.)
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Unread postby jesus_of_suburbia_old » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 13:24:47

I think I answered your question when I stated that we'd be wasting our time, as well as the word pairing of unfeasible and solution . This statement, at least I thought, inherently meant that there probably is no new source of energy.

Really? hydrogen isn't an energy source :shock:. I've only been posting on this forum for the past three monthes and never once heard that.
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peak guano

Unread postby pup55 » Fri 15 Oct 2004, 13:46:06

http://www.guano.com/

I happen to like this example a lot. If there was specific production data by-year, we could construct a depletion curve for it. Also this is not the best reference. there is a book "The World that Trade Created" that has the story in even better detail.

Guano, the accumulated excrement of sea fowl, was once found in great abundance on islands off the coast of Peru. It was extremely popular as a fertilizer for tobacco in the SE US. Conditions have to be just right (lots of sun, no rain, lots of fish and seabirds) to get this type of deposit, so kinda rare.

In the 1850's it was considered such a "strategic material" that the US President, James Buchanan, saw fit to deploy the US military in the area to "protect the supply".

There were also a lot of scams, use of slave labor, and other forms of exploitation to get/force people to do the unpleasant job of digging this stuff up and bagging it and sending it to Maryland. Packaging was in burlap bags, hence the term "guano sack", aka "gunny sack".

Predictably, within a few years, despite the best efforts of the sea fowl, the natural endowment of guano was depleted, causing a lot of economic hardship for Peru, and causing the development of alternate chemical fertilizers in the US. The locals still harvest the stuff, but there is a strict "Guano Protocol" enforced by the Peruvian government, to the effect that guano harvest is only permitted to the extent that it is replenished every year, and there are limits to the harvest of the local anchovies, the food of the sea birds, so as to ensure an ongoing production stream.

Lot of similarities, I think, with the current situation.

Let the bad puns and wisecracks begin.
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Unread postby Concerned » Sun 17 Oct 2004, 02:44:21

Thats some serious shit pup :P
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Unread postby MonteQuest » Sun 17 Oct 2004, 17:23:34

The best example I can think of is the Dust Bowl. As John Steinbeck wrote in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath:
"And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."

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Unread postby azreal60 » Sun 17 Oct 2004, 18:58:26

This is in response to the post by jrob in the above text. You wondered that hydrogen isn't an energy source, rather an energy carryer?

Well, I would say that you haven't been noticing what people have been saying about hydrogen. Hydrogen is indeed not an energy source rather than an energy carrier.

The reason is that hydrogen does not occur naturally in its gasous form. There for we have to do work to create it in that form. Work translates into energy spent. So while if we could figure out a way to use it as a energy carrier, i'm not saying it wouldn't be useful. But the amount of energy we actually use would simply change in form. To produce the amount of hydrogen nessesary to even come close to supplying a hydrogen based transportation system, we would need to increase our electricty supply by a huge amount. I don't have figures, but they have been more than established on other posts.

One of the things that I find interesting about your post was that you implied you hadn't seen any of the many posts on this very subject. I think the reason is those posts are often buried back on the first or second page of a now very large forum. I think because of all the people posting, sometimes we forget to go back and read alot of the early posts. The people on the forum who read those posts then refer to them and don't repeat all the info on them with each new post, and hence somethings they just take for granted people know. Hydrogen being a energy carrier as opposed to a energy source is one of them.

This is the reason we are creating a best of the best forums section. We are going to put threads that brought up the most interesting debates, or the most heated discussions that Didn't get ugly, or the most informative threads. I also have a feeling we will have to split the forums even further, as we are starting to get some posts that are repeats of previous posts.

Oh, and as one final note, keep in mind that this forum is getting more and more crowded. Try and find a thread that your topic is already getting talked about in. When i see the same thing being said in 3 different threads that literally where posted one after another, please check it out. It will make things alot less crowded and make the info you wish to aquire or discemenate alot easier to find. Thanks and as for the actual topic of this survey, I would say no, previous to this we haven't faced a resource scarcity crisis like this.
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Unread postby chris-h » Sun 17 Oct 2004, 19:08:15

Hydrogen is nothing more than a cruel hoax.
Sorry for the bad news. :(
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Unread postby jesus_of_suburbia_old » Sun 17 Oct 2004, 19:23:14

It was sarcasm. Sorry you had to go through that whole explaination :( . I've known that since I started posting on the board. This is why I stated that the pursual of some new form of energy would be a waste of time.
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Unread postby Pops » Wed 20 Oct 2004, 13:22:51

Let’s see,
there were the Anasazi who probably ran out of water,
there were the natives down along the coast of Peru that ran out of arable soil (salinity from irrigation),
there were the plains Indians who ran out of Bison,
there were the plantation owners that ran out of cheap labor,
oh yea, then there was my family in OK, who ran out of oil in their few little wells in the forties.

Not much good ensued for any of them.
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Unread postby holmes » Wed 20 Oct 2004, 18:41:53

No. we are in classic overshoot and collapse. Never had the conditions of the present.
The carrying capacity of the U.S is 100 million.
Just a horrible natural cycle.
we were just born in to it. Oil is holding everything together.
We overshot long ago just didnt know it. Oil covers alot up.
just build knowledge bases. The population is still growing exponentially.
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